Interestingly, Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism" talks about how despite Riefenstahl's attempts to distance herself from her Nazi past, her fascism still comes through in her 1970's rhapsodizing about wrestling and its significance.

And yep, Trump borrows heavily from WWE theater.

https://twitter.com/DuffyEricka/status/1756366271011057982

The contemporary Nazi fringe is obsessed with this stuff, too.

Terror Telegram was obsessed for a while with this guy Antiroot, who would travel around staging wrestling matches with other prominent Internet Nazis.

"It has no commentary because it doesn't need one"

This is true about all fascist theater, including Trump rallies.

People wonder why Trump's confused speech (unlike Biden gaffes) isn't an issue for his base or the media.

It's because fascism is about aesthetics, not words.

https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1756365187836219610

Trump is neo-Nazi in the sense that he very much takes a page from the Hitlerian playbook, and Hitler's fascism in particular was about mass media-ready theater played in broad strokes.

It's about the camera-ready aesthetics and the simple ecstasy of visual recognition.

One of the very damaging consequences of antisemitic undercurrents in left organizing space: it's currently very difficult to discern who it's wise to stand with/amplify when it comes to Palestinian liberation and opposing apartheid/genocide by the state of Israel. Hopefully it's clear from my language already, but since folks like to intentionally misread this sort of thing: when I say "antisemitism," I am not conflating that concept with anti-Zionism.

The two are not the same.

Really trying hard to get my past 6 years of research files indexed and in order before this baby pops in January.

It's such infuriating work, though. We spent SO much time documenting how Proud Boys and Nazis were infiltrating the GOP, with insurrectionary intentions... ...and everyone called us crazy and paranoid right up until the folks we'd be warning about did exactly the thing we'd BEEN warning about.

And continue to make those in-roads, now in broad daylight.

This represents one of the most extremist developments out of the Moms for Liberty world, yet.

Tennessee Active Club isn't just any white supremacist org; it's home to Sean Kaufmann, dangerous Nazi I watched share bomb making plans online.

rightwingwatch.org/post/white-sup… When I say Nazi, I mean Nazi. Full on.

He taught his kids to seig Heil, and shared videos of it in some of the most extreme chats on the internet.

He swapped terror tactics with convicted terrorist Jarrett William Smith in these chats.

(thread)

Even with an extremely well-funded right wing effort to push anti-queer sentiment, brownshirt fascists really kind of nothingburgered at Pride this summer despite a lot of big talk.

And I think that's a pretty good indicator of their diminished power right now. I'm not going to talk about organizing I've been doing on this, because I don't want to tempt fascists or fate, but there were a lot of conversations here in Philly about Proud Boy threats and of course the threat of M4L when their conference was here.

One difficult thing about antifascism in these times is that fascists keep failing comically and yet also somehow upwards "Never get in the way of an enemy making a mistake" said someone whose enemies definitely did not have the ear of Elon Musk

Problem is, Elon actively wants to destroy Twitter, and is intentionally driving away users and especially trusted content providers.

He's not trying to profit, he's trying to wreck.

https://twitter.com/AdultingADHD/status/1676928604469329921

Meanwhile, Mastodon isn't run by any one person or entity, and its user/admin base is highly elitist (and largely anti-Black).

They don't have a profit motive, either, and most don't especially want Mastodon to become the popular Twitter alternative.

We're really in a period of discernment for antifascists, I think.

So much of our work 2016-2021 was an effort to keep extreme fascism from crossing the line into the mainstream.

But from MTG to Moms for Liberty, it's happened. And it's all being whitewashed by white women. M4L is the best and scariest example right now.

They are using the special privileges they get for having successfully reproduced whiteness, and leveraging them in service of extreme fascist goals.

People ignore that they're a hate group because, "moms."

Remembering the high-ranking staffer for 350 dot org who told me years ago that suffering oil workers were the enemy.

If the climate change prevention movement had been just a little less openly contemptuous of working people, I think we'd be living in a very different world. I'd just finished close to a decade as a labor coalition organizer, and I was talking about my frustration with how the enviro movement treated workers.

About how the Sunoco refinery fucked its workers on healthcare after assaulting their bodies with toxic chemicals for decades.

The reality is, organizing to demand the deplatforming of fascists was and is a wildly successful tactic.

Elon bought Twitter *because* we were too successful in deplatforming the far right reactionaryism he embraces.

