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Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Dec 10

🧵Welcome to the Crusades 2.0

An Interview with Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy.

If you’ve been following the transition of the Republican Party from the party of Reagan into whatever the hell it is now you’ll know that the once “useful idiots” of the Republican Party, the Christian Right, now rule the party and they have big plans for Trump 2.0.

As Dr. Taylor points out in our interview about his book The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy, for all the attention January 6th received, a key part of that story has been largely ignored.

Read 10 tweets

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@RachelBitecofer

Dec 3

🧵How to be Sand in the Gears of Tyranny

A Guest Essay by @GalvinAlmanza

Friends,

I’m aware many of you want/need actionable advice on things you can do to help thwart what is coming so you don’t marinate in hopelessness. As Dr. DOOM, I’m not well-positioned for this role!

That’s why when I came across Emily Galvin-Almanza's threaded tweet offering tangible, actionable ideas for real resistance that can really matter I knew I needed to get it to you.

So, I reached out to Emily and offered her the opportunity to write up her ideas to share with The Cycle’s audience and I am delighted she agreed.

What follows is Emily’s article.

I, too, believe in the power of the corporeal.

But then again, I am also one of those elder millennials whose life has been a slipstream from watching 9/11 on my college dorm room TV set to having my high school friends sent to die in Iraq as the rest of us back home marched in the streets to no avail, to the financial crisis that would cost so many of us our future stability, to an impossible housing market, couples having crisis conversations about whether to bring kids into this world, and now enduring the start of Trump 2.0. It’s been a ride. And unlike my parents, it has not been a ride where the marches I have taken part in have singularly changed the course of history.

Read 23 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Nov 18

🧵Why Democrats Failed to Save Democracy
Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party's Brand

Once upon a time the Democratic Party, with its regional base in the Southern U.S. was the party of slavery, and then of segregation.

If you spend much time on social media you already know this because of the many times Trump voters have told you, “but Democrats are the party of segregation!”

Back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Jim Crow Era, the Democratic Party had morphed into an unholy alliance merging a party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades.

By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other largely unnamed civil rights activists finally forced the Democratic Party to choose: preserve their large coalition or end segregation. In part due to the assassination of JFK, then-President Lyndon Johnson sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and in doing so, set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party just a few decades later.

Via Nixon’s Southern Strategy, shrewd GOP strategists like Lee Atwater and Roger Stone recognized that white Southern conservatives were there for the taking, and took them they did relying on various racist dog whistles such as the Willie Horton ad and Reagan’s 1980s Black welfare queen propaganda.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party began to absorb liberal Republicans, predominantly in the North East and West Coast. Ideological liberals became Democrats and ideological conservatives became Republicans through a process known as party sorting and the modern 270 Electoral College map with its handful of swing states became the norm of American presidential elections.

Read 16 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Nov 10

Welcome to the Upside Down:
It's Gonna Be a Long, Strange Trip Into Autocracy

Folks, if you subscribe to the Cycle you know I like to give you reality straight, with no chaser. If you think your mental health isn’t up to that, please flee.

There will be little feel-good content coming from me. Instead, I plan on bringing you a weekly blow-by -blow documenting the decline of democracy loosely based on William Shirer’s work as a foreign correspondent reporting from Berlin in the early years of the Third Reich.

I’ll be calling this feature This is America, after Shirer’s (heavily censored) live radio show from the 1930s and I’ll be offering this service only to paid subscribers because I need to keep the lights on. In case you’re wondering how it’s going, I have no dental insurance so please consider converting your old newspaper subscription money into The Cycle and I will watch the decline of democracy so you don’t have to.

Read 12 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Nov 3

🚨 My final election analysis: who will win?

Dude, Where's My Man Wave?!

Its Starting to Look Like America Understands the Assignment

We’re humans, we like certainty.

In fact, we crave certainty of event outcomes that probabilistic models and horserace polling simply can’t give us.

Whether a single poll, many polls aggregated together, or many polls aggregated together and then combined with other important components of elections (forecasting “models” like 538, Silver Bullet, etc) statistics can only take us so far in predicting election outcomes.

Why?

Well, because even as Nate Silver would tell you, low probability events still occur (think Trump 2016) and because horserace election polling is constrained by unavoidable errors and biases even when done well, including the margin of error, that prevent us from being able to say with certainty which way a race that will be decided by 1 or 2% will end up actually breaking

Read 17 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Oct 21

🧵What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?

Like Hitler, Trump Has Made Clear His Plan is Dictatorship, Not Democracy

January 30th 1933 dawned cold and clear in Berlin as Adolph Hitler took his oath of office and promised Germans he would uphold the constitution. It would ultimately take him less than 30 days to dismantle it.

By March, Dachau concentration camp was opened with its inaugural prisoners: members of the Communist and Social Democrat parties and other prominent Hitler critics. including some members of the Reichstag which Hitler’s allies would join with the National Socialists to voluntarily dissolve to give Hitler near total power.

From the Holocaust Encyclopedia:

“Nazi persecution of political opponents exacted a terrible price in human suffering. Between 1933 and 1939, the criminal courts sentenced tens of thousands of Germans for "political crimes." If the police were confident of a conviction in court, the prisoner was turned over to the justice system for trial. If the police were unsatisfied with the outcome of criminal proceedings they would take the acquitted citizen or the citizen who was sentenced to a suspended sentence into protective detention and incarcerate him or her in a concentration camp.”

Read 19 tweets

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