Thread by @Shoq

Senate confirmed Brian Benczkowski.

Someone with big ties to Putin, and virtually zero courtroom experience is now the next in line to replace Rosenstein at Justice.

How much further, America? Why are we letting the GOP pretend this is normal?

IS EVERYONE IN AMERICA INSANE?

What is more preposterous? That this is happening, or that the @NYtimes, @washingtonpost @CNN keep putting up apologists and stooges to make everyone feel this is just Democracy at work.

ONLY A TOTAL FOOL COULD NOT SEE THE MULTIPLE LEVELS OF CORRUPTION AT PLAY HERE.

@nytimes @washingtonpost @CNN Your country is literally being ripped out from under you, and you have no choice but to just watch it happen, because someone has to act fast, but no one knows what that means.

And the enemy knows it. So keep watching. We are all but certain to lose it all.

We should be camped out in the streets of DC, NYC, LA, and every financial center in the country until the money machine comes to a half.

The ask? Immediate legislation to protect #Mueller, and an INDEPENDENT commission with int'l observers to tell us just WTF happened. #PlanB

There is nothing radical or extreme proposed herein. It's the text-book essence of the non-violent civil resistance @EricaChenoweth educates so many about.

Put just 3.5% of the people into the streets each day, demanding what we are due until we get it: accountability.
#PlanB

@EricaChenoweth Someone will now rush in and tell you this is nonsense; it just won't happen here.

But ask them what the alternative is.
"Elections," they'll say. Or some unnamed fantasy legislation. I call both "#PlanA."

And it's not very likely to to stop them. Sorry, but it's not.

@EricaChenoweth I've noticed that I don't get much push back when I say things like this. It's not because they think they idea is insane. It's because they have no alternative to it. Except that elections fantasy. But ask what happens if they don't work and the #crickets are deafening.

@EricaChenoweth I've said before that @GoAngelo once wisely said to me, in effect, that our people lock-up because admitting the danger (our frog is boiling) forces them to consider what options they have. And their imaginations can't produce any so they just seize-up. We're now a frozen nation.

@EricaChenoweth @GoAngelo

https://twitter.com/Shoq/status/1017245700004941826

When I started this thread, I wasn't going to get into any details of #PlanB because it's still not documented. But this was the outer contours of the idea, and the street component. But the off-street component is where all the pivotal action will be. And that's the novel part.

While I think Republicans have turned into true authoritarians, literally serving only 1/3rd of the nation, I don't think they have to win. It would take just 11 million of us to stop them (3.5%) just by not playing any more. That's basically NYC and LA. That's it. #PlanB

Street component need not be sustained for long. Picture a #WomensMarch every weekend for a month (tho not as polite, and more spread out).

Concurrently, a small % of activists work the off-street actions component of #PlanB. That brings the real leverage. Not the streets.

Occupy pretended to have a plan, but they never really did. White, Graeber, and the rest made it up on the fly, making it stylish to not have one. But they failed.

Having a #PlanB isn't hard. We just have to design one. Pop wisdom aside, few good things happen spontaneously.

What I think makes my approach different from the crackpot fantasies is that it has two very specific, and quite reasonable asks. Demands which the reasonable will agree are not extreme. The people demanding legislative action is at very heart of our democratic ideals, is it not?

#PlanB is a framework, not a total solution. It has 2-prongs: street & off-street. Crowds from local resistance groups, using Slack & other collaborative tools will populate that framework with actions; actions that generate unprofitable local chaos and corporate pain.

No one action requires much time, money, or sacrifice. But carried out on a national basis, by thousands, they will completely disrupt local and national business interests. That pushes the elites to defund & defang Republicans and let Democrats repair their golden goose, again.

It's not expensive, illegal, or even that challenging to pull off. If the public is really as fed-up as your average Twitter-liberal believes, a few thousand off-street activists to do the work is trivial. The street actions are just theater; a show of force, but not leverage.

The only thing I am not revealing here is my big weapon. Again, if you read @EricaChenoweth, you'll learn that actions can often be called "weapons," in civil resistance parlance. #PlanB will have a nuclear weapon no one has ever used before. At least, not on a large scale.

While many civil resistance actions (marches, strikes, die-ins, etc) can be hung on the framework, it's the nuclear weapon that will propel #PlanB forward. It targets the big players: Goldman, Walmart, GM, Amazon nationally, and their local equivalents in just 25 major markets.

