Adam Johnson Profile picture
Aug 28, 2019 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
What a credulous piece of reporting. No mention of Tea Party being a Koch-seeded astroturf, no mention it was animated by racist hostility to Obama and black people and immigrants in general, no mention of its contempt for women. Complete doofus brain shit nytimes.com/2019/08/28/us/…
Except the Tea Party got EXACTLY what it wanted because it’s nominal opposition to deficits was a PR cover for standard anti-poor partisan GOP politics. The net result of 2010 takeover was gerrymandering, anti-abortion laws, anti-environmentalism, taking healthcare from millions.
“Tea Party failed because deficits are high” is supposed to be some cool liberal gotcha but it glosses over how astroturfed and phony the whole thing was.
NYT has incentive to keep buying the transparently bogus line the Tea Party cared about deficits b/c their reporting in 2009 ate it up. They didn’t spot a Bircherism Koch job at the time and think it best to simply ignore it now and view it all as organic “populist” uprising.
Imagine in the year of lord 2019 still thinking a bunch of foaming lifelong republicans—virtually all of whom now back tax cut and spend happy Trump—were animated not by the election of the first black president but a sudden, genuine and race-blind concern with “deficits”.
In Dec 2017—of the 30 remaining representatives who composed the initial 2010 Tea Party caucus—every single one of them voted for Trump’s deficit-bloating tax cuts. They never cared about deficits and we have proof because they voted that way for 9 years. docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u…

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More from @adamjohnsonCHI

Jun 18
The most powerful democrat in the country does not support the MOU and ending hostilities with Iran. Not coincidently Schumer (1) is the only democrat in the senate who opposed Obama’s 2015 Iran Deal and (2) told the NYT last year his job was to “keep the left pro-Israel”
Note too that Schumer did not say a word of substantive criticism of Trump’s armada build up against Iran for eight days, only issuing rambling process criticisms two days before bombing and delaying a war powers vote long after the attack was underway.
As DropSite News reported in Feb, citing a congressional aide, there was support among certain Dems in the senate to stand by and let Trump do their dirty work on Iran then swoop in after it went to shit and use the disaster for political gain dropsitenews.com/p/trump-iran-r…Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 18
The thing where pundits put on the By Their Own Logic strategist cap and proclaim Trump’s series of war crimes “accomplished nothing” as if there was a scenario where flattening schools & doing a 9/11 on Iran would have been Worth It is a subtle but effective mode of propaganda🧵
This framework, where our media class defaults to Imperial Consultant (sometimes couched in “even using their own standards” to mask their obvious ideological fidelity) effectively gamifies real life mass murder and frames Iranians/Lebanese death in terms of its strategic utility
to the needs of Washington and Tel Aviv. A great deal of work is done by this framing, indeed 95% of the work is done and yet this is the only sandbox our media is allowed to play in. Everyone swims in the water of ideology with no notice of how racist and insane this posture is
Read 7 tweets
Jun 9
Duss continues to defend Biden’s initial “strong support for Israel”. This fundamentally misdiagnosis the issue: by “mid Nov” 11,000+ Palestinians had been killed, incl 4,000+ children. This—to Duss—was an acceptable response until it arbitrarily ceased being one for some reason? Image
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Anyone who thought there was any chance Israel would respond with an limited, targeted “war on Hamas” rather than genocidal vengeance and mass killing has no business leading on “progressive FP” as they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of US imperialism and Zionist ideology
This is consistent with Duss and CIP’s position which was refusing to join calls for a lasting ceasefire (and sometimes disparaging them) until late 2023. Anyone with any basic understanding of history knew it would be a nihilistic campaign of mass killing because THEY ALWAYS ARE Image
Image
Read 7 tweets
Jun 1
has anyone done a detailed analysis of Quantum Zionism as an overall PR strategy? Israel is both an abstract moral ideal and a state in urgent need of F-35s. It's a democracy but an explicit ethnosupremacist state, it's interchangeable with Jewish identity, then it isn't.
this march had a who's who of genocidal freaks and open racists leading the pack, self-ID'd fascists who are PRESENTLY IN THE GOVT. If you are marching along side them you are not marching along side an abstract ideal, you are marching along side war criminals.
If pro-Israel liberals oppose these open racists and reactionaries then why not boycott the march until they are purged form it? Why just shrug and quibble afterwards with No True Scots Man handwaving? Between chauvinist solidarity and liberalism they repeatedly choose the former
Read 4 tweets
Apr 16
I wrote about J Street’s “cut off military aid to Israel” PR gambit which, upon closer inspection, is clearly a time-buying scam that 1) aligns w/ Netanyahu’s “phase out” plan & 2) provides a fake Israel-critical talking point for Dems increasingly under pressure from their base.
Jonathan Chait joins the campaign, along with J Street, Lindsey Graham and Netanyahu, to severe US military funding of Israel to blunt opposition and give the appearance of distance between democrats and Israel while maintaining the status quo of arming genocide and apartheid
Also this is one of the most evil and cynical things I’ve ever read: here Chait argues there’s been “selective attention” on Gaza by activists vs the West Bank not because 100X more people have been killed/it’s widely seen as a genocide but because they all secretly love Hamas Image
Read 4 tweets
Apr 4
The Economist and Bloomberg also called the downing of fighter jets an “escalation” by Iran. Everyone knows you’re supposed to just let invading militaries bomb your universities and girls’ schools and apartment buildings and that shooting back is an act of unhinged aggression.
If you’re invaded, 1000s of your people are killed, your infrastructure destroyed and your leadership is wiped out in a sneak attack, anything short of you doing this to the enemy in response cannot, by definition, be an “escalation”. Thats how language works, that how words work
Last I checked Iran has done exactly zero of these things to the US so they have not come remotely close to “escalating.” Being Modestly Successful At Fighting Back is not an “escalation.”
Read 12 tweets

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