I expect you thought that sit-ins at Woolworths' benches in the 50s and multiple sports clubs and music acts refusing to play South Africa in the apartheid years was "performative actions whose only accomplishment is making the people engaging in them feel good" too
@dogemperor No, I did not. I think those were very effective and strategic actions, carefully planned and executed brilliantly. I worked hard in the anti-apartheid movements. I was in a stroller for the Civil Rights sit ins, but my family was there.
@draiochta14 And basically what I'm noting is that the protests against Christian Nationalist groups now are pretty much in that same vein, and also the ACT UP protests (which a lot of folks also claim were performative stunts but DID get a lot of needed attention towards 1/2
@draiochta14 the fact that the Reagan admin pretty much had a policy of "letting the LGBTQIA folks die of AIDS out of neglect". No, protests like this aren't the *only* solution, by far, but I do hold it is a useful part of a multipronged approach and should be seen in that light 2/2
@draiochta14 I'd also argue, as an aside that a protest that has cropped up alongside this one--people mass-reserving seats at Morton's in what amounts to a "virtual sit-in"--is also a valid approach as well. When they won't let you petition them for a redress of grievances otherwise...
@dogemperor The lunch counter sit ins and the anti-apartheid movements were directly targeting those who were enacting policy. Kavanaugh doesn’t own Mortons. The guy who does gave 5 million to Trump. Targeting Mortons is a direct action. Hit em where it hurts.
@dogemperor How do we directly impact the direction the Justices on the Supreme Court? I am not sure we can, unless we had a way to get the Senate to sign off on impeachment. Elections have consequences. Dem voters have never made SCOTUS a voting issue and here we are
@dogemperor The right has been openly telling us what they were planning to do around the court. That is why they wanted Trump and stood by him no matter what he did For those nominations they could shove through I am not sure preventing them from eating is going to change their fanaticism
@dogemperor But good discussion…thank you!
@draiochta14 No worries. And honestly at least some of the point of things like the restaurant protests isn't just to encourage...things like the headwaiter refusing Kavanaugh seating, but uncovering things like Morton's being a big Trump donor, or at least bringing public awareness
@dogemperor Sure. But IF we want large numbers of people to join us, we can’t turn them off before they put in a toe. We need them. We need numbers. This was a mistake the white left made in the 60s. They sent middle America into the arms of the GOP and giving them the power they have today
@draiochta14 I'd actually argue there's...a lot of other stuff that "drove middle America into the arms of the GOP" (frankly, there was a lot of white America in the South that was ALWAYS deeply racist AF, and Christian Nationalists actively weaponized this in the 60s and 70s via 1/x
@draiochta14 "Massive Resistance" (there's a very good argument to be had, in fact, that the birth of *modern* Christian Nationalism was a reaction to most of the elements of the "tax writeoffs and state voucher programs for segregation academies" being ruled unconstitutional), 2/x
@draiochta14 and arguably the New Apostolic Reformation may well have been working at least from the time they and Christian Identity formally split from Lanhamism in the late 40s/early 50s (starting with attacks on mainline churches: https://t.co/WDilLCPfug), 3/x
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@draiochta14 https://t.co/quNQ9jgj06 The RNC was pretty much gone after really from the time of the Southern Strategy, but efforts are especially traceable from 1971 or so onward, this actually substantially predated Reagan or Obama (though they DID weaponize it) 4/x
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@draiochta14 (Note: A lot of what I'm going to post substantially predates Obama's run, it's from...Dubya era, if not beforehand in many cases) Christian Nationalists were deep w/ far-right militias (John Birch Society, Posse Comitatus, etc.) all the way back to Eisenhower, 5/x
@draiochta14 some of the roots (with racist elements in Christian Nationalist movements, the Family aka The Fellowship, etc. actually dating back to the 30s and actual "old school" fascist groups https://t.co/JURhG7Obcl 6/x
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@draiochta14 and Christian Nationalists of the sort that were friendly to actual domestic terrorism (like Army of God, Missionaries to the Preborn, "Christian Patriot militias") were very much a thing in the 80s and 90s https://t.co/bnP6rmMYUL 7/x
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@draiochta14 (Like, you started seeing more actual Christian Nationalist terrorism in the 80s because there were a lot who didn't think Christian Nationalist takeover of the GOP was going fast enough, I...kinda *grew up* in close to ground zero of the New Apostolic Reformation, 8/x
@draiochta14 and I can literally say some of my *very* earliest memories involved a "revival" in the *late Carter admin* where the preacher actively stated that when Reagan took charge, when "Christians took this country", they were going to start rounding up LGBTQIA people and 9/x
@draiochta14 "Satanists" and "Pagans" up, and this was also in a family where I asked my folks what they did with the Civil Rights movement and my mom claimed she dropped out when she found out "MLK was nothing but a troublemaker and a Communist", so yeah. 10/x
