What I don't think (white, Christian) people understand about the Maus ban is, this isn't just "culture wars."

This is a deliberate move to make sure future voters are incapable of understanding how far right "culture wars" lay the groundwork for extreme political violence.
Far right "culture wars" are never just battles about culture.

They are about impacting our knowledge, perceptions, and prejudices so that we are not capable of deciphering their writing on the wall.
What makes the Maus ban so telling and terrifying isn't *just* the fact that it's a clear effort to mainstream Holocaust denial.

It's that this is a book ABOUT how to read the writing on the wall, and the consequences of ignoring it.
And of course, that's what the Holocaust denial project is about, at its heart.

What the deniers really seek to deny isn't just the Holocaust, it's the fact that this sort of writing on the wall exists, can and should be read, can and should be addressed.
I've monitored far right chats and forums for years now, and it's like clockwork the way they go from "culture war" hot take to calls for genocide.

That's what far right "culture wars" are about: building our tolerance for fascism, and creating a pretext for genocidal violence.
That's it.

That's the goal.

They don't want you to be able to catch them until it's too late.

And once it's too late, the next step is repeating the very history Maus depicts.

That's it, full stop.

The end.
(And PS, part of what the writing on the wall always tells us is who the first targets of that violence will be. It is not a coincidence that so many of these books are by, and about being, Jews, queers, and POC.)

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More from @gwensnyderPHL

Jan 26
Coining "disordered organizing" as a term to refer to how fascists and reactionaries use NXIVM-style tactics to exploit deep-seated toxic masculine insecurity and assert cult leader-like control, you heard it here first
All organizing, be it right or left, depends on creating a network of relationships to assert power.

The strength, tenacity, and number of those relationships determine impact.
Reactionaries and fascists in particular almost always sustain those networks with relationships we'd consider disordered if they were familial or romantic.

They're about shame and control, because fascism is about shame and control.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 26
I'm really pessimistic about the future of this country.

It's hard not to feel like Trump was a test balloon for a fascist movement that is now much more overt, strategic, and in control of public and government institutions at all levels
They've figured out how to use the moment very much to their advantage.

Antivaxx is a vector for mass radicalization in a way that QAnon was just a little too niche/wacky to be.

COVID death among the MAGA crowd is going to (further) popularize white genocide conspiracy theory.
There's not a meaningful opposition party with a coherent ideology, a substantive platform, organized leadership, a tangible counter-narrative, and/or a realistic assessment of the threat.
Read 6 tweets
Jan 26
This is... interesting.

I almost wrote something a few days back about something tin-eared Bannon had said recently, because he's usually a very savvy guy and it was so off compared to that usual.
I know it's unhip to say now, but Bannon really was a mastermind when it came to politics and media manipulation. He isn't sophisticated, but he is (was?) very, very smart and the only one on Team Trump who was actually playing chess and doing so skillfully.
We're all very lucky that Trump and then the Mercers dumped his ass, because he could have done a lot more damage. His (lack of) interpersonal skills and Trump's narcissism really saved us there.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 25
I say this a lot: fascism, abuse of women, and pedophilia targeting teen girls are intrinsically linked.

The fascist project relies on coerced reproduction, which relies on abusive control of women's bodies, which relies on sexual ownership of those bodies from a young age.
Fascism is about resurrecting an imagined glorious national past, which requires the production and indoctrination of young people.

To do that, you need to control the bodies that produce the young, to assure that bodies of the right nationality are created.
That, in turn, requires control and sexual subjugation of girls starting from menarche.

Fascists sexually target young girls because they are reproductively "pure" (read: haven't engaged in sex with other, supposedly inferior/dirty nationalities).
Read 10 tweets
Jan 15
I don't think collapse/civil war are inevitable, but folks need to understand that the next big reckoning is going to happen when MAGA folks start trying to make sense of their disproportionate experience of COVID death and resulting demographic fallout.
The voluntarily unvaccinated are at this point overwhelmingly white, which is going to bump up the timeline on whites becoming a minority here.

MAGA folks are going to feel threatened by that and also aren't going to want to take responsibilty for the death of loved ones.
As I've said before, I think it's pretty much inevitable that we'll see a (further) mainstreaming of white genocide conspiracy theory, this time even more explicitly centered around supposed governmental plots to exterminate white people (with COVID as the supposed instrument).
Read 15 tweets
Jan 13
I know I'm a broken record on this, but yeah, things are not okay for parents of small children.

My partner is an essential worker, my infant and I are preemptively quarantining from him and staying with relatives.

I am functionally a shut-in single mother.
And we're *lucky* to be able to do that.

Lucky that I can go somewhere and have a support system, lucky that my support system folks have the resources to isolate effectively.

Lucky that my partner is selfless enough to be away from his new baby for so long.
I miss him, I'm exhausted, my family is exhausted being around a screaming baby unexpectedly when they have work they need to do and their own pandemic stresses to worry about.

Everyone is trying so hard to make this work, but it's untenable in the long term.
Read 4 tweets

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