Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

Chapo Trap House's Matt Christman recruits fans from the alt-right by telling reactionaries they can be left while staying racist/sexist/ableist and even use explicitly pro-Hitler memes, bc only class matters.

It's dangerous af & "Nazis aren't dangerous" is his BS excuse.

https://twitter.com/VioletWanderers/status/1314762721372536834

I research and write about Nazis and white supremacists like the Proud Boys.

In response, Nazis associated with the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in my state put me on a kill list.

I known personally and from direct experience that these people want to slaughter leftists.

I've written about the Proud Boys, who Chapo hosts have repeatedly characterized as irrelevant and posing no threat.

In response, Proud Boys have terrorized me for nearly two years now.

They've threatened my pet, come to my home at nearly midnight to threaten me & vandalize it.

When I co-organized a counterprotest Proud Boys' rally in support of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha killer, Proud Boys switched their rally location to the street intersection I live at and announced to the world that it was specifically because they wanted to be at my home.

That day, they showed up in colors and circled in front of my home repeatedly while clearly carrying a weapon.

When I finally filmed them, they looked right at me and said, "goodbye, Gwen."

https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1309474492767404037?s=19

As rhis was happening, they were telling me on Twitter how they planned to use a "citizen's arrest warrant" to kidnap me off my porch.

Many of these far right terrorists think they have legal/constitutional rights to kidnap political opposition.

Just look at the Whitmer plot.

Then they started circulating these flyers, designed to look like official Megan's Law notices about my supposed (and nonexistent, to those wondering) sex offender status.

The flyers display my picture & home address.

They're trying to get me killed.

https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1311407334871138308?s=19

Let's be clear: I'm a white woman.

White supremacists, organized and not, have ALWAYS posed a clear, present, and everyday danger to people of color and many marginalized folks in this country.

The fact that these assholes are dangerous is not a new development.

What is notable about this activity is the boldness and willingness to terrorize even relatively mainstream and white left political opposition.

The Chapo team downplaying these nazis' eternal threat to BIPOC, they're downplaying a clear & present threat to even the white left.

I'm not stereotypical antifa.

I'm an elected official & former Bernie delegate. I ran a respected direct action labor coalition for nearly a decade.

I voted for Bernie both times in the elections.

I'm very much part of the labor justice left dirtbags claim to speak for.

I am also subject to extreme harassment and violent threats by the white supremacists these podcasters claim pose no threat.

I monitor these nazis. I know firsthand that they'd like to see us dead, that they're itching for civil war & just waiting for a Trump-given opportunity.

I spent a long time being less directly critical than I should have, watching these dirtbag "leftists"'s fans attack women and POC in obviously racist/sexist/ableist ways.

I'd name why the attacks were wrong and shouldn't be done in Bernie's name, but didn't look at root causes.

When I finally spoke out about how I felt the white dude Chapo podcasters were exploiting and poisoning the online Bernie left in exactly the same way I'd watched grifter white dudes exploit and poison Occupy crowds, they sent hordes of their fans after me.

It was a brutal harassment campaign that lasted five months.

There were weeks at a time where Twitter, where I post most of my writing, was functionally unusable for me.

My notifications were flooded constantly with some of the most horrific harassment I've ever received.

It was full of exactly the same sort of ableist and virulently misogynist violent death threats and doxxing I'd learned to expect from my nazi harassers.

From "leftists."

Because I'd spoken out about their faves' racism and sexism.

Christman specifically made sure to repeatedly point his fans in my direction.

At one point, Aimee Terese, a dirtbag influencer known for laundering Nazi propaganda into the left, posted an explicitly pro-Hitler meme here.

We mobilized and got her kicked off Twitter.

In response, Matt Christman launched an entire hatassment campaign against me specifically aimed at promoting that explicitly pro-Hitler meme.

He gaslit his followers about its origins, made a video lying about it and me, recruited a Jacobin writer to the cause.

For weeks, his fans spammed me with variations on that pro-Hitler meme, a meme specifically created on 8chan to try and Nazify the rainbow symbol and terrorize queer folks (I'm queer, fyi).

They also created new memes of my body getting put through a meat grinder.

Throughout all this, one of the main arguments these white dude trolls would use against me was that I was acting like a "gatekeeper" by saying violent racists and misogynists shouldn't be allowed in left movement spaces.

These trolls talked about how Chapo Trap House had "saved" them from 8chan and 4chan by "converting" them to dirtbag leftism, and how if my standards about disallowing racism and sexism had been applied, they'd never have become "leftists."

They said all this in my mentions WHILE harassing me, WHILE they and their Chapo Trap House fanbase comrades doxxed and violently threatened me and photoshopped me going through meatgrinders.

