Alexandra Erin Profile picture
Sep 17, 2017 68 tweets 7 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Sarah Kendzior being labeled a Russian disinfo agent by people following Louise Mensch's narrative, because she encouragea resistance.
According to the ever-shifting inside scoop presented by Mensch's "Scooby Gang" to "Team Patriot", impeachment is always day after tomorrow.
And conveniently, this means no one has to do anything. No resistance. No marches. No phone calls. Relax!, they say. It's all over.
Well. Isn't that a convenient narrative, for everybody? So tidy.
This is the message being called Russian propaganda.
"We actually have to do stuff now" is being held up as a lie designed to dispirit and confuse us.
You know that political cartoon about climaye change, where it's "But what if it's a hoax and we made a better world for nothing?"
Well, what if Trump does fall swiftly and with no help from us?

We still built a powerful political movement with an engaged electorate.
Which is what Mensch and her cronies don't want. She is still a far right Fox News conservative Republican.
The last thing Louise Mensch is for Trump to be gone and us to still be marching, calling Washington, and voting.
She doesn't like Trump because she backed the wrong horse, politically and journalistically, to be positioned with him.
And because he sucks up all the weird reality show freak oxygen on the right, leaving her to seek scraps from the left.
So Mensch has at least two obvious agendas at play. One is that she's getting attention and building a name for herself as a Trump critic.
By constantly shotgunning prophecies with the right legal buzzwords and players attached, she can get a reputation for "accuracy".
And on the day that Trump does fall, after how many hundreds of days she said he would, she can say, "I said he would. I told you."
But at the same time, she's also working to reshape the electorate, to condition the populace... whoever's gullible enough to listen to her.
"Relax! It'll be over seen. Resistance? That plays into Bannon's hands or maybe Putin's. Someone's. Don't make trouble. Mueller's got this."
Does anybody else remember, shortly before the election, people replying to get-out-the-vote threads with "Relax, she's got this."?
There was a very well-organized effort to diffuse any urgency about the election with a message that Hillary Clinton had it in the bag.
That wasn't her actual supporters, who were telling people right down to the wire it was crucial that they voted.
But that's what I think of when I see the Menschian, "Relax, Mueller's got this. The indictments are sealed. Impeachment began already."
According to a story Louise Mensch never to my knowledge retracted, Orrin Hatch *already became president* back in May.
Look at the actual news, though. Would Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi be meeting Trump if he was out, or on his way out?
I know, I know. Nobody following me for long could fall for Louise Mensch's sideshow chicanery. I tweet this for the retweet crowd.
Louise Mensch's stories are... honestly, they're just what the far right fringe printed about President Obama for eight years.
That their were warrants for him, that his election was about to be overturned because he was proven ineligible, that fraud had been found.
That he was going to be impeached any day, if not deported.
And the reason Mensch's stories about Trump look so much like the constant right fringe theories about Obama's imminent fall...
Is because they're the exact same tactics from the exact same people.
Louise Mensch is the person who was hand-picked to run Rupert "Fox News" Murdoch's answer to Breitbart.
It folded, in part because they couldn't actually out-Herrod Herrod and in part because Breitbart's line on Trump through Bannon beat them.
She didn't suddenly have a political awakening on November 8th. She didn't suddenly discover actual journalism or ethics.
She's just running the same game she's always run, but with a new angle: rooking the left with wish fulfillment fantasies of Trump's fall.
We need to protect and support journalists and academics like Kendzior who do have the experience and expertise to address what's going on.
And who are being flooded by Mensch's minions, bots, trolls, and probably a fair number of gullible dupes who bough an appealing narrative.
If you follow me, you know my position hasn't changed from the beginning - this is not going to be swift and it's not going to be sure.
No one has ever taken down a president through impeachment or, assuming it's possible, indictment. Never happened in our republic.
The closest we've come is Nixon's resignation, and the timetable for that is not a two hour movie.
Years of investigation and then he resigned before the impeachment proper. If he'd fought it? Who knows how long it would have dragged out.
Maybe someone will be discouraged reading this. But I believe more will be if they believe impeachment is tomorrow but tomorrow never comes.
The fact that it's so slow is why resistance is so vital, is why it's imperative that we harness the power of the people to fight.
The Senate is planning to vote to gut our healthcare, basically within a week if they can, two weeks at the most.
You think Trump's going to be gone in a week? You think the GOP will be out of power, if he is?
We've got to resist. We have to fight the GOP agenda in Congress. We have to shine a light on the abuses of ICE. We have to oppose fascism.
The good news is - it turns out we've got a lot of power. A lot of power. That's why Mensch is afraid of the people united and mobilized.
Mueller's got his job. It's big and complicated and demanding and exacting and he's got basically one shot at getting it right.
And we have our job.
The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they also grind exceedingly not very fast at all

Our job's to grind the wheels of fascism to a halt
Our job is to slow the advance of authoritarianism, to refute the ascendance of hatred, to mitigate the harm of destructive policy.
Mueller might "have this", where "this" is equal to a handle on his actual job. But his job is not easy or fast or certain.
But Mueller doesn't have the whole resistance handled. That's beyond the scope of his job or his responsibility.
Don't listen to people who say "Relax, he's got this." any more than you should have listened to "Relax, she's got this." before the vote.
Instead, listen to people like @xychelsea, who tell us that #WeGotThis.

