Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

The report reminds us that Western governments spent a ton of money and time tracking a largely-imagined Islamic terror threat as a much more dangerous white supremacist terror movement blossomed beneath their noses.

https://twitter.com/oz_f/status/1336123893363269633

In the US, authoritied didn't take the threat seriously until we were at the point of experiencing white supremacist mass shootings on a near-weekly basis.

That's what happens when you underestimate fascist violence because it doesn't feel foreign enough.

I hope to god that one of the lessons we take from this era is that fascism is *designed* to feel familiar and therefore less dangerous, even as it aggressively scales up violence and death.

Unchecked, fascism scales up violence quickly and aggressively, murdering structurally (look at COVID, kids in cages, the consequences of Trumpian econ policy) even as it emboldens extra-structural terror like brownshirts (Proud Boys, Unite the Right) & accelerationist shooters.

We like to think we know what fascism looks like, but what we think of as fascist are just the novel finishes historical fascists like Hitler and Mussolini added to what were otherwise a radical celebration of images that were aggressively normal, traditional, familiar.

We remember the iconography of Nazi rallies, but we forget all the time Hitler spent going out engaging in elaborate celebrations of German folk culture full of traditional costume and pigtails and the volk equivalent of country dances.

Hitler spent a ton of time working to take the culturally familiar and make it part of the Nazi brand.

Like Trump, a big part of his program was taking traditional, familiar imagery and using it to illustrate a vision of restoring a past national greatness that never existed.

At the end of the day, fascism is a death cult, a death cult that dresses itself up in the costume of the past to convince us that it is nothing novel, nothing new, just a tacky, uneducated call to return to a national past state.

Liberals see the tackiness and the banality and the ignorance, take it at face value, and underestimate the threat.

Sympathizers, meanwhile, don't care if the picture of the past is accurate or tacky.

They're just relieved at the invitation back to power and the familiar.

In the US, there's been no massive rebuke of fascism.

Trump lost by a relatively thin margin. While high-rankings within the GOP are hedging their bets, there's been little to no sign of regret or distancing by his base.

We now live in a country where nearly half the electorate have tasted fascism, and said, "more, please."

More of the death cult that caged children, sterilized immigrant women, celebrated the murder of Black people, and gave us brownshirts and accelerationist terror.

Some of those folks will go about their lives and wait to rally around the next fascist.

Some will lose their taste for the high of ultra-nationalism as their source fades, but some will sour from the experience and find their high elsewhere, in personal violence.

Law enforcement isn't ultimately the answer, especially not in the US, where law enforcement is designed to reinforce and protect the same white patriarchy fascists fetishize.

The answer is us.

*We* need to keep antifascism in the mainstream.

*We* need to keep fascists out of our workplaces and our communities, and off our platforms.

*We* need to make it clear to fascists we encounter that they are not welcome for as long as they choose fascism.

Some are going to say "oh no Gwen then they'll be lonely and do terror" or "oh no Gwen then they'll organize elsewhere where we can't see them," and those people are people who are willfully ignoring the abundance of evidence that this shit works.

They're already deeply infiltrated.

Where they go after deplatforming, we antifascist researchers go there with them and disorganize their much-smaller new networks even more.

When they lose their jobs and community, they begin to rethink their choices.

When you look at who commits acts of terror, they are almost uniformly *already* self-alienated.

The're loners who look to online community to justify their violent anger & find an excuse to act on it.

They don't become terrorists because their community held them accountable.

Our job is to keep that pressure and accountability on, get involved,, and fund/support the people who do the emotionally exhausting work of antifascist organizing and research.

That is how we end fascism and its emboldening of sadists and terrorists.

If we can recognize that fascism's familiarities are sheep's clothing, not reasons to trivialize or ignore it, we will succeed.

If we refuse to take action or recognize the threat because it sometimes wears a Blue Lives Matter t-shirt rather than a swastika tattoo, we will not.

The end.