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Teachers have raised concerns about the influence of incel subculture on teenage boys, as a survey revealed that seven in 10 female teachers have been victims of misogyny in school.

The poll by the NASUWT teachers union confirmed a significant culture of sexual harassment and misogyny in classrooms, with almost 60% of those who participated saying they had experienced misogyny from pupils.

The union, which has 300,000 UK members, says it is deeply concerned about the level of misogyny that is faced by women, trans and non-binary members, and students, on a regular basis.

It is also worried about a lack of government initiatives to tackle the subculture of involuntary celibates (incels), warning that teenage boys are finding themselves drawn into their views because of a lack of support from other, more appropriate, sources.

The term incel is used for men who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner and express online hostility and resentment towards those who are sexually active, particularly women. Discussions in such internet forums are often hate-filled and deeply misogynistic.

According to recent reports, Jake Davison, who gunned down seven people, killing five, in a rampage in Plymouth in 2021 has been lionised by the online incel community, and data has shown the number of visits to forums has increased by almost sixfold in nine months.

Delegates taking part in the NASUWT annual conference in Birmingham over the Easter weekend will debate the issue, after a survey of more than 1,500 female members showed 72% had been a victim of misogyny in their school and more than half (53%) said their school was not doing enough to tackle the problem.

The motion up for debate calls on the national executive to lobby government for misogyny to be recognised as a hate crime. It also says the incel community should be considered an extremist group, based on its links to alt-right viewpoints and hatred of women, and calls for further research into the effect incel communities have on young boys within schools and colleges, which will report back to conference next year.

The motion also calls on the union to lobby for fully funded mental health and wellbeing programmes aimed at boys, stressing the need for early intervention from mental health services.

Kathryn Downs, a secondary school teacher from Leeds who proposed the motion, said: A study in October 2021 suggested that there was a 6.3% chance of being suggested an incel-related video by YouTube within five hops of a non-incel related video. Given the amount of time our young people spend on social media, this is 6.3% too much. Clearly this shows the dangers of failing to support and improve the mental wellbeing of boys within schools.

According to the NASUWT poll, misogyny emanated from across the school community 58% experienced misogyny from pupils, 45% from the senior leadership team, 42% from other teachers, 30% from their headteacher and 27% from parents.

The majority of respondents complained of intimidatory, undermining or unprofessional behaviour (76%), comments about ability (51%), intellect (33%), body (32%), teaching style (30%) and clothing (29%), while 3% of cases cited sexual and physical violence.

One in 20 said the misogyny had been posted on social media including Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok. Of those respondents who reported misogyny to their school, 45% said no action was taken and one in five teachers said they were not believed or their claims were dismissed. Two in five said misogyny had affected promotional opportunities and more than a quarter (27%) said it affected pay.

Participants in the survey provided a long list of examples of the kind of misogyny they faced. One said: Children regularly make sexist comments about womens roles in the home and in the workplace. Children making comments about feminism being a terrible thing and explaining it as man hating, or even the wish to kill men.

Another teacher wrote: Students exposed themselves during a lesson, sexual gestures, sex noises made during the lesson to intimidate.

Another contribution said: Year 9 boys asking in class if Id had breast implants. I have had my backside grabbed in corridor by pupils. Another said: My mentor when I was teacher training said he was going to tie me up and rape me.

On misogyny from colleagues, one said: WhatsApp group which included only male members of staff. A member of SLT commented that I was hot and several teachers agreed. Another reported: Senior leaders being dismissive and undermining of female teachers in front of male pupils. Male pupils ignoring instructions from female teachers.

Dr Patrick Roach, the NASUWT general secretary, said: It is outrageous that so many women teachers continue to suffer this kind of appalling abuse in their workplaces. Our schools and colleges must be safe places for all staff and no woman should ever feel harassed, scared or intimidated just by going to work.

A government spokesperson said: In no circumstances should teachers be subjected to abuse simply for doing their jobs. Any report of sexual violence or sexual harassment to school leadership teams should be taken seriously.

Staff working in education should also receive regular safeguarding training to support them to spot and handle instances of abuse and harassment among pupils or staff.

