Ask HN: Why was it hard to criticize Freedom Fries hysteria while it lasted?

&quot;Freedom fries&quot; was always considered a joke and I never heard anyone ever use it except with dripping sarcasm. Everyone knew it was a joke from the very beginning.<p>It also occurred when it was clear that with the emotions of 9&#x2F;11 passed, that we had no real reason to invade Iraq other than a very loose set of connections and assumptions with very little hard evidence. I was in high school at the time of the Iraq war and anti-war sentiment was strong (granted, I was also in my &quot;rebellious phase&quot; though I still hold to those opinions). Bands like System of a Down and A Perfect Circle had several anti-war protest songs.<p>For the record, most people don&#x27;t even say &quot;French fries&quot;, you just say &quot;fries&quot; or specify the other kids of fries like &quot;waffle fries&quot; or &quot;crinkle fries.&quot; French fries are implied by &quot;fries&quot;.

I noticed something very similar with the whole Brexit process.<p>At the beginning, in 2016, it was made very clear by the Leavers that it was unthinkable that the UK would end up outside the single market and without a free trade deal with the EU. &quot;No Deal Brexit&quot; was called a scaremongering fiction and was promptly dubbed &quot;Project Fear&quot;.<p>Once May invoked Article 50 in early 2017, it became clear that the softest Brexit possible would be harder than even the hardest Brexit countenanced by Leavers during the referendum.<p>Suddenly, the whole debate pivoted to a whole new one, where No Deal was renamed Hard Brexit: harder than any outcome mentioned in the referendum. Then, it was continuously repeated that people had, in fact, voted for that Hard Brexit.<p>It was very strange, and I felt like I was taking crazy pills as the options were redefined, it felt, almost overnight, and it seemed everyone just went with it.

I was 19 and in college in America when 9&#x2F;11 happened and the short answer is that Americans viewed this as a direct attack on their soil like Pearl Harbor in WW2. People wanted to get revenge and hold the attackers accountable.<p>I knew people my age that saw the attack and almost instantly dropped their careers and joined the military. Enlistments saw a huge bump in numbers IIRC. Everyone knew that eventually America would go after the attackers and a lot of people felt like it was their duty to help. And people that couldn&#x27;t directly help felt like they had to do whatever they could to show support--the &#x27;freedom fries&#x27; thing came from that feeling.<p>Politically it was a weird climate. We were just a year past the 2000 election--one of the most divisive and contested elections we had ever seen (Gore vs. Bush, where the election effectively came down to a supreme court decision on Florida ballot counting). Many people viewed Bush as a failson who just golfed and didn&#x27;t know how to run a governor&#x27;s office, much less a country. 9&#x2F;11 instantly put him in the spotlight and for better or worse his reputation was vastly improved by showing some leadership in a time of crisis. It was very, very difficult to criticize him or his lead up to a war against Iraq (even when all signs pointed at the war being illegitimate and unrelated to the attacks).

<i>&gt; Recently ... in PR, media, and other popularity-based professions, there seems to be a very different arrangement of perspectives and emotions</i><p>It was never this bad. The &quot;Freedom Fries&quot; thing was a small subset and not taken seriously. What&#x27;s going on now, however, is frightening. It&#x27;s terrifying.<p>Years ago, when the US invaded Iraq under the pretense that they had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and they were an existential threat that needed to be acted on, protesters like me said, &quot;No, it&#x27;s about Iraq&#x27;s massive untapped oil reserves.&quot; The US said, &quot;We know where they are; they&#x27;re in the North, South, East and West.&quot; Both the UN and NATO said we don&#x27;t see any evidence of WMD and it should have stopped there.<p>The US invaded anyway. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found. Did the US leave immediately, horrified at the war crime? Or did it stay and place its military bases at all the large oil wells? (We&#x27;re still there, by the way. I guess like OJ we&#x27;re still looking for those WMD&#x2F;the real killer?)<p>And how did the media, PR, and other popularity-based professions act? Did they condemn the war crime? Or did they smile and say, &quot;Support the troops?&quot; Hollywood made movies, not exposing the crime, but rather how our soldiers were killing kids and how that made them sad.<p>I don&#x27;t know if there were reasons for this action in Ukraine. We do know that the US had several biolabs there but the verdict whether it was producing bioweapons is currently split between NATO saying no and other nations (China, Brazil, India) saying yes.<p>But the cancel culture of anything Russian is gross and, given the last 80 years of US history, deeply hypocritical. Worse, the way the media is colluding to suppress discussion is terrifying to me in a way I can&#x27;t really express. My main account here on HN is from 2007 but I can&#x27;t use it. I just want us to discuss things rationally.

