I'm increasingly seeing GOP-affiliated accounts showing up to defend the honor of the Gamergate-style dirtbag "left" brigaders and breathlessly push Greenwald-style whines about how very unfair everyone is being to Russia.
These are some pretty strong tells, fam.
There are varying degrees of complicity with Russian disinfo ops across the Grayzone/dirtbag "left."
Guys like Blumenthal are basically just Kremlin mouthpieces at this point.
A lot of the rest of them just seem too smug to consider that they might be getting used/manipulated.
There was a huge reliance on Gamergate-style brigading to push disinfo and silencing ops in 2016.
Many of the brigaders are bots, but in my experience a whole lot more are just angry misogynists looking for any excuse they can find to ragestroke in women's mentions.
Folks on the left need to be really clear that both the GOP and Russian bot ops are working overtime right now trying to turn dirtbag nihilism and broader left dissatisfaction with Biden into de facto Trump support.
Don't be a fucking dupe.
This shit is real.
We're facing down a fascist and I'm watching so many hot take left accounts follow these bots over #neverBiden cliffs like lemmings.
I've said and will continue to say that Biden sucks.
I've also said and will continue to say that it is recklessly dangerous to aid & abet a fascist totalitarian in his effort to consolidate power by promoting social media narratives that encourage non-participation and apathy.
Don't fall for this shit.
Don't be a dupe.
Don't be so wedded to smugly talking down to liberals who blame Russia for rain that you miss what's happening right in front of you.
Yeah, Maddow et al. exaggerate on Russia.
It doesn't mean these disinfo ops aren't real.
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What is happening in Gaza is genocide, & there are so many "left" cosplayers out there right now happy to use it as just the latest pat excuse to opt out of the thorny, impossible question of how we act responsibly as voters in a country where voting does still matter.
It took less than 20 minutes at a suburban kiddie pool for a stranger and me to be deep into a discussion of incompetent cervixes and placenta accreta.
And I realized after, I bet JD Vance types have *no idea* how much women & moms specifically discuss repro health (and trauma).
On the playground and in other spaces where you find moms with young kids, for a lot of us these are war stories we are telling there.
For me it's an explicitly political thing that I was almost apologizing for sharing at first because I try not to come on TOO strong with the politics with parents I don't know.
And then I realized, holy shit, this is actually totally normal and all these other women do it, too.
Interestingly, Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism" talks about how despite Riefenstahl's attempts to distance herself from her Nazi past, her fascism still comes through in her 1970's rhapsodizing about wrestling and its significance.
The contemporary Nazi fringe is obsessed with this stuff, too.
Terror Telegram was obsessed for a while with this guy Antiroot, who would travel around staging wrestling matches with other prominent Internet Nazis.
Those same Nazis got really into starting Active Clubs, which are basically neo-Nazi fight clubs.
Fascism is about theater and aesthetics. Nazi fascists particularly favor wrestling theater. For its pain, domination, and most of all rippling male muscles (and women's absence).
Trump is neo-Nazi in the sense that he very much takes a page from the Hitlerian playbook, and Hitler's fascism in particular was about mass media-ready theater played in broad strokes.
It's about the camera-ready aesthetics and the simple ecstasy of visual recognition.
To the extent that words matter, it's about vibes, not content.
Speech is a background soundtrack.
He nails the brief, propagandic chorus (in 2016, "lock her up & build the wall"; now, "election theft"). The verse is filler. That's all that really matters in fascist theater.
One of the very damaging consequences of antisemitic undercurrents in left organizing space: it's currently very difficult to discern who it's wise to stand with/amplify when it comes to Palestinian liberation and opposing apartheid/genocide by the state of Israel.
Hopefully it's clear from my language already, but since folks like to intentionally misread this sort of thing: when I say "antisemitism," I am not conflating that concept with anti-Zionism.
The two are not the same.
What I *am* talking about is language that conflates Jewish civilians (Israeli civilians, but also Jews in general) with the STATE of Israel and its policies.
Especially when used to justify war crimes against children or hateful behavior against Jewish community here in the US.
Really trying hard to get my past 6 years of research files indexed and in order before this baby pops in January.
It's such infuriating work, though. We spent SO much time documenting how Proud Boys and Nazis were infiltrating the GOP, with insurrectionary intentions...
...and everyone called us crazy and paranoid right up until the folks we'd be warning about did exactly the thing we'd BEEN warning about.
And continue to make those in-roads, now in broad daylight.
A Nazi I watched literally exchanging bomb-making plans and rubbing shoulders with a now-convicted terrorist on Telegram is currently helping run a Nazi club that's now providing security to a GOP candidate in Tennessee with ties to (Koch-funded!) Moms for Liberty.