Because we do.

This is our wheelhouse. It's our domain of power.
Is that discouraging? To know that the people have the power and are waking up to use it? I don't think so.
One of the silly stories we've been telling about the better angels of this country is on the verge of coming true.
If we push as hard as we could and keep pushing, we could come out of this with government of the people, by the people, for the people.
That might be dispiriting to failed rightwing politicians like Louise Mensch, but it's anything but to me.
I trust Mueller but I don't put my faith in him.

I put my faith in us. In me. In you.
I don't tell you to relax. I will tell you to take care of yourself, and each other. Because we've got to.
I don't tell you to buckle up. I tell you to settle in. At the point when things are really happening fast, you won't need an announcement.
And I tell you that there's no one "they" who will stop this, no "he" or "she" who's got this, no one coming to save us...
...because we are the ones we've been waiting for, we are the ones who will save us, #WeGotThis, we can do it, we've BEEN doing it.
Is that discouraging? Is it disheartening?

Maybe to someone whose plan for the future doesn't involve us putting up a fight.
I say we fight. If we're going to win tomorrow, then let's run up the score. If we're going to lose, let's make it cost them everything.
I say we resist every step of the way, so that if Trump falls tomorrow then there's not even one more day he can hurt people unopposed.
I say... you follow me, you know what I say.

I say...

CRY HAVOC, AND LET SLIP THE DOGS OF CIVIC PARTICIPATION.
(They're good dogs, babies.)
And if you find my tweeting more encouraging than not, you can help me keep it going. paypal.me/alexandraerin

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More from @AlexandraErin

Oct 8, 2018
So, electric kettles. Let me see if I can't convert some other white US-born people over.

Here are some reasons:

1. You can set specific temperatures, not just heat things to a boil. Get closer to the ideal temperature for your tea, spend less time waiting for it to cool.
2. If you need boiling water to pour into or over something, not just like a single serving for instant whatever, you've got it in a nice kettle with a spout and an insulated handle.
3. You never have that thing where surface tension has stopped the water from actually boiling even though it's at temperature, and when you move it and disturb the water it explodes all over your hand (Google it, if you don't know this thing.)
Read 10 tweets
Oct 8, 2018
Twitter's specific policy on Dehumanizing Speech is better than I had feared; it's more specific, covering only comparisons to animals (vermin, pests) or tools for a specific purpose. You can give feedback here. Mine focused on implementation. blog.twitter.com/official/en_us…
The Dehumanizing Speech policy being specific is important because if (let's dream big here) it is enforced as written, you can avoid getting suspended for talking about TERFs by saying their beliefs are garbage or their actions are garbage.
My feedback focused on the unequal way in which Twitter's existing policies have been supported. White guys making clear references to genocide, murder, stalking children, etc., get "We have to look at context, this was clearly not serious" replies while their victims get banned.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
For the record, I do hope Brett Kavanaugh's life is ruined. I hope his marriage has been irreparably strained. I hope his social life is in the toilet. I hope he feels no joy at his win. I hope he only stops waiting for the other shoe to fall when it does, like a guillotine blade
My ~*preference*~ would be that he suffer some sort of institutional consequences, even if it was merely not being confirmed to a lifetime position on the highest court in the land, where he will have power over millions.

But the right decided that's off the table.
I hope anyone who comes before the SCOTUS who is even tangentially liberal, left, or Democratic makes an issue out of his participation in the case so that he has to spend his whole career justifying and defending his presence on the bench.
Read 8 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
Well, @RadioFreeTom thinks saying "No problem." implies there's a problem so forgive me if I'm not crowning him a king of situational analysis. What he's calling Trump's "rhetorical excess" is largely projection. The idea that we win by *not* pointing out what they're doing...
...just gives Trump and his party the full benefit of that projection, in that they get to smear their opponents while being insulated from accurate accusations. We've been ceding control of the narrative to them for decades now and it hasn't worked.
The reason @RadioFreeTom wants the Democrats to settle down and be good little children is because up until two hours ago HE WAS A REPUBLICAN and when this is all done he hopes there's a slightly more couth and presentable version of the Republican Party that's still in charge.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
We've got GOP voters talking about drinking liberal tears with their beers, we've got a GOP president lying his backside off to his rally and then telling Jeanine Pirro he wants to hold women "liable" for talking about rapes... I don't see the centrists asking them to be civil?
Isn't it weird how absolutely no pundit wrote an editorial saying that Lindsey Graham's fire and brimstone sermon isn't going to win over the middle? Isn't it strange that no one tells Chuck Grassley that his angry interruptions are going to hurt his party?
There was a lot of talk about whether or not Kavanaugh's vitriolic testimony would hurt him but I didn't see a lot of neutral or centrist-identified people saying that it *should*.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
So let me tell you another reason we need to not back down, not sit down, not be quiet: coward that he is, Donald Trump is at his most dangerous when he feels like he's on top of the world.
The horse race headlines are saying that Donald Trump had his best day as president, and I'm sure he felt it. He just came through a knock-down, drag-out fight and won a battle that people had been telling him to drop for weeks, so right now no one can tell him anything.
If he gets it in his head that maybe he should fire Rosenstein? No one's going to be able to talk him out of it. He might even do it just to extend the high, or see how far he can take it.
Read 8 tweets

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