American Parallel Institutions
Why State Legislatures are so important for the American New Right
I cannot count the amount of times disaffected right wingers have claimed “There is no political solution” or that a glorious right wing restoration of America wouldn’t be possible within their own lifetime. That every institution is rigged against us and that we need to build our own from the ground up. While I’m not going to diss on people genuinely trying to create parallel institutions to foster change in the matter of a few decades, there is a disturbing amount of right wingers who discourage their friends and allies from pursuing the institutions that we can easily capture.
State Legislatures, State Defense Forces(the latter of which I made a thread linked here) and every state party apparatuses as a whole have a ridiculous degree of potential for enacting real change and very few people in these spheres even talk about it. Last year the state of Texas passed a law after a few months of negotiating, hosting multiple special 30 day sessions and going as far as to arrest state legislative democrats who fled the capitol to break a quorum, which effectively made social media platform access, even for the most fringe socially unacceptable groups, a civil right. The law goes as far as forcing Big Tech Companies to pay for the legal fees of people who are banned and sue them for it and it was signed by Governor Greg Abbott, who has a reputation for being a governor whose too friendly to large tech corporations. In fact, the legislature voted against adding amendments that gave exceptions for topics that can get you instantly banned off of most social media platforms, which you can read for yourself here.
So what happened? It got memory holed. I didn’t see a single person on the dissident right even mention this, even among election-focused paleoconservatives, let alone some of the people who dabbled in more esoteric theory on RW twitter. The only people even mentioning this law were Progressives who applauded the efforts of a low level Obama Appointee who put a stay on the law for violating the Constitution. That stay can be undone at a higher level court but several months after the ruling, I had yet to see anyone operating on the online right mention it. Even arguably borderline normiecons like Red Eagle Politics, a YouTube channel focused on Right Wing American Electoral Politics, wouldn’t give the topic the time of day.
There are other important issues that state legislatures can regulate but I specifically chose this one because its an issue that you would think the dissident right would rally behind. They’re often targeted by platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Discord(and have to avoid bans on both), they sometimes get targeted by payment processors and even banks. Something like this should be a bread and butter issue, one related to self preservation and the ability to operate online without hiccups due to targeted moderation. Yet its a topic that is not spoken of.
State Legislatures in the past 4 years have attempted to do everything from banning tech censorship, to heavily regulating abortion and puberty blockers, to nullifying the National Firearms Act at a statewide level, to banning perverted talks on masturbation and gender identity in schools and yet nobody talks about them in these circles to nearly the extent they should and how these structures can be weaponized. The right must start taking a proactive approach to one of the few institutions they can influence directly. Being apathetic will only be the rights downfall.