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Jeet Heer Profile picture
@HeerJeet
Sep 25, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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1. Remember the Mueller cult? That seems kind of funny now.
2. Saturday Night Live did a regular series of skits featuring Trump (Alec Baldwin) cowering in fear under the stern glaze of Mueller (Robert Di Niro in his gruff tough guy mode). As we now know, it was the opposite: Mueller cowered before Trump.
3. Writing in @newrepublic in 2017, I noted that both liberals & conservatives are addicted to the myth of the heroic prosecutor: the selfless federal lawman who can save us from the messiness of politics & political corruption.
4. Historically, the myth of the heroic federal prosector & lawman goes back to the propaganda campaign that J. Edgar Hoover concocted in the 1930s to sell the FBI: amid the real corruption of big city mayors & cops, the G-Man was faithful to the law.
5. But political crimes are as much about politics as about law-breaking: they require a political redress as well as a legal one. What we haven't seen, amid all Trump's corruption, is much political response to Trump's massive corruption (Elizabeth Warren is the exception)
6. More on how heroic prosecutors are not the salvation from political corruption and what needs to be done to rein in future corrupt presidents: thenation.com/article/politi…

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
Feb 2
1. This 2016 exchange between Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel is so essential, really gets to the heart of Epstein's project.
Epstein: brexit, just the beginning.
Thiel: Of what?
Epstein: return to tribalism, counter to globalization. Amazing new alliances. You and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain
2. What Epstein wrote to Thiel in 2016 lines up with what he wrote to his business partner Ehud Barak in 2014: “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” In other words, social collapse is a business opportunity.
3. Epstein was a fixer, someone who made money connecting different parts of the elite together. In this case, he was very interested in hooking up Thiel and Barak in project of selling new surveillance tech to autocrat regimes. For this business project, breakdown of global order was good.
Read 4 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 31
1. The new batch of Epstein documents helps illuminate one contemporary controversy: What is Bari Weiss up to at CBS? I think the answer is she is trying to rehabilate the Epstein network as a bulwark of reactionary centrism. Let me explain.
2. Let's lay out the connections. Weiss' partner and ideological collaborator Nelli Bowles was on very familiar terms with Epstein. Image
3. Announcing her plans for CBS, Weiss said she wants to marginalize the radical right and left while elevating charismatic centrist voices such as Alan Dershowitz, Epstein's former lawyer and crony. Image
Read 8 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Dec 22, 2025
1. So I have a few thoughts on "heritage Americans," Nathanial Hawthorne, witch-hunting, Thomas Pynchon, Calvinism, strange feuds, the Daughters of the American Revolution, FDR, the moral responsibilities of nationalism & (lest we forget) Jack Kirby.
2. The American right is touting the phrase "Heritage American," the supposed identity of people who have been in USA for generations. Much can be said about this form of ancestor worship but maybe one path is to talk about a real Heritage American, Thomas Pynchon. Image
3. The first Pynchon to arrive in the Western Hemisphere was William Pynchon, in 1630. He was the great-great-great-great-grandfather (give or take a great) of the author of Gravity's Rainbow. Image
Read 15 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Aug 22, 2025
1. I think this post is Yglesias' response to critics who bring up his support of Iraq war. The implicit argument here is "sure, I supported the Iraq war, but most people did." The deception here is one of omission. Yglesias specifically supported the war out of crackpot neo-con belief it would allow Israel to have greater leverage over the Palestinians (as they said at time "the road to Jerusalem is through Baghdad"). That is not why most USA citizens in 2003 supported war, which would out of misguided deference to elite in moment of nationalist panic & anger.Image
Image
2. Further, Yglesias' support of Iraq war is inextricable from his general xenophobia and belief that non-American life is not a matter of concern (a view that continues to undergrid his analysis of Israel/Palestine). This photo is, as they say, a tell.
3. Further, when he supported the Iraq War, Yglesias also explicitly called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (using the standard euphemism of Revisionist Zionism of "transfer"). This was not a mainstream USA position and was at that timer rejected even by Republicans such as Bush. Yglesias was well to the right of the Bush administration.Image
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jul 31, 2025
1. This is right but I'd go father. Yglesias is quite literally the grandson of Stalinists. He is here, in a fascinating display of atavism, replicating the classic apparatchik logic "it is right to be wrong and wrong to be right."
2. Stalinists (like the grandparents of Matt Yglesias) had a political problem in the 1930s and 1940s: how to defend a regime responsible for the Ukrainian famine, the purges, and the gulag?
3. The standard Stalinist tactic was simply silence and denial, along with blaming any problem with the system on outside forces (capitalist encirclement, Trotskyite wreckers). All of these tactics found replication in the way Yglesias has responded to Israel's horrific onslaught in Gaza and the West Bank, now culminating in a state-created famine (shades of the 1930s).
Read 11 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jun 27, 2025
1. Worth revisiting the debate between @ezraklein and Ta-Nehisi Coates about Israel/Palestine because there's a specific factual point that Klein got very wrong which he should apologize for. Klein insisted that unlike Hamas, Netanyahu was not "specifically targeting killing civilians."Image
2. TNC responded to Klein with a very eloquent "hm" which I think was a polite way of saying "what are you talking about?" Klein's statement was absurd on the face of it since both in current Gaza onslaught in last seven decades, Israeli government's have killed many many civilians, at a rate that is truly startling.
3. But of course apologists like Klein have always had a way out dealing with the very high civilian death count that he Israeli government has inflected on Palestinians: intentionality. Those deaths were all regrettable collateral damage from fog of war. Lots of civilians died but Netanyahu wasn't "specifically targeting killing civilians."
Read 10 tweets

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