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Rick Perlstein Profile picture
@rickperlstein
Jun 11, 2020 • 3 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
"Pentagon leaders pushed harsh and aggressive tactics...to head off a direct order from the President to unleash combat troops." Quite common in the ratchet toward tyranny: "We had to go hard or the REAL fascists would step in..." talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/path-of…
...In fact, you can hear Nixon saying that all the time on the White House tapes.
(Here's the New York Times article upon which the paywalled--subscribe! support independent journalism!--#TPM post builds its argument: nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/… )

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More from @rickperlstein

Rick Perlstein Profile picture
Aug 11
Fixin' to rant here. Fiercely. Come along for the ride. My subject is the astonishing the intellectual and moral energy I've witnessed in the last 48 hours from people absolutely PASSIONATE about figuring out ways to conclude that Tim Walz might, actually, suck. [THREAD] 1/x
For illustration, start with a post from the magnificent left comics artist and moral witness @TedRall, reading in full, "WHEN I WENT TO SCHOOL, IN THE MIDWEST, FOOTBALL PLAYERS WERE ASSHOLES AND THEIR COACH PROTECTED THEM."

No biggie, I'm interested in one of the comments: 2/x
@TedRall "Walz’s free lunch position sounds wholesome, but both he and the food production industry profit.... When paid contractors took over the school meals in NYC, food quality plummeted. They're branding him as the second coming of Mr. Rodgers, but he's the same as the rest." 3/x
Read 24 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
Jul 11
The NYT detailing 90 reporters onto the Biden deathwatch reveals yet another American civic institition in its glaring failure to stand up to the stress test of imminent fascism. Alas, it...
...falls into agenda-setting elite political journalists' narcissicism sweet spot: it makes themselves the center of the universe, while denying they have any political agency at all...
...Also, lets them preen in their version of virtue, which is "balancing" all the bad stuff they had to say about the GOP.

Akin to how they puffed up and domesticated the Tea Party, to "balance" the way they puffed up Obama.

#infernaltriangle
Read 4 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
Mar 31
I said no more, but I think it might be a useful contribution to expand upon a criticism I've had on @coreyrobin's classic everyone has to read, The Reactionary Mind, since it became such a powerful influence on me upon first reading. It ends making the argument that...
...the American reactionary tradition has reached the end of the line because no one in American politics any longer pursues "revolution" (one of the book's keywords). At the time, my beef was that it doesn't matter whether you and I think revolution is being pursued...
...it's what the REACTIONARIES think; an ethnographic approach here is imperative. The same problem carries over to Corey's argument that reaction cannot have tipped over into something worse called "fascism," because fascism must definitionally be a reaction to socialism...
Read 16 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
Aug 3, 2023
It will be a horrifying fascination to see how much further one of America's political parties has to advance into fascist territory before agenda-setting elite political journalists start to report that one of America's political parties is advancing into fascist territory.
Over/under? Maybe when they start getting shot. Staggering how corrupted American journalism has become from own reason for existing. Facilitating citizenship is literally why they came up with the "free press" part of the First Amendment in the first place.
The elite media analysis of black and white evidence of a coup attempt is almost exclusively "how will this play in the swing states" or "who's winning the messaging war" diarrhea. This is how republics die. I can't begin to express my shame.
Read 4 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
May 1, 2023
Thread on what May Day is really all about. A little while back I scripted a short interlude on the history of strikes for a doc on a famous one. The doc will be coming out eventually, and will be wonderful, but the interlude didn't work out in the end, so I'm prewenting it here.
It's about the simple, blunt fact that before the National Labor Relations ("Wagner") Act made joining unions and striking a right protected by the federal government, those attempted to do so were MURDERED ALL THE TIME--by the state, by vigilantes, by private police.
The main sources I relied on to begin assembling the story are "Labor's Untold Story" by Richard Boyer, a book commissioned by the militant United Electrical Workers for distribution to members and originally published in 1955... archive.org/details/labors…
Read 29 tweets
Rick Perlstein Profile picture
Mar 11, 2023
The most famous Dem economic advisor says rich speculators who had the poor judgement to deposit in an untrustworthy bank have to be made whole. Nothing about the moral hazard this presents, nor the message to the proles who only get $250K in protection. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Only the little people should suffer when there's a "risk to the financial system."
Saving banks while the peasants get stuck with cliches about "moral hazard" was the ideological position Barack Obama CHOSE as the face of the party with his policies on the subprime crisis and financial collapse.
Read 12 tweets

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