I say "aging" not to be down on elders, but because the elders in the establishment have not built up any meaningful back bench of younger leaders and actively fight emerging young leaders.
The problem isn't the presence of elders, it's the absence of any sort of age diversity.
In lieu of accepting a diversity of age in leadership in a way that would allow for younger voices to be represented, they pay a small universe of privileged younger operatives to tell them what they want to hear-- that they can win young people with slick, empty marketing.
That's how you get a campaign like HRC in 2020, with its attempt to replace actual attention to millennial generation issues with a slick and often cringey hard push on celebrity surrogacy (and perpetual mom-trying-to-do-instagram vibes).
It's condescending, it's misguided, and we see it in every jokey Biden White House press release.
The playbook is, be 2007 Obama without making any of the bold promises that millennials naively assumed 2007 Obama was making (explicitly and implicitly).
Except, millennials learned from Obama that vague rhetoric doesn't mean big action.
We've learned to want actual meat in terms of promises *and* in terms of action, and the Dem establishment is still hoping they can sell us Shepard Fairey poster platitudes.
And again, it's not even like they're playing chess.
They're just the most party loyal, the ones that displayed the least real leadership, risked the least for justice or positive change.
They're just bureaucrat lifers.
There's no grand plan beyond, retire in a coffin.
They're coasting off Trump's loss right now.
What scares me is that they simply aren't equipped to counter the inevitable next wave of white supremacist electoral populism.
They weren't equipped to handle this past one, and Trump very much isn't the end.
The fact that they can't even manage to use this impeachment to compellingly close that chapter, tell this story, and build some shared narrative here is ample evidence of that.
It's beyond disappointing, but also completely predictable.
This is the state of the party.
*HRC in 2016, oops
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Proud Goys-- the "Christian nationalist" Proud Boys offshoot mad about PB not more avertly avowings white supremacy-- is leaning hard into Edgar Cayce-based racist vaccine conspiracy.
Cayce was a supposed clairvoyant with a huge influence on contemporary New Age thinking.
We're still sort of at this place where we think of New Agers as hippie and therefore "left" and unlikely bedfellows for QAnon and other racist/antisemitic far right conspiracy theory, but New Age has *always* been tightly linked to fascist thought and race theory.
The Theosophists-- arguably the founders of New Age and certainly a huge influence on Cayce-- played around all the time with race theory.
They were also a strong influence on Nazi occultists.
Telegram is doing *very* little to take down Nazi terror channels now that the Capitol coup attention is past.
We're getting some takedowns, but it moves like molasses.
The good news: when @telegram implements advertising, they'll be extremely vulnerable to activist campaigns.
Telegram has never been revenue-generating, which means there isn't yet a way to pressure them by messing with their profits.
As @nandoodles' work proves, though, advertisers don't like getting called out out for advertising on fascist platforms, much less terrorist platforms.
It's clear from Durov's awkward attempts to get users onboard with advertisement that he's no longer interested in paying for this pet project out of pocket (or whatever his previous funding sources were).
Where there are advertisers and profits, there's leverage.
It's absolutely astounding to me the number of folks who have done little to no research or work on Nazi Telegram but somehow feel qualified to say that deplatforming the terror channels is bad because they enjoyed dipping their toes in once & a while to supplement a hot take.
Deplatforming Nazis is good, actually.
If your research isn't strong or deep enough for you to know where the Nazis go next, that's an issue with your competency, not a reason to come down on deplatforming terrorists.
And if you didn't archive (which is *extremely* simple to do on Telegram, btw)... that's also a problem with your research methods, not damning evidence that deplatforming has made fascism impossible to document or track.
I've said it before, but Dem establishment electeds like Pelosi want to be treated with the deference we accord elder statespeople without stepping down & into that role.
You can't be a current elected *and* an elder statesperson.
By statesperson, I mean someone who acts as an advisor based on their experience, who has stepped back from a direct leadership role and into the role of offering and embodying learned wisdom.
It's not *just* on the folks planning to leave elected office in a coffin-- it's on the party for not making room and respect for statespeople elders.