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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Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter says an enormous amount about the president’s views of justice.
But it also says a lot about the willingness of the mainstream media—the nation’s noble fact checking corps—to repeat bogus claims that suit Democrats.
Remember? ⤵️
For starters, let’s revisit the coverage of how Biden wouldn’t do what he just did.
Biden said he wouldn’t pardon his son, no way. He would trust our legal system.
The media repeated it at every turn, without a shred of incredulity.
Here’s @washingtonpost
Seemingly every outlet did the same. @CNN had a couple of my favorites.
Look at the lede in on this first one.
The media’s job isn’t to simply repeat what politicians tell them. Whatever happened to “defenders of our democracy” and all that?
The news that MSNBC may soon have a new owner (and that it might be a certain X power user) compelled me to finally open my “MSNBC conspiracy theories” screenshot folder and, woo boy, there are a lot.
If you’d like to revisit them, buckle up, and follow along. ⤵️
There’s nowhere better to start than with Russiagate.
Do you remember the promotion from @chrislhayes, @MalcolmNance, @maddow and others at @MSNBC that perhaps Donald Trump was a Russian agent?
I, for one, will not be forgetting.
But there was plenty of other insanity from the gang at MSNBC about Russiagate.
Here are just a couple.
The first seems apropos with Trump again picking a cabinet.
Whatever happened to Harris and Biden’s “strongest economy ever” that the media spent so much time hyping up in the lead up to the election?
I revisit the claims, and explain why they were off the mark about the economy all along, in my latest @AmerCompass.
Quick🧵thread🧵⤵️
It can be easy, in the wake of an election, to forget just how dominant a media narrative was.
One that’s already fading from view was how “great” the economy was, and why it would benefit Harris on Election Day. americancompass.org/its-still-the-…
As a refresher, check out this headline from @axios about the data.
@YahooFinance upgraded Biden’s economic grade to an A. That captures the press sentiment at the time quite well.
In recent days, the mainstream media has taken nakedly ridiculous claims about the tattoos of @PeteHegseth, Trump’s SecDef nominee, to spin up a story alleging he’s an extremist.
It’s an egregious example of politically driven “journalism.” I unpack why. ⤵️
The story really started with @AP, who ran an article claiming that two tattoos that @PeteHegseth has have ties to extremism, citing an extremely thin (and downright suspect) report.
They used that to label him a potential “insider threat” in their headline.
It wasn’t until 3 paragraphs in that a reader was told what that claim rested on: a tattoo of a Latin phrase. They’d go on to mention “concerns” about a cross tattoo as well.
Would be great if Trump’s unconventional picks for his cabinet inspire the media to consider a nominee’s credentials.
They might want to look at the current HHS Secretary, Xavier Becerra, who brings to the table the medical experience of being in Congress for 12 terms.
Or perhaps Obama’s former HHS Secretary, Sylvia Matthews Burwell, who had just finished her stint lobbying for Walmart.
Or Donna Shalala, Clinton’s former head of HHS, whose credentials were as a university administrator and feminist.