This is "the one big trick" that the right has mastered. They present their movement as just "the authentic voice of the volk outraged by Democratic overreach," when really what they're doing is just old fashioned political mobilization. Organize a passle of pissed off people & call it a movement.
You left out an important step in how Republicans increase their power: First you use disinformation to make people pissed off, then you organize them. Case in point: oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2025/09/01/h...
I’d say the Left’s big problem is that it responds to the Republican Party’s invocation of “das Volk” politics by ignoring the racism & ethnonationalism and insisting that “das Volk” is really unified by class.
The problem is that dems dont respond to the talk of "das volk" by saying "fuck off you racist cunts".
In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein did a really good job of dissecting the disgruntled by COVID lockdown to MAGA pipeline.
They also get MONEY to do it. Rich people fund their ‘movement.’ Yes, it does attract people but like the Tea Party it is bankrolled, not spontaneous. In prior years, some supposed spontaneous protests would vanish like a mist in the sun right after the midterms, never to be heard from again.
And sprinkling in some fear
Exactly right. The right looks for something, anything that can be used for old fashioned political mobilization. Back in the’90s, public opinion about climate change wasn’t too different among left, right, center. But then a sharp shift happened among those on the right.
Decades ago the Democrats internalized the Gingrichian propaganda that they’re fundamentally illegitimate traitors and the Republicans alone represent Real America
Yes. Trump provides us with an opportunity to break free of this that we shouldn’t ignore. Trump is such an obvious traitor that it makes it much easier to snort and laugh when someone on the right claims the mantle of patriotism, and snort and laugh is what we should all do.
But the Dems are still insisting that there’s humans on the right and they need to be catered to
At least I know that my right wing family’s pretense to be the genuine patriotic American salt who were condescended to by people like me used to work to make me back off and tip toe around them. It doesn’t work on me any more. I can’t be the only one.
Not to belabor it, but I used to feel guilty for leaving their small town and going off to college and making something of myself. They encouraged that guilt. That sentiment has totally flipped. Now I’m actively angry at them, 24/7, forever trying that shit on me, and
angry that with nothing to do but sit on the couch for the last 15 years retired they have not bothered to dispel their abject ignorance one iota by reading even History for Dummies. That’s their choice, and it’s one I’m now willing to point out and say I don’t respect. Unthinkable ten years ago.
Ironically, people like that are the actual decadent elitists.
These people are shit, and we should talk about and treat them like shit, because anything else invites them in to prey on people.
“Ohhhhh but that’s 30% of the country!” Tough shit. Like 90% of Germans supported Hitler. Should they have been accommodated after?
Leaders are, they are too set and too cowardly to change much. But I think a lot of Dems are reversing this internalization in their minds and I think we need to encourage it and over time we’ll get new leaders without this flaw hopefully.
As a result, like you said, they ceased being able to perceive the right as an organized and directed political movement and instead now see it as the barometer of American sentiment - perhaps sometimes in need of janitorial services, but always assigned primacy.
I’m convinced this happened in the Reagan years.
Reagan was the impetus but Gingrich used it to shape both parties into what we know now.
Watched it happen, can confirm. Newt transformed Reaganism into a false center, causing Democrats to chase after it.
It couldn’t have happened unless Democrats participated. The DLC was the main force that made that happen, and it was formed in 1985.
Fair point, Clinton's neolib victory in 1992 flowed from the DLC. Previously, Dukakis famously tried to wear 'muscular' like a badly fitted suit but ended up looking like a prairie dog in that tank. Clinton didn't need 'muscular' since he had 'cool' & charisma.
The George Floyd protests radicalized a lot of white people AGAINST structural racism. In response, the right tapped into frustration over Covid restrictions (imposed by Red AND Blue states almost equally) and white resentments to organize an old fashioned, racialized backlash against the gubmint.
Historian Jefferson Cowie's book, Freedom's Dominion, is an extended meditation on the deeply rooted American anti-democratic tradition he's called "racialized anti-statism." White people have long decried "federal tyranny" while promoting racist systems of state power. bsky.app/profile/seth...
📌
The Tea Party was covered in the press like it was a spontaneous eruption of populist anger, but those protests drew far fewer people than the recent protests against Trump's administration. The "Tea Party" was just a well-funded organized, right wing movement promoted by friendly media outlets.
What you call a well funded organized right wing movement I (correctly) name as the KKK.
Spot on.
One person I spoke with at this 2009 Tea Party event in Salem was a rich industrialist (who claimed to be a descendant of arch-Federalist Fisher Ames) named William Ames Curtwright. He ran an annual event for right wingers in Oregon called the "Gathering of the Eagles." bsky.app/profile/seth...
Ames died several years ago, but his "compound" in Turner, OR is still used as the site for this annual Gathering of the Eagles. Here's the lineup for this year. I know of at least one self-avowed neo-Nazi who used to attend these meetings where the Oath Keepers and the John Birchers recruit.
speaking of which, do you have any good readings on the John Birch Society? it's one of those right-wing to far-right groups i'm woefully less knowledgeable about
if I prompted an AI with "generate a picture of a conservative dipshit" this is exactly what it would spit out
lincoln *****casarez*****?
One of the honored guests at last year's Gathering of the Eagles was the Gateway Pundit guy. The conservative activist who posted these pictures has described the Catholic church as an agent of Satan. She also has said LGBTQ are demonic, and she made posts celebrating the Proud Boys.
BLEXIT?
That was a Candace Owens effort at encouraging Black voters to leave the Democratic Party. In Oregon that movement got little traction, possibly because they could not find any Black Republicans willing to lead it.
