In lieu of my normal “Bret Stephens write a column and it’s dumb let me make fun of it” thread, let me urge you to read this searing conversation between @cwarzel and @IwriteOK.
The Stephens column is his normal low-batting-average stuff.
It’s basically a book report. Stephens read @AlecMacGillis’s complex, thorough article about policing in Baltimore before and after Freddie Gray and provides a conservative Cliff’s Notes version that loses the nuance.
The Stephens column only *matters* in the sense that it signals what you’ll be hearing from his conservative peers — police are good, everyone submit to them or Bad Things will happen.
But what’s happening in Portland? That’s new. It’s dangerous. That matters.
*wrote* a column, not “write” a column.
The inability to edit tweets will end me one day.
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The #TwitterFiles are just fan service for aggrieved conservatives who exist in the Fox News Extended Universe.
This entire installment from Taibbi is just “ZOMG senior Twitter leaders met with government agencies to identify threats?!? And they considered CONTEXT when evaluating high-profile strategic communications?”
…man, you know that’s just a description of competence, right?
Again, fan service.
It’s December 10th. Trump has lost the election and is loudly spewing The Big Lie that RESULTS IN AN INSURRECTION.
How brainwormed do you have to be to think “the scandal here is Twitter executives developing new tools to deal with Trump’s rhetoric”?
Frequent Alex Jones guest… thought NASA had a secret slave colony on Mars… protocols of the elders of zion… QAnon… COVID conspiracy theorist who died of COVID in 2021.
The thing to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop story was that it was SUPPOSED to be the Trump campaign’s “October Surprise.”
Mainstream media and social media were supposed to take the bait and focus on the appearance of scandal for the last weeks of the election.
(1/x)
They didn’t take the bait. The New York Post story was shunned. Social media platforms treated it as manufactured propaganda with questionable sourcing.
And conservative elites have been PISSED ever since.
(2/x)
They’re supposed to be these brilliant media manipulators.
Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and the rest of the Pepe Patrol pretend at being these incredibly sophisticated actors, injecting precision memes to bend the public will.