Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

Folks, I was an organizer otg first day for both Occupy Philly and Abolish ICE, and a lot of smaller left emergent movements.

The signs I look for that tell me an emergent movement has legs?

They're all there for this US copycat of the far right Canadian trucker convoy.

I really want to emphasize that I'm saying this not only as someone with expertise and a lot of experience monitoring and organizing against the far right, but as someone who has a pretty good track record of spotting, organizing within, and analyzing emergent movement.

When I'm assessing this sort of thing, I'm looking at whether there's a certain amount of social media buzz (there's lots), but also whether there's the potential for resourcing (there's plenty, look at the Canada convoy GoFundMe precedent) & institutional support (it's there).

MOST importantly, though, I look for grassroots momentum.

Are people excited enough that they're actually putting their real names to this and making concrete plans?

Are they engaging with each other around this offline?

And, the answer is very much yes.

This isn't like White Lives Matter, where white supremacists generated buzz but couldn't get institutional backing or people committed enough to go by their real names in organizing chats.

There's no opsec, people are meeting offline already, the digital numbers are huge.

That doesn't necessarily mean what they're talking about doing will happen.

But, folks are networking in localized chats, building relationships, marshaling resources, meeting offline to organize.

That's not just buzz.

That's a burgeoning movement.

It could fizzle. Emergent movements always do eventually.

Sometimes they fizzle before they do something explosive, sometimes the fizzle comes after something big (as with Occupy or 1/6).

It's extremely hard to predict when that fizzle comes, & how much damage will precede it.

What we CAN predict is that up to and until that fizzle comes, we will see explosive network-building happening.

If they pull off a convoy event, those networks will support that.

Even if they fail to make the convoy happen, though, they will still have created these networks.

The buzz-chasers will peel off post-fizzle, but there will be a whole lot of folks who will have gotten a taste for organizing and activism and will deepen their involvement further, finding other ways to engage.

They will build relationships, they will build power.

Here's what that can look like:

- my lawyer from Occupy is now the Philly DA

- my editor for the Occupy Gazette is now a state senator.

- one of the people who organized with me around Tax March is now a city councilperson, with a comrade from Abolish ICE working for them

That's an extremely abbreviated list. Many of the folks I know from emergent sexual misconduct accountability work now hold or work in public office.

Folks I know from emergent movement are union leaders. They're prestigious university faculty. They're electeds or their staff.

Not through any grand conspiracy, but because emergent movement was where we all met and came into relationship together.

Some held positions of power when they came into the space, more found ways to organize and build power through relationships built in that space.

We found each other in emergent movement, those with experience helped those without learn, those who were inspired went on to organize more and some of them succeeded, at least in part because of the relationships they built & skills they learned in emergent movement spaces.

Every one of those emergent movements fizzled eventually, some of them without ever reaching mainstream awareness.

Their legacy lives on in the relationships built and skills acquired by people who stayed involved in movement, though.

Whatever happens with this convoy copycat movement, there are enough pieces in place for those longterm relationship networks to be taking shape.

With or without a successful mass action, those networks are exceptionally dangerous.

When this or another call for insurrection comes (and it will), some these people will now know each other and pick up the phone and call each other and say, "hey, let's get the team back together."

I know, because I do this all the time.

And I do it because it works.

We have to understand, this is the biggest danger with these things.

The convoy call to action is a spark, the left and progressives are forever focusing on the sparks when it comes to monitoring the far right.

There are a lot of sparks.

Most fizzle mid-air.

The real danger is the gunpowder in the room, the people and institutions that are networked closely together, who this but also any spark could ignite.

When a spark burns especially bright, it inspires people. It brings them in. It grows the gunpowder pile.

Whether that particular spark lands on the growing pile of gunpowder is anyone's guess.

If it fizzles, we'll likely turn our attention to the next bright spark.

What we're failing to recognize is that each time this happens, the threat grows.

The gunpowder pile gets bigger.

By the time one of the (many) sparks lands, it is going to be too late.

It's useless to try and guess which spark it's going to be, but it's absolutely useful to go in and disrupt the relationship-building to keep that pile from growing.

That means disrupting these spaces.

Deplatforming them from Facebook and Telegram, where they're funneling people into localized groups.

Deplatforming them from Zello, where they're developing relationship-strengthening rapport.

It means when they say "OK we're meeting at Panera's," you get Panera's to kick them out.

And if they won't, you organize to show up and make that Panera's so loud/inhospitable that the meeting never happens.

It means you go spam their chats with nonsense content.

It means you go in there and pretend to be one of them and pick fights over small stuff and accuse their lead organizers of being traitors or infiltrators.

It means you go in and do the unglamorous work of mapping those emerging relationship networks in local chats, figure out who's who so you know to look out for them next time.

Because there will always be a next time.

We do need to track the sparks.

But what matters most is what we do next-- how we work to dampen (and ultimately remove) the gunpowder BEFORE it explodes.

Thinking about what resistance looks like if the spark catches is important and necessary.

At the same time, the bulk of the work we should be doing now is the prevention (disruption/deplatforming) and the network mapping that will pay big dividends in future fights.

That's less glamorous than planning guerrilla resistance to a fascist insurrection, but it's so incredibly important.

Otg resistance is firefighting.

It's exciting, but we save so many more lives if we also commit to getting sprinkler systems set up preventatively.

Sprinkler installation isn't nearly as glamorous as firefighting, I know.

But the ultimate goal should always be to prevent the need for firefighting to have to happen in the first place.

(The end)

Oops, thread continues here:

https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1491109550803795969?t=qtrL_k6cwKyfvhXrJuQkBA&s=19