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70% of female teachers have faced misogyny in UK schools, poll shows - The Guardian

The modern environmental movement and the far-right movement might appear to be on opposing sides of the political ideology spectrum. But overlap does exist and researchers say it's growing. Christian Aslund/EyeEm/Getty Images hide caption

The modern environmental movement and the far-right movement might appear to be on opposing sides of the political ideology spectrum. But overlap does exist and researchers say it's growing.

At first glance, the modern environmental movement and the far-right movement including anti-immigrant and white supremacist groups might appear to be on opposing sides of the political ideology spectrum. But overlap does exist.

Researchers say this intersection between the far-right and environmentalism is bigger than many people realize and it's growing.

"As climate change kind of turns up the heat, there's going to be all sorts of new kinds of political contestations around these issues," Alex Amend said.

Amend used to track hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center. These days he researches eco-fascism. He says once you start to look at this overlap, you find two big misconceptions.

"One that the right is always a climate denialist movement. And two that environmental politics are always going to be left-leaning," Amend said.

Conservative leaders from Rush Limbaugh to former President Donald Trump have certainly denied climate change in the past.

But today, a different argument is becoming more common on the conservative political fringe.

On the podcast "The People's Square," a musician who goes by Stormking described his vision for a far-right reclamation of environmentalism.

"Right-wing environmentalism in this country is mostly especially in more modern times an untried attack vector," Stormking said. "And it has legs, in my opinion."

"Attack vector" is an apt choice of words because this ideology has been used in literal attacks.

In El Paso, Texas, in 2019, a mass shooter killed more than 20 people and wounded more than 20 others. He told authorities he was targeting Mexicans. He also left behind a manifesto.

"The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations," the shooter wrote. "If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable."

Abel Valenzuela, local of El Paso, meditates in front of the makeshift memorial for shooting victims at the Cielo Vista Mall Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on August 8, 2019. Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

He titled that manifesto, "An Inconvenient Truth," which was also the name of Al Gore's Oscar-winning 2006 documentary about climate change.

Anti-immigrant environmental arguments pop up in more official places too like court filings.

Last July, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a lawsuit against the federal government. He claimed that the Biden administration's decision to stop building the border wall was a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

"I wish people like, you know, the environmentalists cared half as much about human beings and what's going on in Arizona as they do, or they supposedly do, about plant and wildlife, Brnovich said in an interview with KTAR News.

Brnovich argued that because migrants leave trash in the desert, a border wall is needed to protect the environment.

"We know that there's information out there that says that every time someone crosses the border, they're leaving between six and eight pounds of trash in the desert," he said. "That trash is a threat to wildlife. It's a threat to natural habitats."

Mainstream environmental organizations take the opposite view that a wall will harm ecosystems on the border. A federal judge ultimately tossed out Brnovich's case.

Workers reinforce a section of the U.S.-Mexico border fence, as seen from eastern Tijuana, Mexico, on January 18, 2019. Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

This strain of anti-immigrant environmentalism may be growing today but it isn't new. And that brings up another misconception that environmental politics are always left-leaning.

The truth is, eco-fascism has a long history, both in the U.S. and in Europe. Blair Taylor is a researcher at the Institute for Social Ecology. He said even the Nazis saw themselves as environmentalists.

"The idea that natural purity translates into racial or national purity that was one that was very central to the Nazis' environmental discourse of blood and soil," Taylor said.

In the 90s when Taylor started reading books about the environmental movement, he stumbled upon some ideas that seemed very wrong.

"There is this earlier very nativist, exclusionary and racist history of environmental thought," Taylor said. "It was very much based on this idea of nature as a violent competitive and ultimately very hierarchical domain where, you know, white Europeans were at the top. So that's been rediscovered, I think, by the alt-right."

Taylor was kind of horrified to learn that in some ways, the environmental movement was founded on ideas of white supremacy.

The word "ecology" was even coined by a German scientist, Ernst Haeckel, who also contributed to the Nazis' ideas about a hierarchy of races. This history applies to the United States, too.

A view of the Lower Falls at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone National Park on May 11, 2016. Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Dorceta Taylor is a professor at Yale University and author of The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection.

Taylor's research helped reveal parts of American environmental history that had not been widely known.

"We see a taking of Native American lands to turn into park spaces that are described as empty, untouched by human hands, pristine, to be protected," Taylor said.

"Environmental leaders are very, very at fault for setting up this narrative around, you know, untouched spaces. And to preserve them, Native people must be removed, the lands taken from them and put under federal or state protection ... so this is where the language of preservation really crosses over into this narrative of exclusion."

