Jeff Sharlet
@JeffSharlet
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NYT Bestseller THE UNDERTOW: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. THE FAMILY (book & Netflix). THIS BRILLIANT DARKNESS. Words+pics @VanityFair . Teach @Dartmouth .
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Friday, my 14, wary of school, answered a teacher’s query about this weekend by saying we’re going driving in VT’s Northeast Kingdom. “You should go to the Museum of Everyday Life!” said teach. “We went last weekend!” said kid. 1/
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Few days shy of 50 and when I ask my super goth 13-year-old what they're listening to they tell me it's a band I probably don't know called The Cure.
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I’m reading the Buffalo murderer’s manifesto. Let there be no talk of “mental illness.” This document is very cogent, articulate fascist hate, directly linked to fairly mainstream far right ideas.
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English professor here. Just heard an economist on NPR say debt relief “incentivizes colleges to offer more low value degrees.” He means, of course, the humanities. God forbid students learn there’s more to life than maximizing profit.
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The governor of Oklahoma, who just signed a bill banning abortion, period, is being primaried by another Republican who says life begins *before* conception. Yes, you read that right.
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The Hannity video of vigilante leader Curtis Sliwa bragging his "guys" were "putting down" a "migrant" live on camera? "Migrant" was a U.S. citizen from the Bronx who'd committed no crime. They just grabbed a brown man & beat him live on Fox News.
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I've been reporting on the Right for 20 years. I remember when the head of the National Assoc. of Evangelicals told me he knew they'd lose fight on same-sex marriage, but it was just a wedge issue: what they really hated, he explained, is secularism. 1/
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The *solution* to addiction isn't police, it's healthcare. The *solution* to homelessness isn't police, it's housing. The *solution* to gun violence isn't police, it's gun control. The *solution to poverty* isn't police, it's full commitment to ending poverty for all.
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Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity -- the rightwing machine is getting busy claiming rioters were antifa in disguise. This isn't just saving face -- it's reichstagging, setting up a rationale for martial law.
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As a human being, I’m broken-hearted by news from Colorado Springs. As a journalist covering the Right, I’m furious about the latest in our slow civil war. As parent of a nonbinary kid who’s working hard to feel hope, I’m terrified of what happens when they see the news today.
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Best part was when some Democrat yelled "on your knees" as McCarthy approached Gaetz. (I'm not making that up.)
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In Wisconsin. She said she’d never been to New York, she just thought the jacket was pretty. It is. I asked if I could take her picture. “But I’m not pretty,” she said. I told her I thought she was. “Ok,” she said. “I’ll close my eyes and think so.”
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A dude who rallied outside the AZ state capital yesterday. At this point, it’s unremarkable. Most of us just roll our eyes, & even as we loathe this, accept it as inevitable. We’ve normalized Chekov’s gun—the one in the 1st act—& we continue as if the next act isn’t coming.
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Georgia Tech won't require students to wear masks. As faculty at Dartmouth, I'd support a national faculty strike--should it come to that--in support of the 750 Georgia Tech professors who've signed a letter of protest. This decision by the state is a death lottery.
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First the black, white & blue anti-Black Lives Matter flag flew outside of Trump rallies, then on stage, next to the US flag; in Wisconsin last week it replaced the US flag behind Trump; now the American flag, with all its complications, is just gone, & a fascist banner waves.
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18 years ago, Christian Nationalists framed same-sex marriage as one of the greatest threats. They lost that fight against adults, as they knew they would. So now they're making kids their targets. This is not a debate about values. It's an assault on children.
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I’m not knowledgeable enough to have a take, but as a journalist & English prof I can say what I’m noticing as
@CNN
’s tendency to refer to Israelis as “people” but to Palestinians mainly as “Palestinians” is the kind of unwitting language that shapes narratives.
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What do you tell your kids about borders? Crossing into Canada a few days ago, I warned my 9-yr-old, Saira (not her real name), not to giggle. Crossing was a breeze. Coming back, I said, would take longer...
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Big media coverage of these small anti-stay-home protests is a big mistake. They don't represent even a significant minority, but the coverage leads people to mistakenly think there are two sides--and some will choose the idiot wind, damning us all.
