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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Oct 15

🚨🧵Why We Can't Panic
Humans Are Designed to Keep Calm and Carry On

Ten months into Trump’s return to power, America feels like its full of pod people (you youngsters can go ahead and Google that one).

The FBI and DOJ have been purged and now serve as Trump’s personal revenge machine.

The so-called “Countering Domestic Terrorism” memorandum re-brands nearly half the country—anyone left of MAGA—as a potential extremist threat.

Kristi Noem is on airport TVs blaming “radical liberal Democrats” for the shutdown. The law doesn’t matter. The Hatch Act doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. And the public reaction is… nothing. I used to think the problem was information—that if people knew, they’d act. I’m not so sure I believe that anymore.

Here’s why:

The Diary in the Dark

When I first started studying the Third Reich, I kept circling back to a single line from a Warsaw Ghetto diary.

The writer had already lost his home, his livelihood, and most of his family. He was starving in a room shared with five other families, living inside walls his own people were forced to build. Rumors were spreading that deportations east meant death, and he wrote something along the lines of

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@RachelBitecofer

Oct 13

Shut is moving fast now: You really should read 👇

Coordination the American Way:
Inside Trump’s Plan to Turn the U.S. Government into a Weapon Against Us

When historians describe how Nazi Germany became a dictatorship, they don’t start with the camps. They start with coordination — Gleichschaltung — the process by which every institution in Germany “aligned” itself with the will of the regime.

No orders had to be barked. People, fearing irrelevance or punishment and watching colleagues be purged, simply did what was expected. Courts, newspapers, universities, police — each coordinated.

Now, a century later, we are watching the American version unfold in real time.

Reuters just pulled the curtain back on a chilling plan inside Trump’s second administration: a coordinated effort among the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Homeland Security to investigate, harass, and potentially prosecute liberal and Democratic-aligned organizations.

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Oct 1

🧵We're Deep in the Shit Now
The Only Way to Win the Shutdown Was Not to Play

The Shutdown Power Grab

The government is shut down. That alone is bad enough, but here’s the kicker: Trump and his people have already said out loud that they’re going to redefine what “essential” means. Under normal shutdown rules, the basics keep going: Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control, border patrol, some law enforcement. Everyone else gets furloughed. It’s disruptive, but it’s not supposed to be apocalyptic.

But this isn’t a normal shutdown. Trump isn’t Ted Cruz throwing a tantrum in 2013 or the Freedom Caucus in 2018 trying to leverage a short-term crisis. He doesn’t want the government back open. He wants it broken. And a shutdown is the perfect crowbar.

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Sep 28

Smart People Are Dumb, Dumb People Are Experts:
Welcome to the De-Enlightenment

To tens of millions of Trump supporters, expertise itself is proof of corruption. The more qualified you are, the more you must be part of “the deep state.”

This isn’t just dumb. It’s coordinated dumb. It’s the De-Enlightenment: a deliberate inversion of the values that built modern society.

I monitor MAGA for a living. My feed is a constant firehose of crazy — conspiracy memes, medical quackery, climate hoaxes, and 19th-century economics dressed up as “America First.”

And the pattern is always the same: the very markers that once signaled someone was trustworthy — credentials, experience, a government position — now mark them as suspect. To tens of millions of Trump supporters, expertise itself is proof of corruption. The more qualified you are, the more you must be part of “the deep state.”

This isn’t just dumb. It’s coordinated dumb. It’s the De-Enlightenment: a deliberate inversion of the values that built modern society.

The Enlightenment (which religious nuts hate) Changed to Entire World

The Enlightenment was a global jailbreak. In the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant blew open the old world of kings, priests, and mercantilism. Isaac Newton’s physics gave us a cosmos governed by laws, not whims. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations gave us comparative advantage, free trade, and the idea that nations prosper by specializing and exchanging, not hoarding and walling off. The Enlightenment’s gift was method: reason, evidence, and institutions that force power to justify itself.

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Sep 25

🧵🔥🚨This Is NOT Conservatism:
It’s Fascism

I didn’t want to be in DC on election night. I was sick to my stomach. But I went anyway, because if Harris won, I wanted to give people hope, and if she lost, I wanted to make sure no one could spin it as just another “normal” Republican victory.

On Sky News, I sat next to two grinning Republicans celebrating their win. And I said it plainly: this isn’t conservatism, it’s fascism. The panel looked at me like I’d dropped a bomb. But I wasn’t exaggerating. I was describing what’s right in front of us.

We watched Trump try not to leave office in 2020: the fake electors, the call to “find” votes in Georgia, the pressure campaign on DOJ to send fake fraud letters. He came within inches. The only reason he failed was because a handful of officials refused. Those people are gone now. Next time, there won’t be resistance.

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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Sep 19

🧵From Goebbels to Google:
Shame Shit, Different Century

When people say “social media is destroying our society,” they act like we’ve never been here before. But we have. Exactly one hundred years ago, a new technology burst onto the scene, and within a decade, it had completely altered politics, democracy, and the way people understood reality.

That technology was radio, and the Nazis immediately understood its potential to warp minds.

The parallels to today’s social media crisis aren’t just striking—they’re terrifying.

The First Mass Medium of Intimacy

Before the 1920s, mass communication ran through newspapers, pamphlets, and journals. These had editors, fact-checkers, and some degree of accountability. But the radio was different. Suddenly, the most powerful voices in the world could beam directly into people’s living rooms. No mediation. No filter. Just a voice in your ear, in your home.

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