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David Roberts Profile picture
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23 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
In Virginia, Democrats suffered based on an image of progressives ginned up in right-wing media, which they did very little to counter. And they rejected the help of actual progressives. All indications are, they plan to double down on both mistakes.
nytimes.com/2021/11/21/us/… Image
All my life, the same dynamic: the right conjures up a bogeyman left; Dems try to counter it by shitting on the real left. Weirdly, it doesn't work. There was a brief break in this cycle around the election, but it's back with a vengeance.
If I were Dems I would simply build the kind of media & communications apparatus that can bypass the MSM filter & tell positive (& accurate) stories about Dem accomplishments & goals directly to voters, from voices they actually trust & through formats they actually consume.
I would also use that apparatus to (accurately) inform voters that Republicans are working to bring down US democracy.

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More from @drvolts

David Roberts Profile picture
23 Nov
Fascinating study. Rather than starting with a temperature target & modeling backward to determine what's needed, this study used multiple IAMs (models) to simply project ahead based on near-term policy & 2 assumptions about how it will evolve.
nature.com/articles/s4155…
Key: "Despite finding a wide range of emissions by 2050, nearly all the scenarios have median warming of less than 3 °C in 2100. However, the most optimistic scenario is still insufficient to limit global warming to 2 °C."
Seems the likeliest climate outcome is that we don't get enough warming to produce the apocalyptic scenarios activists like to conjure ... but also have millions more deaths, billions more in damages, & heaps more human suffering than was necessary.
Read 5 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
21 Nov
If you hire a bunch of people whose jobs & status depend on hyping & demonizing "wokeism," they will never run short of material. It's a giant, diverse country we live in -- you can tell *any* story with anecdotes if you invest enough energy.
Similarly, if every newspaper & cable channel hired reporters whose job was to find & elevate examples of routine racism denying certain people job opportunities or places to live or positions in prestigious professions, they too would have no shortage of material.
People in media hate admitting it, but they are not simply mirrors, documenting events. They make choices; they decide what's worth our attention, what *matters*.

They have decided that "wokeism" matters more than the still-ubiquitous baseline racism & sexism in the US.
Read 14 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
20 Nov
Doom. washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
Utter, absolute, multi-dimensional doom. nytimes.com/2021/11/17/opi…
That piece by @Edsall is great, but it's remarkable that, in thousands of words, neither he nor any of his contributors so much as *mention* the giant RW propaganda machine & the Dem lack of same. Like fish in water -- it's become so familiar we don't even note it.
Read 5 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
19 Nov
One side will have a unified message about the Rittenhouse verdict -- what it means, what it implies, what comes next -- and one side just won't. Like with everything else.
The Rittenhouse case is a cartoonishly clear signal that the right celebrates political violence and plans more.

Who is telling Americans that? Not Fox. Not CNN. Not Sinclair-owned local news. Not WSJ, not NYT. Not civic groups or churches, not the Dem Party.

Seriously: who?
I return to this question again & again. The right has built a giant machine that bypasses mainstream media to take lies & conspiracy theories direct to voters.

Who is doing the same to get *accurate* information to voters? Whose job is that?
Read 4 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
19 Nov
Give Republicans this: they're not dismantling democracy in secret. They're doing it right out in the open. nytimes.com/2021/11/19/us/…
Greg's right to identify this as the key move, but I think he & I disagree slightly on what's behind it.
I don't think Johnson (+ people like him) is consciously *lying* about believing that Dems cheat, as a pretense or something. I honestly think that credits him with too much intelligence & self-awareness. I think he believes Dems cheat because that's what he needs to believe.
Read 13 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
18 Nov
Imagine how utterly disorienting & infuriating it must be to have to *argue* to your colleagues that depictions of one colleague murdering another should be out of bounds.
"Why can't you take a joke?" is in the all-time abuser top 10. Everyone's who has ever been on the receiving end of an abusive relationship has heard it.
AOC has been physically menaced & cursed at by her own colleagues. They've organized harassment campaigns against her. They've aggressively refused to wear masks around her. They've defended an insurrectionist mob that threatened her & her colleagues' lives. None of that ...
Read 5 tweets

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