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David Frum Profile picture
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24 Jan, 13 tweets, 3 min read
Yoga employs more Americans than coal. But compare and contrast 1/2
and 2/2
I think many of us carry in our minds an image of the US economy that looks like this
when the reality is this
and this
and this
and this
and this
and this
Let's all resolve to live in the now

-END-
One more detail.
Pre-pandemic, solar installation employed some 240,000 Americans - 5x the number employed by coal seia.org/news/united-st…
Sorry, I can't seem to let this go ... one more point ...
Journalists are fascinated by the unexpected. What happened in 2016 was a surprise, so the people who did it drew disproportionate attention.

But surprises are surprising precisely because they are unusual.

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More from @davidfrum

David Frum Profile picture
19 Jan
On October 16 2020, a secondary school teacher named Samuel Paty was beheaded with a meat cleaver in the street of a small town 20 miles down the Seine from Paris. 1/x
Paty's murderer, a young Chechen refugee, had never met the teacher. The killer was incited to the crime by a multi-day campaign of defamation and disinformation on French social media. 2/x
For 5 years, Paty had taught his classes a unit on free speech and its limits in a democratic society. As part of the discussion, he showed his students some of the famous Charlie Hebdo cartoons - after inviting those who might be offended to leave and then rejoin the class. 3/x
Read 14 tweets
David Frum Profile picture
18 Jan
Completing my crash reading course on Haitian history with this excellent book on the two centuries *after* the drama of the war for independence. us.macmillan.com/books/97808050…
Aftershocks of History by @Soccerpolitics does a masterly job of summarizing the often dizzying tumult of Haitian political history - without being distracted from the slower movements of social history: issues of land, labor, status. 2/x
@Soccerpolitics It's grim reading reading on the role of foreign powers, first France, then the United States. In 1856, the US grabbed an island generally regarded as Haitian territory to help itself to guano supplies without paying for them. It's still a US territory. doi.gov/oia/islands/na…
Read 6 tweets
David Frum Profile picture
10 Jan
In October 2001, @tomfriedman wrote a powerful column about the many people in the Islamic world who reacted to the 9/11 attacks with a "yes, but" ... nytimes.com/2001/10/05/opi…
@tomfriedman For many years after that -until as recently as the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo - conservative commentators wondered, "where were the moderate imams who would deliver an unequivocal condemnation of terrorism with no buts, no what-abouts, no blame-shifting?" 2/x
And then you read a statement like this in 2021 by @marcorubio and you wonder ... 3/x
Read 4 tweets
David Frum Profile picture
8 Jan
In February 1981, pro-Franco army officers attacked the Spanish Parliament hoping to halt Spain's evolution toward democracy and liberalism. 1/x
The coup was soon suppressed, in large part because of a miscalculation by the dying Franco regime. In 1975, the regime had restored the old Spanish monarchy, hoping to glamorize authoritarianism. Instead, King Juan Carlos opposed the coup - and most of the army obeyed. 2/x
Here's where the story gets interesting for our current purposes ...

The coup launched to thwart Spain's shift to democracy instead consolidated Spanish democracy. The next year, 1982, social democrats won the biggest landslide in Spanish electoral history. 3/x
Read 15 tweets
David Frum Profile picture
8 Jan
US Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona was shot 9 years ago today. I wrote shortly afterward 1/x

edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/0…
But I warned in 2011, this anti-violence taboo was being corroded by leading right-wing voices - who were providing advance justification for political violence. 2/x edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/0…
President Trump relocated the permissions office for right-wing political violence from TV and radio to the West Wing. Pro-Trump talkers argue that most Trump supporters would never themselves engage in violence. Of course that's true. 3/x
Read 8 tweets
David Frum Profile picture
3 Jan
You're hearing a lot of talk about "irregularities" in the election of 1876 that led to a "disputed" outcome. What is being referred to in this hazy terms?
Across the state of South Carolina, white conservatives had used terror and massacre to deter former slaves from voting in 1876. Here's the story of an attack upon the small town of Hamburg in July blackpast.org/african-americ…
Hundreds of black South Carolinians were killed by white conservative militias. Blacks fought back in many places, but they were out-gunned.

The killings were not spontaneous outbursts. They were part of planned campaign of anti-black voter suppression.

ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/…
Read 10 tweets

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