Ebook: Digital civil war: confronting the far-right menace

A deep look into the raging social media battles between red and blue Americans and the growing threat to US democracy from right-wing extremism.

The Far Right’s rise to power has ignited a digital civil war that rages across multiple fronts and multiple platforms. It is waged with words and images that are designed to inflict psychological harm, to injure through verbal violence, to intimidate and incite, to wreak havoc with rhetoric. The combatants are citizens, activists, politicians, pundits, coders, conspiracists, trolls, agitators, hackers, and journalists. At stake are the nation’s bedrock principles: equal rights, fair elections, freedom of speech, racial justice, and the rule of law.

Are rural white Christians the real Americans? Should teachers be armed or should the Second Amendment be repealed? Is abortion murder or an ethically sound choice for women? Should migrant babies be caged or should ICE be abolished? Should billionaires exist while children go hungry? These are some of the bitter ideological disputes that have turned social media into a political battlefield.

In Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace, Peter Daou, a veteran digital-media adviser to presidential candidates and to major political figures, investigates the underlying value systems and moral arguments of the warring parties, arguing that democracy itself is under assault by an emboldened and empowered Far Right.

Daou shows how the digital civil war is waged with words and images that are designed to inflict psychological harm, to injure through verbal violence, to wreak havoc with rhetoric. He provides a firsthand account from the war’s front lines, and explains that the relentless toxicity of social media – often treated as an aberration – is a feature, not a bug, of digital warfare.

A better understanding of how the underlying value systems and moral arguments of the warring parties play out online, Daou argues, aids us in confronting the Far Right’s takeover of the Republican Party and the consequent assault on truth, facts, and the foundations of our democracy.