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Dr. William Horne Profile picture
Dr. William Horne
@wihorne
Teacher. Radical. Postdoc, @clasvillanova; PhD, @GWHistoryDept. In Case of Emergency: https://t.co/OHJoBVOMCG. (he/him)
6 subscribers
Mar 7 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I reviewed Heather Cox Richardson's excellent Democracy Awakening w/an eye to the current authoritarian crisis. Her work, & the history more broadly, shows the critical importance of holding right-wing criminals & frauds accountable, something we have collectively failed to do. The failure (or refusal) to hold Trump—who is now essentially a coin toss away from the presidency—accountable for his crimes actually builds on a longstanding unwillingness to hold white conservative public figures to the rule of law. Image
Nov 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Some of y'all know I've struggled with Long COVID. I tried a number of treatments & wanted to share what worked the best with my ME/CFS presentation, which helped me get my life back over just a few weeks after starting the program. If you know, you know. retrainingthebrain.com/the-program/ I'm reluctant to share too much specific health stuff on here for obvious reasons, but I had LC really bad & pretty much couldn't function at all over the summer. I got some relief from other treatments too, but DNRS was definitely the highest leverage by far. A game changer.
Oct 20, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Forcing a shutdown has always amounted to a procedural coup designed to overturn existing US law that mandates spending on social services. It is no coincidence that the effort has been led by the very people who planned & supported 1/6, actually part of a multi-front coup plot. And remember that 1/6 itself involved many smaller procedural coups from Trump's "perfect phone call" demanding that Georgia "find" votes for him to the fake elector scheme & Pence's role in certifying slates of electors. Storming the Capitol was a culmination of those efforts.
Jul 3, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A prime example of how Musk has carefully transformed the platform into a vehicle for hate speech & fascism. The first line calls for death to Muslims & Black citizens—not only hate speech but a direct call for fascist violence. Musk’s reinstatement & promotion of fascist accounts, his gutting the TOS, his attacks on legitimate media, changes to “verification,” nixing translation, & even the bugginess all work to undermine access to legit info & expand fascist hate speech & violence.
May 31, 2023 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
For those who haven’t been following, GA brought terrorism charges against protestors & their supporters, & have now arrested their bail support & legal defense organizers, in direct violation of the 1, 4, 6, & 8 amendments. This is the behavior of a fascist police state. Protestors & supporters of the movement to block the construction of “Cop City” were charged with terrorism & denied bail for the very serious crime of attending a concert, having mud on their boots, & having the # of a bail fund. theintercept.com/2023/03/08/atl…
May 29, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
1) The word for what you’re celebrating here is slavery.
2) Tell me you don’t know a single thing abt labor or gender history without saying you don’t know anything abt it.
3) Unwaged work in capitalist societies is intrinsically dehumanizing & deadly. Work is indeed bullshit & should be distinct from production/consumption, but that there is a different tweet.
May 24, 2023 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
Dear @Target, as a historian who studies white supremacist movements, I want you to know that placating groups like this only increases these vigilante & paramilitary threats & violence. That’s what you’re doing here. I want to share some suggested readings that illustrate the point. First, on white power movements in recent U.S. history @kathleen_belew's Bring the War Home is essential reading. hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Yes, I too dump thousands of books onto pallets in the hallway when I’m doing an “inventory” of the books that I have on the shelves in my office. Totally normal, nothing to see here in a state that’s aggressively banning books. Meanwhile, over here on planet earth:
May 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is what a fascist state looks like, kids. It’s going to get infinitely worse if we don’t fight back. Historically, this type of book banning & school purging identifies targeted communities as “internal enemies” beyond the protection of the state, leading directly to white vigilante & state violence.
May 18, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
In my latest, I explain how the GOP attacks on university education in Florida not only harm students, but also represent a grave threat of fascist violence grounded in the very history that Republicans are banning. thedailybeast.com/im-a-professor… Recent Republican legislation banning teaching about the history of inequality & white supremacy in the U.S. actually has a long history, one that has ALWAYS been accompanied by white supremacist state & vigilante violence. Screenshot of text: DeSant...
May 18, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The GOP regularly supports this kind of violence as an expression of their suppressionist policy goals. In fact, two sitting GOP governors—Kim Reynolds & Greg Gianforte—were involved in similar assaults, Reynolds on a protestor & Gianforte on a reporter. Reynolds: desmoinesregister.com/story/news/pol…

