I'm going to keep saying it, this is the moment where dangerous people get desperate and do increasingly desperate things, with the Philly vote count centers being a very obvious targets.
Realize that there are MAGA and especially QAnon folks who are seeing a Biden victory as apocalyptically bad, and I am not exaggerating.
QAnon people are sucked in *deep.*
We don't have much of a consensus reality as it is right now, but they're far gone from what's left.
There are also militia and boog types who understand that this situation is a powderkeg and are extremely hoping to find an excuse to light a match.
They may not feel much or any loyalty to the Trump, but many are absolutely hoping to use his loss to spark civil war.
Deescalation is the watchword right now.
Drown them out, obscure their visuals, absolutely do everything you can to make them less visible and less interesting to press.
At the same time, be aware that there is a very real risk of violence here.
I believe in diversity of tactics, and I believe there are times where punching a nazi in the nose can be a wise and strategic move.
I just invite folks to think very carefully about what strategic purpose confrontation serves right now.
Think carefully about whether you're considering confrontation because it advances liberation, or because it feels good to yell at fascists.
Sometimes it's the former, sometimes it's both, but if it's all mostly the latter maybe this isn't the week to follow through.
Consider also what privilege you have, and who you may put at risk by pursuing confrontation.
When fash (very much including police) lash out, they usually target the visibly marginalized first, regardless of who actually authored the real or perceived provocation.
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I am feeling very anxious about the potential for far right terror right now, more than I've felt at any other time since I started doing this research, and I literally specialize in Nazi terror Telegram.
Philly's already had a foiled terror plot and a bomb threat in <24 hrs.
I'm glad we're out here militantly defending the results, but I also feel our vulnerability extremely strongly right now.
To the chuds behind the police barricades a little, but to folks who are keeping a lower profile much, much more
Folks who follow me hopefully remember and recognize that I am very frequently at the front edge of encouraging folks to come out and confront fash.
I am not a nervous person when it comes to this crowd.
Speaking of Bannon, I know the official left position is that liberals basically hallucinated him and Putin entirely, but I really remain convinced that we are deeply lucky that Trump's ego wouldn't allow him to tolerate the man in the White House after SNL puppetmaster sketches.
Idk that Bannon is anywhere approaching genius, but he absolutely had a streak of brilliance when it came to building common cause and narrative between reactionaries in the white working class and eugenicist billionaires.
I talk a lot about the importance of vision, and Bannon was an expert at both articulating a vision of a protectionist white nationalism that appealed to reactionaries across the economic spectrum, and an alternate vision of horror that terrified those racists across the board.
You know, I really really do not like Hillary Clinton and I campaigned hard for Bernie in the primaries, but it was meaningful for me as a woman seeing a woman break the glass ceiling of presidential nomination.
These shatterings matter.
It's not that I felt HRC was ever the right choice, or that we should ever back or support a candidate who represents oppressive policy because of their identity.
Tokenism helps no one.
At the same time, when a marginalized person achieves an achievement their identity has been long barred from by law and/or prejudice, it materially changes things.
It can give a glimmer of hope to folks from that identity that maybe new roads have been opened.
I'm not trying to be mean, but this is deeply unhelpful rhetoric that helps reinforce a narrative about getting back to "who we are," as if we weren't already a proto-fascist white supremacist patriarchy long before Trump ever so much as signed up for a Twitter account.
I get it, we all want this nightmare to be over.
But, it's a nightmare that has been going on for some people for a very long time.
This isn't a repudiation of white supremacy or fascism, because Biden doesn't represent a repudiation of white supremacy or fascism.