During WW1, there was apparently some amount of effort to rename sauerkraut &quot;liberty cabbage&quot; to avoid the German association. My understanding is that this was at least in part driven by a worry from cabbage producers that the public would have a negative reaction to a German-named product. Thus, it may be that in some cases, the causality is reversed - it&#x27;s not that products are renamed to stoke anti-X sentiment, but rather that anti-X sentiment makes it necessary to rename products. Obviously that was not the case with &quot;freedom fries&quot;, though.

When the freedom fries thing came up it was ridiculous and I am not sure how far it went in other states but they where still french fries in California. As far as I know it was just a republican stunt in the congressional cafeteria and never went beyond that. I think I remember them also renaming french toast to freedom toast.<p>I also remember how my dad reacted on them trying to ban “The Anarchist Cookbook” after columbine. We bought a copy, and so did a lot of other Americans at the time.<p>I don’t see your example with the kefir in the same light you do. What I see is a company marketing itself (sort of similar to green washing or rainbow washing) and not some sort of consent. The only consensus I see is that many companies are pulling the same advertising move. Have you asked people around you what they think about it? How many told you they think its ridiculous?

I was in high school in the US at the time. I encountered plenty of irrationality and rationality, pro-war and anti-war, but never encountered or even <i>heard</i> of anybody who had a negative reaction to criticism of the concept of &quot;freedom fries&quot;. It was nigh universally mocked in my circle and my extended circle and all media I saw.<p>Edit: Not to imply support for it didn&#x27;t exist - plainly it did. This was just my experience on the East coast. However, earnest public support for it seemed so rare, it honestly was almost like even the people who proposed it understood it was kind of more something funny&#x2F;irreverent, rather than a serious protest. I&#x27;m not sure how valid that interpretation is.

See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Virtue_signalling" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Virtue_signalling</a>. If we switched that off I&#x27;d guess that over half of the the output on social networks would go away.

I was a senior in college on 9&#x2F;11. The creation of the DHS, TSA, and the passing of the Patriot Act all occurred rapidly, with anyone trying to say &quot;Hey, wait a minute..&quot; shouted down as being unpatriotic and&#x2F;or a terrorist sympathizer. I went into the Army right after graduating, being the patriotic young man that I was.<p>Some learned from that and didn&#x27;t let themselves get whipped up by propaganda during our latest round of crises. Most did not.

It wasn&#x27;t hard at all. I ridiculed it and walked out of a restaurant in a Vegas casino because it had freedom fries on the menu and told the server so.<p>There are always people who are scared of dissenting. History often refers to these people as &quot;collaborators&quot;, if it bothers to refer to them at all.

Freedom Fries was a joke, but you might be interested in McCarthyism<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;McCarthyism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;McCarthyism</a><p>which, in my opinion, has many similarities with the current anti-Russia hysteria.

I was in the DC area during that time and everyone pretty much mocked &quot;Freedom Fries&quot; from the start. It was primarily the GOP congress members doing it at the time. No one else changed the name and the majoring of media outlets poked fun of those few that actually used the term &quot;freedom fries&quot;. In 2008 there was a small, short lived boycott of Palin wines because people didn&#x27;t like McCain&#x27;s VP nominee (who wasn&#x27;t associated with the winery).<p>This feels a lot like that, only with the media encouraging it this time. That leads to more people and groups jumping on the bandwangon. It&#x27;s a chance to indulge in guilt-free cruelty to a designated outgroup.

People with a slavish devotion to counterintuitive explanations are just as predictable and pathetic as your so-called synthetic flock.<p>Russia started a brutal war of aggression. People want to protest any way they can. Its not complicated.

Was it hard? People certainly did make fun of it.

Bush and Putin are both war criminal, period. They both &quot;Manufactured Consent&quot; to justify going to war. American right-wing journalist use propaganda, like freedom fries to denigrate and vilify the opposition.<p>In the case of the US, Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, was living in a mansion in Pakistan. The hijackers were mostly Saudi&#x27;s. Bush decided to attack Afghanistan, then Iraq? The Saudi was killed by a small group of soldiers, so war was unnecessary. The attacks are the sign of someone very incompetent or a war criminal. The offenders were Saudi Arabia.<p>On a side note, 2000 American&#x27;s died in September on the day, and people were outraged. During Covid, 4000 American&#x27;s were dyeing daily (not just one day), and people were like it&#x27;s no big deal, I&#x27;m not going to get vaccinated or wear a mask. So the whole thing is disingenuous.<p>It was immediately apparent that when the US engaged in war crimes and got away with it other countries started to salivate. It&#x27;s easy to see a link between what happened in Iraq and Ukraine. But again, both are war crimes.