Gianforte: abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/h…
May 15, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Florida just banned everything I teach at the university level. If legislators bothered to take my class, they’d learn that backlash events like this always coincide with white supremacist vigilante & state violence. Then again, they may already know. Students tell me they wish that they’d been taught abt histories of inequality in the US before college. They often say they feel like they’ve been lied to, well, bc they have. They don’t *want* to learn racist mythology—they want to understand the world as it actually exists.
May 15, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The dumbass hot takes by COVID minimizers make me so angry as someone w Long COVID, not only bc of the debilitating nature of that UNTREATABLE condition, but also for the underlying claim that we took too many precautions to preserve life & health in 2020. Despicable! You are now (thankfully) less likely to die in the immediate term from a COVID infection. You DO STILL have a relatively high risk (25-30%) of getting longer term symptoms & disability from even mild COVID infections, as I had.
Apr 16, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Imagine being someone who sees GOP:

1 Calls for violence against opponents
2 Book, content & course bans
3 Attacks on LGBTQ folks & repro health
4 Voter suppression, anti-protest & reprisal bills
5 Rising hate crime & political violence

& then finger-wags calling it fascism. I mean even if you know jack shit abt historical fascist movements—as Tom Nichols appears to—maybe under those circumstances just consider sitting it out? Like, who exactly are you (Tom Nichols) trying to help here?
Apr 14, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Winning the fight against fascism requires that we work together to create a livable future. To that end, I'm sharing my remarks from a carceral studies conference bc understanding the carceral state isn't just an academic project, but one of survival. drwilliamhorne.substack.com/p/incarceratio… I left some things open for discussion when I wrote this, but want to add that incarceration & work really are intertwined, w/incarceration rates tracking w changes in automating, subcontracting, offshoring, & unemployment.
Apr 10, 2023 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
Just white woman Michelle Tandler claiming that her fear justifies lynching, reproducing exactly—almost word-for-word—the famed “lynch a thousand times a week” speech of suffragist Rebecca Latimer Felton.

You can read it above, but I want to make sure we see how suffragist Felton justified lynching:
“When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime...
Mar 20, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Reading this brilliant Saidiya Hartman line in a whole new light amid the GOP backlash against the 2020 BLM protests: “Suppose the recognition of humanity held out the promise not of liberating the flesh or redeeming one’s suffering but rather intensifying it?” We see this pattern time & again, whether its the white supremacist violence in response to emancipation & Black enfranchisement, the lynching & massacres in response to Black organizing, or the Klan/Citizens' Council terrorism campaign in the aftermath of Brown.
Mar 20, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
We should add DC to this list & note that you can’t move your way out of a fascist movement bc they seek the total destruction of all who oppose them. The reason lies in the narrow way they define the nation—in this case around racist & cartoonish worship of The Founders—that requires total subordination of all others for the nation to fully exist.
Feb 12, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I know this isn't the space for this but there isn't a world where I would say nothing—I consider Vincent Lloyd to be a good friend & colleague whose work I admire, both in & outside academia. We're all subject to critique, some of it justified in this case (if also partly a product of miscommunication), but if our focus is limited to the critique, we risk missing the larger struggle for justice we claim to advance. So much of our work gets caught in that trap.
Jan 22, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
A century ago, racist mass violence like the Elaine, Ocoee, & Tulsa massacres forced marginalized communities to accept white conservative power under threat of certain death. Today, the "mass shooting" appears to serve that precise function. The disgusting truth is that this white conservative mass violence has been a defining feature of American "democracy" since its inception.
Jan 21, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Remember that time Trump goaded on his rioting supporters chanting "hang Mike Pence?" Yeah.