Let’s talk about four stories over the past week and how they relate: - the Proud Boys’ mob assault - the Rise Above Movement arrests - the Kroger killer - the MAGA bomber
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The Proud Boys get a lot of their media engagement through the alt lite and other right wing sources. It’s the lens through which they view the world. This is not dissimilar to what it appears that the MAGA bomber was doing.
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Whereas RAM and the Proud Boys found relationships through fight clubs and a sense of unity, the MAGA bomber’s feeds read like someone whose sense of community was the comment section on whatever forums he could find.
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The Proud Boys differ from RAM in that RAM wants to usurp the status quo but the Proud Boys seek to reinforce it. Two sides of the same racist coin. The MAGA Bomber seems to feel like he is defending the status quo against an insider threat in the form of the Democratic Party.
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His social media presence seems to reflect a sense of lonely entitlement. There’s a lot of similarity here to the Kroger killer but something about the Kroger killer stands out.
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The MAGA Bomber seemed hyper-fixated on certain things, certain stories and narratives. You see that often. The Kroger killer, though, seemed all over the place. His social media read like his main connection to the rest of the world was conservative local talk radio.
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If you’ve never listened to the kinds of radio that has deeply-held opinions on the performance of local high school football, you ought to.
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One of the ways that conservative talk radio succeeds is by always providing breadth, to sell society as a whole as something that is sick and changing, instead of saying there are finite point sources making it sick.
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All this is to say that we’re not being attacked from a single vector. Right wing media pressure is a constant gradient pushing people, and the right has enough breadth to provide everyone with the thing they are most likely to consume.
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Right wing media is a gradient pushing rightwards, toward violence and oppression. One of the symptoms of this is that you are basically guaranteed to generate random terrorists. Like popcorn kernels popping.
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If you want to create violence with plausible deniability, that’s how to do it. Apply pressure and wait. You can’t control the when or where but you can be promised it will come.
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@threadreaderapp unroll please -
Hello you can read it here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1055951088510255104.html … See you soon.
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