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

Oct 29
Important to note how framing this as exclusively a “Muslim” or “Arab” issue (as democrats, NYT, MSNBC, etc have been doing for months) is a subtle way of reinforcing the premise this is a sectarian or tribal grievance rather than people—across many demos— angry about genocide
It’s playing in the AIPAC/ADL sandbox which loves to frame the issue as sectarian or ethnic rather than colonial/anti colonial or genocide/anti genocide. With the not so subtle implication that *those people* are hot headed and not thinking straight. It strips it of moral content
Obviously Arab/Muslims are more likely to register disagreement RE: Gaza for many reasons, but young voters very much do too. As do black voters. But keeping the debate in the sectarian sandbox avoids discussing the *substance of what voters are angry about with respect to Gaza*
Read 4 tweets
Oct 14
In The Nation, with (anonymous) researcher and writer Othman Ali, I examine double standards in media humanization, comparing CNN and MSNBC coverage of Palestinian vs Israeli and Palestinian vs Ukrainian victims. Here are our main findings🧵 thenation.com/article/societ…
First off: why MSNBC and CNN? Given it's a Dem president arming and funding the ongoing genocide, this study is the first installment of a multipart series detailing how Center-Left media helps sell the wholesale destruction of Gaza to liberals and centrists over the past year.
The general idea is liberal support in the US––or at least indifference––is essential in maintaining the arms flow and military support necessary to Israel's destruction of Gaza. Thus Center-Left media's role in obscuring the horrors is dispositive and or central importance.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 4
ok so NYT is just gonna publish this conspiratorial claim without an ounce of skepticism or providing a single shred of evidence. cool. Image
if US intelligence has evidence of Iranian agents posing as students and organizing protests can they... name them? This is a very specific and explosive claim would be nice for anyone, anywhere, to provide any evidence of this
I always knew the extremely low "foreign influence" standard of RT or Press TV simply reporting on things in a tabloid manner, in English, would be used to undermine any and all leftwing protests moving forward but this is a new and extreme claim. proof should be forthcoming, no?
Read 6 tweets
Aug 15
Netanyahu’s been clear for months he will not accept a lasting ceasefire deal. He’s said so dozens of times. Yet Biden keeps faking like this is a thing that could happen without a credible threat of US cutting off aid—which Biden refuses to do. The Trump angle is a non sequitur
More silly WH spin from Ravid, this is his whole beat
Netanyahu won’t accept a lasting ceasefire deal because Biden refuses to use any meaningful leverage (an arms embargo or credible threat thereof) to compel him to do so. Everything short of this is theater. Harris, as far as can be gleaned, has the same policy.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 1
Everything NYT lists here that supposedly makes Harris “inching” closer to the Left on Gaza is wholly superficial and already Biden WH policy, right down to the vacuous Empathy-Speak and the warping of “ceasefire” to mean brief pause followed by continuing the destruction of Gaza
If switching to a candidate with (at least for now) the exact same Gaza policy + some bleeding heart rhetoric is enough to win over skeptical lefties on the issue of genocide then this is a dark day for whatever the US Left is supposed to be
The myth that Harris “called for a ceasefire” ahead of Biden won’t go away. She began doing so in line with WH’s co-option of the term in the lead up to the Michigan primary and immediately after to stem the uncommitted movement.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 15
NYT says they’d have withheld anti Trump editorial Sunday if they could have. If the shooter wrote a manifesto citing Paul Krugman and Gail Collins maybe this would be a polite gesture but he was some rw crank, why is liberal media accepting premise they are somehow responsible?
Begging people to get a grip.
There are plenty of psycho killers who cite the NYT to justify their actions, but they are sending weapons to Israel and Saudi Arabia not one off losers shooting at presidential candidates.
Read 4 tweets

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