(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?

2020 Hell Teacher #1: The Cops.

Cops in 2020 taught a very thorough lesson on how deeply rotten the US policing system is.

Even those of us white folks who were ACAB already received deep experiential lessons on their violent fragility, mendacity, and wanton cruelty.

For me, this is the year I watched them shoot my husband twice in the back with rubber bullets as he struggled to help trapped nonviolent protesters trying to scale a hillside to comply with police dispersal orders after being heavily gassed without warning.

This is the year one locked eyes with me, aimed at me, and shot those rounds at me as I tried to give first aid to screaming, weeping gas victims.

It's the year I watched a police car speed into a line of protesters, hitting people, and never so much as slow down.

It's the year tear gas components disrupted my hormones and left me bleeding so much I'm still not sure whether or not it was a miscarriage.

It's the year I watched them flood entire Black neighborhoods with that abortifacient gas in the middle of quarantine without consequence.

When someone show you who they are, believe them.

Cops showed a whole lot of white people who they are, taught us a lesson cops teach Black folks each and every day.

They are a racist institution that treats all of its own as God's soldiers while allowing them to indulge their worst sadistic impulses on the marginalized without consequence.

They are a corrupt occupying army, not protectors.

They always have been.

Abolish them.

2020 Hell Teacher #2: Russia.

The thing Russia *keeps* teaching us, if we'd listen, is that we live in a digitized sociopolitical economy. Cyberwarfare isn't just fucking up Pentagon systems or hacking an election anymore.

It is now also about hacking *us* & our relationships.

That's not an exclusively Russian lesson, but it's a lesson their ops have made extremely clear.

I'm not talking Maddow speculation about political thriller Russian spy stuff, I'm talking just bad actors showing up in our social media spaces and manipulating us.

Which brings me to...

2020 Hell Teacher #3: Disinformation.

Disinformation isn't new, but the isolation of 2020 has made us exponentially more dependent on the digital for our social experience and therefore exponentially more vulnerable to disinfo.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When Bernie left the race, harassment (usually driven by disinformation propagated by the podcast crowd) became their full time hobby.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

COVID-19 is last because it is an accelerant that was poured on each and every one of the lessons of the previous five Hell Teachers.

By itself, it's just a biological phenomenon.

Interacting with us and our lived reality, it exposes our ugliest and weakest points.

COVID helped cops teach that racist police violence is so ingrained, they'll spray Black neighborhoods with a respiratory irritant tear gas, drive Black folks coughing out of their own homes at a time when we're all supposed to be staying inside to keep ourselves & others safe.

COVID-19 helped teach us the danger of nationalism & capitalism, the way it left countries and companies racing against each other instead of collaborating to find a vaccine.

Russia hacked our vaccine research, but also how fucked up is it that it was secret in the first place?

At the same time, COVID-19 drove us into the digital in unprecedented ways, making it our primary means of interacting in our social world for many.

We've long lived in a digitally augmented reality, but the digital emerged as the last COVID-free space to engage with others.

That transition taught us a lot about our own resiliency, and also about the lessons we could learn
from marginalized communities that already use digital as a primary social/work space for reasons like language and disability.

Unfortunately, one of the lessons we learned about our resiliency is that it is often not quite what we'd hoped, that we didn't have the redundancies in our social safety nets to keep us all connected.

That let some of us more easily ignore injustices & fall down rabbit holes.

For those who could afford to stay ensconced inside, it was easy to ignore the police brutality right outside, the genocide going on in ICE concentration camps, the ugly municipal raids on unhoused encampments that violated CDC guidelines & put poor people at even greater risk.

Easy, easier than ever.

And, as digital space became our new primary reality, that isolation made it easier than ever for folks to sink into online echo chambers, buy into the weaponized disinformation of white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theory.

While overt white supremacist terror communities wither thanks to antifascists, these rabbitholes flourish.

COVID, hostile state actors, and our president all helped white supremacists recruit to conspiracy theories that superficially mask their extreme racism/antisemitism.

COVID also shined sunlight onto our undercurrents of ecofascism and passive eugenics, as well as the active reality of medical racism.

"Nature is healing" was a eugenic, ecofascist phrase dropped so often, it became a meme.

State governments overtly suggested deprioritizing care for the disabled.

BIPOC and disabled people have been systematically and disproportionately denied quality medical care and access.

That has always been true, but COVID has compounded the deadliness.

So, here we are at the end of 2020, with COVID deaths spiking and vaccines on the horizon (for privileged countries, at least, which are already hoarding), but having to temper optimism knowing weaponized disinfo and medical racism have undermined public trust in that project.

A combination of incompetence and COVID seem to have effectively ended Trump's claim to the presidency more than any particularly capable work by Democrats, who have learned all the wrong lessons and are already making noise about compromising with racist reactionaries in 2021.

The left, which had started to enter the mainstream using a liberatory and intersectional voice, is a disaster, still overwhelmed by its popular takeover by trendchaser class reductionist white reactionaries who rub shoulders with Nazis & encourage harassment of the marginalized.

Trump is likely not going to manage a coup, but he has given a wide swath of the US a taste for fascism, a fact that Biden's inauguration won't change.

The tide of racist, antisemitic disinformative paranoia Trump rode to the presidency is more mainstream, popular, and present than ever.

It is also increasingly diffuse, infiltrating not only far right spaces but also fringe corners of the left and homeopathic community.

Shit marginalized folks and liberatory organizers have warned about for decades is coming home to roost for everyone, not just the marginalized anymore (though the marginalized are still nearly always the hardest hit).

From climate change to COVID, reality is intruding into the lives even of the privileged.

We're at-- beyond-- a point where we culturally have to make a decision about what "reality" means to us, what informs it, and whether disinformation continues to overwhelm it.

We can choose to make it a year we begin to a shared practice of deeper accountability to the truth and to each other, challenging disinformation and oppressive behavior and finding ways to better support one another as a culture.

Or, we can let more and more people succumb to soothing, responsibility-dodging disinformative lies that hurt the marginalized most but ultimately harm us all.

We can sit like frogs and boil to death in this vile broth.

Here's to the hope of a 2021 where we believe the folks nearest the flame when they warn it's hot, and that we collectively learn to jump to freedom instead of pretending we're not going to become frog soup if we don't change our ways, and fast.

That's my hope for the coming year, and really the only hope for the future.

We need to become a culture where we honor the truth, and each other, and soon.

That is the only way out of the frog pot.

And time is running out.