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Seth Cotlar Profile picture
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6 Jan, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Agree 100%. It was never surprising to me that GOP voters would like Trump. I was, however, mildly surprised by how quickly and completely most GOP elites accepted Trump’s baldly authoritarian behavior as a legitimate way to act as President.
In the summer of 2018 I wrote this. If you’d told me Jan 6 happened and most GOP electeds were not too upset about it, and some thought it was awesome, I would have scoffed. Image
Link to full piece. sethcotlar.medium.com/the-peaceful-t…
Five days before Jan 6 it was clear to me that, in a normally functioning constitutional democracy, Trump’s behavior as sitting President was impeachable.
The rapidity with which Freedom Caucus opponents of executive overreach like Mick Mulvaney became toad licking enablers of Trump’s cult of personality was shocking, even to a cynic like me.

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More from @SethCotlar

Seth Cotlar Profile picture
8 Jan
I watched a live stream of this very small event (maybe 100 people there?) and saw an "election fraud expert" tell an elaborate version of the big lie & call the Biden administration illegitimate. He then said he was part of the Oregon GOP's "election integrity project."
One of his "arguments" was that mail in ballots (an idea pushed by OR Republicans in the 1990s, often with Democratic opposition) was the reason why Republicans haven't been elected Governor in a long time. Uh huh.
He made several unsubstantiated claims about election fraud in Oregon, as if that's why Trump or the GOP/QAnon Senate candidate didn't win the election. So anyway, someone who claims to be working with the Oregon GOP "election integrity" project spoke at a Proud Boy rally today.
Read 8 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
7 Jan
There's a really important moment in this conversation between Michael Barbaro and Liz Cheney where Barbaro puts his finger on the larger problem with the political culture of the GOP and Cheney just totally dodges it. nytimes.com/2022/01/06/pod…?
Barbaro points out that Trump has been telling "the big lie" since before he was elected in 2016, with barely a peep from Liz Cheney. But then suddenly, after the 2020 election when he did what he'd been doing all along and what everyone knew he'd do, she's "shocked, shocked!" Image
The thing that Cheney (and the few remaining, reality-based Republicans) can't wrap their minds around is that the politicians are now the political arm of a Trump/Fox/Bannon/Breitbart/Daily Caller/Daily Wire/PragerU MAGA media complex.
Read 6 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
7 Jan
On Jan 6 last year, the official FB page run by the Cambria County PA Republican Party posted this statement about the violence. But the real action was in the comments... Image
If you still have FB for some silly reason, you can find them here. facebook.com/permalink.php?…
For example. As many people have said on here recently, the base is further radicalizing the already radicalized local GOP leaders, who are further radicalizing the state and national level party. Trump touched off a dangerous feedback loop of radicalization. ImageImageImageImage
Read 5 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
1 Jan
Just read an article about conservative students in Texas secretly taping their "subversive" professors who are trying to "brainwash" them. Same article talked about "middle class patriots" trying to ban books & control curriculum in public schools.
Article is from October 1964.
Here's the full article if you want to read it. It's a fascinating window into an earlier moment when the American far right was highly energized, especially at the local level. commentary.org/articles/willi…
The context for that story was the 1964 nomination of self-described "right wing extremist" Barry Goldwater as GOP candidate. A month after this piece was published Goldwater got shellacked by LBJ, thus creating the (false) impression that right wing extremism had been squashed.
Read 8 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
1 Jan
Democratic politics requires building coalitions.
Building coalitions requires compromise, patience, forbearance.
Social media is the space where much political organizing happens these days.
Social media fosters the exact opposite of compromise, patience, and forbearance.
Thanks for coming to my depressing-as-hell Ted Talk.
That said, "social media" is an ever changing thing that is not homogenous. It contains multitudes. It is not inevitable that "social media" will contribute to the collapse of democratic polities (such as they exist today).
Read 5 tweets
Seth Cotlar Profile picture
31 Dec 21
One of my first experiences of being swarmed by the angry fascist followers of a MAGA social media influencer involved this guy pointing them my way back in 2018. The swarm died down after I blocked a few hundred people (including him), but it was (and still is) pretty sobering.
Most of the fascist accounts I ended up blocking were not bots. They were MAGA accounts run by real people (though almost always hiding behind avatars) with between 5 and 30K real, angry followers who they knew they could weaponize just by saying the right words.
The majority of those trolls were pathetic keyboard warriors who just took pleasure in threatening a professor with violence, a good number of whom took particular pleasure in pointing out my Jewishness while wishing me harm.
Read 7 tweets

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