Taylor read the notes and diaries of early American environmentalists and learned that the movement to preserve natural spaces in the U.S. was partly motivated by a backlash against the racial mixing of American cities.

"White elites, especially white male elites, wanted to leave the spaces where there was racial mixing," she said. "And this discomfort around racially mixed neighborhoods infuses the discourse of those early conservation leaders."

John Muir was a Scottish-born American naturalist, engineer, writer and pioneer of conservation. He campaigned for preservation of U.S. wilderness including Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park, and founded The Sierra Club. Universal History Archive/Getty Images hide caption

The connections between environmentalism and xenophobia in the U.S. are long and deep. In recent years, some prominent groups, including the Sierra Club, have begun to publicly confront their own exclusionary history.

"We're not just going to pretend that the problem's not happening. We're actively going to do the responsible thing and begin to address it," said Hop Hopkins, the Sierra Club's director of organizational transformation.

The organization went through its own transformation. In the 20th century, the group embraced racist ideas that overpopulation was the root of environmental harm.

In fact, in 1998 and again in 2004, anti-immigrant factions tried to stage a hostile takeover of the Sierra Club's national board. They failed, but the organization learned a lesson from those experiences you can't just ignore these ideas or wish them away.

"We need to be educating our base about these dystopian ideas and the scapegoating that's being put upon Black, indigenous and people of color and working-class communities, such that they're able to identify these messages that may sound like they're environmental, but we need to be able to discern that they're actually very racist," Hopkins said.

It's common to come across people who say they believe in the environmental movement and the racial justice movement, but don't believe the movements have anything to do with each other. That disbelief is why Hopkins said he does the work he does.

That work goes beyond identifying the racism and bigotry in the environmental movement. It also means articulating a vision that can compete with eco-fascism. Because as climate change increases, more people will go looking for some narrative to address their fears of collapse, says Professor Emerita Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College.

"If you have this apocalyptic doomsday view of climate change, the far-right can use that doomsday view to its own strategic advantage," Hartmann said.

In that way, the threat of eco-fascism has something in common with climate change itself.

The problem is visible now and there is time to address it, but the longer people wait, the harder it's going to be.

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The far-right's vision of environmentalism has long roots in the US - NPR

The overview of Matthew Roses A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right (Yale University Press) in this recent column stopped well short of addressing the religious perspective the author brought to the material under analysis. I characterized Roses worldview as Christian humanist without much confidence that the brand name would be instantly recognizable. Indeed, to anyone shaped by the culture-war arguments of recent decades, Christian humanism will sound like a contradiction in terms. It might be the one point on which Jerry Falwell and Christopher Hitchens would have agreed.

The thinkers discussed in A World After LiberalismOswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist and Samuel Francis, a group whose work spans the decades between the First World War through the start of this centurytend to think of Christianity as the root of egalitarianism, liberalism, democracy and related blights undermining the natural hierarchy that should prevail in a well-ordered world. They are more culturally sophisticated than any given pocket of misanthropic xenophobes or mens-rights movementarians on social media, to be sure; otherwise, the world views overlap quite a bit. That similarity is not necessarily grounds for dismissing these philosophers of the radical right, but rather an indication that their doctrines have a constituency.

I finished my column on Roses book feeling not quite up to unpacking his Christian-humanist perspective but also wanting to ask him a few things. Fortunately, he was agreeable to the idea of an email interview. A transcript of our exchange follows.

Q: Of the five authors you discuss, only Oswald Spengler is a name familiar outside a pretty small milieu. What led you to this particular rabbit hole?

A: The authors I cover started to be mentioned by journalists in Europe and the United States in early 2016, during their coverage of the refugee crisis and the Trump campaign. It took only a little bit of reading for me to discover that there was an intellectual tradition on the far right that was different from what I had assumeddeeper, more modern, more philosophical, more reflective about contemporary thought and life, and more suspicious about the place of Christianity in Western culture. I didnt share any of their ideas, but I had to admit that this intellectual tradition sometimes posed serious questions. In March 2018, I published an essay on intellectual foundations of the alt-right in the magazine First Things, and the response to it was really overwhelming.

Q: Was there any model in mind in writing the sort of political/intellectual profiles that make up your book?