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"Secularism" is a boring word for an idea that isn't boring at all: that nobody's religion should rule another. When Christian Nationalists make trans kids the latest target of their assault on that idea, don't think you're immune if you're not trans: they're coming for all.
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What Rosen is describing is the stress test of fascism. Fascism pushes each link in the chain of democracy. “Will this one break? Will this one break?” Probing, prodding, until it find the weak link it can snap.
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Police open fire with rubber bullets on a peaceful protest in Compton, California, tonight, & it's barely news. Cops acting with significant and indiscriminate violence toward massive crowds of civilians is becoming business as usual.
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Trump discovering semicolons is like velociraptors learning how to open doors.
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Think about how often Christian Nationalists change their mind about just who it is that they say is the great threat: Muslims, gay teachers, queer marrieds; before that, interracial couples; before that, women voting. Once it was Catholics. Often, Jews.
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I'm 47, run 5 miles a day, look healthy & am--except for the dead patches in my heart from 2 heart attacks at 44. That puts my mortality risk just shy of that of an 80-yr-old. I have 2 kids, 11 & 6. Help me be there for them?
#stayhome
#HighRiskCovid19
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Tonight in Wisconsin. First the anti-Black Lives Matter flag flew outside his rallies, then beside the American flag. Now it has replaced the American flag. That’s significant.
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Christian Nationalists seek out who they think is vulnerable & use that group as leverage to seize power over everybody. Maybe you're not trans, don't know any trans folks, maybe you think this isn't your fight. Christian Nationalists are counting on you thinking that.
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What makes it truly grotesque is that if Christian Nationalists thought another target would better serve their ends, they'd stop talking about trans kids. They are, as their own theorist Chuck Colson wrote, motivated not by any "issue" but by hatred for all secularism.
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Stunned to see there’s actually debate over whether it was ok for the NYT reporters to hold back crucial J6-related details for more than a year for a book. It was not. Any interviews with them—and they shld be interviewed, it’s important stuff—shld challenge them on this.
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Vital point: "Christian nationalists" doesn't equal "Christian." It's a political formation w/in larger sphere of Christianity, & there's no successful resistance against it without solidarity w/ the many Christians--some conservative as well as liberal--of good & open faith.
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Great news from Spain tonight: the far right Vox party, descended from fascist dictator Franco, massively underperformed in elections, losing big on its platform of anti-trans, anti-immigrant, antisemitic “biological” nationalism. The fascist moment is global, but not inevitable.
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"Patriotic education" is Stephen Miller's fascism + Mike Pence's fundamentalism. Some years ago, I took a course in "patriotic education" for my book THE FAMILY. I spent a season reading its textbooks & talking to its teachers. Here's what to expect... A thread.
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Deep scary: 1/50 k refers to military scale maps & publicly available US Geological Survey maps of areas mostly surrounding military installations. This isn’t a metaphor. This isn’t slow civil war. This is a congressman calling for the real thing.
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I held my dad's hand as he lay dying 2 years ago, heard his last words, each one a sentence it literally hurt him to say: "It's. Been. Wonderful." I think of that gift now when I read of those who must say goodbye over a phone--& of the man who's stolen it from so many thousands.
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I'd say Madison Cawthorn is cosplaying 1930s fascism but it's probably just easier to say "Madison Cawthorn."
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All of which to say is that even for cishet folks, the defense of trans kids, currently the target of a far right campaign of hateful ferocity, isn't altruistic. It's self-defense. This isn't one of those "first they came for X" things; the Right is coming for it all, now.
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Important thread. I interviewed the creator of this flag. The people who saying it has nothing to with race are just wrong. He made it as a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter.
I woke up yesterday morning, looked out my window and saw the neighbors had hung this flag on their children’s playground.
Pull up a seat, and join me, friends, for The Chronicles of Being Black in a Rich, White suburb
A thread 💀
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Acting Secretary Chad Wolf! The Wolf Man! The Wolfster! Wolfy! With cool sunglasses! And headphones! No military or law enforcement background—but he did go to college on a tennis scholarship! Yeah! Commander Chad!
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Far right Christian nationalists are counting on cishet liberals tsk-tsking over their assault on trans kids w/out doing anything because they provide room for the Right's expansion of power over everything, including those tsk-tsking liberals.
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Trump now claiming that countless mail carriers threw away his ballots because mail carriers are Democrats who "like their pensions." So now pensions are part of the deep state, too.
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His name is Mark Sherwood. "I believe life begins in God before it begins at conception," he says, claiming every life is pre-planned by God even those that begin w/ rape, as he says his did. He's saying--& I'm not being mean, this is his claim--that God wanted his mother raped.
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Growing dominance of "Blue Lives Matter" flag w/in Trumpism suggests a formation close to but not identical w/ both white nationalism & police state: I'll call it "police nationalism." Identity founded on fetishization of an explicitly brutal & implicitly racist idea of policing.
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There are the 5 who died in the siege & the 2 who committed suicide after That's 7+the 3,692 covid dead of today, plus at least 280,000 of the 380,000 that preceded them. No US president has ever killed so many Americans. For nothing. Not even an awful ideology. Nothing but id.
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So here's a new picture. I don't put my kids' pictures on the public internet, but with my daughter's approval -- this is part of her "burning anger" -- here she is, adding her slogan,
#keepourcountrycolorful
, to one of which she approves, not far south of the border.
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This NYT headline is like the Mona Lisa of both-sidesism.
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Hearing legal analysts explain why legally, technically, it was possible to find Rittenhouse not guilty—instead of talking about how what we call law has been shaped, especially in the last few decades, to enable this kind of killing.
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“Polarizing,” WaPo? Because he refused to go along with a coup? This is disgraceful
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Police nationalists, like the civilian creator of the Blue Lives Matter flag, are mostly *not* law enforcement. Rather, they're people who form an identity, a sense of themselves, *through* fantasizing punishment for others. Hence the popularity of the Punisher motif.
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When Chuck Todd says Americans can't handle a Trump prosecution, 1st q is, "Who do you mean by 'Americans'?" But I'll take the bait. I've been reporting for awhile on the real risk of civil war. Which is *why* I think we can "handle" that prosecution...
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Take this seriously. “Perimeter probe”: Higgins thinks indictment precedes bigger attack. “rPOTUS”: “real POTUS,” Trump. “Hold”: “stand back & stand by.” “Buckle up”: prepare for war. “1/50 k”: military scale maps. “Know your bridges”: militia speak for prepare to seize bridges.
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It’s plausible Judge Cannon is, essentially, crooked. Also plausible, & really even scarier, is that she’s ruling this way because she’s scared. She may realize that if she ruled against Trump MAGA cld target her. A federal judge, scared: that’s how fascists seize institutions.
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Found out tonight my 11 year old has been secretly recording some of my wife's and mine coronavirus conversations for what she says is going to be a big covid-19 documentary project. I am annoyed and filled with deep admiration.
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No they f**king do not,
@NYT
. What the hell is going on with your headline writers? This is borderline Breitbart garbage. This is as irresponsible a headline as you've run--and you've been pulling some doozies lately. Seriously--who's writing this?
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Franco came to power with the aid of Mussolini and Hitler and then set about executing his political enemies. His regime also used rape as a political tool. It was called the White Terror. This is one of their mass graves. This man is an influential think tanker.
Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco
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I'm a reasonably successful political journalist and I've never felt the need to watch Meet the Press in my life. Maybe you don't have to, either.
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Jesus,
@cnn
, no he did not. He did the barest effing minimum of his job of governance. He declined to go out of his way to take part in this particular slaughter. He's no damn hero.
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This new NRA ad is barely a whisper shy of a call for full civil war.
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As a journalist w/ 20 years on the far right beat, I'm going to close-read
@60minutes
' MTG segment. To start: "MTG is as famous as they get." That's their justification: fame. AKA popularity. AKA the fundamental currency of fascism. 1/
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Police nationalists are white supremacists (including occasional non-white ones; it's an infectious disease) who don't want to think of themselves as such. Police nationalism allows them to fetishize force as "law" and relieves them of having to think about what law is.
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As my daughter saw at the border, authoritarianism targets POC first & most severely; the secondary goal of white supremacy, tho, is to keep white subjects in line through a mix of privilege & subtle punishment for questioning that privilege.
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I’m in disgusted awe of how quickly political elites are cohering around a new CW that DeSantis—who started a private militia under the explicitly white supremacist sign of a white alligator, & “election police,” & kidnapped a plane load of families—is a return to normal.
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I've been reporting on rightwing movements for 20 years. I've never seen more guns than in the last two years of reporting for The Undertow. As
@chrislhayes
, it's not sport & also no longer for "defense." Now, Right is arming--at in militias, thru *churches*--for "war."
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CNN this morning talking about whether declarations of interest in bipartisanship are “sincere.” This is insane, surreal, Man in the High Castle shit. One party just attempted a coup. Moments like this I’m ashamed to ostensibly be in the same line of work as these memory holes.
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17 years for Joe Biggs is WAY less than federal guidelines. In handing it down, Judge Kelly, a Trump appointee, admired Biggs' military service--which should have led to a heavier sentence, not a lighter one. He used the training given him by the U.S. to try to overthrow it.
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Do Americans know how big an Erdogan defeat would be? Not just for Turkey; for us, too. Erdogan isn’t the Trump of Turkey; Trump is the Erdogan of the US. A key figure in updating authoritarianism within a democracy & thus the global fascist ascendency. His fall could ripple.
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Trump opening post-indictment speech today: "Together we stand up to the globalists, we stand up to the Marxists." Historically, this is hate speech for "Jews." A subtle move, feeding outright Jew-haters & broadening their conspiracy theories to all his enemies. 1/
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Shorter Susan Collins: you can be married or have a planet to live on. Pick one. Don’t be greedy.
Susan Collins tells
@JNicholsonInDC
that same-sex marriage bill may be doomed now bc of what Dems did on the inflation reduction bill
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Year ago I saw my first black flag of no mercy, flown by those for whom “patriotism” means civil war asap, no prisoners to be taken. Now I see more & more, WI, MI, IN, OH, NY, VT. This house is in Bath, Maine. Trampoline & a lovely garden in back. Hula hoops. & a murder flag.
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Jesus. They're really going for it, aren't they? The end of the world.
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Police nationalists often merge "law & order" w/ an authoritarian idea of Christianity. But in essence I think it's a secularization of authoritarian faith, fetishization of a fixed, received "law & order" similar to fundamentalist "natural law" w/ state power replacing divine.
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When I launched THE UNDERTOW I did an event w/ a NYT politics reporter who scoffed at use of "fascism." When pressed, he didn't seem to know what it means. Here's my definition, informed by years of reading and... "fieldwork." With illustrations! A thread. 1/
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...as if the power of authoritarianism threatens only people of color. It threatens POC more; but it threatens *everybody.* That's what authoritarianism is. You do nobody any favors by imagining you're immune.
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@joesakthatsme
No, it doesn't. But the point is that even their fascist "justification" is a lie. Lies all the way down.
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Yes,
@washingtonpost
, “Democracy Dies in the Darkness.” You know where else it can wither? A3, inside, which is where you buried the fiercest, highest stakes pro-democracy speech I’ve heard from a president in my lifetime.
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There should be no other story tonight than Mike Pence refusing to commit to a peaceful transition. That’s it. That’s the terrifying news.
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That's because the Nazi flag only means one thing. The police nationalist flag now means many things: anti-Black Lives Matter (which is how it began), Trump, &, yes, a martyred memory of officers killed in line of duty. It's like Trump: it twists.
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Adam Lanza kills 26 w/ assault rifle: We talk about mental health & guns. Omar Mateen kills 50 w/ assault rifle: We talk about Islam.
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Troll outraged with me for disparaging Madison Cawthorn's politics because, sez troll, he "gave his legs for... our country." It was a car accident. I wonder how many Cawthornian fascists have projected a military martyrdom story onto this twit who never served?
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How do I tell my queer child not to be afraid of the world when the speaker of the house has written in favor of criminalizing their very existence? I think as upset as we are, the scale of this bluntly fascist victory has not yet fully registered.
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And there you have it: the richest man in the world isn’t crypto-anything. He’s a full-on, explicit race-war white supremacist. Some will say he always was. I don’t think so—& I think that’s what I call a reassurance narrative, like, yeah, nothing new. No—it’s worse.
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Democracy dies by a thousand little cuts—and liberalism’s obsession w/ fascism’s hypocrisy is one of them. How many times do we think we’ve really nailed fascists in self-contradiction only to find they don’t care—& even delight in the charge, which after all is proof of power.
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Trump live in SC, on Biden: "this is a sick nest of people that need to be cleaned out, and cleaned out immediately." This is classic authoritarian exterminationist language, from Germany to Rwanda to Serbia, comparing enemies to vermin.
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...the fascists believe the worst has already come. They may or may not explode. If they do, that won't be on our terms, it'll be on theirs. We can't game that out. We can't tiptoe past authoritarianism. We have to hold on to democracy, or give it up. Prosecute Trump.
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You may have seen a popular meme of the anti-Black Lives Matter police nationalist flag with stripes pulled away to reveal a Nazi flag. I get the sentiment, but it obscures fact that this authoritarian flag is, now at least, far more versatile in its service to neo-fascism.
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Take the good news when it comes. & this is some MIGHTY good news. Poland has been a “leader” in the far right group of nations. Now Poles are leaders in the rejection of fascism.
Highest recorded voter turn-out in Poland with 73% of the public reported voting.
"Poland’s opposition parties look like they’ve won a solid victory in the country’s general election — and if the result holds it signals a radical change both in Poland and in the EU, where the…
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Implicit in the slogan "Back the Blue" when used by police nationlists is the fantasy of a coming conflict (which aligns neatly with QAnon's idea of a "storm") in which "backing the Blue" will mean choosing a side in a civil war not so much feared as anticipated.
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I'm not suggesting that the U.S. border guards had a deliberate plan to favor white people over non-whites. They just appeared to do so. They weren't all white themselves. That's how power works, too: the uniform is that of white supremacy.
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The police nationalist memes of cops w/ kids aren't false. Police, for all the profound & fundamental problems w/ American policing, often do good things. One can recognize that & still see police *nationalism* for what it is: The replacement of civil authority w/ armed power.
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Now, I can imagine some folks saying, "I can't believe you apologized to those fascists!" To which I'll say: That's how power works. It makes you complicit. It makes you craven. I've experienced it before...
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When someone says their covid-spreading activities are “worth the risk” they don’t really mean to themselves. They mean to other people. To you.
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Those dismayed at what is evidently considerable support for Trump must remember that fascism isn't a fad. It takes time to grow. It's been growing a long time. It will take a long time to root out. This will be the work ahead, even if Trump holds on for now. 1/
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QAnon Shaman invoking God as a justification for participating in a murderous assault on the Capitol--to recite Psalms in the Senate--is *not* an aberration. This is the logic of Christian nationalism, no more nor less than that of Hawley, Cruz, Greene, Pence, etc., etc.
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“Raises Questions”? What will it take for the NYT to figure out the answer?
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Addendum: Lot of responses telling me word I'm looking for is "fascism"--a word that *is in the thread's first tweet.* But the point of the thread is to look closer, to consider the particular manifestation of a fascistic phenomenon, the better to oppose what's happening *now.*
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Boring picture of a terrifying flag, third I’ve seen in Vermont. The all black American flag of no mercy, take-no-prisoners in if/when shooting starts.
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Just heard MSNBC live reporter say that there are no indicators Jack Texiera—hard right Catholic gun zealot & conspiracy theorist who hated government, called Ukrainians pigs, and screamed racist & antisemitic memes—has any “political motives.”
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I've been reporting on the Right for 20 years. I believe self-definition matters. Police nationalists now call their flag "Back the Blue"--a statement they experience not as non-partisan but as transcending partisanship. It's an assertion of ultimate authority. But worse...
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I was worried about my daughter, of course. And that concern shaped something ugly in me: A hope that our whiteness would keep us out of further trouble. One more aspect of power's control: it plucks the strings of the ugliest chords within you...
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New def of “middle class,” according to capitalism: living in your car.
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When we got to St. Albans, VT, we pulled over and went for a walk. I asked my daughter if she'd been afraid. She surprised me. "No," she said. She thought for a moment. "Mostly, I was burning with anger."
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New low in Trump grifting: disguising a plea for money as an overdue bill.
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