If You’re Not Afraid, We Aren’t Doing Our Jobs

2/ We've been warning you all along that this election isn't about BBB or prescription drugs or guns or climate or anything else in the policy domain.

It's about the emergent authoritarian state shambling its way toward the end of small-d democratic politics.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 24, 2022

Question:  Assume voters are not en masse glued to Twitter (because they aren’t). Are they more likely to vote for abstractions like “saving democracy,” or on concrete concerns like inflation and drug prices? Show your work.

4/ One the first day of the new GOP's reign, the impeachment of Joe Biden begins. The endless Benghazi 2.0 investigations begin.

Expect weeks to TV on Hunter Biden's laptop. Expect endless hearings on the BLM and the imaginary Antifa threat.

You know why.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 24, 2022

Winning friends and influencing people for 2024. Nothing succeeds like the thing that got you booted out of office the last time.

6/ Next, pleasing their god-king. He demands they "investigate" the Big Lie and they will create a wave of scandals where none exists because the purpose of the Big Lie is corrode and undermine faith in elections.

Undermining faith in elections is central.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 24, 2022

Worked pretty well for them in Georgia. I hear Arizona is solidly red still, too.

8/ They've kept the old GOP brand -- low taxes, individual liberty, blah blah blah -- but the new GOP is nationalist, populist, and increasingly fascist.

McCarthy and McConnell are still playing the old game of Washington and their corporate donors are flooding them with cash.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 24, 2022

I pause here to note “political violence” was “mainstreamed” in American politics in Chicago ‘68. By Kent State in 1970, when four people were shot because other people were expressing a political position on the Vietnam War, and nobody held the shooters accountable. By the Klan opposing voting rights after the Civil War. By the Civil War itself. Political violence was so assumed in American politics Jules Verne could mock it when Phineas Fogg passed through small-town middle America and found a riot was actually just an election for the town dog catcher. His audience got the joke. “Mainstream violence”? Violence is as American as cherry pie.

10/ ...Overton window hard. They'll turn the power of the state into regulating business and enterprise to serve their ideological vision...and it'll work.

Why is Facebook a fetid hellhole? Because Zuck didn't want Trump to regulate him.

Iterate, widely.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 24, 2022

I swear, if I read one more reference to the “Overton window,” I’m going to take a hostage. Clichés are just substitutes for thinking.

12/ And they'll be abetted by the "conservative" media apparat desperately trying to fit grand and petit authoritarianism into a Burkean frame.

...and a mainstream media caught up in access t opower and Washington's dumb old game.

End.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 24, 2022

Finally we get back to what Newt said, but still without explanation of the mechanisms that make arrests happen. Are we to believe control of Congress is control of the legal system? That what Donald Trump couldn’t do as President, the GOP Speaker can do? Or is Wilson just saying: “Oh, yeah, that crazy thing Newt said? That’s gonna happen, too.”

Because none of this makes any damned sense except as fear-mongering. Which is also a tool of the autocrat.