A few years ago, I started writing about a political phenomenon that I termed “Ctrl+F politics.” The rise of the internet, I observed, had led to the rise of actors and institutions whose explicit role in our civic life was to scour the debates that it generates in search of words or phrases that can be stripped of their mitigating context and weaponized against the unsuspecting. As an illustrative example of this behavior, I pointed to the novel Huckleberry Finn, which, to a dim-witted computer charged with discovering instances of the N-word, could well seem like a racist novel, but which, to a human being who has read and understood all of it, is exactly the opposite. The future, I predicted, would consist of a great deal of this “Ctrl+F” behavior, until, eventually, it rendered nuance impossible, made clarity and brevity unattainable, and turned politics, academia, and journalism into a Hobbesian disaster area.
Last week brought with it the most brazen example of this trend that I have ever seen, when Vice President Kamala Harris decided to demagogue the entirety of Florida’s new school curriculum on the basis of a single contorted line. Having assiduously explored the program’s text for words that she could extract from their rightful berth, Harris found one that suited her purpose and proceeded summarily to the outrage stage. Pointing to an instructional provision that aimed to show “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” Harris charged that Florida had “decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery.” “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us,” Harris insisted, “and we will not stand for it.”
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