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 17
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.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 16
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.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 16
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
Read 4 tweets
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

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