Missing Data and Worldview Gaps
Or, What Molly Conger's Weird Little Guys highlights about weak research practices
Many, many weeks ago, I started writing a piece to share a mini-series on Molly Conger’s Weird Little Guys, a podcast that mainly explores histories of people who lost themselves down white supremacist and related extremist rabbit holes, until their beliefs resulted in harm to others. In the course of Conger’s thoughtful deep-dives, she reveals larger systems of normalized, tolerated, and even encouraged everyday societal violence in the US. She makes what is often treated as the actions of “lone wolves” and other such individuals a much more coherent cultural milieu in which it has always been easy for some people to become deranged by hatred of the Other.
This mini-series was a group of episodes exploring the long, twisty history of white US citizens zipping off to African states to indulge in supremacist delusions of glorious conquest through race war especially during the era of South African apartheid. That mini-series was published while Afrikaaners were seeking and receiving “asylum” claims under the current POTUS—even though many of the white supremacists in South Africa will never move because they think “God” has decreed this land for them, and because the blood spilled in past feuds requires further commitment so as not to undermine prior sacrifice.
Most of those episodes are as thought-provoking as they are chilling (especially the ones addressing people who got away with the overt slaughter of black South Africans for years), but I would honestly recommend the last in the mini-series—the one where Conger puzzles out when and why POTUS got so wrapped up in this issue himself, and reviews related diplomatic politics and media indulgences in recent years—as a starting point for the whole set of episodes, if you’re interested.
This is because, while all episodes demonstrate Conger’s excellent methodology as an independent researcher, some episodes necessarily demonstrate more range in analysis than others—and this last piece in the South Africa series, while verging on more contemporary commentary than is her usual preference, is filled with many demonstrations of how to test the reliability of stated claims by prominent officials—and also, reminds people to pay attention to guests who seem to show up on a wide range of media platforms overnight.
Conger’s work does not trade in sensationalism, even when her podcasts address deep worldly trauma. Rather, her interest in white supremacy and related forms of extremism in the US has strong roots in personal experience with the damage done by such groups to local community. From her close exposure to the harm caused by such extremists, Conger has sought to understand the systemic and personal pathways that create such miserable ends for human beings in the first place. She always speaks with care and attention to the victims of their actions. She also speaks with a firm understanding that these perpetrators are, at the end of the day, simply “weird little guys”—not larger-than-life at all—and this reframing of their ideas and actions is a critical part of how we reclaim anything remotely resembling civil society from them.
The way Conger presents her work is exceptional, too, because she is a strong advocate for modelling research practice in the delivery of her conclusions. This means that she’ll highlight how she knows what she knows—whether from poring over old court documents, or being present in courtrooms herself, or from reviewing surrounding documentation in traditional media, or from deep-dives in difficult online forums—and then wrestle with the reliability of what emerge in these places. Comparative analysis, keyword searching, name cross-referencing, clarification as to when errors emerge in the documentation and it is possible to know these are errors…
Conger isn’t just focused on telling you a story.
She’s also doing the work of teaching people how to weigh the level of confidence they can and should ascribe to “facts” of different kinds.
And that’s probably why I admire her work so very much.
One of my greatest frustrations in recent years has lain with the number of people in my circles interested in listening to folks who do not source their claims, and/or do not take the time to explain why their sources or interpretations should be privileged over sources and interpretations that say other things entirely.
It has been a great sorrow of mine to have people anxiously ask me not to mention a certain name or use a certain source in my own writing, because the person once said X or the source once published Y. That is the path to media illiteracy, because the moment you’re afraid to name and contextualize a given source for broader analysis, you’ve given bad-faith actors all the fodder they need to shut down anything else you might say. Under that school of propagandist media-management, all a bad-faith actor has to do is find one flaw, one bad statement, one awkward turn of phrase, to keep people with different views from sharing a whole body of far more relevant analysis.
And yes, admittedly, there are some venues I won’t ever source directly, and which I am openly exasperated to find that others take credulously and spread with great enthusiasm. This is because the pundits/outlets involved are deeply bad-faith actors who benefit disproportionately from being named and broadcast widely. They want to be discussed, and so say and do sensational things to achieve those ends—with little care for accuracy in the remarks themselves.
Even then, though, there are still contexts in which it is important to name such figures and media outlets, and to talk about the impact of what they’re saying on the broader discourse, so—all things, judiciously, in their time and place.
Missing data and skewed cultural referents
Which brings me to the latest episode of Weird Little Guys, in which Conger’s research yields a much more potent body of commentary on media literacy. In “A Brief History of Vehicular Violence”, Conger explores some of the most oft-cited research on causation for vehicular ramming attacks (VRAs)—incidents, that is, where a vehicle is used as the primary weapon of attack, especially on pedestrian targets. Conger starts with the conclusions as they are presented by that research as self-evident, and then she starts to look closer at the data used to reach those conclusions.
In the process, Conger comes to a growing realization that these researchers started with a foregone conclusion (the idea that VRAs began in the late 1980s/early 1990s, via Hamas-related incidents in Israel and occupied territories, and are predominantly a tactic of Islamic extremism) that does not reflect even the full body of data used by these researchers… and which also overlooks one subset of much older data entirely.
I highly recommend the full piece, because of the care that goes into Conger’s evaluation of these researcher claims and deep-dives into the selectivity of their data sets, so I won’t rehash her commentary here in full.
However, the core argument that Conger makes, while analyzing and debunking a set of research with significant influence in policy circles, is important:
Such studies often tell us more about the researchers than the research subjects.
Who we choose to include and exclude as a worthy victim, and as a perpetrator of harm worthy of our attention, is significantly shaped by the cultures we inhabit, and through them, the preconceptions that define our immediate world.
As with news media, though, this doesn’t mean we should utterly exclude the work of any given researcher from our understanding of a topic—not even if they picked their data sets in ways that aren’t entirely defensible, on closer review.
Quite the opposite, actually:
Researchers like the ones Molly Conger reviewed for this episode—just like the “weird little guys” in her series in general—have so much to teach us.
No, not necessarily from the contents of their beliefs, or from the actions they take on the basis of them—but from the sheer fact that they occupy limited subject-positions, and often cannot overcome their preconceived notions of a given topic, yet still want to be regarded as having a singular lock on objective reality.
The world is filled with people who think they have a lock on truth.
Beware the versions of these people who cannot or will not cite their sources—and who would rather shut you out from reviewing the fullness of the data yourself, rather than model the sort of journalistic and scientific integrity that we so desperately need to build a healthier and more curious culture of discourse for us all.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML