Again, I think it's too early to assess if or how well this will come together, emergent movement fizzles more frequently than it pops.
That said, a lot of the pieces are there.
On the ground meetings are happening, a grassroots network is emerging, there's a celeb component
We know from the Canadian one that money (lots of it) is likely available, which will heavily attract even more of the kinds of niche celebrities grifters that helped popularize 1/6/22.
And of course, it will also present at least the perception of resourced gathering otg.
The big asterisk is that they'll really need at least a few truckers to hang on to the branding, and if antifascists and unions make it clear that going is a Very Bad Idea With Serious Consequences, they may be hard to attract even in small numbers.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
They're deadly, they're destructively loud, they can plow through police car barricades, small numbers of people can use them to obstruct large swaths of roadways, & they deceive people into reading fascism as a workers' struggle.
The "small numbers" bit is critical, btw, because it isn't *actually* a worker struggle.
It isn't a mass movement, or even an industrial movement.
But trucks take up so much more room than the bodies they actually have.
It lets them look populist, even though they aren't.
And let's not forget that vehicular assault/murder is a very popular tactic that the far right in the US and Canada has already deployed repeatedly against POC, women (incels love this tactic), and protests.
I've been researching the extreme far right for close to 4 years now, and I have yet to come across a good term for groups like the Proud Boys, identitarians, and Nazis.
"White supremacists" is the convention, but it obscures the fact that our whole society is white supremacist.
I tend to go with "organized white supremacists," but the reality is that structural white supremacy is very much organized, too.
I also think the fact that framing them solely in terms of race elides the centrality of patriarchal & anti-trans gender politics for them.
I'll use some version of that for Proud Boys and the like, but what I'm really longing for is an umbrella term that encompasses the extreme white supremacist far right, including its (pseudo)intellectuals and politicians.
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.
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.