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”
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I know there’s a lot going on but we just had a media conspiracy implode that I think captures something important about the corporate press.
Did you hear about how Trump was allegedly going after John Bolton as retribution for his criticism?
Well…follow along ⤵️
We saw a week straight of media suggestions that Trump was abusing the powers of the state to deal out “retribution” to John Bolton following the news that the FBI (“Trump’s DOJ!” headlines rang out) raided his house.
We were in “unsettling” times, to hear @nytimes tell it.
The *Editorial Board* at @nytimes put out an even more dramatic statement, asking who Trump’s next payback victim after Bolton would be.
A single poll has bootstrapped a media narrative that DC residents are outraged by Trump’s takeover.
I poked around the cross tabs of the poll — of 600 or so of DC’s more comfortable residents — and I think it’s pretty suspect.
How come? Follow along: ⤵️
Let’s start with the poll. The @washingtonpost talked to 604 people, of whom 90% — 90%! — self-described as living in “very good” or “good” neighborhoods.
So, fine. 80% of people who like where they live in DC are upset.
But even beyond that, it’s worth asking whether this poll really captures DC’s opinion.
In the poll, only 31% describe crime as a “serious” or “very serious” problem in DC.
When @washingtonpost asked this same question in May, *50%* said it was a serious problem.
I feel like I’m losing my mind about the Biden autopen pardons.
The former president said he made every decision. His staff says that he didn’t actually make the final call on thousands of them.
We’re supposed to treat this as normal?
I try to unpack. ⤵️
This got new life from a Biden interview w/ @nytimes.
NYT leads by repeating Biden’s claim that he made the calls…burying the admissions that 1) he really didn’t & 2) where he allegedly did, the aids sending details to the autopen weren’t in the room when the call was made…
…instead, they relied on what senior staff had allegedly heard, which was then passed along.
The piece ends with the revelation that Biden’s then-chief of staff gave the final sign off.
Given what the former admin has lied about, why should we trust this reporting of events?
The coverage of the anti-ICE riots in LA is perhaps the clearest example of advocacy “journalism” in Trump’s second term.
Reading the reporting, you would never know the most significant fact: the American people support Trump’s deportations.
Follow along ⤵️
First, the facts about the riots.
You’ve seen the burning cars, looting & clashes between police & protestors.
Demonstrators blocked the freeway, attacked ICE agents, all in an effort to prevent the deportations of illegal aliens. Trump deployed troops to allow ICE to operate.
As @MarkHalperin and @seanspicer discussed, the situation in LA is so tranquil that the mayor has instituted a curfew for the city.
The new book “Original Sin” from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson recounts the effort to cover up Biden’s cognitive decline ahead of the election. The authors point to many guilty parties.
The one glaring omission? Their colleagues in the corporate press. Follow along ⤵️
There are numerous dramatic reveals. The Biden team considered condoning him to a wheelchair? Maybe in his fog he forgot about the border?
But as I worked on a review for @commonplc, the one thought that I kept coming back to was that you can’t tell this story without the press.
Perhaps no one was more vital to the continued fiction that Biden had it together than the media.
Tapper and Thompson even highlight some of the telling moments.
Biden’s cancer diagnosis is a tragedy I know first-hand.
But our sympathy can’t silence questions about Biden’s cognitive decline, clarified just days ago by the Hur tape.
The media tried to bury the story then. They’re trying again now.
I’ve got the receipts. ⤵️
When the report first came out in 2024, outlets rushed to demean Hur, accusing him of serving as a Republican hatchet man.
Just look at this take from @USATODAY, who assembled sympathetic voices to make the case that Hur “crossed the line.” They found an expert to call it a “disgrace” and then featured the obviously unbiased Eric Holder to lead a section titled “Way too many gratuitous remarks.”
The audio makes clear that Hur, if anything, played down how alarming the claims were.
(If you haven’t listened to the Hur audio yet, you should.)