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Jared Yates Sexton Profile picture
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1 Apr, 4 tweets, 1 min read
The Right has turned our politics into a meaningless spectacle infected by corporate philosophies and public relations strategies intended to maximize profit and minimize responsibility.

It’s led to tragedy and rising neo-fascism.

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/tossing-pape…
As we watch efforts to disenfranchise people of color by the Right, we have to recognize corporations are completely fine with oppression, but that their brands depend on the appearance of caring.

Branding is at the heart of all this, and provides clues as to where we can go.
What we’re dealing with is an illusory politics operating on spectacle and completely removed from the principles espoused by political brands.

To get better, to stave off so many crises, we must move past these illusions and return to dealing with very, very real problems.
In this illusory moment, we have to recognize that both politicians and corporations are engaging in a Machiavellian dance of espousing ideas while actively working against them.

We have to get smarter about this, its implications, and its opportunities.

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More from @JYSexton

Jared Yates Sexton Profile picture
3 Apr
Here’s the state of the GOP.

Fallout from a brazen attempt to disenfranchise people of color is a “gift.”

Because all of it is a game. People’s lives. Democracy. The disintegration of shared society. Just one giant zero-sum game. Image
I wrote more about it here, but the Right has completely devolved into an organ seeking nothing but power, profit, and the protection of the white, wealthy, and powerful.

To accomplish that, they’ll destroy democracy and traffic in nothing but illusions.

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/tossing-pape…
The Right wants, simultaneously, to wield absolute power and frame itself as a victim of conspiracies, culture, and dangerous, emerging trends.

This faux victimhood legitimized all the violence and oppression and underhanded actions. This is who they are.
Read 4 tweets
Jared Yates Sexton Profile picture
29 Mar
It needs said that the wholesale dismantling of liberal democracy the Right is after, that it now requires for its political survival, takes more than racist legislation, targeted disenfranchisement, and stacked courts.

It requires violence.
Some people keep treating this current moment as simply a political contest, but it’s honestly way more than that. The Right is doggedly pursuing, as a project, a return to past moments of oppression and suppression.

That doesn’t just happen with ballots.
I talked more in-depth about this last night on this livestream, but Trumpism was only the beginning of openly violent, bad faith rhetoric.

What the Right is preparing for, in no uncertain terms, is an embrace of violence as a means of securing control.

Read 5 tweets
Jared Yates Sexton Profile picture
25 Mar
Something we have to come to terms with is that media has an unbelievable and often poisonous effect on us, especially when it’s used by powerful, racist forces determined to alter reality to their favor.

Let’s talk about Birth of a Nation and what it did. 1/
Birth of a Nation was based in part on the work of Woodrow Wilson who, before he became president, was determined to alter history in order to reform perceptions of the Confederacy and white supremacy.

His “histories” helped create the Lost Cause mythology we’re still fighting.
Wilson completely propagandized the Civil War, giving the South a new story and mythology, painting slave owners as paternal and moral guardians and slaves as grateful workers. He portrayed paramilitary proto-fascists the KKK as a whimsical but heroic, necessary group.
Read 7 tweets
Jared Yates Sexton Profile picture
23 Mar
We could have common sense gun reform and save untold amounts of lives.

But the Right's unrelenting, tragic refusal is based on their need to fundraise, create a climate of fear, and protect guns as a means of continued white supremacy.

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/a-culture-of…
Guns are a tool of white supremacy, a means of allowing a few to control the many. It's how colonizers oppressed indigenous people and slaves.

They need them now to intimidate anyone from advocating even the slightest change.

It's the same story of white supremacy over and over
This devotion to guns, even as people are needlessly slaughtered over and over again, is based on a need to keep Americans afraid and white people ready to carry out violence should systems of power be troubled.

It’s time we reckoned with our poisonous history.
Read 5 tweets
Jared Yates Sexton Profile picture
23 Mar
Saying a culture of constant, predictable mass shootings “can’t become the new normal” doesn’t reflect the reality that this is now a very well-established, long-lasting normal.

We have to face facts. In order to change this we have to recognize the severity of the problem.
Our culture of aggrieved white men grabbing an AR-15 and killing droves of people has a long, tragic history.

This isn’t an aberration, it’s part of an ongoing project, and to cure it we have to look at how we’ve arrived here.
This continued dance of throwing up our arms, saying “I can’t believe this happened here,” writing off the killers as disturbed or whatever, then a short scripted back and forth on guns that goes nowhere can’t continue.

These things don’t just happen. There are reasons.
Read 4 tweets
Jared Yates Sexton Profile picture
22 Mar
Studying the history of white supremacy, the conspiracy theories always repeat.

Whether it’s the 17th century overthrow of Maryland’s government, the stirrings of America’s revolution, the Red Scare, or the Capitol Coup, it’s always foreigners and traitors using people of color.
There’s something inherent in the pursuit of white supremacy, a projection of malicious intent that legitimizes violence, enslavement, and exploitation, a constant paranoia that the sins of that exploitation will themselves be exploited.

And that fear allows anything.
As I’m making my way through history it’s gotten so predictable how those white supremacist paranoias will take shape, how aggressive actions will be legitimized through the same foreigners/traitors/bipoc lens.

It’s a maddening cycle.
Read 7 tweets

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