Van Jones: “Democrats are coming across as annoying and offensive and out-of-touch. I think there is a message here.”
Anderson Cooper. “It seems annoying to a lot of people”
The Democratic Party has become “moralizing” and “self-righteous” agree @davidaxelrod & @VanJones68
“Voters are being brow-beaten in being told they’re voting for racists. People do not believe that about themselves and do not believe that America is full of the hateful kind of people that McAuliffe & Biden told us Virginia was full of”
“Moderate Democrats feel put down by pundits & progressives when they express an opinion that maybe schools should open, teachers should listen to parents, or Joe Manchin has a point when he says 1.7 trillion is a lot of money. They don’t want to be insulted by progressives”
The elections were a repudiation of the progressive agenda across the country
A lot of people were shocked by how badly Democrats lost in Tuesday's elections, but many had warned that progressives were out of touch with the electorate. Why didn't the Democrats listen?
Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, progressives have argued that taking back power required Democrats to move Left, aggressively confront structural racism, and stand firmly with the teachers’ unions, environmentalists, and criminal justice reformers.
But the election of a Republican as governor of Virginia, the election of Republicans in NY & NJ, and the repudiation of progressives in Seattle & Minneapolis on criminal justice, suggest that voters are turning against progressives on race, education, and crime.
Paul Krugman says voters shouldn’t be mad at Biden because he has no control over the price of gasoline, but that’s absurd: the US is the world’s largest producer of oil; Biden froze new oil/ gas leases in January; and he may open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower prices.
It’s true that part of the reason that the US is not producing more oil and gas is because the sector expanded too quickly between 2010-2015, and US firms since have been wary to invest in new production.
But oil prices rose after 2015 & we did not see more investment
There are still people who say nuclear energy has no future but China just announced it will spend nearly a half trillion dollars building 150 new reactors over the next 15 years. That’s more than the rest of the world has built over the last 35 years. bloomberg.com/news/features/…
Nuclear is much, much more important than climate change, as I argue in a major new piece for @unherd
- Emissions in Europe & US in 2020 were 26% and 22% below 1990 levels
In the last 15 months, HarperCollins has published two, 400+ page, thoroughly-researched books by me, each with 1,200+ endnotes. You might not agree with them, but if you haven’t read them, you have no business accusing me of cherry-picking evidence.
I tweet 280 characters. I write op-eds 900 words long, publish Substacks 2,500 words long, and write books 115,000 to 140,000 words long.
Don’t read a tweet or skim a Substack and then accuse me of not being comprehensive.
My books are comprehensive. It’s why I write them.
I do 3-minute TV segments and 3 hour long podcasts. Don’t complain about the things I left out of 3 minutes. Almost everything is left out of 3 minutes. Even 3 hours isn’t very long.
If you want comprehensive, thorough, and balanced, please, read the books.
Glide is a major homeless service provider. It received $4.8M from San Francisco in 2020. Its head of harm reduction said, “People have used [fentanyl] for years and not come to harm. We can’t be shaming, stigmatizing, sensationalizing."
I love HBO comedian @iamjohnoliver but last night he repeated myths about homelessness including that it is caused primarily by lack of housing, that it causes addiction more than the other way around, and that the solution "Housing First."
In a 25-minute segment last night Oliver attributed homelessness to poverty, high rents, and lack of housing. Oliver showed interviews with homeless people who say they would like to work full-time but are unable to do so because they have to live in homeless shelters.
Unfortunately, Oliver repeated many myths. The vast majority of people we call “homeless” are suffering from untreated mental illness and/or addiction and it led them to lose their job, housing, and family ties.