Stop sharing Josh Hawley’s posts and videos. You’re only increasing his reach and allowing him to build a dangerous platform of perceived persecution and misinformation.

This started with Trump. They know how to use these sites to their advantage.
Hawley is daring you to share his message of perceived persecution and playing on your natural instinct to prove him wrong that he isn’t silenced.

Social media isn’t a conversation, it’s an economic and political platform. We have to learn that from our past.
The Right knows moderates and liberals can’t stand being called biased or unfair and so they create a “moderate” space that moves discourse to the right. This has worked in papers, on TV, and now social media. Don’t enable this. Recognize it and recalibrate.
Outrage sharing only builds platforms and adds to impressions and reach. This is why outlets publish clickbait outrage pieces. A share is a share is a share.

We have to examine our habits and recognize they’ve contributed to this crisis. We have to change.

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More from @JYSexton

24 Jan
News shows, networks, major publishing outlets, politicians, and pundits.

When you invite conspiracy theorists and fascists and white supremacists onto your shows or into a conversation you are saying they have a valid point of view and are a necessary part of discourse.
We have to stop treating these conspiracy theorists, cultists, and fascist movements like they are anything besides radicalized groups that continually spew propaganda that will further radicalize others and poison culture.

Analyze them, dismantle them, work AROUND them.
But any conversation about this would be incomplete if we did not mention that many outlets understand featuring conspiracy theorists and fascists and bad faith actors also drives their bottom line as it leads to outrage and widespread sharing of their content.
Read 4 tweets
23 Jan
Normal was never normal, it was an illusion that allowed the wealthy and powerful to become wealthier and consolidate power. That illusion is flickering and has to be replaced. The question is whether the replacement will be mass violence or a realer, more human future.
There is no choice. To concede the future is to allow mass antidemocratic forces to kill and purge and plunge us into a dystopic future as long as the planet holds out.

The choice is to make a choice.
The more I study history the more I realize it’s just eras of illusions that hold sway and allow exploitation until the illusion gives out and a new reality takes its place.

The future belongs to people who recognize this and make a choice.
Read 5 tweets
22 Jan
Here’s how we deal with blatant GOP hypocrisy. Don’t share the post, screenshot it and explain the purpose of deception.

“McConnell is now trying to change discourse around majority rule in the Senate to slow legislation after years of gleefully steamrolling the minority.”
Sharing the post gives the liar impressions, fries their reach, possibly even helps the lie trend.

Refuting the lie and providing context takes out the venom and might even help people who don’t know what’s happening understand the situation.
We have to start rethinking social media, messaging, and our relationship with this poison. Bad faith Right Wing messaging has an effect, as does sharing op-eds and articles by major outlets designed explicitly to outrage the Left and profit off their hate-sharing.
Read 5 tweets
21 Jan
Been thinking a lot this morning about bad faith on the Right and how it’s already in full bloom from its media and politicians.

It’s time to change the way we handle this, the way we experience it, the way it makes us feel and how it effects us.
For those who spent the early aughts watching The Daily Show it became a study in those bad faith tactics, how the Right was engaged in malleable ideology, nihilistic power grabs, and outright gaslighting.

It’s an incredible weapon and it’s time to disarm it.
We all know the Right has become a principleless, antidemocratic, fascistic movement dedicated only to power and profit. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise and allowing these snipes and bad faith efforts to have any oxygen whatsoever. They’re not a surprise, at all.
Read 8 tweets
20 Jan
Just a reminder that Donald Trump is a completely untalented man who has been so privileged that he became President of the United States because he thought he deserved it and never actually tried once to do the job.

Just a total failure, embarrassment, and shame.
Truly and honestly, no man has ever been the total embodiment of all the worst and reviled American, and human, traits. Trump’s existence is an indictment and a living, breathing warning should we not look upon him and immediately reconsider our culture and history.
This has been a moment of chosen ruin. A catastrophical mistake which a cult poisoned with white supremacy and weaponized conspiracy theories embraced and inflicted upon us.

The tragedy so far is unfathomable. It will only be worse if we don’t heed this warning.
Read 4 tweets
19 Jan
You know, forgiving student debt isn’t just about erasing debt.

It’s admitting college, a necessary function of open society, has been captured for perverse profit and opening the door to reform.

It’s a massive, desperately needed, stimulus that costs literally nothing.
Forgiving college debt is the first step in a needed confession that the economic changes of globalism created a captive class who were held hostage by profiteers and that did real and lasting damage to not just the debtors but the people who didn’t go and the country as a whole.
One of the steps to fixing this fascistic crisis is to reckon with the intentional divide between the college educated and those who couldn’t afford it. We need to vanquish this debt, admit it was a massive profit scheme, and begin the process of opening up education.
Read 5 tweets

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