The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss
progress has been remarkable and internationally noted,” for “innovative and effective policies to reduce poverty and ensure the inclusion of previously excluded groups”; the results “lifted millions of people out of poverty” (quoted in Chomsky, 2018, para. 24).
However, by 2016, impeachment was greeted with wide public approval due to Brazil’s faltering economy and antipathy toward across-the-board corruption. The proximal trigger to the impeachment was alleged accountancy crimes, including the timing of the government’s payment of a loan to the Bank of Brazil. Not only were Rousseff’s ostensible crimes scarcely discussed during her Senate trial, their status as crimes was itself a stretch. Stephen Mothe (2016) explains that, in Brazil,
The president can only sign a decree once it has gone through an extensive process, which includes technical and legal analyses within the Ministry of Planning and ←35 | 36→other organs. At the time in which the three decrees reached Rousseff’s desk, there was no explicit understanding that they contravened any legal norms, but rather an implicit endorsement of their compatibility with the law, dispelling any possibility of malice or willful misconduct on the part of the president. […] It was only through a posterior decision, reached under questionable circumstances, that the Audit Court found the decrees irregular, and applied this understanding retroactively. (2016, para. 7)
Once impeachment was in motion, Mothe claims that Brazil’s senators shifted ground and transformed questions about a bureaucratic procedure into a full-blown political trial. In this view, there was no scandal to speak of; but there was abundant flak-in-action.
As Brazil’s 61 senators cast their impeachment ballots, 20 of them were implicated in the sprawling lava jato (car wash) anti-corruption investigations that Dilma had enabled to go forward (Arnaudo, 2017; Caudros, 2016; Democracy Now!, 2016). Michel Temer replaced Rousseff as president—a lofty perch to reach when he had been barred from running for office for eight years due to an election fraud conviction. In a stark departure from his PT’s predecessors’ policy package and without an electoral mandate, Temer’s administration rapidly implemented a deep austerity regime that was loathed by Brazilians. Austerity, along with Temer’s recorded participation in bribery, drove his administration’s approval rating in polls into single digits (Caudros, 2016)—scandal that Temer managed to weather as he hung on for two years until the end of what had been Dilma’s elected term. Along with sandbagging the lava jato anti-corruption investigations, the flak campaign against her presidency signals restoration of traditional class hierarchy in Brazil to cancel PT’s efforts toward more widely spread prosperity.
Impeachment was flak-in-action enacted by a small circle of elites. However, the campaign against Dilma also had its vox pop (or bottom-up) dimensions, implicating large numbers of Brazilians. New media was a key conscript against Dilma’s government. During election season in 2014, candidates employed online computational propaganda, a large share of which was bot-driven. Following Dilma’s reelection, the opposition’s online apparatus was not rolled up and, instead, mobilized as a permanent flak caravan (Arnaudo, 2017). Groups such as Revoltados ON LINE and Vem Para Rua (“Go to the Street”) had 16 and four million members respectively and their messaging reached many more (an estimated 80 million people). In Dan Arnaudo’s appraisal, the online outrage was “boosted by botnets” and “helped lay the groundwork for the impeachment campaign” (2017, p. 15). Flak memes ←36 | 37→ricocheted through Brazil. Through sheer repetition, around half of Brazilians came to believe that PT had ushered illegal Haitian immigrants into Brazil for the 2014 election and that an armed drug gang was a PT affiliate. The delegitimizing flak tall-tales lubricated support for Dilma’s impeachment (Arnaudo, 2017, p. 18).
Dilma was a prisoner of Brazil’s military dictatorship, subjected to torture as a young woman at the start of the 1970s. Impeachment is a “soft” tactic by way of comparison. At the same time, if they are not confronted, the “civilized” procedures of flak may prove more destructive of governance for gutting it from inside its own system of checks and balances; in this case, by repurposing impeachment from a question of scandal to an instrument of flak.
A Survey of Sub-Categories of Flak
Having considered what flak is not—namely, scandal—I will pivot to subtypes of flak, beginning with a basic distinction between flak-in-action and flak-in-discourse. Herman and Chomsky’s original characterization of flak emphasizes its manifestations in actions; to wit, letters, phone calls, or more drastic, law suits directed at flak targets. Throughout this volume, however, I will dwell more on what I am calling flak-in-discourse than on flak-in-action by mainly analyzing texts. At the same time, I readily acknowledge an often-intimate link between discourse and action; indeed, speech can be readily regarded as at once discourse and action.
In sharper definition, what then is flak-in-discourse? It is not garden-variety talk or writing; rather, it presents weaponized forms of discourse that at some point in the chain of its production is backed with power. The authors of flak-in-discourse do not seek to inform or educate the public as an end in itself. Rather, the flakster’s objective is to inflict damage on a target. It follows that flak-in-discourse is not simply a negative review made in good faith. In this view, assessing the Los Angeles-based rock band Warpaint’s most recent recording as below-standard is not in itself flak, regardless of whether the criticisms are crude or couched in sophisticated musical analysis. Good faith criticism’s project is not to derail the musical career of Warpaint as an end in itself or to otherwise complicate the lives of the band members; and even if it was, a lone crank’s review will not have the clout to halt the band’s trajectory. In contrast with a flak campaign, a lone crank’s review is similarly unlikely to incite concrete action such as a boycott of Warpaint or a committed movement devoted to hindering the band from playing. Finally, criticism ←37 | 38→of Warpaint does not in itself rise to the level of a sociopolitical issue, thus has too faint a signature to be construed as flak.
A case study of climate change denier Christopher Monckton follows to further concretize the differences between flak-in-discourse and flak-in-action—as well as discourse and action’s proximity to and synergies with each other. In the case study, I will also introduce further terminology for flak targets (personalized/issue-oriented/meta-ideological) and flak modalities (boutique versus vox pop).
Flak-in-Action/Flak-in-Discourse Case Study: Lord of Flak
Christopher Monckton is a climate change denialist brand-name who has made presentations across the world, including in the U.S. Congress—a presentation that prompted a 48-page rebuttal from climate scientists (Hickman, 2010). In politics, Monckton was an adviser in the Conservative Party in the 1980s but has since careered further right in having been a (losing) parliamentary candidate for and deputy leader of the anti-Europe and anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party. As concerns political activity, Monckton has asserted himself to be a member of the House of Lords—an imaginative claim for which the British State has repeatedly chastised him in writing (Beamish, 2011, para. 4). He inherited the title of Lord when his father passed away but is not a member of the House of Lords entitled to vote with the parliamentary body. Monckton has also, inexplicably, claimed to have been awarded the Nobel Prize and to have formulated an elixir that is effective against AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and the common cold (Bickmore, 2010). Notice that this brief survey of documented claims by Monckton about his CV constitutes description with implicit criticism—not flak!
As concerns discourses on climate change, Monckton has made public power point presentations in which he purports to demolish the pillars of climate science. One of Monckton’s performances in 2009 was hosted by the Minnesota Free Market Institute on the Bethel University campus. Climate researcher John Abraham of University of Saint Thomas in Minneapolis attended the event. In response, Abraham crafted a university class-session length power point slide show with voice-over that he posted on his campus’ server. Abraham’s response adhered closely to the scientific issues and characterized Monckton as an engaging presenter—if decisively wrong on substance, hence the need for rebuttal.
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Barry Bickmore, a self-described “Republican scientist [who] advocates sane energy policies” at Brigham Young University, described Abraham’s slide show as “an exceptionally mild-mannered, careful