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theflannelfist.bsky.social
The Flannel Fist
@theflannelfist.bsky.social
76 followers 59 following 63 posts
Ordinary People, Loud Ideas brings a working-class, leftist perspective to the front lines of policy, power, and protest. From country roads to Capitol halls. https://open.substack.com/pub/ordinarypeopleloudideas
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By the 1960s, the long coup had matured. Courts, media, schools, and think tanks ensured democracy served capital, not citizens. Violence was unnecessary; influence and ideology did the work.
The Red Scare was the ultimate corporate counterrevolution. Unions, teachers, activists, and artists were blacklisted. Social democracy was stigmatized. Fear replaced ballots as the elite’s tool.
The JBS perfected the paranoid style: anyone advocating for equality or worker power was a communist. Government was always the enemy. Corporate rule always the solution.
By the late 1950s, Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society. Its mission? Fight communism, suppress unions, attack civil rights — all while training ordinary Americans to defend corporate privilege as “freedom.”
The America First Committee (1940) lobbied against U.S. involvement in WWII — not for peace, but to protect corporate interests. Corporate power masqueraded as civic virtue.
The slogan “America First” was their first move. It wrapped elite self-interest in the flag, turning opposition to FDR’s New Deal into “patriotism” while quietly dismantling social democracy.
After the Business Plot failed in 1933, the ruling class learned a lesson: violent coups are messy. Influence is permanent. How corporate elites rebranded fascism as patriotism and built a long-term strategy. 🧵

#LongCoup #JohnBirchSociety #AmericaFirst #CorporatePower #RedScare #ColdWarAmerica
This isn’t conspiracy. It’s policy.
Funded by DHS grants.
Brokered by “public safety tech” startups.
Rubber-stamped by city councils that never read the fine print.
The fusion centers — like Kentucky’s Intelligence Fusion Center in Frankfort — are the nervous system of the surveillance web.
Local feeds in → Federal oversight out.
It’s the soft infrastructure of a domestic spying network.
ShotSpotter/Raven microphones are next: audio triangulation systems sold as gunshot detectors.
In reality? They record neighborhood soundscapes — and feed into the same “fusion” data hubs.
Flock cameras don’t just snap your plate — they log your route, time, and patterns.
That data goes to cloud servers, then to law enforcement networks linked to federal databases.
They call it “community policing.” It’s actually mass movement mapping.
From Pikeville to Paducah, local cops are signing secret contracts with tech firms.
They’re sold “public safety.” What they get: 24/7 license plate tracking and real-time location data shared with federal agencies like DHS and ICE.
NEW: Kentucky’s being wired into a national surveillance web.
Flock cameras. ShotSpotter mics. Fusion centers.
All feeding federal databases — and nobody voted for it.

🧵 A map of how the Commonwealth got caught in the net ↓
Today, Trump is the impatient heir to that same century-long strategy: accelerating a process built over decades to consolidate wealth and power at the top.
From courts to media to think tanks, the elite learned patience. Democracy could be bent without tanks in the streets. Every deregulation, tax cut, and anti-union law became part of the slow-motion takeover.
Congress called the plot “credible,” then buried it. No arrests. No trials. The men behind it walked free. The lesson was clear: coups are messy; influence is permanent.
They recruited a Marine general, Smedley Butler, thinking he could be bought. Butler didn’t just say no—he went to Congress and exposed them.
The plotters: DuPont, J.P. Morgan, Remington, GM, Goodyear, Chase Bank. The mission? March on Washington with 500,000 veterans to crush the New Deal.
1933. America in the depths of the Great Depression. Wall Street billionaires hatch a plan: a private army to overthrow FDR. It almost worked—and no one went to jail. Here’s the story of the Business Plot, and why it matters today. 🧵

#LongCoup #FDR #CorporateAmerica #DemocracyUnderThreat
Every time power investigates itself, the truth comes out blacked-out.
And the rest of us are expected to pretend that’s justice.

✍️ Read the full piece:
“No Evidence — After They Erased It”
🔗 open.substack.com/pub/ordinary...
The Investigation That Never Was
You don’t party with a predator, praise his “taste in women,” and then play dumb when the spotlight turns on.
open.substack.com