Ah. Thanks!
Anyway...Dems need to break out of the impulse to see 200 white people protesting against Covid restrictions as "the voice of the people which we must heed" while seeing 10X as many people protesting racist police violence as "a niche special interest group that's out of step with real Americans."
Also see, Labour Party, UK.
It's exactly the same here in the UK where small protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers are driving much of our current media discourse and political decision-making.
The voice of the people was also clear: 2020 election was a referendum on Trump’s handling of COVID…and USA rejected it (by 7mm votes at that)! It is bizarre that the opposite narrative has taken hold when it is clearly wrong
Here's that "voice of the volk" Wm. Ames Curwright, the organizer of the Gathering of the Eagles events, posing for a pic at CPAC 2014 with Joseph Farrah, the editor of WND. He's the person who in 2011 convinced an NYC billionaire to double down on birtherism as his ticket to political prominence.
Drumpf was not a billionaire in 2011. He might be now due to his grift but not then.
And here's that "voice of the volk" posing with one of the most important organizers of the far right movement inside the GOP, Morton Blackwell, who's been at it since 1979. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_...
I guess I'd be remiss if I didn't promote my own research here--which is about the 60+ year, far right insurgency inside the GOP that finally realized its goal with the nomination of an illiberal, conspiracy-obsessed, anti-leftist populist named Donald Trump. rightlandia.ghost.io/walter-huss-...
the Bush-Cheney era "real Americans" line in which only right wing whites, preferably rural, are the legitimate population of the country, and the press' willingness to adopt this viewpoint, should've taught more people a lesson www.thenation.com/article/arch...
💯💯💯💯
U got that right.
More than that, they need to learn to push back on the media framing. Insist that the media acknowledge the men behind the curtains. We all know that money from Russia and other far right power centers fund this billion dollar propaganda machine but no “serious” reporter would dare frame it that way
🔥🔥 Seth!
Is this an American terrorist group?
Angela Todd….. I know that name from somewhere
I think she ran a harassment account on Twitter but I’m no longer there and I can’t recall what the @ was.
She was one of the people behind the disinformation campaign about Jo Ann Hardesty. She posts as PDXreal. Her husband (ex-husband?) got in some trouble re. child porn/solicitation I believe.
Ohhhhh raindrop works (who appears to no longer be here though linktr.ee/RaindropWork...) followed / reported on that if I recall correctly.
Was she the mom who brought the PBs to intimidate kids outside of skyview high school in Vancouver, someone who ran for local office & then relocated to south of Portland? I can’t recall.
Not sure
These people aren’t conservative. They’re reactionary extremists
They’re all just branches of the kkk, aren’t they
Well you know if Lara Logan is a featured speaker it's not a conspiracy theory nutjob gathering, amirite?
There is literally no one big news media love more than astroturfed right wing protesters. They could carry signs saying 'I am paid to be here' and excited reporters would humbly beg for the opportunity to hear from this noble salt of the Earth pure creature of the American Spirit.
Im so glad you mentioned the Tea Party, first thing I thought of
Everyone knows the Kochs astroturfed the Tea Party and people with a brain know the main fury motivating members of it was racial animus generated by the election of the first black president. It drove people so crazy that the KKK essentially reformed, this time as the Heritage Foundation.
Incredibly succinct, absolutely correct. Imagine if you had 83K followers you could present this in 10 separate skeets with a bunch of other useless information that really doesn’t have anything to do with anything besides your own accomplishments, we’d really get somewhere. And your name was Seth.
Reacting not to the debt or deficits but to the election of a black person as president.
The far right are devious and relentless in their pursuit of maintaining white supremacy
🎯 it is their single focus, everything else is just gravy.
He might as well switch sides if he's going to spout that nonsense. We need to primary anyone who falls for such hooey.
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They also have convinced people they're the "Conservatives", when they're actually radical & well outside of the mainstream in their ideology & policies.
Don’t skip Step One: use your mass media machines to manufacture a permanently pissed off demographic
You can’t shame the shameless people who instigate this stuff. But you can still shame the media voices that still very much present as wanting to have shame that uncritically amplify them. Make them own their choices.
What they've managed to do, and what the left, in my lifetime has never managed to do, is create a political coalition that doesn't break up every time an ideological fault line appears.
American Liberal ideology has always been the reason that there's no functional Liberal political movement in America. They don't have a collective identity or class solidarity; they think and behave as individuals. The solution is young Americans that weren't indoctrinated by American media.
American "Conservatism" isn't conservative; it's a reactionary far right movement that's in conflict with modern knowledge and science. They use exactly the same methods as Lenin and Hitler to achieve political goals; classical conditioning.
YES THIS A MILLION TIMES
Until liberals “fight fire with fire” across all communication platforms and quit apologizing for not achieving perfection in governing, we are in dangerous place. I would’ve thought the 2020 “Stop the Steal” shenanigans would’ve been the proper wake up call to upgrade the Dem apparatus, but no.
To use another example, after Trump‘s felony verdict in NYC in May, 2024 the “lawfare” tropes that flooded social media almost immediately after the verdict must have been coordinated. I’m not sure if any researcher has done a deep dive on this, but it was eerily similar to “Stop the Steal”.
Indeed! The right has a consistent, stable and predictable agenda. They just use novel opportunities that come along the way to justify their agenda and frame their agenda as a "response".
I remember distinctly in maybe Feb or March of 2020 when the death numbers first got reported by race, and thinking, "oh shit, here it comes." And it did, almost immediately.
'passel' ftw
This cartoon is from the Ottawa convoy in February 2022, but it addresses a technique that's used daily on various media:
