Joseph Phelan: […] Platform accountability doesn’t happen without organizing, right? We can do all the lobbying we want and pay the high price lobbying firms. We can get as many op-eds as we want, et cetera, et cetera. But it actually comes down to organizing.
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Organizing is contesting for power at the individual and group level. And our opposition, the right wing, is contesting for power. Let’s not get it twisted. We are not organizing on an even playing field, where we’re just trying to create a better world of a world that exists and there’s no one in control. There is an organized opposition that is trying to destroy us on the battlefield of ideas, the battlefield of politics, and the battlefield of the economy. And so, when we think about this, we have to think about how we are in a contest for power.
Shanelle, you’re talking about how is this [white supremacy] mainstream? When we think about the role of the right wing, we can call it the Right, we can it the Far Right, we can call it white supremacists, white nationalists. I’m gonna call it the opposition right now, because actually, I think if we think about some of the stuff you talked about, Kris, like the language and the fear around children, and then Shanelle, you touched on it around the great replacement theory and its tie back to centuries old anti-Semitism, and then the manifestation of that in anti-Black racism in this country, there are linkages here. Great replacement [theory] and the denial of support to trans children, trans children becoming a villain in the story, those things are linked. Narratively. So, what we’ve seen is the mainstreaming of white supremacist ideology that used to be far more at the margins. I want to say, I think when we think about particularly disinformation and social media as a context, it feels like things have sped up; the curve has gone up very quickly.