With Biden having been declared the winner (for now) by major media outlets, I figured it would be a good time to share some of the people who’ve threatened retribution against Trump supporters.
The list is a lot longer than I had anticipated it would be👇
It wouldn’t be right to start with anyone but @RBReich, who I will remind you was **Secretary of Labor** under Bill Clinton and is here calling for the extralegal prosecution of his political opponents as part of a truth and reconciliation commission.
You would think such an idea was roundly refuted, just one blue check going off the reservation.
You would be wrong. Here’s @MSNBC’s @chrislhayes, one of the key voices on one of the largest networks, echoing the same sentiment.
The list goes on. There were plenty of blue checks throwing this idea around. Here we have @jvagle and @treygraham.
I need you all to take a moment and appreciate how utterly batshit this thread from @SteveSchmidtSES is.
At least we’ll know what hats they’ll be wearing when they start rounding folks up, thanks to @jamieleecurtis
They’re doubling down on this perspective today, which is comforting. Here’s @quinncy.
We had A LOT of think pieces on the subject. Here we have @inthesetimesmag.
Thankfully for all of them, there is already one in the works! We had the “Trump Accountability Project” led by @HariSevugan.
Nothing says “healthy democracy” like “now that we’ve won, who has the list of our enemies handy?” right, Hari?
There’s apparently a bunch of blue checks involved in this one. Here’s @mbsimon, replying to @AOC, in very normal, totally not threatening at all, fashion.
At the end of the day, I can’t imagine these folks will be shipping conservatives off to the gulags in a divided government, much as they would like to.
But it fundamentally cuts against the spirit of America to suggest someone should be punished for their political views.
We are not some post-genocide society. The suggestion that we need a Rwandan-styled Truth and Reconciliation Commission is preposterous. And free societies don’t develop political hit lists.
This champagne fascism from the Left needs to stop. Now would be a good time.
Anyway, congrats to @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris for their victory (at least until we hear on appeals). Perhaps, once the champagne has finished flowing, it would behoove of both of you to think about why your victory gives even some people who weren’t wild about Trump real pause.
And if you’ve read this far you probably don’t need to hear it from me, but you don’t need to be excited or celebratory about an electoral victory for someone whose supporters want to punish you for thoughtcrimes.
This is eventually just going to be a thread of @chrislhayes saying that we need to catalogue and punish Republicans.
It was only a matter of time until @joelockhart checked in on this one.
Has since been deleted but zero percent surprising that @donwinslow finds himself on this list.
It was only a matter of time before the grifters at @ProjectLincoln got involved on this one.
Nothing says unity like treating the other party like an “active threat to democracy” to hear @WajahatAli tell it.
Step 1: ID your enemies
Step 2: put them in a handy list; distribute list to allies
Step 3: punish people for crimes real and (more likely) imagined.
This sure feels a little bit like Mao’s China from the students of Harvard.
I wish I was surprised that this thread needs to keep growing but it’s inescapable when you consider that lots of people like @DavidOAtkins think that people who don’t support his preferred candidate need to be “deprogrammed”
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I’m not sure people realize just how egregious some of NPR’s “journalism” has been. Amid the debate about defunding the network, I wanted to walk down memory lane to revisit some of its worst coverage.
There’s a lot. ⤵️
First, perhaps the most egregious display of activist journalism: their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story of corruption involving a major party candidate on the eve of the election.
Not only did @NPR not cover it, they bragged about refusing to do so.
Insofar as @NPR did cover the Hunter Biden scandal, they actively tried to cover it up.
They applauded Facebook & Twitter strangling the story as part of a push against “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
The story, of course, turned out to be far from invented.
If you missed Trump’s address to Congress last night, I wouldn’t rely on media stories to explain it.
Rather than report on a speech viewers found “inspiring,” the corporate press played PR for Democrats.
Wanna know why trust in the press is underwater? Look. ⤵️
A @CBSNews poll of viewers found “A large majority of viewers approve” of Trump’s message, overwhelmingly describing it as “inspiring,” rather than “divisive.”
The speech was certainly partisan - and viewers skewed right.
But the press’s own view appears to slant their takes.
What leads me to claim that? Well, just look at how @CBSNews decided to report on the speech.
They tweeted out that “there was a horribly tense feeling,” and it was “filled with drama.”
Why focus on how their reporter felt, rather than viewers?
Having worked on the Hill I get the ubiquity of Politico Pro and its cost.
But I think it takes an enormous suspension of disbelief to call it a conspiracy theory to look askance at the millions of dollars the Biden admin paid the paper that ran this hatchet job on his opponent.
Which, to be clear, is exactly what outlets like @CNN are doing.
@CNN This from @axios seems particularly unreasonable.
It isn’t a “fake theory” to say that Politico is “funded by the government.” It is, to the tune of $8 million. That isn’t in dispute.
Quick 🧵 revisiting corporate media claims on the Covid lab leak theory then (a “conspiracy theory,” “misinformation,” etc.) vs. now (“okay the CIA even admits it”).