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

Sep 9
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.
Read 7 tweets
Sep 8
Ok even if one accepts this frame where the perceived victim gets veto power over language, every single time a Democrat in congress says “Israel has a right to defend itself” 100s of kids are killed that week, nonstop for 100 weeks. Why isnt this expression therefore off limits?
This squishy bullshit sounds superficially sensible to half paying attention liberals, racists, or both. But more Palestinians were killed in first two weeks of the “Israel-Hamas war” than Israelis have been killed by Hamas since the creation of Hamas 40 years ago.
What do only one set of Very Special Feelings matter? Why are Palestinians (or Lebanese or Syrian or Yemeni or Iranian) feelings not allowed to matter? These are rhetorical questions I know the answer
Read 4 tweets
Sep 6
Buddy upon news of the merger Ellison **put out a press release in the Jerusalem Post detailing how he “loves Israel” and “quietly donates quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF”**

Bari Weiss is a one note shill for Israel. But for sure, it’s just the free market at work
Even the sycophantic Puck News write up which was more or less transcribed from Ellison acknowledges her substack isn’t worth $150million. CNN and NYT both bury references to their mutual hatred of Palestinians as a reason for the deal. Let us be serious.
If you think a billionaire nepo child whose wealth comes largely from Israeli and DOD military contracts is interested in installing Bari Weiss at CBS News because Joe media consumer is clamoring for third rate genocide denial schlock I have a Michigan ave bridge to sell you
Read 5 tweets
Aug 23
This has every dishonest liberal cliche:

1) One Bad Man Theory

2) Reinforce “Hamas must go” pretext for genocide (how exactly, magic??)

3) meaningless “offensive” vs “defensive” weapons

4) “two state solution” pablum

5) centering needs and ego of state committing genocide
It’s got (2), (3) and (4) with (1) more or less implied
My favorite liberal rhetorical sleight-of-hand is when Deeply Concerned Democrats spend four paragraphs lamenting suffering in Gaza then say “but to be clear Hamas must go” ok so with what mechanism are you going to achieve this? vibes? Wizardry? How do you get from A to B?
Read 4 tweets
Aug 14
Not sure what it would look like to “turn” on Mamdani, but I assure you any such “turn” will be grounded in (admittedly difficult and complex) value judgments on key issues. All politics requires subjective analysis of priorities and compromises, this is kind of its whole deal
I assure you conditional support is not some neurosis of the left, and we know this because Mamdani won the democratic primary and the whole of the democratic establishment—from Schumer to Gillibrand to Jeffries—refuses to endorse him. This is also known as “purity politics”
as I note down thread, I do not think Mamdani talking with Obama alums is evidence of "selling out" or whatever and I think Mamdani refusal to "denounce" "globalize the intifada" and cave to the crybully contingent is evidence he is far more principled than 99% of politicians.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 12
The thing is this isnt really a change. Conditioning bombs to the flow of aid is consistent w/ 2024 Dem consensus of Bomb Palestinian Kids on 600 Calories a Day vs the (R) position of Bomb Palestinian Kids on an Empty Stomach—modestly preferable but still objectively pro-genocide
The fact that this very low bar is now considered some type of “break” from Israel is just further evidence that this latest round of performative outrage is an ass covering exercise, something that can be pointed to at a later date.
Conditioning aid to just the flow of food without pushing for a real lasting ceasefire and conditioning bombs to the actual bombing—and sniping, shelling and broader siege is, at its core, an intervention over optics. “Continue the killing but no more images of starving kids pls”
Read 5 tweets

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