(thread) I'm doing my own personal reflecting on 2020, what it took from us and what it taught us. I have no patience for "God never gives you anything you can't handle" Pollyanna bullshit, but I do think hell moments are often harsh teachers. So what were 2020's lessons?
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As I always like to point out, the primary purpose of disinfo isn't to make us believe the disinfo itself. The larger goal is to spread so many conflicting lies that we become so cynical that we stop believing truth is ascertainable.
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Disinfo seeks to make us so exhausted with trying to figure out what's true that we just fall back on believing in info what confirms our biases, even if we once would have found it ludicrous. That sets the stage for Trumpian and other lies.
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Bannon, Trump, the far right, and other hostile actors very effectively weaponized disinfo to mainstream far right paranoia in 2015-6. In 2020, we saw disinfo galvanize the right further in deadly ways. We also saw it poisoning discourse across the political spectrum.
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When COVID hit and we began to adopt preventative measures, we saw QAnon and Trump's mainstream base join avowed white supremacists at rallies pushing disinfo about masks, & protesting shutdowns. We saw deep racist & antisemitic disinfo about COVID quickly brook the mainstream.
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We saw our own president holding daily briefings where he regularly repeated fringe pseudoscience disinformation, everything from hydroxochloroquine to bleach injections. It is hard to overstate how many lives disinfo cost us this year.
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We saw the far right double down on its own disinformatic conspiracy theory and successfully invite Trump's base on that death cruise. We also saw reactionary "left" spaces increasingly adopting Russian disinfo as talking points & practicing casual disinformative badjacketing.
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Which, speaking of. 2020 Hell Teacher #4 is the dirtbag "left." This crowd-- overwhelmingly white, privileged, and male-- rode Bernie's coattails, profiting off the labor of the diverse group of liberatory organizers that made his candidacy possible.
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What they spotted in Bernie populism was white dudes who were entirely apolitical before Bernie, who looked at *decades* of work liberatory organizers had done to create an antiracist, feminist, interesectional left & said, I want free health care but also to still be racist.
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That wasn't Bernie's base, btw. That just happened to be a crowd on Twitter that got disproportionate attention because white dudes always get heard more here, and journalists live and breathe Twitter.
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It was a nice big start for a fanbase, though, and dirtbag podcasters and Jacobin and a not-insignificant faction of DSA saw $$$ and fame and indulged them, spitting out reassuring class reductionist hot takes and doubling down on the weakest aspects of Bernie's campaign.
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The most hellacious, traumatic part of 2020 for me wasn't getting gassed or shot at. It was the incredible volume of dehumanizing, misogynist abuse these guys egged their fans into raining down on me FOR MONTHS when I had the temerity to say their sexism/racism hurt Bernie.
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The dirtbags are Johnny-come-latelies to socialism talk. A sizeable percentage and maybe even the majority of both the podcasters and the Jacobin folks come from tremendous wealth and cultural privilege. This is playacting for them.
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This was the year they really showed themselves for who they are, rich kids dressing up as working class warriors for an audience of middle class post-Gamergate white bros eager for a new excuse to mass-harass women & BIPOC w everything from dehumanizing memes to death threats.
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When Bernie left the race, harassment (usually driven by disinformation propagated by the podcast crowd) became their full time hobby.
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What dirtbags taught us is that the left is not immune to reactionary infiltration. They taught us that if we are not principled and liberatory in our populist work, we let people into our home who will then go out, invite Nazis to our table, and call us wreckers for objecting.
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They also taught that the nebulous crowd of racist, ableist misogynists that burbled up through the chans, gamer community, and incel/MRA/PUA Reddit and metastasized into Gamergate is still motivated by aggrieved, reactionary hatred more than any specific political orientation.
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That's energy that Bannon tapped into, but at this point it's very clear even self-avowed "leftists" like the dirtbags at Chapo Trap House can harness as long as they provide them with the red meat of juicy disinformation and marginalized targets for their violent harassment.
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The dirtbags also did real damage to the notion of informal labor at the worst possible time. They pushed an idea of a post-work automated economy that only flies if you pretend the massive amount of unpaid work marginalized folks disproportionately perform... isn't work.
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Which, unless you really want a future where robots raise your kid and listen to you talk about your bad day and all the other little labors of home and relationship, is total bullshit. They don't want a future without work, they want a future where they don't work.
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That's always a terrible thing to put out there, but it's especially damaging in this moment where informal home and domestic labor has been multiplied by quarantine remote schooling and remote work, and all this trauma has compounded our emotional labor needs.
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Then, there's 2020 Hell Teacher #5: White Supremacist Terrorists. If I was making a non-hell teacher list, the teacher here would be antifascists, because this has not been a good year for the racist terror set.
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As folks who follow me know, a lot of my activism work of the past 2 years has centered around antifascist research and organizing over the past two years, focused primarily on local Proud Boys and the Terrorgram assholes. What they taught us is, deplatforming works.
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In 2018-19, Philly and ally antifascist researchers relentlessly outed local Proud Boys here, costing them jobs, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and their reputations. We isolated them by outing their connection to the local GOP and holding their party friends accountable.
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At the same time, accelerationist Nazi terror-- temporarily set back by the Atomwaffen internal drama and loss of Ironmarch forums-- became trend du jour for the edgelord 8chan set. There were attacks every few months... then every month... & by July 2019, more than once a week.
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We worked together successfully in 2019 to take down 8chan, at a time when it was the primary direct feeder to the Nazi Telegram recruitment channels egging people on to terroristic violence.
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A lot of people said, oh no, now they'll just disappear to secret channels and we won't even know what they're up to and it will be worse. Except, antifascists were in those channels already working to disrupt and deplatform them, too.
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2020 was a year of high profile terrorist arrests that strongly demotivated these terrorism-would be's-- and I maintain that while cops should be abolished, there are times that pitting cops against Nazi terrorists is effective. HOWEVER.
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The much more powerful work that ultimately decimated 8chan and Terrorgram-related Nazi terror wasn't cop-driven or even seen, for the most part. It was antifascists patiently driving them off one platform, then another, then another, into monitored obscurity.
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2020 was a very effective proof that antifascist action and research are necessary and powerful prophylactics against far right terror. Antifascists taught us that with their success, and these loser terrorists taught us that in their defeat.
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And finally, the most obvious Hell Teacher of 2020, COVID-19. There's so much to unpack here, and I'm trying to cook a New Year dinner at the same time, so bear with me as we walk through this one.
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