Thread by @mateosfo

One year ago today, Confederate traitors prepared to rekindle a war they never stopped fighting.

White Americans who’ve never been exposed to real red-state/American Taliban sentiment tend to not believe those of us who’ve lived/seen it.

They’ve been gaslighting us 30 years.

In 1989 I moved to Colorado Springs from Washington, DC for school. My childhood was purely progressive: Protests against apartheid at the South African embassy; constant protests against Reagan’s “friendly fascism” — I thought that was what America was like.

Landing in Colorado Springs was like diving into a cold plunge. The largest Christianist indoctrination centers were there, training a generation of violent fundamentalists to hate un-Christianist, unwhite, female, and LGBTQ Americans. They were very active in the community.

While I lived there, they passed a statewide proposition that literally made it illegal to be gay. It was eventually overturned, but again, their intentions and their methods were never hidden.

There was also the US Air Force Academy, which had active partnerships with the American Taliban to indoctrinate cadets and teach them to bring white christianist supremacy into the US armed forces.

All this is documented.

My awakening was at a women’s health clinic, where …

… protests against abortion had been planned and a bunch of students decided to do a counter-protest. The Christianists were … unhinged. Incandescent with rage and clearly primed to act on it, violently.

And, they did: The 1990s were a decade of radical Republican terrorism.

Bombings at abortion clinics, bombings at Black churches, the meteoric rise of violent Christianist preachers and mega-churches, Oklahoma City — all these things took place out in the open.

Also during this time, my southern friends told me about their high school textbooks …

… which described not the “Civil War” to end slavery & extend civil rights to Black people, but “The War of Northern Aggression,” waged against innocent southerners who merely sought economic/political independence under the Constitution.

These textbooks are *still* in use.

In this context, the growing push by American Taliban to also force radical Christianism into school textbooks throughout the country was a giant red flag.

We knew they were training and organizing terrorist cells.

We knew their strategy was to use churches and rogue military.

But … VSPs gonna VSP. Violent evangelicals became the subjects of fawning media pieces, biopics and “parachute” journalism that treated them like exotic species in a Middle American zoo — not a massive, well-funded, heavily-armed terrorist organization plotting against the USA.

The only reason the 2nd Civil War didn’t begin at the end of Clinton’s second term was the Supreme Court appointed George Bush to the White House. Had election not been halted, and Gore properly confirmed, the white supremacist militias who declared war on the US one year ago …

… would surely have done so in January 2001. The threat was palpable.

And so was war. The moment SCOTUS halted the election, everyone who’d been paying attention knew that war was imminent. With Cheney in the White House, there was no question — there would be a war and …

… the Republicans would use it to advance their fascist aims.

Like clockwork.

Cheney used the occasion of war to re-kindle the “sagebrush rebellion,” the heavily-armed western rancher movement against the US.

Ronald Reagan famously endorsed the violent “rebels” in the 1980s

These rebels staged sporadic violent actions throughout the 80s and 90s but the events that lead to the terrorist occupation of Malheur Refuge in 2016 are perhaps the most significant — because the terrorists appealed to, and were ultimately pardoned by, Donald Trump.

The thing about that was, Ronald Reagan would have heartily approved.

And that’s what’s most maddening about Jan 6.

Tons of people On Here paid attention to right-wing blogs and Reddit posts and said, hey, look, Republicans are prepping their terror network for an attack.

It was *utterly* unsurprising. Planned in the open, by people who have been planning and executing violence against the US for decades.

It was American Taliban partnered with Sagebrush Rebellion and boosted by traitors in the US Air Force.

Sprinkle Tucker Carlson on top.

I want the lesson of January 6 to be one thing and one thing only:

The forces of gaslighting are substantial in the USA. There is, in fact, a powerful constituency for Republican violence, and many of them have taken up roles in propaganda at cable networks and newspapers.

Now the threat is deeply existential, and some of them can no longer deny what we’ve all been seeing with our own eyes — for decades.

January 6 did not arise suddenly from the ether. It is a single point on a long timeline — a timeline that is far from over.

Republicans never accepted the basic premise of the United States. They started, and lost, a Civil War over it — but they never gave up the “lost cause.”

They are willing to destroy everything, including the lives of their own, to achieve victory.

This is truth.

We can certainly overcome and survive their attack. But *only* if we fully acknowledge the nature of the attack, and the nature of our enemy.

No more time for deniers and gaslighters.