(thread)

The investigatory/legal fallout from 1/6 seems by all accounts to be shaping up to be pretty massive, which is not entirely shocking given that fash just humiliated cops and feds at the heart of the nation's Capitol.

None of that will make this go away.

What happened in DC was a revolution for the right.

They claimed their power and, at least for a few hours, they got away with it.

They really smell themselves now, as a pastor friend of mine likes to put it.

In liberatory organizing, we talk all the time about what it means to give up power because we don't think we have it, and how tidal the shift is when folks awaken to what happens when they act in mass movement together.

That's how people start to believe a win is possible.

Well, that's what the far right got a taste of in DC.

That realization of, oh, mass organizing oriented towards action can move mountains.

They understand that the absence of a militarized cop presence was a product of their political will.

When they start seeing large-scale legal consequences, they will react the way they always do when their infrastructure is under attack, which is to be like "this only makes us stronger and radicalizes more people!"

It's not true, but it's also worth unpacking a bit.

Deplatforming is a process, not a goal you hit and be like "OK we deplatformed the Nazis."

If that were true, Nazism would have ended sometime right around 1945.

At the same time, we'd laugh anyone being like "well Nazis only got stronger after 1945" out of town.

You remove the megaphone, they cede to shadow.

What we have to understand about fascism is that it is the shadow self of liberal democracy.

It is how anti-democratic reactionaries hijack the organs of liberal democracy, like free speech and right to assemble, and turn them against liberal democracy itself.

In a political culture where we say liberal democracy is enough-- where we convince ourselves that the formal organs of liberal democracy themselves will assure the continued existence of liberal democracy-- fascism will always exist.

It's how you hack that system.

If there is one thing I PRAY we've learned from Trump's presidency, it's that the formal organs of liberal democracy are easily hackable.

They do not contain fascism.

If compromised, they become infected machines spreading the virus to the rest of the network.

Folks in the US really really tend to want to believe that if you have the hardware of liberal democracy, it's just a really good machine and the virus of fascism can't make us of it.

No.

Fascism is a virus.

It's software BUILT to infect the hardware of our civil network.

You don't fight that virus at a hardware level.

You fight it at a software level.

You have to figure out how to combat that virus in the context of our civil world, our operating system.

The operating system of US liberal democracy predates fascism.

It doesn't come with a built-in anti-virus software that can detect and combat the threat.

We have to learn to install that antiviral software-- antifascism-- ourselves.

We run it by being it.

Running that software it means continually running what we're witnessing against our examples of what that virus looks like, and deleting-- deplatforming-- lookalikes.

Viruses evolve and mutate and reappear.

You can't just be like "the Hitler version had a swastika on its arm, I don't see a swastika on its arm, this one's fine."

You have to keep updating your libraries.

You have to keep up with what it looks like, and you have to keep shutting it down.

Whatever you think about liberal democracy as a hardware system, it's what we're living in right now.

As long as that's true, fascism will keep trying.

When we deplatform Nazis, they don't disappear.

Antifascist researchers don't lose track of their many evolving faces.

We keep updating those libraries.

It's the responsibility of *everyone* in a liberal democracy to keep updating that antifascist software, to keep our antiviral software up to date.

Otherwise, we all but agree to get hijacked again.

Nazis and more mainstream fash have had a taste of what organized power looks like.

They'll keep organizing, and it is our job to understand what that looks like and to disorganize them.

All the carceral system can offer is a postponement.

It wouldn't be over even if every last one of them went to jail (and, they won't).

Fascism always finds a way, if we let our guard down.

Consequences won't make them stronger, but they will force fash to evolve and adapt.

If we don't keep track of the forms they take, that adaptation will give them a critical advantage over us, one they will use to whatever extent we let them.

This isn't one and done.

This is a wakeup call.

Install that antiviral software of antifascism in yourself, if you haven't already.

Keep it up to date.

Otherwise, we'll end up right back here again.

And next time, they'll be better-organized.

And if that's the case, there may not be a next time after that.

The end.