The backlash is *because* of our success. To look at Elon's Twitter and point to it as "evidence" that this organizing was ineffective or unsuccessful is like looking at the current war on trans folks and saying it proves that queer organizing is a failed project that never accomplished anything.

We need to understand anti-vaxx as not only a eugenic attempt to murder the vulnerable, but ALSO specifically as an attempt to make public education a means of population control by way of enforced disease spread.

Which ultimately will kill not only kids, but public ed itself. We already see schools in lower income areas and specifically Black/brown areas encouraged to take a carceral approach to "absenteeism"/"truancy," to the point where parents face the possibility of incarceration for it.

People mistake RFK Jr. for left because of his name, of course, but also they look at his history as an "environmental lawyer."

There's a popular misconception that all "environmentalism" is leftist.

Actually, ecofascism is a thing and VERY common in the far right, esp Nazism.

https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1670877987045011461

German Nazism, for example, was strongly influenced by and arguably emerged from the Volkish movement, which was all about connecting to German land and nature and restoring its supposedly natural relationship with its supposedly natural inhabitants-- "Aryan" Germans.

I hope that no one is missing that Moms 4 Liberty's whole brand is white natalism.

They are leveraging all the privilege and (conditional, patriachally-conferred) authority that US white supremacy grants specifically to white moms as a reward for reproducing the race. And of course, they are using that privilege and conditional authority to push aggressively for racist policies that reinforce white natalism.

Which in turn reinforces the privilege and conditional authority that white momhood confers under our white supremacist patriarchy.

This isn't exactly breaking, but a whole lot of Nazis (Andrew Anglin, for example) have been doubling down on how child brides are the ideal mate.

This isn't new for Nazis or the far right, but it's extremely telling when it comes to "grooming" discourse.

https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1658865192128634882

As I've written many times: pedophilia is baked into the far right.

They want compliant, vulnerable, easily-influenced child brides trapped in marriages where they start spawning children immediately post-menarche.

Tara Reade was such a good barometer for where folks were re solidarity with survivors.

Whatever the real story was, libs who loved #MeToo    as a bludgeon against Trump jumped so fast when it came to saying, actually when it's my guy, I don't have to believe women. Plenty of shady stuff about Reade has come out since, and would have come out if Dems had lived up to their espoused values around sexual misconduct and convened a process to hear and evaluate her claims.

But instead, most people just "my guy would never"-ed it.

Shameful.

This, this, this.

Philly's larger machines aren't what they used to be, but the ward system is very powerful.

National-level folks are trying to make this election out to have been a referendum on progressivism, but it was really more of a test of the Dem machine itself.

https://twitter.com/dennismhogan/status/1658833274095935491

Which is what most Philly elections are, right now.

The old Dem machine used to be an amalgam of regional machines. Those regional machines are fading and the overall Dem machine is struggling to hold itself together.

The problem isn't AI, it's capitalism The biggest social AI problems are the consequences of a shitty system that incentivizes profit by way of theft.

A system that prioritizes the interests of the people and groups who have already succeeded in thieving and hoarding wealth.

Elon Musk has spent the past year at least trying to gin up murderous resentment against the unhoused.

His tweets against unhoused people in SF have been intentionally, grossly dehumanizing.

He likely using this moment to boost content supporting the murder of the unhoused. I don't for a minute trust that his "open" policy on algorithmic code includes whatever temporary tweaks he orders his teams to implement, especially when it comes to boosting/deboosting certain takes and stories.

Feeling some feminist feelings re: today's verdict in the Proud Boys trial.

Zach Rehl, one of the PBs convicted of sedition, headed up the chapter that terrorized me, my building, and my neighborhood as retaliation for my research.

For years, people gaslit me about it. The first time the Proud Boys paid me a house visit, some accused me of being a hysterical woman who made it all up.

Others suggested I was some brunch-eating lib lady too blithely privileged to have known this was a possibility.

Both were false, both were sexist.

This guy has no clue what he's talking about and I very much wish people would stop treating him as if he did.

A THREAD

https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1647337035793833985

Okay, starting with this.

Nope, nope, nope.

Fascists-- past, present, and likely future-- are not hyper-competent.

Very much the opposite. The trains did NOT run on time.

You just got shot for saying otherwise.

https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1647337038775984128?t=sfnrcxJWWn_w_JEYVM4r-Q&s=19