@draiochta14 Same church also had Efrain Rios Montt and Ollie North selling up Iran-Contra and the Guatemalan Genocide as "God's work" while running a grift claiming they were sending aid to the (heavily westernized and CoE) Miskitu First Nation but sending it to Contras instead. 11/x
@draiochta14 This is literally shit I saw growing up, and even though there's actual documentation that this stuff was going on in the 80s it's not something a lot of folks seriously believe was going on *that early*. (Same for QAnon stuff; save for the wacky stuff re JFK, 12/x
@draiochta14 almost *all* of it is recycled "Satanic Panic", right down to claims about "products of horror" that were supposedly made from aborted kids.) So basically my point I was making is...a lot of people, between the 50s-90s, got recruited into some amazingly toxic stuff 13/x
@draiochta14 Like, you had churches starting to be taken over from within by Christian Nationalist stuff on one end, and you also had...women who weren't part of the working economy, or who were pretty much at home, also getting pulled into it, or people getting pulled into it 14/x
@draiochta14 through literally a generation of kids being raised in a lot of the South in 'segregation academies' that were literally the predecessors of "Christian homeschooling" and THAT kind of curricula, and they basically got recruited into a cult 15/x
@draiochta14 And I do not use the term "cult" lightly, I use it in literally the "coercive religious group that uses undue influence to isolate its members from outside influence" stuff. Again, one of those rare things where I can talk on it having seen it from the inside, 16/x
@draiochta14 but even as far back as in the 80s there was a whole-ass "alt-economy" forming https://t.co/dxICvPJ6YA And major, major funders all the way back from the 50s and 60s https://t.co/ccHGX5TvJ9 17/x
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@draiochta14 And as doctors and social workers started realizing a lot of the stuff (like degaying, and an increasing trend to being anti-vax, and really anti-mental-health-treatment) was harmful you had alt-medicine https://t.co/TnyhkSBBwP https://t.co/UAaEcUcMQJ 18/x
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@draiochta14 and hell, you had *DEMOCRATS* sucked in to the whole alt-mental-health stuff that Christian Nationalists were setting up even in the *early 80s* (Tipper Gore's PMRC promoted Bob Larson's "Back in Control Training Center", an early "Bible based boot camp" 19/x
@draiochta14 of the EXACT type that @ParisHilton is a literal survivor of (and which is STILL a major industry in the US, as an aside)--and they promote stuff like "degaying", and trying to cure people of depression and anorexia by "exorcisms" and taking away actual medication) 20/x
@draiochta14 @ParisHilton And basically right around the time Reagan became president, we lost the Fairness Doctrine, and we *also* had...the rise of "godcasting" networks thanks to a lot of FCC deregulation, we did have regs from 50s-60s https://t.co/faLYVVFnTv 21/x
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@draiochta14 @ParisHilton because of both stuff like "Father" Coughlin's pro-Nazi propaganda in the late 30s/early 40s, and Aimee Semple McPherson being a general scofflaw re radio regulations (and literally accusing Herbert Hoover of being fulla Satan when the FCC was established to 22/x
@draiochta14 @ParisHilton actually have a regulatory body for radio that had the statutory *authority* to enforce regulations). And a lot of the "news with views" programs even in the 70s and 80s were the predecessors of stuff like OANN https://t.co/oAba8SV4Ni 23/x
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@draiochta14 @ParisHilton and between media consolidation (with hostile actors like Salem Networks and Sinclair Broadcasting), the rise of stuff like Fox News, and abuse of a specific loophole re distant radio translators there are actually parts of the US... 24/x
@draiochta14 @ParisHilton where as far back as fifteen to twenty years ago, there were few choices that were NOT Christian Nationalist or otherwise pushing far-right stuff where Rush Limbaugh was the *most progressive* voice on radio https://t.co/FsrJiDTPYj 25/x
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@draiochta14 (And social media has basically been a repeat of this whole problem: the major social media networks are at best held by apathetic sorts if not outright hostile actors who are sympathetic to the far right or are accelerationists themselves.) 26/x
@draiochta14 And generally this isn't just happening in Podunk towns, they've been pretty explicitly targeting white, middle-class families in the suburbs who are Anxious and who did the whole White Flight to the suburbs in the 50s and 60s (and to segregation academies), 27/x
@draiochta14 because coercive religious groups explicitly "home in" on people who have a PERCEPTION that their world is coming apart (even if only psychologically): https://t.co/mOHe2iPNKJ (LONG thread I wrote about how cult recruitment works, especially targeting Karen in the exurbs.) 28/x
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@draiochta14 You see, I'm actually intimately familiar with how that happens, because...my own mother was recruited, in exactly this way, back in the late 60s/early 70s before I was born (according to family stories, apparently through a play-group my older sibling was in). 29/x
@draiochta14 While I don't believe my maternal unit was actually convinced to join by my sib apparently asking they didn't go to church at the tender age of three, I *do* think probably the parents of my sib's playdate companions DID recruit my mom into the cult, 30/x
