Slowly all kinds of lesser details are emerging from the Capitol coup attempt, not *really* important but of the texture I've always used to understand the experience of rightwing movements and thus their shape and threat...

Like the fact, noted by Mark Danner who was at the insurrection, that men lined up to piss against the wall of a museum. A smithsonian, I imagine? Did they piss there because it was a museuam? 2/

Or this detail from the correspondence of indicted militia leader Jessica Watkins, who wrote of arranging for comrades to "schlep weps." (Weapons) It means nothing, really, this Yiddishism from an anti-Semite, but it's the kind of meaningless detail I collect to see the whole. 3/

Fascinating from the militia transcripts is the fascist discovery--as they realize their national leaders won't go as far as they want--of a fascist variant of horizontalism, leaderlessness. 4/

Occupy Wall St was about 10 yrs ago. I covered it for Rolling Stone and Bookforum. I loved it--the defiance, sure, but more so its imagination, so absent from US politics. But I also recognize a twisted genealogy btwn Occupy & Insurrection. 5/

The insurrection was Occupy Wall Street through a lens darkly. Violent where Occupy was not, roid-raging where Occupy was deliberative. But there were Occupiers who even then I recognized as vulnerable to the fascist flip, a la Mussolini's anarchists. 6/

Don't get me wrong: This isn't critique of Occupy or suggestion it "led" to Insurrection. It didn't, even as I wouldnt be surprised to see slim Venn diagram of overlap. But we see ways in which populism hates a vacuum; absent left or progressive activism, the right will surge. 7/

As a journalist long covering the Right, I've seen that fascist flip from progressive populist discontent to rightwingism before. I watched 2012 debates w/ rightwing NH secessionists who said they'd given up anarchism after Occupy's defeat. Cant beat the right, so they joined it.

Before that I reported on the Teen Mania "Battle Cry" rallies for tens of thousands of fundamentalist kids--at which they basically learned the Adbusters critique of corporate power, but then turned it toward Christian fascist ends.

There's a much vaster & more complex discussion about the ways in which the decades-long bipartisan strangulation of the U.S. labor movement--& I mean the movement, not just negotiations & dues--carved the space in which contemporary neo-fascism prospers.