Thread by @mattsheffield

The next few weeks will be historic in this country. You will remember them.

Plenty of people at Fox News are doing the right thing. But the far right wants Trump to go "full fash" and fulfill their decades-long fantasy.

For a number of years now, right wing donors and media figures have been begging Trump to become a dictator. And not just random nobodies.

RW elites have been coming to the opinion that capitalism must be saved from democracy.

I've written before that right wing elites are far more radical than the MSM will report. There's no better example of this point than Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and Facebook board member.

He wrote in 2009 that women being able to vote is a threat to capitalism.

"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron."

More Thiel:

"The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became about free-market politics — capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd....

"... For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand."

"The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it... there are no truly free places left in our world." cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/pet…

Thiehl's radical, anti-democracy sentiments are why Facebook has promoted and enabled endless fraudulent right wing Facebook pages. I

t's why the most powerful person setting the company's political policies is a far right Republican, Joel Kaplan

Joel Kaplan is Facebook's vice president of global public policy. He's one of Brett Kavanagh's best friends and personally helped shepherd the nomination through the Senate. thedailybeast.com/facebook-execu…

Kaplan also forced the company to protect right wing Facebook pages from propaganda crackdowns.

He literally said this about anti-disinformation efforts at FB: "We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives." washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

Thiel also is the founder and main owner of Palantir, a global data company that seeks to construct profiles of every human being for review by law enforcement agencies.

It has giant federal contracts thanks to his close connections to Trump.

It's almost impossible to believe this is real but it is. Every major news outlet has covered Palantir but almost no one knows about the company.

While building it, Thiel has been establishing extensive connections with full-on white nationalists buzzfeednews.com/article/rosieg…

While Thiehl, Kaplan, and other far right business executives have been attacking democracy from the top end, it's coming under attack at the popular level thanks to media figures like Alex Jones and several others.

Left of center people mostly think of Jones as a crazy dude who believes nonsense about Sandy Hook and reptilian overlords but he's far more insidious. And much more influential. Since Trump became president, Jones has called for dictatorship repeatedly.

“Mr. President, they’re not going to stop, they’ve already started a civil war! They’ve all got to go to prison!” he said in 2018.

On the same program, Jones called for CNN anchor Anderson Cooper to be executed.

“Whatever has to happen is going to happen. We’re going all the way against these people, period. We have to do it. There’s no other choice.... You know what the punishment for treason is."

But it's not just Jones. Trump's favorite Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, has been calling for mass imprisonments for years. I wrote about these two and other far right influencers urging dictatorship in 2018. It's only gotten worse since salon.com/2018/01/29/far…

I could add examples to this thread for the entire day and still only scratch the surface of people with high-level White House connections and direct access to Trump calling for violence & promoting racism.

Tragically, these people aren't talked about much in the elite press.

The radicalism of Republican elites is one of biggest problems in this country.

But it's a hard story to report because the participants use strange lingo, have complex connection networks, and often have obscure religious beliefs. Most editors don't have the patience for it.

Fortunately, there are some great journalists who do wonderful work on these matters. I encourage you to follow @RightWingWatch, @KFILE, @RosieGray, @tina_nguyen, @letsgomathias, @egavactip, and @oneunderscore__ and @jaredlholt. Please add more names here!

PS: The philosophy that Thiel appears to subscribe to is a form neofascism called "neoreaction" whose primary advocate is a former libertarian named Curtis Yarvin. More on this here: nymag.com/intelligencer/…

PPS: Despite all the criticism it received for promoting right-wing hoax websites, right before the election, Facebook tweaked its algorithms again to boost extremist websites like Daily Wire and downgrade progressive outlets like Mother Jones. motherjones.com/media/2020/10/…

PPS: So much has happened since then that most people forgot about it but Joel Kaplan was also the instigator of a vicious, right-wing smear campaign against @ColorOfChange. He faced no discipline after it was disclosed by the NYT: nytimes.com/2018/11/14/tec…