@draiochta14 and there's *so much* of that. A non-negligible number of people got recruited into the group I am a walkaway from via AmWay or other MLMs that were being promoted by women to other women in the 50s-80s and that's where a lot of other nastiness cross-fertilized 31/x
@draiochta14 (Yes, I did a long-ass thread on this too, where it relates to the increasing trend where people are practically oppositional-defiant re covid precautions AND mental health treatment: https://t.co/4abl5DRyMc) 32/x
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@draiochta14 But yeah, this has been going on a *very* long time, and again it's complicated by the fact we're not even dealing with a normal political movement at this point, it's *literally* a cult with political aspirations (and even exit counselors will tell you this) 33/x
@draiochta14 And part of the problem is that there really is *not* a good, known, effective way to get someone out of a cult who has not had something happen to them that shocks them out of the cult mentality (people are led into cults via their limbic systems, not their heads) 34/x
@draiochta14 Now, on the political end, re Christian Nationalism and its origins in racism (showing this is really a problem that's ultimately the result of Reconstruction having ended too early): https://t.co/0Hk6sUfJQs 35/x
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@draiochta14 More on how "segregation academies" and the end of Massive Resistance (school voucher money and tax benefits for segregation academies) led to modern Christian Nationalism: https://t.co/RTnz7sM5S7 36/x
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@draiochta14 My fellow researcher @brucewilson doing a whole-ass teach-in on this, back in 2013: https://t.co/0JhI9BpMQ1 Also, there's another thing besides MLMs that started up in the 50s that has a lot to do with the present mess 37/x
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@draiochta14 @brucewilson I mentioned how my mom got recruited into the cult originally, and how MLMs tended to be used. Well, at the same time megachurches started to be a thing, and they actually use an almost identical method to MLMs to grow huge https://t.co/wRycRP38f1 38/x
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@draiochta14 And by growing huge, they also network, and--similar to an abusive "business motivational org" in an MLM--groups that use this whole "pyramid" structure go very, very abusive and very 'big brother" https://t.co/RxfufRTk60 39/x
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@draiochta14 So basically...the point I'm making is that frankly a lot of "white America" you were never going to get, for pretty much the reason I never got any of my family out of the cult before they died (there were a few that "played along" but either never truly joined, but 40/x
@draiochta14 nobody who was *raised* in it escaped other than me, and pretty much I've become effectively a "family of me and my friends and my SO" because I've had to go no-contact with my entire extended family who were largely sucked in by the time I was in middle school :( 41/x
@draiochta14 And my mom was Patient Zero in our extended family for that, so...yeah. That tells you how fast it can happen. And again, they're targeting people who are all very Nervous about the BLM Thing, and The LGBTQIA Thing, and they're actually insecure about the decision 42/x
@draiochta14 to become mothers, to become parents, in this world and its environment, and their money isn't as stretching as far as it was...yeah, that can make them prime for someone setting the hook for some horrible stuff 43/x
@draiochta14 So we're kind of at a point (because this HAS laid indolent, and now it's basically taken over the party apparatus of an entire political party, and people are becoming more extreme as they've come *so* close to a victory via a coup by law, then by gun, by the courts... 44/x
@draiochta14 we're at a point that really just about EVERY form of resistance we can work on is needed, we need plans A-Z, and...if a guy who is earning $2.13 an hour (plus tips) has as his form of resistance showing Kavanaugh the door, God bless that man. 45/x
@draiochta14 But the point being, we need multiple angles of attack at this point, and yeah, one of those is getting more progressives in office. One is more *organized* protest action (which requires the services of people who are whistleblowers who let folks know WHO to protest, 46/x
@draiochta14 the actual funders of the coup in progress, etc.--assuming it's not a case like where Morton's opens its mouth), and yes, some of it IS actually "naming and shaming" to let people know that being an Agent of Injustice is Not Socially Acceptable or Right. 47/x
@draiochta14 And if someone is in a low enough position of power that their form of resistance *is* naming and shaming, well, sometimes that naming and shaming can lead to people digging in and finding the funding sources, and going after the meatier targets. 48/x
@draiochta14 (Protests like this I tend to look at like...dogs flushing out game when going hunting. You might see one bird or two, you send a bird dog out, he'll flush out the whole flock. (Protesters like the ones at Morton's can be our bird dogs, in other words.) 49/x
@draiochta14 But we can't just rely on people flushing out bad actors, or legislative solutions, or even things like general strikes or street protests, at this point we need to work on ALL fronts because Christian Nationalists are very much in a total war with the rest of us 50/end
