arctotherium Profile picture
May 3 12 tweets 6 min read Read on X
I very strongly appreciate this essay and wish there were a hundred more like it for other orgs. The SPLC is one of the biggest and most important nodes in the closure of the Internet, coordinating debanking and censorship outside the formal state. Image
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Amazon, for example, incorporated SPLC judgements into their pipeline automatically, and this is the norm in the financial industry. Image
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The SPLC coordinated pressure campaigns against the private sector 2017-2022, specifically Internet companies and payment processors. The easy for any individual company to do is knuckle under, especially since most decision-making managers will be sympathetic to begin with. Image
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Major threats included "coordinated negative public messaging" and also legislative, executive, and regulatory action. Image
Industry employees are, right now, in 2026, afraid for their physical safety if they say things that hurt the SPLC. Image
The timeline: debanking really starts in earnest in 2017 in response to the election of Donald Trump, and was supercharged after Charlottesville. Image
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The SPLC explicitly included elected politicians and extremely high profile normal conservative political figures in their list of individuals and accounts to be debanked and censored. This is, eg, responsible for the ad boycott of Tucker Carlson*. Image
*And no, this isn't retroactively justified by Carlson being crazy; there are many crazy media figures.
The SPLC seamlessly moved from "debank actual terrorist organization" to "debank regular elected politicians." Image
What makes this all really funny is the SPLC getting hoisted on their own petard; they were the major voice calling for nonprofit financial transactions to be more heavily scrutinized by the government! Image
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Organization called "Free Press" 2021 EoY communication: "Our efforts have yielded numerous concrete changes. After years of pressure from Free Press and our allies, Twitter finally banned Trump... We’re now pushing [Facebook[ to permanently ban Trump." We're nonpartisan BTW. Image
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Anyways, I'd like to publicly thank Patrick McKenzie for writing this. I recommend all of my followers read the whole thing and purchase a paid subscription to McKenzie.

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More from @arctotherium42

Jun 25
Employers hiring people and then training them in the specific skills they require has declined as a hiring model for decades, in favor of a hiring market where employers look for people who already have those skills. Image
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In the training/internal labor markets model, a company struggling to find specific skills will train promising entry-level employees. In the hiring market model, they can raise wages or otherwise improve conditions. In both, they can also substitute technology for labor. Image
Neither a hiring market nor training model for matching jobs to seekers is compatible with "skill shortages" as a concept, which implicitly assumes skills are fixed and once people with those skills run out employers can do nothing (except through immigration or schooling). Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 24
"Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (TR Fehrenbach, 1973/1995) thread of threads. Mesoamerican civilization was horrifying and very backwards by Old World standards, but unique.
Read 13 tweets
Jun 24
Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995). The PRI had massively expanded higher education. These universities were entirely 'free'/self-governing and became locuses of left-wing organizing. Image
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In 1968, security forces fired upon a massive student demonstration/riot against the Olympic Games. Image
By 1970 Mexico had made enormous progress; the national income increased sixfold while the death rate dropped by half. But Mexico was still struggling with foreign-exchange; the govt pursued import-substitution to improve balance-of-payments. Image
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Read 13 tweets
Jun 24
Thread with excerpts from the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) section of TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995). Calles created the PNR in 1929 to institutionalize the govt and Revolution, creating a Mexican party-state. Image
The Calles/Obregon governments were corrupt, but never succumbed to paranoia; there was no equivalent to the Soviet or Chinese liquidations of class enemies, the press was free, and the average Mexican had nothing to fear from the govt (Red Terror against the Church aside). Image
Roughly 19M acres were redistributed through 1933; most land remained with latifundios. But the new latifundios were not like the old ones, they were commercial enterprises rather than social systems. The clerics, army, and latifundistas were all tamed by Calles/Obregon. Image
Read 25 tweets
Jun 24
Thread with excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995), on post-Revolutionary Mexico. To justify land reform, the revolutionaries revived the principle that expropriation was justifiable if the national interests demanded it. Image
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The Constitutionalists defeated the Villistas in battle and assassinated the leader of the last revolutionary faction, Zapata, by treachery. Image
Carranza, the erstwhile leader of the victorious Constitutionalists, dug his own grave by trying to promote someone other than Obregon to the presidency after him; he was forced to flee the capital, run down, and murdered. Image
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Read 15 tweets
Jun 22
Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). The Porfiriato gave Mexico a generation of stability and development for the first time since independence. This left Mexico overdue for another civil war: the Mexican Revolution.
One problem was that the Porfirian school system had created a large, literate middle structure (not class). These educated mestizos became dissatisfied due to lack of opportunity; growth was rapid but not rapid enough to absorb them all. Image
The Revolution kicked off in 1910, when Diaz announced he'd won reelection with 99% of the vote. This kicked off an insurgency in Chihuahua, in the mestizo, frontier north. Image
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Read 26 tweets

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