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

Dec 4
There’s a frog in boiling water element to this too. On polymarket you can bet on whether Gaza will be ethnically cleansed. On Kalshi you can bet on whether they’ll be famine in Gaza (that one paid out for ‘yes’ btw) This is objectively depraved and should not be legal but 1/2 Image
Image
it is not only legal but totally normalized and never commented on by anyone in our media. CNN, by partnering with Kalshi, is going to be “reporting on the news” now while offering the chance to wager on these events. On mass death, starvation, dispossession and genocide. 2/2
The fate of victims of an ongoing genocide—a genocide often supported and backed by the same investors and executives of these gambling apps—are just another chip on a roulette table. The total dehumanization of the billions of NPCs they wager on and fleece is complete and total.
Read 5 tweets
Nov 27
A simple way of explaining this to people is that Israel’s calculus is that they can maintain apartheid and carry out genocide and will still be seen as a normal country—just with some bad apples. BDS says no, this is unacceptable. Israel is banking on Business As Usual. 1/4
“Open dialogue” claptrap is just another version of Business As Usual. To the extent speaking to Israelis in person has any political utility (very debatable) it is VERY MUCH outweighed by the more urgent and meaningful goal of cementing Israel’s pariah status. 2/4
There’s a reason why 38 states have passed anti-BDS laws and exactly zero have banned Socratic Masterminds like Peter Beinart or Ben Burgis from speaking to Israelis. One challenges actual power, one is fart sniffing idealism and/or careerism 3/4
Read 4 tweets
Nov 13
None of the people in these emails lovingly chatting with Epstein will face social consequences and we know this because in 2019 it was revealed Bill Gates met with Epstein several times—and his wife of 30+yrs divorced him over it!!—and this basically went into a memory hole.
All you have to do is produce some Netflix documentaries about public health or climate change or whatever and everyone basically moves on.
Read 6 tweets
Nov 5
[$70 million organization dedicatedly entirely to israel]: it’s important politicians understand Israel is irrelevant and they need to ignore it
It’s an interesting PR tactic common with pro-Israel groups I call Quantum Zionism. they put on press tours, trips to Israel, luncheons etc for politicians, then when it’s a politician critical of Israel they go “um obsessed with Israel much? Hum, curious why that would be?”
The obvious implication is this “singling out” or “obsession” can only be explained by antisemitism. But they can’t actually say this because they don’t have the courage or substance to level such a charge so it’s just heavily implied
Read 4 tweets
Nov 5
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? Image
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.”
Read 4 tweets
Nov 3
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.
Read 5 tweets

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