(thread)

As a) a highly trained movement organizer and b) a professional researcher of the violent far right, I cannot roll my eyes enough at everyone from law enforcement to CNN personalities being like "we're trying to figure out who organized this."

First off-- and most folks have their heads on straight about this, at least-- Trump called it, his loyalists mobilized.

The incredibly irritating thing, though, is that folks do not seem to comprehend the difference between tactics and strategy, both of which are integral parts of organizing anything from a birthday party to an insurrection.

Tactics without strategy are throwing shit at a wall of an condemned building.

You may make a big fuss, but it doesn't necessarily move the ball towards your goal in any meaningful way.

Strategy is, how do my tactics clear the road to my goal.

If my goal is, make Joe happy on his birthday, my strategy might be "make him happy by throwing him a surprise party."

Who puts up the balloons, how you trick Joe into showing up, how the cake gets made-- those are the tactics.

They're only as good as the strategy itself.

If Joe hates surprises with a passion, all the balloons and cake in the world won't get you to your goal.

When you're organizing something, you have to take into consideration how much you're going to let your base and allies in on your strategy.

In liberatory movement, we build strategy transparently and democratically *with* our allies and base.

In liberatory movement, there might be *tactics* that are need-to-know to preserve the element of surprise, but principled democratic movement means coming to the goals and overall strategy together with our base and sharing/discussing them with our allies.

So, back to the events at the Capitol.

Trump was *very* clear with his base what the broader tactic was: storm DC.

His goals and strategies? Not so much.

He told his followers that the goal was to storm DC to prevent the confirmation of the results of a stolen election.

Now, we know Trump well enough at this point to know he doesn't care about the truth, so there's no real reason to believe *he* actually believes it was stolen.

We also know Rudy was calling Senators even *as* the storming was happening telling them they just wanted the vote delayed past midnight so they could claim it was never confirmed legally.

(We also know Rudy had his facts wrong about procedure, but... that's Rudy).

Now, I would personally argue that Trump's real goal was to do what he's always done, which is spread disinformation to cause confusion, obscure truth, and ultimately confuse people enough to let his base believe he's still Charlie Sheen "winning."

The fact is, whatever was going on in Trump's head (and even Trump may not know), the goal he very vaguely communicated to his followers-- insurrection to install him for a second term-- was likely just him selling them on a tactic that moved his personal disinfo goals forward.

Trump's own vagueness about how that tactic strategically moved his stated goal forward meant his base had to essentially start with a broad, undetailed call to a tactic and try and extrapolate Trump's underlying strategy themselves.

They knew Trump wanted Pence to magically stop certification, they knew Pence had already basically said he wasn't going to perform that imaginary magic trick, and they knew if the vote went forward, certification would happen.

Once pressuring Pence into that impossible trick was clearly off the table, there was only one mechanical strategy that made sense in terms of how the "storm DC tactic" would stop certification: physically prevent the vote.

There are a lot of *strategies* that might actually have meaningfully made sense to move that forward, namely more organized pressure on Trumpist congressional electeds to engage in disruptive behavior and undermine procedure in various ways.

That would require an actual articulation of how strategy connects tactics to accomplishing a clear goal, though.

And that is a conversation that never happened, because the goal of Trump and allies like Turning Point was never really stopping certification.

The goal was chaos.

I typically loathe Game of Thrones references, but that "chaos is a ladder" bit is really a profound bit of strategic insight.

In the fog of confusion, the loudest voice usually prevails narratively.

And Trump is (was, pre-Twitter ban, lol) very, very loud.

The trouble with inciting chaos is, you have to know the *kind* of chaos you're going to get.

And remember Trump complaining the rioters looks "low class"?

Trump understands that his base is ignorant, racist, and passionate, but he loathes them too much to know them granularly.

Let me tell you, though, I study them, and I do understand them pretty granularly.

By and large, the MAGA crowd are just run-of-the-mill everyday racist reactionaries enjoying fascism from the comfortable distance of television.

The folks who mobilize for something like a Trumpian incitement to riot include some of those folks, but those aren't the ones that really thrill to it.

The folks that see a call to riot in DC and get truly pumped are the real wild ones of the far right, the extremists.

There are the true believers, namely QAnon, are the ones who really believe that the prophecy of Trump's second term is a sacred thing they must fulfill.

Their hallmark is *disorganization.*

They know there will be a "storm," they're just waiting for the cue.

Cryptic messaging is their bread and butter, and "storm" is one of the prophetic keywords, and with less than three weeks til Biden takes power, they're desperate to hear it and act on it.

Then, there are the influencers, the folks that rode QAnon to fame and money.

Lots and *lots* of money.

They were literally sharing their personal Cashapp info in their incitement videos about "storming" on YouTube.

It's a cynical, profitable grift.

Next, you have the brownshirts, like Proud Boys.

They're semi-closeted white supremacists (any semi-closed chat is filled with incitement about Jews and Black folks), they use Trump as a mascot, but they're mostly just showing up to brawl and recruit by echoing people's biases.

