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Aug 20 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
#Idaho is an interesting indicator of white extremism as politics right now.

Quick thread here -

1/11
What you're looking at is a region where the militia movement is organized, unusually ideologically united (even if the ideology is incoherent), and both right as hell and bugf**k crazy.

spokesman.com/stories/2016/m…

2/11
Consider June of '20 in Coeur d'Alene, during the nationwide scares about a "BLM/antifa bus" (they were never clear which).

Residents of Couer d'Alene took to the streets and, like, stood around and threatened each other with guns.

washingtonpost.com/national/prote…

3/11
The entire idea of doing this is profoundly stupid given the demographics of Idaho.

There are 10,000 Black people.

IN ALL OF IDAHO.

Northern Idaho, near Coeur d'Alene, has fewer than 3,000.

statisticalatlas.com/state/Idaho/Ra…
4/11
People in Coeur d'Alene were fooled by a hilariously obvious deception.

We're talking dead-obvious, like "badly faked email written to a police department" obvious.

It bespeaks a community of white people who are deeply vulnerable to manipulation.

facebook.com/choejoohn/post…
5/11
At risk of sounding like a Pompous Old White Dude Holding Forth On His Subjective Opinion As If It's Fact, we *can* run a few simple counter-factuals against this kind of situation.

6/11
Like, for starters, I don't care what legislation Democrats pass, they're not winning this state.

Idaho, statewide, registers 4:1 Republican:Democrat.
sos.idaho.gov/elect/VoterReg…

I don't need to look at 538 or betting markets to know that it ain't happening.
7/11
There's no educating people out of this, because militias, and with them, the white nationalist movement, are deeply embedded into Idaho culture.

Start with the Christian Identity movement in ID and you can draw a pretty straight line to today.

splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…
8/11
The most active groups involved in hate speech attacks on libraries are biker gangs. An activist in Idaho twigged me to them last year when they started attacking libraries.

With apologies for the blog source, this has been going on for a minute.
dailykos.com/stories/2022/5…
9/11
A lot of counterfactuals about appealing to propriety or morality fall short when you look at this basic fact.

ID is avowedly religious state (81% of Idahoans believe: pewresearch.org/religion/relig…) where people are OK with BIKER GANGS HARASSING LIBRARIANS.
10/11
The idea that moderates in Idaho can make a difference is also, unfortunately, not realistic.

The more you look at how Idaho is, the more that '22, and by extension '24, look like pure voter turnout contests with the fate of our democracy at stake.

11/11

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More from @JoohnChoe

JChoe Profile picture
Aug 20
It's interesting to revisit citizen activism strategy in view of increasing certainty about Russian collusion in 2016 and compromise of the Trump presidency generally.

Baldly put, there's not a lot of ambiguity left anymore, not if you do the reading.

That changes things.
1/18
In passing, it's notable that @MuellerSheWrote (<-- follow) has a better summary (here: ) than CNN (cnn.com/2022/08/19/pol…).

But I'm showing this not to demonstrate that so much as to establish that the release of the Barr memo on Mueller is a thing.
2/18
As much as people like me have argued that we need to act as if the Presidency is compromised since '17 or so, there's also been a countervailing, and I think necessary argument, that we don't know for certain and can't act as if we do.

At stake is reflexive control.

3/18
Read 18 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Aug 18
There's something called a "rep grind" in MMOs that I think about lately in relationship to work.

Like, you see this thing, the sparkly tiger?

That took about a week of doing "reputation" quests for one in-game faction in WoW; not a week of evenings, I mean like 168 hours.

1/x Image
A rep grind in real life means that sometimes you're doing things not for immediate payout, but rather as inbound marketing to raise your reputation with a particular faction.

An example that gets cited to me is the ChinaTalk guy, this cat:
twitter.com/jordanschnyc

2/x
There are three or four fairly regular paths to power in America, I think; wealth, some forms of service, elite education, and notability.

The game for that last pathway is played by going up for jobs that you don't apply for, but are rather offered to you if you're right.

3/x
Read 6 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Aug 18
there's another 10 days left on my Facebook ban so I suppose my Twitter folk are gonna have to see these Image
Image
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Read 4 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Aug 18
Conventional wisdom on midterms, that the President's party loses seats, assumes that midterms are a referendum on the CURRENT PRESIDENT.

This is the problem with the idea that the Democratic Party was always going to lose seats in the midterms.

cnn.com/2022/08/12/pol…

1/8
It is completely wild, given, like... you know, THE ENTIRE THING THAT THEY ARE... but even Fox News is (somewhat offhandedly) admitting how much Trump is utterly ruining their midterms prospects.

foxnews.com/media/washingt…

2/8
This points to a flawed assumption that I made; I'm probably not alone in doing so:
patreon.com/posts/project-…

In January, before Dobbs, Ukraine, and the MAL raid, based on Cook Political, I assessed that the Senate was our last bastion against a Republican insurgency.

3/8 Image
Read 10 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Aug 18
Russia is engaged in massive resource extraction out of Ukraine focusing on wheat, corn, and agricultural commodities.

From '18-22, it's smuggling; in '22, it turns into something different & high-intensity. This is what it looks like on a calendar.
patreon.com/posts/69766256

1/9 Image
From open-source reporting corroborated by expert military analysis, we can guess pretty well that the Russian occupation in general is ad hoc, chaotic, and not very organized.

So, this dude was supposed to be running it.

And... yup. That's a baby.

joohn.substack.com/p/how-grain-th…
2/9 Image
Step back from the circus, pull the disparate reports and incidents of shipments of smuggled or extracted resources into a single data set, look up each shipment, each ship, each company and each owner, and this is what it looks like (left to right).

3/9 Image
Read 9 tweets
JChoe Profile picture
Jul 2
This is an important piece of the Ukraine grain theft puzzle coming out from Cook, Ivanova & Pitel in FT.

It's showing us what Russian wealth extraction strategy is going to look like for southern Ukraine.

ft.com/content/86d2be…
This specific smuggling/laundering strategy - mixing raw resources together to disguise origin - is a proven, profitable, relatively low-risk kleptocratic strategy.

This is what Russia does with coal in the so-called Luhansk & Donetsk People's Republics.

patreon.com/posts/66297971
This has a somewhat interesting hedging effect when commodity prices increase, and the value of the ruble falls.

A rubles-only currency zone is like a cell's phospholipid bilayer; the charge differential across it is energy that can be harnessed.

joohn.substack.com/p/rubles-only-…
Read 6 tweets

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