Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 Profile picture
Oct 3, 2020 10 tweets 4 min read Read on X
1. The absolute folly of the GOP's "COVID is a hoax we can simply pretend away & thumb our nose at" is being exposed as this massive cluster spreads:

So Far: Sens Johnson, Tillis, Lee, Kellyanne Conway, Hope Hicks, Donald Trump, Mark Meadows, Ronna McDaniel, Bill Stepien

With
2. these folks- they made decisions that led to them contracting the virus. They purposely exposed themselves to the virus, & each other while taunting and criticizing appropriate safety measures. So its hard to feel bad for them. BUT they also insisted on putting innocent people
3. in danger & at some point, positive tests are going to start to pop up for those folks. People who DO follow safety recommendations. People who just wanted these people to wear a damn mask, limit their social contacts, behave as if there is a deadly pandemic out there instead
4. like petulant teenagers who simply can't sacrifice one damn year out of their lives, even if their actions will cause other people to die. BC that is what they have been doing for the past few months with their behavior. Hosting events that have led to people getting infected
5. and dying. And frankly, the only thing that would have ever stopped them was their own outbreak, which was bound to happen bc its a deadly pandemic and it only needed 1 breach to spread around a group of people crowded in shoulder to shoulder, not masking. If they had been
6. following CDC guidelines, if they had been masking and staying back from each other and behaving as the rest of us, with prudence and a healthy dose of caution, then even if there was a breach, it would not be ripping through them like a CA forest fire. But I am mostly fearful
7. for the innocent people that were forced into situations with these people. The Bidens, their team and their supporters at the debate who are now in danger bc the Trump family was indulged in their ridiculous refusal to follow public health rules of wearing masks inside.
8. And have the Trump kids- @IvankaTrump, @FLOTUS, @DonaldJTrumpJr @EricTrump @kimguilfoyle offered an apology that their political hack has now put the lives of other people in peril?? Has the media asked them for one? Why not? It is shameful. Same w the Pres debate commission-
9. they owe @JoeBiden and the other audience members an apology. They allowed the Trumps to skip testing bc he was allowed to arrive too late. They could have insisted on him arriving in time to accommodate testing. The Trump's have behaved shamefully, but much of what they do
10. they do bc of other people with power enabling them- apparently in some attempt to appear "bipartisan." Do your damn jobs- lives are on the line. Democracy is on the line. Your calculus should be on that.

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More from @RachelBitecofer

Feb 9
🧵The Tipping Point Is Upon Us:
Will MAGA Simply Ignore the Courts?

Ok folks, we’re three weeks in and have already entered the “constitutional crisis” phase of things.

I want to draw your attention to something critically important in the coming week. The federal courts have started to respond to Elon Musk’s illegal attack on federal agencies and programs like USAID.Image
This is going to create a real litmus test for the survival of our democracy.

Much of what Trump and Elon are doing is so flagrantly illegal, it is hard to imagine much of it surviving judicial review, even at the Supreme Court level.

Yes, the Federalist Society controls the Court, but on occasion at least three of their justices, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Roberts have ruled on the side of the Constitution against Trump. There is one major exception and that is the immunity case where they not only did their best to create an untouchable presidency, but also did it in a way to drag the case out of being tried before the election. So we know they have it in them.
I expect the lower courts to reject most of Trump’s power grab. All we can do is hope that those 3 justices recognize by creating the Imperial Presidency, they are rendering their own power obsolete.

The sitting Vice President went public with what us MAGA watchers already knew: there is a forceful movement within MAGA that argues federal court orders should simply be ignored.Image
Read 10 tweets
Feb 1
American Idiot:
Voters Know Nothing, Jon Snow.

This 🧵 is about the effects of partisanship on public opinion.
Please RT & share it! #TheMoreYouKnow Image
This book, The American Voter, first published in 1960, is the Bible of my subfield in political science: political behavior.

Political behavior is the study of the way people think, feel, and act with regard to politics and includes everyone from political office holders and candidates (elites) to your average man on the street voters.Image
As soon as phones became prolific enough to allow for scientific polling political scientists launched surveys to figure out what Americans knew about their government.

