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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Trump openly said his motives for attacking Venezuela are to seize its oil. But recent explainers in WaPo, Politico, BBC pontificating about Trump's motives do not mention this fact at all. I wrote about western media's bizarre refusal to state the obvious columnblog.com/p/media-pontif…
For years Trump has openly talked about how he thinks the US should take over other countries' resources. Indeed, exploitation of resources is his most consistent, publicly espoused motive behind his foreign policy. Why is this dynamic rarely discussed in Venezuela coverage?
I get that 'resource grab' stuff has the undignified and Unserious whiff of conspiracy but this isn't an issue when the guy in charge openly says “when I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. [Had I won in 2020] we would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil.”
this is all so tedious. This sleight-of-hand is exactly what make the Abundance guys so cynical. What Sanders says here is that the generic "good govt" stuff is banal and fine. The issue is **this is not the whole of their project** which anyone with two brain cells can see
The Abundance "movement," as it exists in reality, (rather than a vague marketing pitch) but actual policies, think tanks and funders with actual goals, is defined by deregulation and left-punching. And anytime this is mentioned they do the coy "Who me?🥺I just want more stuff"
everything Abundance argues that is unobjectionable is vague to the point of being politically meaningless. Everything they actual specify, when it comes to actual trade offs, priorities, and narrative focus is explicitly anti-populist and pleasing to their billionaire patrons.
Ah I see the Christian studio behind the Qanon exploitation film Sound of Freedom is releasing a gritty origin story hagiography on George Washington July 4 weekend 2026 and doing the aggrieved “help us make it the No 1 film in America (to own the libs)” marketing campaign
Mel Gibson chose to make the enslaved people free black workers (unclear why 18th century Mel Gibson would be so kind??) when he did The Patriot, curious how they handle this awkward fact. They may just ignore it, or just imply his slaves are cool and chill with the situation
The problem with depicting Washington was that he has a LOT of slaves. It wasn’t like a Mark Twain situation where his family had one or two for a while and it can be glossed over, he enslaved ~600 people in his life. It was His Whole Deal, it’s how he got powerful and rich.
Another attempt at a fake scandal, Mamdani’s position on this is the same as Trump’s (thus far at least, thankfully). Demanding Hamas disarm is a nonstarter for obvious reasons. This is a rational and moral position because the alternative is open-ended nonstop genocidal killing
“Hamas shouldn’t be forced to disarm” isn’t some abstract normative position, or endorsement of Hamas, it’s a rational position because that’s what a “ceasefire” is—a cessation of firing—not demanding unconditional surrender from one side.
Blithely demanding “Hamas must disarm” was the thin military pretext that dragged on this genocide for months on end, it’s a call for continued collective punishment posing as an anodyne moral proclamation. It’s dishonest, faux liberal smarm.
Vance’s speech was a masterclass in shameless demagoguery. They cant find any credible media “cheering on” Kirk’s killing so they just highlight media criticizing him, then pivot to random nobodies celebrating Kirk’s death, then seamlessly switching back and forth between the two
The reason the goal posts has to shift from “celebrating Kirk’s killing” to “mocking it” to “being mean/misquoting him” is because no one with any power or significance on “the left” celebrated it so they have to create a fog by mixing in random social media posts w/ “the media”
Vance did this shoddy demagogic trick just one week prior when he tried to claim some undefined “media” “told you that Donald Trump was on his death bed” which literally no actual media outlets did. It was just Random People Online
One of the few certainties in social science is high social trust is essential to healthy societies which can only be achieved through greater equality. We not only rejected greater equality (ofc) but built our economy around a machine whose primary value proposition is deception
Having a technology adopted overnight that is, in most of its applications, premised on tricking people (often in intimate settings), doing plagiarism remix, letting Silicon Valley do our political thinking for us and exploiting people with mental health problems is Probably Bad
Is this text I’m reading genuine? Is this image I’m seeing real? Is this video authentic? The constant paranoia and mistrust the ubiquity of this technology promotes (or worse, a type of widespread post-modern indifference to authenticity ) is immeasurably corrosive.