I guess it never occurred to these harassers that whem I said welcoming the alt-right into left movement space without setting standards on racism, sexism, and ableism endangered marginalized people, THEY were the exact danger I was naming.

I'm a disabled queer woman.

Chapo fans and white supremacists alike have used every aspect of each of those marginalize identities to demean me and harass me while making threats both direct and implied against my personal physical safety.

It's not a coincidence.

It's not two discreet and unlinked groups doing the exact same thing, trying to dehumanize me in the exact same way.

There's a reason Christman downplays the danger of white supremacists.

Christman downplays the danger of white supremacists because a lot of the Chapo girft and nearly all of Christman's grift is profiting off getting disaffected white dudes from troll culture to shallowly switch from alt-right to "left" affiliation while keeping their hate intact.

Chapo Trap House hosts & Christman especially can't afford to admit that white supremacy is dangerous.

These millionaires made their money not just telling fans that hate isn't a problem, but telling them that white supremacy is a marker of working class realness, actually.

They're rich people who made their money falsely caricaturing the working class as hateful fools.

Their grift is telling hateful privileged people that it's okay to be hateful, that white supremacist, ableist, and misogynistic hate is essentially a form of worker solidarity.

This "nazis good because cops bad" shit is them giving themselves away as hypocrites and liars yet again.

They stanned cops back when cops were During the uprisings, when cops gassing entire Black neighborhoods with abortifacients and letting armed, racist vigilantes run wild.

Chapo Trap House did an entire episode licking cop boot.

They portrayed cops as working class heroes (as opposed to the traitor foot soldiers of white capital that they are).

They cited deceptive polls to say Black people stan cops, mocked a respected Black prison abolitionist.

And yet somehow, whenever it's convenient, they use "cop bad" as a way to excuse supporting white supremacists and attacking decidedly not-cop antiracists.

Once, I commented within a movement conversation to say that white folks shouldn't unilaterally make rules about all Black protest like "no photos," because not all Black protesters are the same and some Black protest leaders (MLK, for example) used photos strategically.

Christman fans and his pals at TrueAnon (whose producer, incidentally, had livestreamed incriminating footage repeatedly from BLM protests that month) used this to "prove" I was a cop plant advocating for all protesters to publicly self-surveil.

When cops are beating and gassing Black people, Chapo portrays them as working class salt of the earth.

Then, when it's convenient, they pull a 180. They use copjacketing conspiracy theory to defame antiracists and defend literal Nazis.

"Enemy of my enemy" isn't a useful argument in defense of white supremacists *or* cops, because policing is a white supremacist institution.

There are times police beef with nazis, but there are also plenty of police who *are* nazis.

That's, like, the entire history of the KKK.

The Chapo Trap House hosts and the dirtbag "left" movement they used Bernie's success to popularize has always been nihilistically hateful.

Now that they don't have Bernie's coattails to ride anymore, that hateful nihilism is increasingly fully on display.

The good news is, their following and income stream has stagnated as a result of that unmasking and lost momentum.

The problem we face is less and less an of successful recruitment by dirtbags, and more and more an issue of reversing the deep harm they've done.

The first step of healing is treating is eliminating the infection.

The infection is class reductionist bullshit discourse that excuses and more often than not valorizes white supremacy behavior as some faux working class status symbol.

So, call that shit out and counter it everywhere you see it.

Remind people that white supremacy and especially violent white supremacy is a tool the rich use and exploit and promote.

Name it for the ruling class manipulation that it is.

Same with ableism.

Name that it's a ruling class tactic to valorize worker productivity and demonize and attempt to be rid of those of us who have less immediately profitable bodies and/or minds.

Same with misogyny.

Name it as a trick by which capitalism guilts and forces marginalized people and especially women into performing unpaid or underpaid emotional and domestic labor by femininizing it and devaluing the feminine.

None of these hatreds reduce to simplified class politics terms-- they're far more thorny and pernicious than that-- but they sure as shit have massive class politics components that the dirtbags deliberately pretend don't exist.

Call that shit out.

Name that we need marginalized people in our spaces for movement to succeed, and that excusing and especially valorizing these oppressive hatreds makes left space literally undsfe for the marginalized.

Name how these narratives UNDERMINE mass left movement-building.

If you're a privileged person, especially a white dude, this isn't just the wise strategic move, this is your fucking obligation.

Your silence is complicity.

Not just complicity in our oppression, but in subterfuge of leftist liberation movement.

One of the most important responsibilities of the contempoary left is countering fascism.

If we can't do even do that, we are broken and useless.

This is not a moment where we can afford to be broken and useless.

If you have the privilege and capacity, it's your responsibility to be part of the work of repair.

Do it now, before it's too late.

Because, trust me.

If you're openly, genuinely leftist, the fascists want to kill you, too.

You're just a little farther down the list.

(The end)