Post

https://twitter.com/JoshNBCNews/status/1312739803838984192

More from @RachelBitecofer

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Mar 15

🚨🚨🚨A List of Grievances
Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be altered for light and transient causes; and experience shows that people are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by altering the systems to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations reveals a design to elevate one man above the laws and institutions of a free republic—when the people’s votes are treated as obstacles, the rule of law as inconvenience, the public treasury as private opportunity, and the grave powers of taxation and war as instruments of personal ambition—it becomes the right of the people to speak plainly of the injuries they have endured, and through their votes to seek redress.

For a free people cannot long remain free when leaders impose new burdens upon them without candor, levy economic taxes upon them under false pretenses, and risk their lives and security through rash decisions made without the sober judgment such power demands.

Read 15 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Mar 12

🚨The Pentagon’s Armageddon Problem
When Christian Nationalism Runs the U.S. Military

Pete Hegseth's White Christian Nationalist wet dream was to start war in the the Middle East to bring on biblical apocalypse.

And here we are. 🧵

As American troops were prepped to attack Iran, some were told something rather chilling.

According to complaints filed with a military watchdog group, soldiers were briefed that the conflict unfolding in the Middle East was part of “God’s divine plan.” Some commanders reportedly referenced the Book of Revelation and framed the war in prophetic terms.

Think about that for a second.

American soldiers — sent halfway around the world with rifles and drones — being told they are participating in biblical prophecy.

This isn’t a fringe sermon happening in a megachurch somewhere. These are the kinds of ideas circulating inside the same political movement that now controls the Pentagon.

And the man currently running it, Pete Hegseth, has spent years promoting exactly the worldview that makes that framing possible.

Read 18 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Mar 9

🚨🚨🚨Iran’s Other Leverage: WATER

A couple days ago I wrote about the first lever Iran holds in this war: the Strait of Hormuz. If Iran disrupts shipping through that narrow channel between Iran and Oman, roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply gets caught in the crossfire. Oil spikes. Shipping markets panic. The global economy starts sweating. That’s leverage.

But Hormuz is only half the story. Because there’s another vulnerability sitting right across the Persian Gulf—one that almost nobody outside the region knows about.

The modern cities of the Gulf are built in the middle of a motherfucking desert. Dubai. Abu Dhabi. Doha. Kuwait City. Manama.

Like this kind of desert!!!

Cities like these couldn’t exist before modern infrastructure. They exist because massive industrial plants along the coast turn seawater, the only water there, into drinking water. Take those machines away, and the system holding these cities together starts to break down frighteningly fast. Which means that in a regional war, those machines become something else entirely: targets.

Read 12 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Mar 5

🚨🚨🚨Shit is About to Hit The Fan in the Strait of Hormuz:

For 60 years, Middle East Experts Have Feared Exactly What Trump Just Did

There are a lot of people in the Middle East tonight who are staring at their phones and wondering what tomorrow is going to bring.

Airspace is closing. Flights are being rerouted. Oil markets are jumping. Somewhere right now a tanker captain is trying to figure out whether it is safe to move through the narrow strip of water that carries a fifth of the world’s oil supply.

Somewhere else a sailor on an American warship is getting briefed about what it means to enter that same strip of water after Iran has warned that any vessel attempting to pass could be attacked.

For most Americans this still feels distant, abstract, like another foreign policy story unfolding somewhere far away. But the truth is that the next phase of this crisis is likely to unfold in one very specific place.

A place that most Americans had probably never heard of until this week.

The Strait of Hormuz.

You see that teeny-tiny spot. That’s just a 21-mile stretch through which world peace has longed hinged.

And the decisions being made around that narrow stretch of water may determine whether this moment becomes a contained geopolitical crisis or something much larger and far more dangerous.

Donald Trump ran for president promising something very simple: no wars.

Read 22 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Feb 15

🚨🚨🚨 🧵You Build the Fences First
Infrastructure for Tyranny

In 1933, the Nazis did not hide Dachau.

They invited outsiders to see it.

Foreign correspondents were escorted through the newly opened Dachau Concentration Camp and shown neat barracks, orderly rows of bunks, and prisoners moving through structured routines. Guards stood upright and disciplined. The grounds appeared controlled, even efficient. What visitors saw looked administrative.

The violence — already present — was kept out of sight.

Early outside impressions could therefore be framed in bureaucratic language: order, discipline, containment, political detention. The regime understood something essential: if you shape what observers see, you shape how institutions are understood.

And in 1933, Dachau was not yet a symbol of industrialized mass murder. It was a political detention center. Its prisoners were primarily communists, social democrats, trade unionists, journalists, and critics of the new regime.

The Nazi’s genocidal machinery came later.

First came the infrastructure.

To understand what that infrastructure meant in practice, it helps to look at one of the men who passed through Dachau in its earliest weeks.

Hans Beimler, a Communist member of the Reichstag, was arrested in April 1933 and taken to Dachau shortly after the camp opened. His experience bore little resemblance to the orderly image shown to visitors.

Read 18 tweets

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

@RachelBitecofer

Feb 4

🧵How Putin Pulled Off The Greatest Intelligence Operation in History:

Putin's Small Investments Have Yielded Large Returns

This is a story about the best investment anyone’s ever made—anytime, anywhere.

Not a company.

Not a weapon.

Not a technology.

An idea.

In the early 2010s, Vladimir Putin looked at the United States and saw something most Americans refused to see about themselves. Not weakness in our military or the economy, but a country still strong by nearly every objective measure—and increasingly persuadable that it wasn’t.

By 2016, America had built the most powerful information ecosystem in human history: global reach, instant amplification, frictionless distribution, and no limits on money. And it had paired that system with almost no meaningful guardrails when it came to political speech. You couldn’t lie to sell a product. You couldn’t defraud investors. But lying to sell politics? That lives in a vast gray zone, protected by law, amplified by platforms, and rewarded by attention.

For a former intelligence officer, this wasn’t subtle. It was an open flank.

Putin didn’t need to defeat the United States militarily. He didn’t need to match American power. He just needed Americans to turn on one another inside a system designed to magnify conflict.

Why Misinformation Was the Weapon

Russia could never outspend the United States in conventional power. But modern intelligence operations aren’t about brute force. They’re about shaping environments—especially the information environments in which democratic decisions are made.

Read 14 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @RachelBitecofer

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!