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...
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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.
AMEN!!!
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-...
And there it is. Christ almighty.
Completely off subject, but how do you like Ghost for your newsletter?
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...
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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
Is this her? pdxrealmedia.com/about/
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.