The benefit of nonviolence, and why it succeeds historically, is that the public is more willing to join in. People have fears and violence always triggers them, If it's relatively safe to come and support a cause, millions can be recruited and give a movement critical mass.

I won't divulge my weapons yet, but here's an analogy. At noon, just 2,500 activists in 10 Atlantic cities have a fender bender, faint, stall or run out of gas in the busiest intersections in America. Hard to organize? No; Expensive? it's free; risk of jail or fine? minimal.

Remember, this is just an analogy to stimulate the imagination. It's a workable action, but just meant to inspire thinking about how easy it might be to hang fully resolved action items at very specific nodes on the #PlanB framework, Nodes that can be replicated very easily.

Thus, wherever one node-action works, it can be instantly cloned and propagated to other cities in hours or days; not weeks and months. We can harness the power of web networking legends & gurus, many of whom are VERY Liberal and located right here on Twitter. Some follow me.

It's the creativity stupid. The one area conservatives are always struggling with. The best minds like to be fertile and creative, and we've always had a powerful intellectual army. We've just never enlisted it to a real war effort since WWII, the Cold War, and the Space Race.

Consider this: There are probably 5000 who could be enlisted into one action in my Twitter stream alone.

Now imagine accounts far larger that form the community ecosystem of other Actions. But only as mobilization channels, not as an "organizer" the govt can target.

Every corner of Twitter has nat'l, regional and local "hub" activists already in place. Indivisible tapped some of them to grow so quickly. These are existing assets that can be organized by a meta-network structure that places their value where it best fits on the framework.

The net design is the biggest challenge.
Right now, i am "advocating" a series of actions. That's not "facilitating" them. That's the pretext which Potus, Congress, or local govt would use to crush organizers with instant laws. Organizers will need secure digital channels.

I didn't want to discuss my #PlanB thinking yet, but I am getting very worried about our country. If our worst fears are realized,it may be too late to plan anything. So that's the idea of #PlanB. Let's plan what's possible, so the possible is available if and when it's needed.

ICYMI Benczkowski was the camel that broke my lower-back. I've decided to start sharing the core of my #PlanB idea to get people interested in helping. If we wait until things get worse, we'll get no chance to plan anything. We'll just react in the moment, improvise…and lose.

Huh, was #Letterman reading my timeline? I hope so!

The always pointed @AntheaButler has a few nodes to hang on the #PlanB framework. On the "messaging" branch where we tell America how much harm Trump's GOP has done. Let's stop the bitching, pearl clutching and hand wringing and start "doing something."

https://twitter.com/AntheaButler/status/1017399064181264385

@AntheaButler When I saw Anthea's thread, I was writing this to a one of my groups aware of #planB. We all have lots of good ideas. We have to start organizing them for implementation in whatever form makes sense in specific contexts. High-minded rhetoric isn't fighting; fighting is fighting

@AntheaButler Yep, another "weapon" that's worked at smaller scale. Now imagine that disruptive firepower aimed at Wells Fargo, BoA, Chase, Citi, and Morgan Stanley. They'd be on the phone to Trump and McConnell on day 2 saying, "Uh, this just isn't workin' for us." That's how it works.

https://twitter.com/lisafittko/status/1017381190809112576

Jessica is spot-on. We frogs are watching the thermometer rise higher each day, and actually doing less and less. That makes us all complicit. But don't expect (most) journalists to wage war. They get paid to sell advertising; not start movements.

https://twitter.com/kitchenliving54/status/1017371715503091712

Look at Twitter on any given day. 95% of the anti-GOP/Trump tweets are outraged liberals pounding the table, while journalists cover the horse race without appearing to care much about who wins or loses. That leaves the public uninformed about just how bad things really are.

As much as I loathe @morning_joe and their awful format & panels, they are at least keeping up some semblance of a reveal that people are fed-up.

You won't hear that on most other networks. They just treat this crisis as ripe content for selling more dick pills.

@Morning_Joe I keep mentioning @EricaChenoweth's 3.5% rule. Her Ted talk will help you understand it. In a nutshell, it's the percentage of any population needed to help non-violent civil resistance win major concessions from the elites & hegemons resisting change. rationalinsurgent.com/2013/11/04/my-…