A: One of the hardest parts about writing this book was that theres so little scholarship on most of these figures. There are a few people out there doing great work, and I pay tribute to them, but I didnt have any obvious models for the book itself. I cite my old teacher Mark Lilla, and I would recommend his style as a model for how to write intellectual history for a wide audience. I should also mention Isaiah Berlin, whose books are really galleries of individual intellectual portraits. For me, the best kind of writing helps the reader to see the unity or tension between a subjects thought and life.

Q: You interrogate these mens ideas from a distinct stance that I characterized in the review as Christian humanism. That was, admittedly, guesswork, based on what seemed like echoes of Charles Taylors critique of secularity and Alasdair MacIntyres perspective on modern ethics. Heres your chance to set the record straight, or to clarify where youre coming from, in any case.

A: Good guess. I am Roman Catholic, and Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre have certainly influenced how I understand modern moral thought. But since my book is about authors that arent well-known, let me mention a philosopher whos influenced me, but whose name might not be familiar to many: Heinrich Rommen. Rommen was a star student of Carl Schmitts but was later imprisoned by the Nazis for his involvement in underground Catholic publishing. Rommen went on to write a number of important books about Christian democracy, which deserve to be better known.

My approach to the radical right is similar to the approach that Rommen took to his former teacher. [Schmitts work in political theory has been influential despite his membership in the Nazi party between 1933 and 1936. SM] I see it as inspired by a religious and moral critique of modern life, especially modern notions of equality and justice, which the radical right thinks are corruptive of the highest human aspirations, And here I partly agree: liberalism is unsatisfying. Our need to be loyal to a community or people to the exclusion of others, our need to inherit and transmit a cultural identity, our need to admire human greatness, our need to experience spiritual transcendencethese are needs of the human soul that liberalism cant satisfy. But they are real needs, and a culture that ignores or impugns them is inviting disaster.

Q: A recent Pew survey found that most regularly churchgoing white Americans (including those identifying as Catholic) voted for Trump in 2020. The former president has tapped into many of the same concerns as the strain of radical-right, anti-Christian/neo-pagan thought you analyze. This seems contradictory on some level. Any thoughts?

A: My book is about an ignored chapter in 20th-century intellectual history. It is explicitly not a book about what happened in 2016 or a guide to the new right in 2022. Many books about the far right essentially argue that it represents a powerful political demographic but also that its intellectually backwards. I sometimes joke that my view is the opposite: I think its a small movement but one that has some sophisticated thinkers.

Q: Fair enough! Do you have other work in progress?

A: I do. Right now Im going through Samuel Huntingtons archives at Harvard. Did you know he was writing about religion at the end of his life?

Q: Other than about a clash of civilizations with Islam?

A: Yes, near the end of his career, Huntington became especially interested in the relationship between religion and national identity. Im still working through a manuscript that he never finished (or published), and Im fascinated to see that he was thinking about theology. One obituary of Huntington reports that he said he wished to be remembered for his patriotism and his faith.

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Interview with Matthew Rose on 'A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right' - Inside Higher Ed

But Klaassen isnt the typical Fox News viewer. Hes Canadian, and he watches Fox from his home in Alberta. He had traveled to Ottawa to join the Freedom Convoy to protest Canadas COVID-19 policies and the countrys prime minister, Justin Trudeau. I havent watched mainstream media here since this guy [Trudeau] got in the first time, he said.

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The American rights footprint on the trucker protests could be seen far beyond Klaassens hat or news consumption choices. As a matter of fact, there were times when the Canadian convoy seemed like a most American affair. Many of the protesters waved American flags. A sign read, Drain the Swamp. Gadsden flags could also be spotted on a given day in Ottawa during the three weeks that the convoy besieged the citys downtown. At one point, a protester waved a Confederate flag.

All of these symbols on display in Canada were the manifestation of a massive campaign on social media, right-wing websites, and major conservative and misinformation-spewing outlets like Fox that drummed up the Freedom Convoy and pushed Americans to donate millions of dollars toward it. In fact, the majority of donors to the convoy were American, just as the majority of social media posts in support of the convoy were from the United States, according to a non-peer-reviewed analysis by Kawser Ahmed, a professor at the University of Winnipeg who focuses on radicalization and violent extremism.

