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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Sep 4

🧵A Blue Tsunami Is Headed for Virginia and New Jersey:

Out-Party Fundamentals Are About to Open a Can of Whoop Ass on the GOP

Sometimes life comes full circle.

Almost ten years ago, I was putting out a forecast in 2017 projecting a big win for Democrat Ralph Northam over his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie in the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race.

That race was widely treated—by media and the conventional wisdom—as a knife-edge toss-up. Yet my polling with Quentin Kidd at the Wason Center at Christopher Newport University consistently tracked a Democratic lead of at least six points.

How were we so confident? Because fundamentals matter. Because in-party/out-party dynamics—specifically whether your party holds the White House—are a heavy anchor pulling against your performance in off-year races. Virginia, above all, is fertile ground for the midterm effect. Once a new party moves into the White House, Virginia tends to rebuff it, amplifying that national trending through local elections.

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Aug 13

🧵The Nazi War on “Asocials”

You Can't Cure Crime Without Crushing Freedom

When the Nazis sold themselves to Germany in the early 1930s, they didn’t just promise jobs, glory, and a return to greatness—they promised a national makeover. And like all authoritarians, their definition of “cleaning up” had less to do with fixing the economy and more to do with purging poor people.

The Reich was obsessed with visual order. Cities were to be spotless, streets safe, public behavior disciplined, and every human being was expected to conform to the Nazi ideal: healthy, hardworking, racially “pure,” and loyal to the state.

If you didn’t fit, you were labeled Asozial—“asocial.” This was not just a slur; it was a bureaucratic category, written into policy and enforced with police power. And it covered a broad swath of people the regime saw as “blight”: the homeless, the jobless, alcoholics, drug users, petty criminals, beggars, the mentally ill, sex workers, and even some single mothers and LGBTQ people.

Read 21 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Aug 10

🧵🔥👇
Appeasement Didn’t Work Then.

It Won’t Work Now.

While he was in prison, the German version of Club Fed, for trying to execute a coup, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf — part autobiography, part revenge manifesto, part how-to guide for dismantling the post–World War I order.

It wasn’t subtle. He said, outright:

“The reunification of German-Austria with the Motherland… must be carried out.”

And he was clear the borders of Germany should expand:

“It is not the preservation of peace, but the expansion of the people’s living space that is the most pressing task of our time.”

That’s “living space” (Lebensraum) — for Germans only — at the expense of anyone already living there. In fact, you may not know this, but once they killed off all the Jews in Eastern Europe their next step was supposed to be turning the death camps onto the rest of Eastern European-another 40 million people who they saw as racially inferior.

Read 17 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Aug 7

🧵STAT(S) of the Week: Tariffed Enough Already

Trump’s New Tax on America

Trump’s tariffs are finally here—and they’re hitting your wallet like a second income tax. He promised China would pay. Instead, American families and small businesses are footing the $29.6 billion bill. Here’s what he’s not telling you.

In July 2025, the U.S. government brought in $29.6 billion in tariff revenue. That’s not a typo. That’s nearly $30 billion in a single month—triple the average from previous years. It’s the kind of hockey-stick spike that should set off alarms. But to hear Donald Trump tell it, this is a triumph. “We’re making money again,” he crows at rallies. “Other countries are finally paying!”

Except they’re not. We are.

That money isn’t coming from China. It’s not coming from Mexico. It’s not being extracted from globalist trade cartels or shady overseas middlemen. It’s being paid by American families. By small businesses. By Etsy sellers, knife makers, Hallmark, Walmart, and yes—by you.

Read 19 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Aug 6

🔥🧵Different Party, Same Ideology

The South Switched Teams but Kept the Same Ideology

There’s a favorite talking point on the American right: “Democrats were the party of slavery. Democrats were the party of Jim Crow.”

If you're sick of that, this 🧵is for you.

There’s a favorite talking point on the American right: “Democrats were the party of slavery. Democrats were the party of Jim Crow.” They throw it out like a grenade in political arguments, as if it were a trump card that delegitimizes any modern conversation about race, justice, or the parties’ respective commitments to equality. And yes, it’s true — the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. It was the party of Jim Crow.

But that was then. And this is now.

The part they always leave out — intentionally — is the political realignment that took place in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Because if you follow the story of what happened after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, you’ll find a transformation not of values, but of party. The party label changed. The ideology didn’t. And the South — always the stronghold of racial hierarchy — found a new political home in the Republican Party.

Read 22 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Aug 4

🧵The Anatomy of “Othering”:
How Authoritarians Build Permission for Violence

All autocratic regimes need enemies. Authoritarians invent them to seize power.

If there’s one universal truth in the history of authoritarianism, it’s this: violence doesn’t begin with bullets—it begins with words. It begins with a process. A framework. A campaign to paint certain people as dangerous, alien, corrupt, or diseased. To make them “other.”

Once a group is defined as outside the moral circle of society, anything becomes permissible. Ostracization. Censorship. Persecution. Deportation. Detention. Extermination. The list evolves, but the logic remains the same: they are not like us. And because they are not like us, they must be stopped.

Recurring Themes in Authoritarian “Othering”

Dehumanization – Comparing people to animals (vermin, cockroaches), diseases, or machines.

Collective Blame – Holding a whole group responsible for societal ills or conspiracies.

Conspiracy Theory – Framing others as part of secret plots (e.g., Jews, Deep State, Soros).

Read 20 tweets

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