This thing that right-wing opinion leaders and media outlets have aggressively mischaracterized and mislabeled for nearly a year must be real, because people nowadays keep talking about it! Image
“We didn’t start the fire,” he said, holding a jerry can and a match.
Imagine someone applying the same logic to Havana syndrome, or the lab-leak theory: “people talk about it now, so it must be real.”

People would look at someone who made such arguments with a straight face as if they were mad. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
I could go on, but honestly I would just be recapitulating this thread by @drvolts. It describes the backdrop of today’s effort to legitimize the ‘critical race theory’ moral panic — white, reactionary epistemic hegemony — with absolute clarity.

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More from @ggreeneva

7 Nov
There was a term in usage in my home state, Alabama, before my time — a term for people seen as too concerned with the rights of people on society’s margins.

That term was “n––er lover,” if you wonder.

Anyhow: that’s what comes to mind when I hear “are Democrats too woke?”
Am I saying anyone using “woke” as a pejorative might as well be using the N-word? No.

What I _am_ saying is that this article on America’s penchant for reactionary backlash is spot on — and with the words “too woke,” one identifies oneself with the latest backlash.
But don’t just take my word about this.
Read 6 tweets
3 Nov
“We were so willing to take seriously a global pandemic, but we’re not willing to say, ‘Yeah, inflation is a problem, and supply chain is a problem, and we don’t have enough workers in our work force.’”

Okay, Rep. Spanberger: let me name a concern or two. nytimes.com/2021/11/03/us/…
Thing #1: Can we name what Dems in the WH and Congress should have done to immediately solve the chip shortage?

Hell: part of the shortage results from the failure of Texas to keep the lights on last winter, ruining countless chips in mid-production. Biden’s fault? How?
Thing #2: A huge purpose of the Build Back Better agenda is to help people get back into the work force by providing crucial supports: child care, home care, and so on.

Maybe it’s a better use of a Dem representative’s time to lay into the Dems on the Hill blocking that?
Read 6 tweets
3 Nov
I hate that it may have taken a shocking election night to make this happen—but better now than never.
To give myself as much grief as I dole out: I should have taken more seriously the point I made, late last year, about the need for people to see amends made after a hellish 2020.

BBB is not some giveaway. It’s an apology for the failure to provide a functioning nation-state.
That’s how it needs to be designed, at least.

@zachdcarter nails this in a piece he’s adapted for the Atlantic. Public-health arguments for keeping schools closed for much of 2020 were sound — but the results were punishing & traumatic. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Read 8 tweets
3 Nov
It seems seems strange, TBH, to expect voters to make the GOP pay a price for Trump or Jan. 6 when Democrats in government seem sluggish — if not outright diffident and unenthused — about extracting one. How many months did the party blow seeking a bipartisan 1/6 panel, again?
How many months did Dems in Congress fritter away seeking Republican stewardship of an investigation into their own party, which precipated 1/6? How many leading Dems have offered — still offer — paeans to bipartisan cooperation with the GOP, the party of Trump and 1/6?
How many times have leading Democratic figures openly asked for a “strong Republican Party”?

Why should voters see the need to hold the GOP accountable, if Dems stress the need to work with them?
Read 4 tweets
3 Nov
Like I said this AM, McAuliffe swept a field of hopefuls to his left— including a real-deal democratic socialist. The party fell into line, as it reliably has in Virginia for as long as I’ve lived here.

Whatever happened tonight, don’t put it on progressives. It ain’t our doing.
“Tugged too far to the left” by … spending seven months courting Joe Manchin? Ending a war the country had already lost? How, exactly?
Read 4 tweets
3 Nov
I’ve been talking w/ @MelissaRyan about this: a lesson top Dems need to learn, pronto, is that the campaign is not the campaign.

The talk of schools wracked by CRT & trans rights run wild traveled mostly through Fox & other right-wing outlets — not from Youngkin himself.
What Youngkin and the Va. GOP did this year is a light update of the Trump playbook: floating and propelling a storyline that meshes with the candidate’s narrative (‘her emails’), and relying on the use of official/gov’t platforms (see, e.g., the below) … vox.com/2015/9/30/9423…
… partisan media orgs, and stochastic outrage to perpetuate that storyline without a campaign spending heavily for paid media to put that storyline across.
Read 8 tweets

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