Whats disturbing about that fact is not that individual Americans played a role in a protest outside the United States that kind of activism happens all the time, for better or worse. Its that the misinformation that is being spread about COVID, governments, and the press by right-wing media campaigns is contributing to an extremist right-wing movement on a global scale, one that is undermining democracies at home and abroad.

While many of the protesters in Ottawa were not extremists by any reasonable standard, many of the convoys organizers were. Some, for example, had initially called on overthrowing the Canadian government or held white nationalist views, which ultimately made the Freedom Convoy a potential breeding ground for radicalization. A protest-goer, for example, may have first been nudged to attend the convoy to indeed protest vaccine mandates, but they could have easily begun interacting with members of fringe, extremist alt-right groups in person or online.

The Freedom Convoy has since faded into the background, and its American copycat seems to have fizzled, but the Ottawa event should serve as a warning for how quickly misinformation campaigns can galvanize the global extremist right-wing network today be it through TV, social media, or the dark corners of the Internet.

Because Facebook, Twitter, and other social media giants play an outsize role in disseminating misinformation, many pundits and politicians have made it seem like better regulating these companies will rid the world of radicalization networks at the snap of a finger. And while regulation is certainly a crucial step, it is only part of the antidote to violent extremism. The reality is that there is no silver bullet that will dramatically limit dangerous ideologies reach and impact in the near term. To the contrary, policy makers have to start thinking of radicalization and the spread of conspiracy theories as a long-term problem one that requires a solution that spans a generation or more.

To start, regulation is key, and the longer Congress waits to pass legislation, the worse the problem will get. As this editorial board has argued before, the federal government must start properly using its antitrust laws to go after monopolistic behavior by big tech companies, break them up, and increase competition. (The Biden administration has so far taken some promising steps in that direction.)

But more than that, Congress has to tackle these companies business models and specifically make consumer protection laws that articulate how and when private user data can be collected, how it can be used, and how long it can be stored. What allows misinformation campaigns to have such success is that advertisers can target, with precision, individuals who would be interested in what they have to offer based on the users data that these companies sell. And so misinformation-driven outlets can easily expand audiences by specifically broadcasting to people who have similar political views but have yet to go down conspiracy-ridden rabbit holes.

Additionally, any privacy law, particularly those in the near term, ought to have an opt-in clause, which would require consumers to affirmatively opt in to having their private data collected under clear and transparent terms that are void of deception rather than have data collection switched on by default.

When it comes to limiting the spread of conspiracy theories, dangerous ideologies, and radicalization networks, regulation will go only so far. After all, these are problems that societies have always faced on varying scales. Thats why lawmakers should look at addressing misinformation before it actually spreads and invest in social media literacy education that could help people, from an early age, figure out how to spot common techniques and tells of misinformation.

And though some Republican states are passing legislation to sanitize how American history is taught in schools, studies have shown that teaching people about extremist ideologies in a controlled setting where the ideas can be contextualized and debunked before people are exposed to them in the real world reduces the odds of those ideas being appealing or convincing.

In recent years, far-right misinformation campaigns have been linked to mass shootings at a mosque in New Zealand, an assassination of a member of Parliament in Britain, and an insurrection attempt in the United States. Canadian authorities found and seized a significant stockpile of weapons and ammunition near the US-Canada border in relation to the trucker convoy. Its not that far of a stretch of the imagination to think that political violence could have spilled out during the convoy protests in Ottawa. And unless lawmakers step up soon, the odds of that kind of outcome will only grow.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us on Twitter at @GlobeOpinion.

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There is no silver bullet against misinformation. But there are solutions. - The Boston Globe

The last programming that viewers of RT America saw, on the morning of March 1, was a half hour of BoomBu$tthe Russian-funded networks business show. That day, cohost Rachel Blevins, a 27-year-old from Mineral Wells, an hour west of Fort Worth, had led with a roundup of economic fallout from Western sanctions against Russia over, as she put it, its ongoing military operation in Ukraine, using Vladimir Putins euphemism for his war.

Though that days coverage of the conflict on BoomBu$t was mellow compared to the previous RT America show, which had featured one guest averring that not all Ukrainians are Nazis and another complaining that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was being hailed as a hero. Blevins focused on the negative impacts from the sanctions: higher oil prices, a potential 2008-style global financial crisis, recession fears, and even tensions over the International Space Station. Next: a plug for The World According to Jessehosted by Jesse Ventura, the wrestler, conspiracy theorist, and former Minnesota governorfollowed by a cheeky house ad that said, RT is not alt-left or alt-right, but we are a solid alternative to the bullshit. Then, abruptly, the screen went dark and a message appeared: This channel is no longer available. DirecTV.

It was another blow to a network that was seeing its reach drastically curtailed due to government bans in Europe (an EU ban took effect the next day) and restrictions imposed by big tech companies such as Facebook and TikTok. Two days later, RT America announced that it was suspending its operations altogether. Launched in 2010, the channel was the Washington, D.C.based offshoot of the network formerly known as Russia Today. RT had begun broadcasting in 2005, soon expanding into a globe-spanning network of TV channels and digital media funded by the Russian government and run by close affiliates of Vladimir Putin. RT America became a home for iconoclasts, second-act pundits, and opportunistic apparatchiks, many of whom pretended not to notice their employers alignment with the Kremlin.

Blevins, along with most of the staff, was out of a job. She hadnt been the most prominent host at RT America, but she was one of its most loyal. She started working at RT America in 2018, just over a year after graduating from Texas Tech University with a degree in journalism. Her last BoomBu$t show was her 196th. In the early days of Russias invasion, Blevinss coverage had been highly diversionary; while the Russian military pressed into Ukraine on February 25, the second day of what RT called a special operation, Blevins led the program with a story about a Russian investigation into genocide in the breakaway Donbas region of Ukraine that had purportedly been carried out by Ukrainian neofascists. Analysts had warned just a week before that Putin would use exactly such a fabrication in order to justify invading Ukraine, as he had done in the lead-up to the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

As RT was systematically deplatformed in Europe and America, Blevins became one of the loudest voices defending her employer. On Twitter, she batted back at a legion of critics who saw her as a fitting target for their rage over RT and Russias war. A representative example: Your profile bio has a typo, it says Opinions are my own, it should say Opinion are from Vlad. Fixed it for you, I take payments in euros or dollars (sorry no rubles atm).

On February 27, as Russian troops bore down on Ukraine, Blevins took to Rokfin.coman Austin-based subscription platform similar to Patreon that mostly features wrestling and conspiracy contentto address RT critics. Ive never been told by RT what I should or shouldnt say. Ive never been told I needed to follow any sort of narrative and thats why I work for the network I work for, she said. She went on to defend the way RT covered the war in Ukraine, referring to the so-called invasion and linking the conflict to U.S. policy. For all the people sitting there saying, Well, Ukraine is a sovereign country, they should be able to do what they want to dowell, to a certain extent, sure, however, thats not whats happening now. Ukraine is not acting as a sovereign nation...it is acting under the influence of NATO.

On February 28, when Twitter slapped a label on her account warning that it constituted Russian-affiliated state media, Blevins fired back, insisting that she is an individual journalist who does not speak for Russia or Russian media. After being bombarded by what she describes as a flurry of hate mail, Blevins deleted the tweet only to surface the next day to address her critics. If youre one of the people pushing to ban RT and threatening myself and my colleaguesI hope you know that youre not achieving what you think you are. And when RT America shut down on March 3, she was one of the few RT employees to speak out, writing on Twitter that she was heartbroken and signing off with a George Orwell quote: Journalism is printing what someone else does not want publishedeverything else is public relations. When I talked to her on the phone the next day, she said she felt as if she was in a nightmare I still havent woken up from.

Blevins, for all her pro-Kremlin messaging, had never quite fit the stereotype that might leap to mind when one thinks of Putins American puppets. For lack of a better term, she came across as a normal young American journalist, passionate and seemingly sincere. But shed been with RT America for three and a half years, and she continues to vociferously defend its journalism. All of which raises some questions, foremost among them: how did a young woman from a small town in Texas end up as the face of RT America as the network spectacularly imploded?

Blevinss family moved from Colorado to Mineral Wells, an economically struggling town of around 15,000, when she was eleven. She attended Community Christian School, a small, private religious institution, where she graduated as valedictorian in 2013. A scholarship landed her at Texas Tech, where she began taking journalism classes. After her professors warned that young journalists usually have to toil for years covering local crime and local elections, Blevins said she planned to switch majorsthat is, until one of her professors assigned her and her classmates to conduct an official interview with a source. She chose the topic of government control of media. Her father, a regular listener of talk radio, suggested she interview Ben Swann, a TV journalist originally from El Paso who has alternated between stints as an award-winning major-market local TV anchor and an enthusiastic promulgator of conspiracy theoriessometimes at the same time. When they met, Swann had a short-lived radio show on the Republic Broadcasting Network, a fringe Texas-based outlet that has repeatedly featured hard-core white supremacists and Holocaust deniers.

Blevins says the interview helped open her eyes to what she terms independent journalists and independent networks. Facebooks algorithm had catalyzed the explosive growth of viral content farms, many of them seat-of-the-pants publishers that specialized in sensational and conspiratorial storiesand it just so happened that Swann was launching a website, Truth in Media, that needed writers. I was kind of in the place of saying, Okay, well, I dont have much experience, but I can try. And so I started out writing for him. By June, she was regularly freelancing for the site.

Swann was also a regular guest on RT America at the time, sometimes echoing Kremlin propaganda. In one 2014 segment, he averred that any credible evidence does not seem to exist that Russian-backed insurgents in Ukraine were responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17an argument that was part of a larger campaign by Putin and RT to sow confusion about who was responsible for the 298 deaths that resulted. (An RT reporter resigned on air in disgust over the outlets coverage of the incident.) Years later, when Blevins had her own RT America show, Swann would pop up as a guest; in one of her last shows, he was introduced as a crypto analyst.

It didnt take long for Blevins to get noticed by RT higher-ups. Just a few months into her freelancing gig at Truth in Media, during the fall semester of her sophomore year, the news director for RT America saw one of Blevinss stories and reached out to offer her a job as a reporter. I said, Hey, Im still in college; Im going to get this degree. I will reach back out, and lets keep in touch and basically keep the networking going until I graduate. The offer might seem odd, or premature, but it was standard practice for RT. A 2020 Oxford study, based on interviews with 23 RT journalists, found that the networks management deliberately recruited journalists with little to no experience, in order to be able to mold the newly hired journalists and shape their minds.

The Truth in Media site no longer exists, but from what I could find, Blevinss work was fairly tamemostly write-ups of headline news with a libertarian bent. But it introduced her to a wider community of conspiracy-prone, Russia-credulous outlets. Soon she was freelancing for two more such sites, the Free Thought Project and We Are Change, the latter of which is run by Luke Rudkowski, an associate of Alex Jones who got his start as a leader of the 9/11 Truth movement in New York and came to viral YouTube fame in 2007 for yelling that former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was New World Order scum. Blevins produced stories that mostly focused on police brutality in the U.S. and American atrocities abroad, but bore the hallmarks of the RT style: persistent whataboutism, fury at the mainstream media, and a reflexively pro-Putin posture.

For a newsletter for Texas Techs College of Media and Communication, Blevins was writing articles with headlines like Department of Public Relations Presents Student and Faculty Member of the Year Awards. At the same time, for We Are Change, she was writing articles with all-caps headlines like WHY ITS TIME FOR THE WASHINGTON POST TO GIVE UP THE ANTI-RUSSIA CAMPAIGN, WHY THE U.S. IS DEMONIZING RUSSIA TO COVER UP FAILURE IN SYRIA, and RUSSIAN PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN WARNS DONALD TRUMP OF COUP DETAT, the latter of which published in January 2017 and argues in the lede that Putins latest sensational comments put the nail in the coffin of this whole Russian hacking scandal that we have been hearing about for the past two months.

Two Texas Tech journalism professors I spoke to said they knew nothing about Blevinss unusual freelance gigs during her time there. But they praised her as a top student. She was one of the sharpest young girls that came through the program, said Mary Ann Edwards, who taught her news writing. She was diligent; she was so conscientious about everything she did. Professor Randy Reddick recalled that she got a 94 on a paper criticizing media coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign. His main criticism to her: Be careful, this is opinionatedyou might rephrase.

After graduating in 2017, Blevins kept churning out freelance pieces as well as making her own videos for Facebookat least until the platform began cracking down on misinformation in the wake of Trumps election. In 2018, Facebook scrubbed the Free Thought Projectwhich was reaching 20 to 30 million people per week, according to one of its foundersfrom the platform. Later it zapped Blevinss own Facebook page, where she had accumulated close to 70,000 followers and posted videos, some of which she claims had a million views. With her freelance work drying up, Blevins turned to her next best option: the network that had made her an offer three years earlier.

