Thread by @PaulHRosenberg

Trump's "9/11" attack on @IlhanMN was not just the amplification of a "controversy" created by a rightwing rage machine, as @brianstelter said on @CNN. There's a MUCH bigger creation story behind that: 1/12 salon.com/2019/04/20/cam…

To begin, @brianstelter was 100% right: "Controversies don't just erupt like a bolt of lightning sparking a fire. No. Controversies are created like an arsonist lighting a match.” 2/12

https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1117461778131116032

But there's a 2-fold story *behind* that story: how the right-wing rage machine was created in the first place. @DavidNeiwert explains the basic architecture & @chris_bail explains how Islamophobia got added relatively late. 3/12

Manufactured outrage is part of the "transmission process" moving extremist views into the mainstream, described by @DavidNeiwert in "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" dneiwert.blogspot.com/Rush Newspeak Fascism.pdf and "The Eliminationists" amazon.com/Eliminationist… 4/12

Though a similar structure existed in the 1930s, its modern configuration took shape in the 1990s, as @DavidNeiwert explained in Part 6 of "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism": 5/12
dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003_08_10_dne…

Islamophobia entered the picture through a nuanced, but ludicly-explained process @chris_bail describes in "Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream," press.princeton.edu/titles/10395.h…
which I think of in 3 main stages. First, crisis creates an opening: 6/12

Second, mainstream attempts to respond can backfire, creating even deeper openings: 7/12

Third, the former fringe groups now have the ability to reshape the political landscape: 8/12

Turning specifically to the attacks on @IlhanMN, they began cloaked in the *pretense* of combating anti-Semitism, using out-of-context snippets. The pretense was exposed by @AOC: 9/12

But now the pretense has been stripped away. After Trump's attack, @IlhanMN was attacked wildly as part of an Islamophobic response to the Notre Dame fire, as described by @chick_in_kiev: 10/12

Finally, @IlhanMN was *never* remotely like an actual anti-Semite. She did the exact *opposite* of portraying Jews as "the other" at the very beginning of a speech from which one controversy was created: 11/12

Read the whole story here: 12/12 salon.com/2019/04/20/cam…