Corona beer took a PR hit when the pandemic started.<p>That&#x27;s beer. Not a bottle of virus. But people are not superficially logical.

&gt; I was too young to notice all the details in people&#x27;s behaviour in the post-2001 political climate (and I&#x27;ve never been to the US). Anyone with some interesting perspectives who remembers?<p>The most visible reaction was people would fly the American flag on their car, sometimes multiple. Stuff like this was pretty common, though far from ubiquitous: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;US-American-Patriotic-Window-Clip&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00EPE1SMG" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;US-American-Patriotic-Window-Clip&#x2F;dp&#x2F;...</a>. Within a few years most of that stuff went away, as the flags wore out or people got new cars.

I don&#x27;t think it was hard to criticize; it always seemed to be a little tongue in cheek and lighthearted.<p>Have you read Chomsky&#x27;s &quot;Manufacturing Consent&quot; and discussed the ideas inside with others? While he is right about in general about editorial bias, he ultimately posits that media that shares his own political agenda is good and media that does not is bad.<p>Media-induced hypersensitivity to fear porn is certainly an issue, and the good people of this board like to think they are invulnerable to it. Ha.

I remember there being a few news stories about them being called &quot;Freedom Fries&quot; but nobody outside of the TV called them anything other than French Fries.

I do avoid buying Russian made products&#x2F;products from companies that deal with Russia so the target market here is me, I suppose.<p>If the product appears Russian I won&#x27;t buy it, I assume there are enough others who feel similar that they would rather take it of the market than explain how it is not Russian.<p>This has nothing to do with freedom fries, it has everything to do with the place the product is made.

The &quot;freedom fries&quot; thing was always seen as a joke-- why do you think it was a &quot;hysteria&quot;?

&gt; I was too young to notice all the details in people&#x27;s behaviour in the post-2001 political climate (and I&#x27;ve never been to the US). Anyone with some interesting perspectives who remembers?<p>The public in almost every country with the exception of the US and perhaps the UK were against the invasion of Iraq. On message boards people were debating the merits of going to war. Virtually every person in favor of the war argued in the same way. Saddam is not cooperating with weapon inspects so what should we do? We must do SOMETHING before ITS TOO LATE. Six months prior they likely had no idea Iraq even existed, but now they were really worried for their own security cause Saddam might do something evil. It most definitely was brainwashing on a massive scale.<p>Journalists and experts knew the reasons for the war were bullshit but they couldn&#x27;t state it clearly. Some UN expert who I forgot the name of said something like &quot;I recommend we let the weapon inspectors proceed with their work&quot;. Everyone on tv phrased themselves cautiously &quot;it&#x27;s unlikely&quot;, &quot;we don&#x27;t know&quot;, &quot;it would be unwise&quot;... That stuff doesn&#x27;t get through when the other side claims a madman has nuclear weapons he is about to detonate so we must act NOW!!! Bush and his cronies enacted one of the worst mass murders of the 21st century (so far) and it&#x27;s a shame they will never be brought to justice.<p>We should have learned something from this but we didn&#x27;t. In fact, the bandwagoning on most political issues seem to have gotten worse. Criticizing government invasion of privacy? What are you? A pedophile lover? Objecting to ISPs banning Russian media outlets? You Putin puppet! Against vaccine passports? Anti-vaxer!

It was criticized. Jokes on late night TV, opinion columns, water cooler. If Twitter was a thing back then, it would have been memed hard.<p>I think you answered your own question. If it’s a fairly meaningless protest, why should the counterprotest be meaningful at all?

Huh? It was super easy to criticize. That was all we did. Because it was stupid.

My recollection is that a lot more noise was made about &#x27;Freedom fries&#x27; in political circles, while most people thought it was ridiculous and ignored it, and went on ordering their French Fries.