Then there's a hodge podge of other violent white supremacists, including militias and actual Nazis.

These guys mostly disdain Trump and the US state in general, and they've been training up to violently overthrow the government when the opportunity appears.

Part of me wants to be like, "when you're a carpenter with a hammer, you tend to assume every problem is a nail."

White supremacists like militia are definitely highly trained in the carpentry of violence, but tbh the problem for them wasn't certification.

These are hardcore antigovernment types, they train in that carpentry of violence with the very specific goal of hammering a very specific nail of a problem, and that problem is the very *existence* of the government seated in that Capitol building.

So DC became (pardon the pun) the perfect storm of

1) gullible Trump cultists desperate to answer his call & fulfill Q's prophecy,

2) racist brawlers looking for an excuse to brawl;

3) cynical anti-government Nazis & militia looking to violently overthrow government entirely.

And then you have crowds of folks shipped in by cynical operations like Turning Point, whose defining feature isn't necessarily extremism so much as a tendency to take comfort in authoritarian instruction and follow others' lead without question.

So there's no shared strategy at all, and not even shared goals.

Some people are there with an end goal of just following orders, some are thinking the goal is specifically and mechanically stopping certification, others really just want to incite violent overthrow of the US.

There's not even a shared explicit tactic, beyond "storm" DC.

So while most of the "just following orders" types and the cultists were trying to figure out wtf they're supposed to do, the brawlers and violent overthrow types already knew *exactly* what they wanted to do.

In other words, you've got a bunch of folks whose DEFINING & MOTIVATING PERSONALITY TRAITS in that moment are hatred of "the enemy" and following others without question.

And mixed in, you have a bunch of violent, highly motivated & anti-government white supremacists.

Add in influencers who speak the language of the Q cultists competing for a very profitable messiah status, a status that largely depends on advocating extreme action and following through, and you've got opportunists ready to make $$$ by being on the front line of the "storm."

No one organized this, not in the sense of shaping a strategy intended to accomplish a goal and uniting people around a set of intentional, clear tactics to accomplish that goal.

What happened was simply disorganized incitement for a variety of reasons by a variety of different actors, all with different goals that mainly centered personal grift.

To the extent that there was a shared strategy, it was basically South Park underpants gnomes:

PHASE 1: Incite chaos

PHASE 2: ?????

PHASE 3: Profit

Which sounds silly, except in an era of disinformation, that "??????" phase usually ended up making itself known and easily implementable if folks had enough social media savvy.

That ladder of chaos is easy enough to climb if you yell something ridiculous loudly & monetize.

It's worth remembering, we have spent the past five years with people going "this time they've really gone too far, the chickens are definitely gonna come home to roost now" about Trump and his base, and then nothing ever happens (because, ahem, whiteness).

For influencers and follower types who came up in this exceptionally low-consequence, high-disinformation environment, the notion that it's *possible* for white racists to go too far and face consequences is abstract to non-existent.

Things are a little different for the brawlers & also especially the overtly terrorist Nazis I monitor.

Both have faced actual legal consequences lately, with the harshest penalties falling on those engaged in the autonomous cell terror tactics the terror Nazis mostly favored.

Those folks are now *very* aware that there's a safety in numbers, if those numbers are high enough that you can slip away in them and not get caught personally.

They were there, the numbers were there, they were cowards extremely ready for a win.

So, influencers wanted glory, glory was on the front lines, a critical mass of brawlers and other violent actors were more than happy to take advantage of the moment and make the Capitol halls themselves the front lines.

Those actors with clear and explicit goals were surrounded by a crowd *defined* by

1) fear that the enemies inside the Capitol were going to crush their religious-fervored dream of permanent Trumpian authoritarianism

2) a tendency to follow perceived authority w/o question.

Brawlers and Nazis and other violent white supremacists kept raising the stakes, influencers refused to fold and kept raising because their influencer authority (and $$$) depended on it, and authoritarian followers followed thaw perceived authority of influencers and the crowd.

Trump primed a bunch of sheep-like followers for violence, put them in front of the Capitol shoulder-to-shoulder with a motivated, organized, violent antigovernment extremist element, and then left them depending on inflammatory influencers for further instruction.

Those influencers ended up in an escalating game of no-truth and all-dare with the brawlers and the organized, violent anti-government white supremacists, and the sheep followed the lead of that semblance of authority, because that is what sheep do.

No one "organized" this.

Trump incited his followers to create confusion, hoping to set the stage for a continuing disinformatic grift.

He's too disgusted by his base to know or care how vulnerable they would be to other bad actor incitement, and it backfired spectacularly.

To the extent that there's *organized* culpability here, it's cynical actors like Turning Point who knew exactly what they were doing and what it would mean, but stoked those flames and materially assisted in creating this scenario, anyway.

The rest is disorganized culpability:

Trumpian disinformatic incitement that backfired.

Violent white supremacist opportunism.

Influencer one-up-manship.

Surprise successes by brownshirt brawlers.

Sheep following grifter shepherds into the flames.

It's exhausting to watch mainstream media grifters doing battle to be the Great Explainer who divines the grand plan and identifies its architects.

