Read on Twitter
I saw a tweet that I now can't find that said that Trump has other ways of communicating, but taking away his Twitter is like moving the remote control across the room.
And what's striking to me is that it's like that for his followers as well. They don't have his constant stochastic demands.
We'll see more violence, more planning, more general hideousness from the white supremacist nationalist right. But they are not organizers by nature.
This is an indictment of Twitter, which could have banned Trump even before he ran for president.
Related to my earlier point that the terroristic right are not organizers, I think this also relates to why police behave differently toward them. This is not discounting institutional police allegiance to white supremacy.
But I think a secondary reason is that civil rights activists ARE organized, and their goals are ultimately about rights and protections. When I've been to marches, there's a plan to protect the most vulnerable. I'm not a planner. I've just seen it in action.
Whereas a white supremacist riot is actively about attacking and harming others. It is not organized in the same sense that a rights march is organized.
I think the performance of police violence feels "safer" to police in a scenario in which most people want to protect themselves and each other. The cop talking about how he thought about shooting in the crowd on the 6th, but realized they'd kill him?
It made me think that police perform violence when they're less afraid of violence actually being enacted upon them.
I want to note that this is me thinking "aloud" some ideas that have been roiling in my head for the last week+, and I have not researched this. This isn't conclusive. I'm trying to think it through.
But it does strike me as very much a performance. Police create violence, a scene of chaos, and then use that scene as an excuse for what they enact within it.
There was a video, and I now no longer remember which one, there have been so many, of people in a peaceful protest singing and standing on grass. The police are watching nearby.
At a certain moment, they move into formation and storm the notably lowkey performance on the grass. Then we have chaos, screaming, running, clouds of visually confusing gas, and so on. And then it looks like a scene that requires order.
It's not the one I'm thinking of, but when police gassed protesters to give Trump space to walk to the church so he could hold up a prop Bible, it was similar.
Thank you to @OpheliaInWaders for remembering for me! https://twitter.com/OpheliaInWaders/status/1352768289580187648
Anyway, I started this with Twitter and banning Trump, and these two things are linked in my mind, because performance is not fake, but performance is conscious of audience.
I used to use this as a young parent. I knew I would perform patience better when there were people around, so when I was losing patience, I'd either take the kids out somewhere or imagine someone was watching me.
Trump performed the Trump Show on Twitter for an audience of millions, an audience that grew when he became president and then didn't do president work.
Spicer comes out and lies about crowd size on day one, and the press conferences go downhill from there as a source of information. Twitter is where Trump did his work, such as it was.
And reality rushed to reshape itself to his social media statements, since we had no other real window into what he was doing. Executive orders came from spontaneous tweets made while watching Fox News.
This was an ideal situation for the quasi-mystical right, since they could endlessly dissect his typos and "will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" posts.
Without them, there's less "instruction" to angry people. He stoked their anger, he told them it was righteous, and he promised them, overtly and implicitly, many things.
And then he's gone, and the impact was felt before he actually stopped being president, because his presidency was conducted through Twitter.
He did more things, including some very harmful things, after he was banned, but the temperature went down.
Deplatforming helps. It really does. And what the right wants and has created, repeatedly, is a sense of urgent danger that only works when there isn't actually that much danger.
Basically the gated community effect.
(Fear of crime increases in gated communities. There are multiple studies on this; I'm linking to one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042812003758)
That's one link based on a hasty search, because again, I'm just trying to think this through a little. There are a number of loose connections that make sense in my head, but I haven't quite followed them.
Basically, something different about how performance works on the right from how it works in the center or on the left.
And I want to be clear, because I've accidentally pissed people off using "performance" on here before, that performance doesn't automatically mean "faking."
