Matthew Sheffield Profile picture
Nov 8, 2020 11 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Joe Biden's first speech since his unofficial victory struck lots of the correct notes. We need unity and healing but it must be done correctly to work. Here's the link to the video and transcript if you missed it: npr.org/sections/live-…
The most important step in healing is to understand that the Trump/GOP coalition is not monolithic. And also, he should understand that the GOP elite does not act in good faith. Their goal is to do nothing.
Mitch McConnell figured out years ago that Americans don't support conservative economic or governmental views.

So instead of trying to pass laws to make that happen, his goal was to stop laws and use courts to push his agenda. I wrote about this in 2018 salon.com/2018/02/07/mit…
This is critical because even GOP voters don't support slashing the government the way that conservatives want. I know because I used to be a pollster.

Here's what I found: thehill.com/hilltv/what-am… Image
The key to national healing will be for Biden to separate Republican voters from Republican elites. This means that he MUST call out the Republicans for never presenting policies. This must be a DAILY exercise by his White House.
Republican voters don't know that the healthcare bill that Trump nearly signed in 2017 would have effectively removed pre-existing conditions protections from Obamacare.

They don't know that the GOP wants to take away Medicaid expansion from the millions who now have it.
Democrats were not paying attention as the GOP built a multi-billion-dollar parallel reality machine to ensnare religious people to manipulate them. This "Matrix" of media must be crushed through direct confrontation and accountability.
Even now, most mainstream media reporters and editors just don't know all-encompassing the conservative media panopticon really is.

RW media literally are claiming that Trump is going to win, even now:
One of the biggest things I am going to be doing in the months and years ahead will be to expose just how little conservative media figures know about politics.

When they're on cable news panels, their manipulative ignorance isn't called out.
Quite literally, US conservative politics has become an identity and a religion. The only way to free people from the delusion is outreach that fights the lies where they happen.

But I will need millions of people to help with this. Please spread the word! Thanks so much!
PS: One of the other things I want to do is expose how predatory the right-wing ecosystem is on its marks. They literally have no problem helping scam artists cheat elderly people out of their retirement savings: thebaffler.com/salvos/the-lon…

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More from @mattsheffield

Apr 6
Flashback lol of the day: Trump's top tariff adviser Peter Navarro made up a LARP of himself named "Ron Vara" which he repeatedly quoted in multiple books.

He even gave himself fictionalized biographical details, including being an Iraq war veteran. cnn.com/2019/10/16/pol…
Peter Navarro is such a crackpot that he has to literally invent economists who agree with him because everyone thinks he's insane.

This is who Donald Trump thinks is smart.
And btw, after Navarro was exposed for citing a fictionalized version of himself, he went and did it again, making up an email address for Ron Vara and circulating a memo during the first Trump term nytimes.com/2019/12/11/us/…
Read 4 tweets
Apr 3
🧵Carl Sagan wasn't religious, but he was still a prophet.

Working together, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and countless aids built the greatest diplomatic and economic structure the world has ever seen. This enraged religious fundamentalists.

Humanity was headed for the stars. But not on religious literalism's terms.

The Christian right rallied and began tearing at American greatness while blaming others for their actions.

Carl Sagan saw them coming.
Education investment and regulation was stopped. Superstition was enshrined in schools. Instead of covering health care and adding job guarantees, extreme Republicans cut welfare and outsourced jobs.

The far right created almost all the problems Trump voters are angry about.
Read 14 tweets
Mar 17
🧵 Republican hatred of Democrats and of separation of church and state has significantly damaged political polling because reactionary Americans are willing to lie about their opinions if they think it helps Trump.

This fact has serious implications for Democrats...
I've written about how Republican voters now evince NPC-level responses to political polls. We're seeing that in particular with how Trump followers falsely thought the economy was in recession during Joe Biden's presidency, only to drastically reverse themselves under Trump Image
Image
In academic political science, there have now been several studies about "expressive responding" among committed Republicans, especially regarding Trump's obvious lies about his 2017 inauguration crowd size online.ucpress.edu/collabra/artic…
Read 13 tweets
Feb 2
🧵 The world is on fire. Chaos reigns.

Why is this happening? Primarily because fundamentalist Christianity has become an undead intellectual zombie.

What's even more bizarre and grotesque, however, is that Trumpian Christianity is much more about Nietzsche than Jesus.
Most contemporary fundagelical Christians have never heard of Friedrich Nietzsche, the profane atheist philosopher who died at the beginning of the 20th century. But his ideas are at the epicenter of the fascist Christianity they have embraced.
plus.flux.community/p/the-apocalyp…
Living at the cusp of modernity, Nietzsche saw earlier than most that science and philosophy had totally destroyed Christianity's moral and scientific claims. "God is dead," he proclaimed, eager to establish a new morality based on power.
Read 12 tweets
Nov 6, 2024
🧵 The election is going to be decided by people who don't like the candidates. Donald Trump always had a core of voters who don't like him but vote for him anyway.

It seems that the Harris campaign wanted to build a group of this kind for herself.
But the two parties' possible voter universes are not the same and cannot be motivated with the exact same tactics.

Historically, speaking, American political parties were multi-ideological. But the right wing activists who took over the Republicans changed the party.
They changed the nature of who was in the party. As the inventors of cancel culture, they kicked out all of the liberal and moderate Republicans who used to be very common.

They did this through relentless media propaganda aimed at Republicans to make them more reactionary.
Read 22 tweets
Nov 4, 2024
🧵 After 9 long years, it's starting to look like Donald Trump has become overexposed to his fans.

Democrats have been significantly more enthused since Kamala Harris entered the race than Republicans have.

In a base turnout election, Trump loses. Image
Trump lost in 2020 because he failed to get some of his 2016 voters to come back to support him. You can slice who these people were, but demographically it was primarily white men. Trump improved his share among most other demographic groups.
These former voters either chose to vote for Joe Biden or they stayed home.

In 2024, he is trying to bring them back but Trump has not modified his message really at all. So why would they return?

As the race ends, Trump is playing to empty seats
Read 21 tweets

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