I&#x27;d call it the &quot;Support our Troops&quot; hysteria, with &quot;Freedom Fries&quot; being just one small topic buttressing the larger cognitive dissonance. &quot;Freedom Fries&quot; played only a small role, to a certain segment of people who thought it was clever, as a partisan thing within the overall movement. Many people supported the war on Iraq while not particularly viewing &quot;freedom fries&quot; as a worthwhile point to defend.<p>Characterizing it all as &quot;synthetic&quot; flock mentality is misleading. Fundamentally, humans are herd animals and the US had &quot;just&quot; been attacked. The media most certainly directed it and helped it along (see also: Clear Channel&#x27;s list of censored songs), but that underlying feeling of being attacked is what supplied the energy driving the fervor. Compare one of the larger memes - &quot;support the troops&quot; (by wearing this cheap bracelet), to the actuality of the soldiers coming home from Iraq being some of the most ardently antiwar people around.<p>Ultimately cognitive dissonance works because people <i>want</i> to have their fiction validated. They wanted to believe that France was another foe (as opposed to a friend trying to talk sense into us when we were drunk). The management of consumer-facing companies want to believe that their token &quot;solidarity&quot; will help stop Russia&#x27;s terrible attack on Ukraine. One can view it as useless or one can view it as pitching in what little they can, but the one sure thing is that rationality won&#x27;t stop it.<p>PS another connection between the two topics that I can&#x27;t help but make is that the lack of US&#x2F;UN involvement in Ukraine is somewhat due to all of the credibility that was wasted on Iraq (et al). So much effort and resources were wasted trying to force &quot;freedom&quot; (ie western business, mostly) onto societies that didn&#x27;t particularly want it, that now we&#x27;ve finally got a society yearning to escape from the shadow of the USSR and begging for our help, but we haven&#x27;t the stomach to send troops. And on the flip side, all of USG&#x27;s interventionist wars (&quot;regime changes&quot;) were watched by people like Putin, stoking his paranoia and setting an example for him to do the same thing.

Laughed about in Europe, too.<p>After 9&#x2F;11 US politicians started to wear little flags on their suits. I think that lasts until today.

For the record, I think Freedom Fries were what they renamed the fries in the Congressional cafeteria or something like that. I never saw it on any menu outside of that. But it wasn&#x27;t hard for me or my circle of friends to criticize, because it was so goddamn stupid. Not least because &quot;French&quot; fries were invented in Belgium. But there was also the very convenient oversimplification it represented, where supposedly &quot;the terrorists&quot; attacked us because they &quot;hate our freedom.&quot; Jeez I dunno guys, could it be maybe slightly more complicated than that? I don&#x27;t know what it&#x27;s called in pop psychology, but you know how when a psychopath&#x2F;narcissist does something shitty like I dunno steal your TV remote, and then when you call them on it, they cloak it in virtue saying they can&#x27;t believe you would &quot;accuse&quot; or &quot;attack&quot; them for nobly defending you and your children from the corrosive influence of TV and&#x2F;or lack of exercise? Yeah that.<p>Once I was at a gathering in 2003 and somebody had this weird-looking bulldog. Someone asked about it, and it turned out to be a French bulldog. So I said &quot;You mean Freedom Bulldog&quot; and everybody had a laugh.<p>Related: Big pickup trucks with &quot;boycott France&quot; stickers on them. Like any of those guys had ever bought anything from France!

It wasn&#x27;t hard. Freedom Fries was a response to France not cooperating with pretty sketchy intelligence used to start a war.<p>Even people who supported freedom fries were mostly tongue in cheek. I faintly remember people being much more serious about France and Germany&#x27;s ties to Iraq&#x27;s chemical industry.

Why do you claim that it was “hard to criticize Freedom Fries”, especially since you admit you are too young to know? Who is telling you this misinformation?

why don&#x27;t you write a sternly written letter to the editor

The United States were not the aggressors but the victims (putting it simplistically), much like Ukraine is. In the moment, Americans wanted allies to help them hunt down terrorists who committed, supported and&#x2F;or funded 9&#x2F;11. France was not the most willing ally and thus Americans, for better or for worse, became somewhat anti-French. The &quot;Freedom Fries&quot; craze was in-name-only though; it&#x27;s not like McDs or Burger King literally renamed or stopped serving fries.<p>&gt; &quot;In a 2005 opinion poll by Gallup, participants were asked if they felt the renaming of French fries and toast was &quot;a silly idea or a sincere expression of patriotism;&quot; 66% answered it was silly, 33% answered it was patriotic, and 1% had no opinion.&quot;