Our Open Letter to The Economist
To the Editors:
We just found out via your announcement on Twitter that you'll be hosting Steve Bannon at your Open Future Festival in New York City, our home town, next month. As longtime subscribers, we cannot tell you how disgusted we are at this announcement; we just cancelled our recently-renewed subscription.
We extensively study disinformation and hate speech online. One of us is the co-founder of the London-based Global Disinformation Index Project and Faculty at New York University, teaching a class on Disinformation and Narrative Warfare this coming academic year.
One of the key elements of the curriculum will be Karl Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies, specifically Note 4 to Chapter Seven. We are sure the erudite editorial staff at The Economist knows Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, but in case you forgot, he states:
"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
It was no accident that Popper wrote these words during World War II, when the forces of intolerance were literally on the verge of destroying tolerant society. Today, we see similar forces rising up, amplified by ad-driven social media, and once again being given a platform by people who quite honestly should know better.
A Medium post on the event by Audience Engagement Editor Adam Smith uses words that are eerily and disappointingly similar to those of our current so-called “president:” “...it is vital that we invite views from all sides."
Without equivocation, it is absolutely NOT vital that we invite views from “all sides.” Sides that peddle in intolerance, hatred, and bigotry cannot be tolerated as Popper argued, for they will destroy the very debate you seek to facilitate. There is no such thing as a reasoned debate with people like Steve Bannon. He and his followers treat anyone who is not a white, Christian, straight, cisgender male as subhuman. Does The Economist wish to encourage this destructive cancer on our society?
Fascism and white supremacy are neither logical nor reasonable. They are sloppy, dangerous, hate-filled shortcuts human beings take to avoid confronting our pain and fear. If you want your platform to be one of logic, truth, and reason, including the most illogical, unreasonable, lie-filled, and wholesale destructive parts of human nature is anathema to your cause. Steve Bannon’s agenda should not be given space, nor should we entertain the lie that there is any logic or reason to his lazy hatred.
When a peddler of fascist ideology like Steve Bannon seeks a platform, it is not to engage in reasoned debate. Bannon seeks false equivalency of an ideology that dismantles the very humanity of people who are not white, Christian, straight, cisgender men, and he does so to provide scapegoats for those with latent fear or anger in order to fracture society into warring, controllable factions. False legitimacy feeds false equivalence; "Tolerate our intolerance!" they say, luring the tolerant among us into a self-destructive trap. We MUST resist this argument. Our tolerance is exactly the weakness they seek to exploit.
By inviting Bannon to your Open Future Festival, you fall into the trap he and his followers deliberately set for you, and you lend legitimacy, moral equivalency, and credence to his fascism and white supremacy. Uninvite him now, and not only regain our subscription, but help preserve the open tolerant society we all worked so hard to preserve, the one that Popper so passionately defended as he wrote those words many years ago.









