Unsatisfied with the UC Berkeley Police’s explanation, Ori continued to dig. He talked to a student who used to work for U.S. intelligence but got no answers. He asked other faculty, but they were equally perplexed. Ultimately he remembered that one of his students had written a paper on anarchist structures and turned to him for insight.
The student didn’t want to talk on the phone, so Ori met him at a dive restaurant near campus.
“So, do you have any info? Which narrative is correct?”
“None of them,” the student said. “They’re all wrong.”
And so we present narrative four, as told by Ori’s student.
Anarchists did indeed attend the protest. They smashed the windows of Amazon and bank outlets within the student center to express their dissatisfaction with the economic divide. They weren’t paid by anyone—and in fact were so wary of being found out that they didn’t even communicate via social media.
At some point during the night, a heat lamp fell down and caught fire. There were no Molotov cocktails. These kids didn’t know how to make one.
But when the media reported that firebombs had been thrown, the UC Police thought the campus was actually under paramilitary attack. Instead of making arrests, they retreated in the face of what they believed to be a superior force. The situation therefore wasn’t contained and continued to spiral out of control. In other words, the digital echo affected real-time police action, which allowed the situation to escalate.
We underscore that no law enforcement individuals acted negligently. Just like Uncle Shoe Store, they responded in a rational manner to the information presented to them. That information originated from unreliable sources but was quickly amplified by being retweeted, reposted, and repeated, to the point where it appeared legitimate.
They fell victim to the digital echo. It could happen to any of us.
In a world where verifying facts is becoming increasingly difficult, inclusion is imperative. It gives us sources as close to the ground or the action as possible, providing our best chance of getting at the truth.
Despite our best efforts, there will still be times when truth cannot be reliably distinguished from fiction. In the absence of verifiable truth, competing narratives will vie for allegiance. When we are forced to compete in a battle of narratives, inclusion is still our best weapon: only by leveraging a diversity of voices can we create a winning narrative.
CHAPTER 2: THE POWER OF NARRATIVE
McDonald’s vs. McVegan
To begin our investigation, we remain on Sproul Plaza but go back in time.
Twenty-two years before the Milo Yiannopoulos protests, in 1995, Ori was pulling a metal wagon along Sproul, the very spot where the agitators—whoever they were—would wage their attack. Ori normally walks with a hurried stride, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from his pace that day, which was nearly a crawl.
His load was heavy: two folding chairs, a card table, twenty stacks of pamphlets bound with thick blue rubber bands, and a dozen or so signs affixed to cardboard backing, all balanced atop a red wagon that had started its life as a toy for kids. Now, having been donated to the cause, it was covered in political stickers. The wagon’s front left and rear right wheels wobbled under the weight of its cargo. Tadamtumtruph, tadamtumtruph, tadamtumtruph, they groaned as they rolled over the smallest bumps in the concrete.
There were also psychological reasons for Ori’s slow pace. He wasn’t just pulling a heavy wagon; he was feeling heavy as well. Simply put, he dreaded arriving at his destination a few hundred feet away on Sproul Plaza, along one of two rows where student clubs “tabled” about their particular causes.
He found an open spot between the lacrosse club and an environmental group.
Ori began by unfolding the card table, then organized the pamphlets into four neat rows. Pamphlets on animal research at Berkeley were in the first row, information about the abuse of primates in the second, the philosophical arguments for animal rights in the third, and miscellaneous pamphlets explaining the history of animal rights in the fourth.
Next he put up a poster for his group: a vivid photo of a chimpanzee strapped to a metal contraption with the block-letter words BERKELEY STUDENTS FOR ANIMAL LIBERATION underneath.
He sighed. It was time for the debates to start. Ironically, Ori had joined the group to meet new people. He was putting himself through college, and to save money, rather than splurge on a dorm room, he lived on the wrong side of town with a schizophrenic who spent nights arguing with the voices in his head.
A freshman living off campus and a committed vegan, Ori had hoped he’d meet like-minded friends. Instead, here he was engaging in a debate with a biochemistry PhD candidate about the efficacy of animal studies.
“You’re all idealists who don’t know what you’re talking about,” the scientist said, his voice rising.
Ori tried to take a reasoned approach, but the tension only mounted. Meanwhile, the guy at the lacrosse table was engaged in a lengthy conversation with a tanned freshman interested in joining intramural sessions.
How Ori wished he had joined lacrosse, or even the environmental club, where a group of hippies were talking about a beach cleanup project. At least those two groups attracted potential members.
Things came to a head a few weeks later, when BSAL organized its first protest of the semester. After doing rigorous recruiting, making special signs, and obtaining a permit from the city, BSAL staged a daylong protest outside a McDonald’s. Out of the tens of thousands of Berkeley students, seven people showed up.
The tiny group held up signs showing photographs taken in slaughterhouses and gave out pamphlets describing the difficult conditions within them. The hope was that the graphic imagery would sway opinions. “Wait a second,” a passer-by might say. “I respect animals and this place tortures them?”
That conversation never happened.
Instead people engaged Ori in so-called debates, which were more like one-sided tirades about why he was wrong and/or crazy. And those who didn’t engage in such debates—the vast majority of people, that is—ignored him and his fellow protesters. And when we say ignore, we mean ignore. It was as if the animal rights activists were phantoms.
But Ori was undeterred.
By noon, the group had stood out in front of McDonald’s for three hours. They had given out hundreds of flyers but hadn’t actually dissuaded anyone from going in. Then a middle-aged woman, her kid in tow, walked toward the group.
She looked like she could be one of Ori’s mom’s friends: friendly and kind, a woman in whose home he could have grown up. The nice lady approached the group, and Ori and his peers smiled at her. Finally, here’s someone on our side, they thought. But the woman said nothing. Instead she came up to the guy standing next to Ori and literally spit in his face.
As she walked away, she yelled toward the stunned protesters, “Stuck-up elitists!”
It was an ironic epithet to hurl at a group of activists who wore secondhand clothes and persisted primarily on lentils and cabbage. But at the same time, whatever you might think of the politeness of spitting in someone’s face, the woman came from an understandable place.
Here she was trying to take her kid out for a fun, affordable meal, and a bunch of protesters were calling her immoral. Let’s face it: health food is more expensive and difficult to find than ubiquitous McDonald’s restaurants. What gave these holier-than-thou protesters the right to tell her what she should do?
If