I was reaching out to RT America, saying, Hey, you know, Ive been very vocal about foreign policy. Ive been very vocal in my frustration with some of the things that the U.S. government is doing and with the way the media landscape is today. And for me, RT America was the only option where I could actually cover the stories that I was passionate about, and it was the only place where I was seeing that coverage happen. She got the gig.

Part of the appeal for Blevins, she says, was RTs version of the old Fox News Fair and Balanced slogan: Question more. And indeed, RT wasnt left-wing or right-wing in the style of so many U.S. outlets. Thats because, as RTs own top leaders have acknowledged, the outlet is intended to impress Kremlin talking points on its audiences, particularly during times of war, and to sow division among Americans. It attracted American viewersand some of its editorial staffthrough a resonant critique of the failings and moral outrages of mainstream media and U.S. foreign policy. On some days, RT sounded like Noam Chomsky, on others, like Steve Bannon. The one constant theme was that America is a failing empirea contention that many Americans find appealing and absent from mainstream media.

Plus, as Bloomberg put it in 2017, referring to another young RT America anchor: Where else on cable news could a 27-year-old inveigh against U.S. imperialism on a nightly basis?

In conversations I had with Blevins, she had no qualms about working for RT and seemed mostly mystified by the backlash toward the networks coverage of the war in Ukraine.

It frustrates me that taking the stance of providing context to a conflict is automatically seen as supporting that conflict or supporting what the Russian military is doing, said Blevins, who calls herself incredibly anti-war. She added: And I think that its frustrating to come from a standpoint of everything has to be one way or the other. Everything has to be left or right, right or wrong, whatever.

Does Blevins really think Putin invaded Ukraine to fight Nazis? Had she used the Kremlins euphemistic phrase military operation because that was the Kremlins preferred phrasing for its war?

She admits to being surprised that Russia actually went through with an invasion, but cant quite process the criticism over the networks terminology. It feels like Im in a place where I cant win, she said. Every single thing I say, every term I use is going to be blown up in one way or another. And at the time, RT as a whole had been using that phrasing, and that was what we continued to use for our show just because we were in a position of trying to find the best way to navigate it, and we may not have chosen the best way to navigate it.

Blevins kept returning to context she said had been omitted by the mainstream media. In her account, its the U.S., not Russia, who is the primary aggressor. Russia did not wake up and decide that it was going to just take over Ukraine. I dont necessarily think that theyre fighting to take over Ukraine from what Ive heard and from what Ive paid attention to. But the way that the media coverage has been, that, you know, Putin is someone who wants to go in there and to overthrow the Ukrainian government and to install someone who he agrees with. And what weve actually seen happen is that the Russian government has two main demands from the moment that they lead this invasion in the country. Their demands have been that Ukraine be a neutral state and that it be a demilitarized state.

Moreover, she said, the U.S. media had turned a blind eye to the American financing of neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Russia understands the threat of having Nazis on their doorstep, she said. Exaggerating the threat of the far right in Ukrainewhich elected a Jewish president, Zelensky, in 2019 has been a consistent Kremlin messaging tactic at least since Russias annexation of Crimea in 2014. Like most propaganda, there is an element of truthUkrainian nationalists with neo-Nazi views played a prominent role in fighting Russia in the Donbas region in 2014. But outside Russia and the hallways of RT, Putins claim that his goal in waging war on Ukraine to denazify the country is greeted with ridicule.

With RT America off the air, perhaps forever, Blevins is trying to reboot as a freelancer. Her Twitter account, still bearing that Russian-affiliated state media label, looks scarcely different than it did when she was employed by RT. Shes making weekly videos for a tiny paying audience on Rokfin; the most recent had her explaining to fans that she had struggled with my coverage of the Ukraine conflict and conceding that she may not personally agree with exactly the way [Russia] has gone about invading Ukraine, while arguing again that Putin is taking on neo-Nazis.

But as for her time at RT, she says she has few regrets. The opportunities that I was given theregoing from being straight out of college into a reporter position, then going on to hosting an international business-finance showthose are opportunities I would not have gotten anywhere else, she said. I will always be so grateful for that.

See more here:
How a 27-Year-Old Texan Became the Face of Russias American TV Network as It Imploded - Texas Monthly