Well, it’s over. For real, this time time. With a typically dramatic video, the kind that long-time viewers of this series love, David “Santa” Riddell announced the end of the 1776 Restoration Movement. He dismissed the board, turned off the auto-renewal membership grift and dismissed the national team.
The reasons are many. Since being driven off the National Mall a year ago, the Christofascist cult has struggled for relevance, and has resorted to increasingly desperate schemes to gain attention, like live-streaming the birth of a new #1776RM member.
Yes, you read that correctly. A #1776RM organizer filmed herself in a tub giving birth while a crawl at the bottom of the screen encouraged donations to her Cash app.
Meanwhile, elderly members of the group drove around the country in an RV, stopping in small towns to sit in lawn chairs and wave flags. This was their outreach strategy. Trolls online called it the “Traveling Old Folks Home.”
Viewers Got Bored
But even the trolls, the most devoted #1776RM viewers, got bored, feeling that the series lacked the conflict and drama of the National Mall occupation in the summer of 2022. They moved on to mocking Freedom Corner, a more dangerous little group of insurrectionists.
On Twitter, I posted a “looking back” series of tweets from a year ago, during the group’s heyday. It’s amazing comedy. The poop bucket, “Your car’s on fire!”, “Penis-shaped picture of my mom,” the nightly battles against trolls and each other – no wonder it was such a highly addictive series to the thousands of people around the country who tuned in to see the latest twists and turns of this soap opera of right-wing dysfunction.
It was something you couldn’t explain to others, lest you be seen as the crazy one. “Biketifa saw Flopper so he started flopping around on the ground while Anarchy Princess yelled, ‘Flop, flop, flop!'”
IYKYK.
Filled with memorably dumb characters, absurd fuck-ups and wild turns of phrase, it didn’t seem real. My conspiracy theory is that it was the work of the greatest improv comedy troupe in history. Why else would people film their own humiliation?
It would make a great Netflix series. And maybe it will one day.
The Art of #1776RM
The amount of art that this little group prompted is just astonishing. Channels like Just a Lazy Gamer sprang up to document the group while Damnation Drive-In mocked it.
There’s even a channel which reenacts great chud moments with Barbie dolls! Absolute madness.
And beauty, such as this lovely artwork, which includes convites and trolls:
here is the uncropped version 😄 Drawn last year while they were still on the lawn. pic.twitter.com/x4cBF3ek72
— Florence Power (@OhNoMelons89) August 10, 2023
When one of the chuds announced that he was writing a book about 1776RM, a parody account began work on their own version, using ChatGPT. I’m betting that the parody comes out before the ChudBook.
— Mag’s Book (@mockerofchuds) June 27, 2023
Twitter is full of #1776RM memes and songs – and there is more, much more, hidden away in private forums, a whole community of folks devoted to satirizing the fascists.
It Was the Friends We Made Along the Way
So, maybe it was the friends we made along the way? It certainly provided entertainment to me, and meeting some of the trolls online and in-person was a plus. #1776RM brought together people from wildly disparate backgrounds for the purpose of chud mockery.
The trolls won. And now there is a network of folks experienced in disrupting fascist groups. Good preparation for 2024, and what will be the wildest election year of our lifetimes.
