What we're seeing in Texas is shock doctrine capitalism.
It's a strategy where governments engage in austerity measures that make it impossible to respond adequately to emergencies, then use the aftermath to privatize & justify *more* austerity.
The rich profit, the poor die.
We've seen it with COVID on a national level.
All levels of governments have made extreme cuts to our social safety net in the past three decades, leaving us unable to weather this storm.
They'll be using the human cost & resulting tax shortfalls to justify austerity for years.
We saw it in Philly after the 2008 crash.
Then-Mayor Nutter used the shortfalls to engage in extreme austerity measures down to trying to close libraries and... selling off most of our snowplows.
The austerity measures are *always* shortsighted auctionings-off of necessary infrastructure, with the promise that private infrastructure will be a magic bullet solution down the road.
Spoiler: I live on an arterial road in West Philadelphia.
I don't think I've seen a snowplow out here *ever.*
Our streets are slushpiles for days or weeks after every snowstorm.
There was no private solution magic bullet.
The same Texan government officials who failed to plan for climate change or build workable infrastructure for emergency response will inevitably continue to blame people for relying on the government to do its job, especially when it comes budget time.
They'll use their own failure as "proof" that government can't be trusted and privatization is the way to go, accelerating austerity and putting profitable contracts in the hands of rich folks who will make money even as they leave people hanging when the next emergency comes.
If you don't believe me, look what's happening with Philly right now with the vaccine.
We put our lives the hands of a white college kid get-rich-quick start-up, with predictably disastrous results.
Under shock doctrine, neolib governments-- Dem & GOP both-- treat crisis as outside the domain of government.
They engage in austerity that exacerbates future crisis.
Then, when crisis arrives, they pay exorbitant fees to private companies for miracle bail-outs that never come.
Then, they use the inevitable cascade of disaster and its cost to justify even more cuts, which even further exacerbate future crisis, which results in *more* costly and ineffective privatization, all of which will get used to justify even more austerity measures down the line.
It's a scam and the only people who benefit are profiteers & the politicians whose careers they fund.
It's a downward spiral that hurts all of us, most especially the marginalized.
They use the moments where folks are most vulnerable to extract wealth from the most vulnerable.
Under shock doctrine...
The vulnerable freeze.
They starve.
Their oxygen tanks deplete.
They die.
The profiteers and the politicians they patronize?
Well.
When things get rough, there's always the Cancun Ritz-Carlton.
This has long been the grift by which US electeds betray democracy and their constituents.
What's new is their openly fascistic unwillingness to even pretend to care, even as crises they have a hand in accelerate and compound, leaving vulnerable people to die.
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.