There's a lot of profit and clout to be had doing that, but at the end of the day it just promulgates another untruth.

There's no architect, there's no grand plan.

That's not how disinformation, incitement, or their consequences work.

The idea that there's a grand plan is, at the end of the day, the seed of conspiracy theory and its comforts.

It's human to want to believe there's a grand plan, that if you can just uproot this one weed in the garden, things will go back to some natural garden order of perfect.

The truth-- and it can be dispiriting if you don't want to do the work, but exciting if you do-- is that there is no perfect natural garden, there never was. The natural order is just a lot of seeds in the wind that sometimes land and sprout.

That's nature.

You can plant the seed of conspiratorial thinking, and sometimes it will grow, and you can sit there in the shade of that tree scowling at the world around you being like, "someone evil planted all these plants I don't want here, I think I know who, we should GET them"

The shade of the tree of conspiracy theory is comforting, but its fruits are sour and not particularly nourishing.

If you have the charisma you might be able to convince people they should pay you and respect you as Keeper of the Tree, but that doesn't do much to make a garden.

Evil is just the absence of good.

There's no devil to hunt down that planted the poison ivy, you just deal with it when it encroaches and keep planting the plants that sustain nourishment and beauty, that resource a better world.

You deal with the poison ivies-- the Trumps, the Bannons, all the racist disinformatics-- by teaching people that poison ivy is bad, actually, and by doing the work of weeding the seedlings and cultivating the plants of the garden.

There's no grand plan or architect of the poison ivies of white patriarchal supremacy.

They're just seeds in the wind that take root.

Collectively, we either do the labor of weeding the weeds & cultivating the crops, or let the weeds form a thicket that chokes out the flowers.

There's no hunting down the grand architect of poison ivy and solving the problem once and for all.

That's fantasy that lets us off the hook of labor at the cost of giving up our own power and our ability to create a better world.

The hard truth is, we didn't do the unglamorous, unending, everyday work of weeding.

We didn't do the unpleasant work of confronting the neighbors who didn't weed their little patch of earth, who let the poison ivy grow to seed, helping it spread.

And the even harder truth is, we didn't do that work because we didn't want to fully work our own patches of ground.

We didn't want to normalize that accountability, because someone might then spot a poison ivy seedling on our ground, and we might have to admit complicity.

We have to get to the point of saying, we are gardeners, and these seeds will always be in the wind.

If we do our work and weed before plants on our own patches of earth go to seed, there will be fewer seeds, but the problem will never go away entirely.

We need to learn to wean our egos off the appeal of blame, and begin to take responsibility for the fact that we long ago let this thicket grow, that it has gone to seed, that we failed again to weed, and that it is now blistering us undeniably.

We need to say, okay, time to just put some gloves on and go to work and weed accept that we'll probably need to invest in a truckload of calamine lotion.

We need chop down those trees of conspiratorial thinking and let the sun in.

That is how we get a garden.

And we need to accept that this is work that never ends, that at least some seeds will always be in the wind, and that when we miss or ignore the weeds growing on our own patch of earth, the neighbor helping us notice them is doing a service to us and to the collective.

It's not an easy conclusion, it's not a comfortable one.

It will always be simpler to pretend that an evil saboteur snuck in unnoticed in the night with a stash of vines and carefully twisted them around the rosebushes, that we are hapless victims of some anti-democratic Grinch.

Let me be clear: there will always be those who hand out bouquets of poison ivy and call them daisies.

They are bad actors, they are agents of disinformation, they have culpability in our collective delusions, and they must be held accountable.

Never forget, though: they didn't invent the poison ivy.

They didn't sneak in and twist those vines in the night, and no show trial for that imaginary crime will make it so.

Trump, Bannon, Turning Point, QAnon influencers, Nazis just found a way to grift off our collective unwillingness to address the problem at the root.

They bottled the poison we let grow, rebranded it as virtue, and sold it back to us in exchange for clout, power, and profit.

Who organized this? No one.

Who incited it? The grifters.

Who is responsible? We are, most especially those of us who have managed to reap the fruits of privilege from the soil of others even as the garden chokes on our watch.

It's that simple, and that complicated.

It's that obvious, and that obscured.

It's that easy to see, and that hard to acknowledge.

What happened is on us, what happens next is on us.

We do the garden work of weeding and the self-work of learning to recognize the difference between the seedlings of truth and the seedlings of ignorance and disinformation, or we resign ourselves to all blistering, eventually.

Justice and its children-- democracy, liberation, truth, accountability, community, joy-- are not complicated things, but they are continuously work-intensive and humbling.

They are an evolving challenge, always and forever.

There is no catching the devil and being done.

We can rise to that challenge and become our best selves to the best of our capacity, becoming our best as a culture and a community.

Or, we can try and stay under this dark tree, taking pride in our own cowering & sloth, until every last one of us becomes blistered and hungry.

That is the choice.

It is that easy, and that hard.

The end.

ADDENDUM: here is a practical, important way to help weed the garden today, this very moment. https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1348683308549419009?s=19