Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

One way to be superhelpful in getting us out of the woods is to blast the internet with hot takes about how the woods never existed, actually

There has been & continues to be only one responsible way to combat the fact that we have a totalitarian fascist in the White House, and that is to loudly declare that fact and prepare to actively counter a wide range of possible fascist and totalitarian overreaches.

There is a whole entire fecal rainbow of ways that fascists secure & consolidate power, from coup to paramilitary revolt to just... winning elections.

Fascists could not care less about norms or laws, so you if you only plan to counter the things they're allowed to do, you lose.

Anyone saying there was no attempted coup is saying that because they fundamentally misunderstand fascism (and coups, probably).

There has been an attempted coup underway all year, and arguably longer.

They tried to dismantle the postal service to subvert mail-in votes during a pandemic, knowing their anti-scientific base would be more than happy to show up maskless in person in droves.

They uprooted mailboxes, ffs.

We need to learn to understand that voter suppression is a kind of coup attempt.

We have a long history of coup attempts and successes in this country, but we don't name it or own it out of a misguided and racist sense of US exceptionalism and superiority.

The hot take among the Clever White Dudes is, Trump just did what the GOP always does, just more intensely and very clumsily.

Yes, you fucking tools, exactly.

Fascists say the quiet parts loud.

They do the secret tricks in the open.

That is how fascism works.

The Trump team fucked its rats passionately and proudly on live TV.

Yes, their predecessors fucked rats behind closed doors.

That does not make what happened this year ratfuckery as usual.

What happened this year was qualitatively and quantitatively more extreme.

If folks really want to be like "it was nbd because actually folks have been staging coups in this country for eons with varying degrees of success, just more subtly," then okay, let's have that conversation.

Let's have the conversation where we acknowledge that the US has never been a democracy, that the will of its people has been sabotaged every election by mechanisms that hinge on extreme targeted racism and xenophobia, & acknowledge we're an undemocratic white supremacist nation.

But of course, none of these Very Clever White Dudes want to go there.

They want to be like "it wasn't an attempted fascist coup, it was just a very overt, concentrated, frank version of what normally happens," ithout acknowledging that our "normal" is racist and undemocratic.

So yes, this is is many ways an extreme version of the familiar.

It is familiar because white supremacy and voter suppression are familiar.

That's how fascism works.

It's an open embrace of the ugliest, formerly whispered aspects of what a nation finds normal/familiar.

So yes, all this should feel very familiar, because these are the ugliest aspects of our nation, the things we've tried to deny about ourselves made plainly evident and undeniable.

That is what fascism does.

One of those ugly familiarities is large-scale suppression of the Black vote.

That is as American as apple pie.

That does not make those efforts any less of a coup.

Given that these fights are *still* going on, it is the height of irresponsibility to run around crowing about how the (incidentally, disproportionately Black in my personal experience) people concerned about a coup were just Chicken Littles, unlike your Very Clever White self.

These are coup attempts, there have been a series of them, they are undeniably racist and overtly so in ways that are an unmistakable departure from the GOP tradition of quiet ratfuckery and dogwhistle white supremacy.

In other words, these are & have been fascist coup attempts.

The fact that Trump is 1) so self-destructively bent on driving out the competent that Guiliani is the best general he can now muster & 2) so busy pouting he hasn't yet managed to launch a meaningful resistance does not make these coup attempts any less real or any less fascist.

As 1/20/21 gets closer, it becomes less and less likely that Trump will succeed in staging an effective coup.

The possibility still extremely exists, however, and the people who have decided to try and game the odds for an "I told you so" by downplaying that are fucking poison.

Praise the folks who have been vigilant, help folks learn to be vigilant, and keep sounding the drum reminding folks that we are vulnerable to fascism *because* its seeds already existed in our normal, our familiar.

That is how you responsibly talk politics under fascism.

The hot take economy will always reward the Very Clever White Dudes who make money betting on the status quo and mocking those who understand that status quo's inherent ugliness and instability.

There's a lot of money to be made denying fault lines don't exist.

As with earthquakes, this is a probability game.

These guys make their money betting the big one won't hit this year.

Every year it doesn't, they argue it's proof the fault line doesn't exist, even as the pressure mounts beneath our feet.

It's time to stop listening to the gamblers, to the dilettante white dudes who treat elections like roulette tables.

For them, it's a game.

For vulnerable people, it's life or death.

It's already crushing marginalized people.

So maybe we could start listening to (and paying) folks closest to the pain, folks who know that this fault line is real, because their homes and loved ones and livelihoods fall through the cracks it forms, and have for generations.

When people tell you we're out of the woods, ask yourself if these are people who know what trees look like.

Don't trust someone who told you forests don't exist to be the one you trust to tell you that you're now safe from falling branches.

Very Clever White Dudes spin the roulette wheel and tell you that it's a compass, actually.

After all this, after four years of their bullshit bet-placing nonsense, can we stop listening to them, finally?

Please?