(PS) I don't know what the heck is going on here, but I know that in 48 hours you have three extraordinary events happen: an unprecedented blocking of a foreign attack; an unprecedented attack on the platform doing the blocking; an unprecedented policy reversal by that platform.
(PS2) And in the midst of all this, you have the president *whose team conspired with the Kremlin in the initial attack* threatening to *gravely injure the platform that refused to host the attack* using the *full might of the U.S. government*.
This is terrifying stuff, people.
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(THREAD) Tim O'Brien is a great Trump biographer. But as a fellow Trump biographer, I'd disagree that there's no strategy component here. Trump's M.O. is a metamodern melange of strategy and instinct. What's he doing? Building his brand among his audience. cnn.com/2020/10/18/pol…
1/ When I first began writing academic articles about Trump in June 2015, I posited that he'd be appealing to many folks because—instinctively, not in a reflexive way—his paradoxical juxtapositions of opposing tendencies represent the darkest end of our current metamodern moment.
2/ At a time when postmodern political theorists—who in the waning years of that paradigm have come to love bipolar dialectics, which see polar-opposite forces contend with one another until one is destroyed—were calling Trump's followers "angry," I called them "angry optimists."
I wrote 2 days ago that Trump *knew* a *long time ago* that Giuliani was involved in a Russian disinformation campaign. It's almost like I wrote a book called Proof of Corruption about this. Glad it's now breaking news on CBS. Proof of Corruption became a bestseller in September.
PS/ To be clear, Trump knew *well* before December 2019—as detailed, using many major-media sources, in Proof of Corruption. Today's breaking news is that it was December 2019; tomorrow's news will say "summer 2019"; eventually everyone will catch up with the book: "spring 2018."
PS2/ And yes, I'm talking about spring 2018. Media is so many months—even years—behind the curatorial research in the Proof series that it's releasing as "breaking news" Trump knowing about a plot he knew about a year and a half earlier than CBS News now says. This is incredible.
I've been thinking about this lately because my time as a political journalist is almost done. I've been planning to move on for a long time.
(Note: I'd add my recent chat with Russell Brand to the list above, but it's not out yet. So I'll add the below.) theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
I know some will feel put out that I won't be spending November obsessing over each new Trump atrocity. But I just can't. I've given 5+ years of my life to covering this madman, and it's taken a toll. My work on Trump's life from 1987 to mid-fall 2020 will have to stand as it is.
A couple weeks back I wrote here that our three year-old rescue hound Quinn doesn't know how to sit properly. Some of you gently took me to task, as you thought that the picture I offered wasn't a very good representation of the problem. How about this one, dog lovers of America?
PS/ (Quinn is a she.)
PS2/ (This is, as you can probably tell, the oldest and dirtiest chair in the house. But we can't get rid of it because both Quinn and Scout are obsessed with it, treat it as their "home base," and couldn't bear to be parted with it. And we would basically do anything for them.)
Twitter has deleted, so far today, 150 followers from my feed out of (presumably) some sort of security necessity. Virtually every day, 100 to 300 followers are dutifully deleted. About 2,000 weekly. But Kremlin disinformation? Now *that* can freely appear *anywhere* on Twitter.
Can you imagine if Twitter policed Kremlin disinformation as fanatically as it polices the follower counts of Trump critics? If it removed one Kremlin-pushed "news" story from its platform for every one follower it removes from this (and many other) feeds?
That would be amazing.
Twitter has never explained to its users how it identifies followers that need to be removed from certain accounts—and I don't mean one at a time, I mean *mass purges* of 20 to 100 followers *all at once* that occur over and over throughout the day. Every *single* day. See below: