Sundrop

I dislike "big tent." I like "solidarity." Solidarity holds on even when it's unpopular, which is dangerous, but it doesn't let people go. I distrust those willing to give up this group to get that group while saying "we need all groups." We DO need all groups; so hold tightest to marginal groups.

The extent to which Dem Party (and way too many progressives/liberals) adopts the narrative told about them by the far right as truth and then disavows and fights with that fictional representation is incredible.

Excellent 🧵 on the underlying architecture of the tech we use.

Food stamps are set to run out of funding in early November & I’m just here to remind you that if you catch someone stealing food at the grocery store then you should immediately call the ghostbusters because you clearly saw a ghost and they clearly vanished into thin air and you didn’t see nothin.

"I will support you except where showing my support inconveniences me" isn't support and isn't allyship - not for racial justice, not for Palestine, not for the environment, and not for trans people.

If Harry Potter is more popular than trans people, that's an indictment of society, not trans people.

"Give up this hobby that is literally bankrolling our extermination" isn't a big ask tbh.

White men don't know shit about ending authoritarianism.
You've literally never done it in the history of whiteness.

We are retroactively losing the Civil War, WWII and the Cold War thanks to white identity politics.

"purity tests" "circular firing squad" "the left eat their own" are such bullshit phrases.

people disagree on politics! that's how it works.

deal with it instead of whining about marginalized people correctly pointing out that certain "compromises" only strengthens fascism

no kings is the floor, not the ceiling

They are arriving because of the mass mobilizations and they have figured out that Twitter isn't going to be the main space to monitor activity.

If a random-ass white lady popping up is ever actually useful, I would so do it.

I beg of everyone to please listen to Sydette.

Hi. There is an influx of government sites and I’m gonna use what little clout I have

To say

Don’t bait them.

pay them DUST.

Commit to boosting coverage of what they do, centering the voices of who they target .

In fact start muting folks who over antagonize them

I can’t believe he forgot ACORN.

No Kings, Stancil said, is "like an order of magnitude bigger than the civil rights movement, if you want to place it on a scale of historically notable activism." That's not a reference to crowd size—it's a claim as to historical significance. I don't know how it can be read any other way.

And while Stancil is now claiming that he was making a narrow claim about crowd size, that's not actually true either. Here's what he said in his first post on the subject:

White people have a kind of intra-white respectability politics about the level of racism that's considered permissible in polite company and I think a lot of polite racists are mad the gutter racists are tarnishing their good name.

I don't care for any kinda racist but I love myself, so. 🤷🏽‍♀️

The question "how many people participated in the civli rights movement?" is not a question that has a simple agreed-upon answer! So even if your measure of "bigness" is number of participants divided by national population, Stancil's claim is isn't obviously meritorious!

And while I'm up, you can't measure the number of participants in the CRM by comparing the March on Washington with a particular No Kings march, or even aggregating. How many people donated to SCLC and SNCC? How many did local organizing? How many people wore pro–civil rights pins?

Go ask any historian what it means for one social movement to be "bigger" than another. Any fucking historian. If they tell you, without you prompting them or coaching them, that the one true measure is how many people show up for marches in connection with that movement, I will eat my hat.

But again, "bigger" is, in isolation, a meaningless concept. It's incoherent. The issue isn't that the CRM was "bigger," though there are lots of ways in which one could comfortably argue that it was. The issue is that the claim that NK was "bigger," full stop, is incoherent.

If we're measuring "bigness" by number of Nobel Peace Prizes won, or federal laws passed, or number of people willing to give their lives to the cause, or FUCKING INFLUENCE ON THE COUNTRY'S HISTORY, the CRM is quantitatively, objectively bigger. So no, to say NK is "bigger" isn't "true."

"X is bigger than Y" can only be true—can only be a claim whose truth value can be assessed—if there's a clear, straightforward, shared metric by which you can measure the bigness of each.

Like, if I were to claim that "No Kings is bigger than Google," or "No Kings is bigger than the Empire State Building," or "No Kings is bigger than Niagara Falls," you'd be confused. And if you asked me to explain, and I said "how many people go to marches for Google?" you'd just walk away.

Because the civil rights movement WASN'T A MARCH. It wasn't a series of marches. That's just factually, empirically, fundamentally not what the civil rights movement was.

To say No Kings is "bigger" because of crowd size, you must first adopt an incorrect definition of the civil rights movement.

Seeing people say that "by the numbers" Stancil is right about No Kings being bigger than the civil rights mvt. But no. That's not how any of this works.

It's like saying I'm a bigger organizer than Greta Thunberg because I'm taller. It's not technically true, it's just stupid.

The Regime's goal is to grind everyone down. Plain & simple. Our goal is to refuse this by taking turns to fight where and how we can. When one group needs to bow out, then another group needs to step in and so on. We don't all have to do everything. We can all do something though. Stay in the fight

"political violence is never acceptable," is a phrase you don't hear politicians say after cops beat the shit out of peaceful demonstrators

Maybe I’m reacting strongly because this stuff is getting used to tell people in these communities under attack not to “start” violence, or maybe it’s because of it sliding over history…..