The results were shocking. It turned out that other than who the current president is and vague impressions of what the two parties stand for, average Joes and Janes knew next to nothing about their own government!
Read 21 tweets
Jan 12
🚨🧵New from The Cycle 👇

Trump, MAGA, and the Breaking of the American Mind:

A Majority of Republicans Say They are A-OK With Trump Suspending the Constitution

Have you ever had a random conversation with someone that just sort of stays with you over time?

I had one such conversation back in 2019 or so participating in an event.Image
The conversation was with a graduate student assistant from Rwanda who was working the event. That evening a few of us gathered under the Virginia summer sky to night gaze and hang out.

Always eager to talk with people from other cultures, and especially from places with a political history like Rwanda’s, I was eager to ask about Rwanda’s recovery from the genocide that ripped the country apart in a 100 day blood bath during the Rwandan civil war in 1994.Image
The victims of the Rwandan genocide were the Tutsi ethnic group, murdered in a wave of violence unleashed by the assassination of the Rwandan president by Hutu extremists, another Rwandan ethnic group. The genocide left somewhere between 500,000 and a million people, mostly Tutsis but also including moderate Hutus, dead.
Read 24 tweets
Dec 10, 2024
🧵Welcome to the Crusades 2.0

An Interview with Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy. Image
If you’ve been following the transition of the Republican Party from the party of Reagan into whatever the hell it is now you’ll know that the once “useful idiots” of the Republican Party, the Christian Right, now rule the party and they have big plans for Trump 2.0.
As Dr. Taylor points out in our interview about his book The Violent Take it by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening our Democracy, for all the attention January 6th received, a key part of that story has been largely ignored.
Read 10 tweets
Dec 3, 2024
🧵How to be Sand in the Gears of Tyranny

A Guest Essay by @GalvinAlmanza

Friends,

I’m aware many of you want/need actionable advice on things you can do to help thwart what is coming so you don’t marinate in hopelessness. As Dr. DOOM, I’m not well-positioned for this role! Image
That’s why when I came across Emily Galvin-Almanza's threaded tweet offering tangible, actionable ideas for real resistance that can really matter I knew I needed to get it to you.

So, I reached out to Emily and offered her the opportunity to write up her ideas to share with The Cycle’s audience and I am delighted she agreed.

What follows is Emily’s article.
I, too, believe in the power of the corporeal.

But then again, I am also one of those elder millennials whose life has been a slipstream from watching 9/11 on my college dorm room TV set to having my high school friends sent to die in Iraq as the rest of us back home marched in the streets to no avail, to the financial crisis that would cost so many of us our future stability, to an impossible housing market, couples having crisis conversations about whether to bring kids into this world, and now enduring the start of Trump 2.0. It’s been a ride. And unlike my parents, it has not been a ride where the marches I have taken part in have singularly changed the course of history.Image
Read 23 tweets
Nov 18, 2024
🧵Why Democrats Failed to Save Democracy
Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party's Brand

Once upon a time the Democratic Party, with its regional base in the Southern U.S. was the party of slavery, and then of segregation.

If you spend much time on social media you already know this because of the many times Trump voters have told you, “but Democrats are the party of segregation!”

Back in the 1950s and 1960s during the Jim Crow Era, the Democratic Party had morphed into an unholy alliance merging a party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades.Image
By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other largely unnamed civil rights activists finally forced the Democratic Party to choose: preserve their large coalition or end segregation. In part due to the assassination of JFK, then-President Lyndon Johnson sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and in doing so, set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party just a few decades later.Image
Via Nixon’s Southern Strategy, shrewd GOP strategists like Lee Atwater and Roger Stone recognized that white Southern conservatives were there for the taking, and took them they did relying on various racist dog whistles such as the Willie Horton ad and Reagan’s 1980s Black welfare queen propaganda.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party began to absorb liberal Republicans, predominantly in the North East and West Coast. Ideological liberals became Democrats and ideological conservatives became Republicans through a process known as party sorting and the modern 270 Electoral College map with its handful of swing states became the norm of American presidential elections.Image
Read 16 tweets

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