Authors David Neiwert

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David Neiwert
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
1) “Eliminationism” is a term you need not just to become familiar with, especially in today’s American rush toward authoritarianism. This will be a long, illustrated thread explaining what it means, how it works, and why Donald Trump is now our Eliminationist in Chief.


Warning: Some images contain violence and are disturbing.

Also warning: This thread is ridiculously long. 75 tweets is insane. I apologize. But this stuff is important. I hope you find it compelling anyway. If not, I understand.

2) So, what exactly do we mean by “eliminationism”? Here’s the academic definition:


3) It was largely coined by Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, about the role ordinary Germans played in the Holocaust, which he described as fueled by “eliminationist antisemitism.”


4) The book describes how in reality the largest numbers of Jews and other victims killed by Nazi directive were rounded up and gunned down or immolated en masse and buried in mass graves by ordinary Germans and non-Jewish residents of German-occupied territories.
SOCIETY
David Neiwert
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
Thread: A 12-year flashback to the first time I ever heard of the Oath Keepers. It happened in 2009 when I was monitoring ‘Patriot’ movement chatter and came across a YouTube video by this man: An ex-Marine named Charles Dyer. You can see why it caught my attention.


2) Dyer’s style was disturbing—combining a skull-mask imposed digitally and his fondness for ‘inspirational,’ anthemic music in the background—but his incendiary, violent rhetoric was especially worrisome. Watch this one to the end: ‘You’re damn right I’m a threat.’


3) This video and others I was seeing float around on the fringes of the suddenly burgeoning ‘Patriot’/militia far right made me concerned about their recruitment of military veterans. There were good reasons to be

4) As it happened, I raised the alarm at @crooksandliars only a month or so before Homeland Security issued its ill-fate warning about precisely that problem—which set off months of hysterical hyperbole from Fox News and the far right

5) You may remember how that all turned out: The projection-fueled attack on DHS’s domestic-terrorism-monitoring section ended up gutting the section and sending the Obama administration into hunker-down/failure mode when it came to the radical
CULTURE
David Neiwert
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
I’ve been watching the right-wing narrative regarding the Jan. 6 insurrection with keen interest, and realizing that the American right again intends to resort to its well-worn “waving the bloody shirt” gambit. A thread about what that will mean.


We all know the phrase and its meaning: Someone who “waves the bloody shirt” is a demagogue whose rhetoric callously recalls violent incidents for the purpose of scoring cheap political points. /2


The phrase originated during the Reconstruction era following the Civil War. In the early years, white terrorists from armed paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan roamed the Southern countryside intent on terrorizing black people and anyone assisting them. /3


Preventing blacks from voting was the primary focus of the terrorists. Their reputation for threatening people at the polls themselves was well established. /4


During this period, some 3,000 black freedmen would be murdered in the South. The majority were people lethally attacked at their homes—shot through windows and doors, and at other times lynched. /5
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