New, from me: there is a concerted effort to deny and obscure the meaning of January 6th. In this piece, I examine the different flavors of January 6th revisionism and explain why it matters. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/little-big-l…
January 6th revisionist flavor #1. Tone policing: it wasn’t an “insurrection” or a coup, or a mob, or terrorists, or a riot etc…
January 6th revisionist flavor #2.
Whataboutism: What about Dick Cheney—he was a bad guy and is commerating January 6th? Seems bad. What about George Floyd protests? donmoynihan.substack.com/p/little-big-l…
January 6th revisionist flavor #3: Leftists protest all the time, what’s the big deal? Why should we focus on one particular protest at the Capitol? donmoynihan.substack.com/p/little-big-l…
January 6th revisionist flavor #4: Just calm down, you are being hysterical (and its actually the Dems who are rigging elections)
January 6th revisionist flavor #5:
It was an inside job! A false flag! What are you hiding?
January 6th revisionist flavor #6:
The true victims are the protestors. We should support them against a totalitarian state.
January 6th revisionist flavor #7: Attempts to overthrow elections should not be politicized. Please stop talking about them in divisive terms! donmoynihan.substack.com/p/little-big-l…
January 6th revisionist flavor #8: Anti-elitism.
The herrenvolk don’t care about this despite the best efforts of DC and media elites. (Bonus point if you are a Governor or Senator or media elite saying this)
Any major political event will be contested and subject to re-evaluation. But the tell among the January 6th revisionists is an unwillingness to acknowledge the basic facts of what happened and its implications for American democracy.
The January 6th revisionism was predictable and predicted. Here is Jake Tapper on January 6th itself saying the politicians who were involved would try to whitewash what happened. But the revisionism is much broader than those few, incorporating most of the right-wing media.
We have learned a lot since Jan 6th. To the extent that a revisionist perspective is needed it is that we saw it too narrowly at the time. The images of rioting and looting helped us miss the greater dangers were happening behind the scenes and which are driving current policy.
I'm not saying that people have to treat January 6th as 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. You merely need to believe that US political elites should take it as seriously as they did Benghazi. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/little-big-l…
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The connections are pretty clear. Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society helped bankroll the work of Ginni Thomas. He also arranged for Clarence Thomas to attend Koch fundraisers. propublica.org/article/claren…
The shared purpose of Leonard Leo, Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas and the Koch network was to put right-wing judges on the court. And Clarence Thomas used his public position on the court to raise money for that.
Clarence Thomas used to support the Chevron doctrine, which allows delegation to administrative expertise. But the people who fund the Koch network can't buy off administrators, so they want to remove their influence from the process. Now Thomas agrees with the donors.
Also this guy: young people today can't afford a house because they occasionally buy new clothes
If the people @FinancialReview care for free speech at all, they will do the decent thing and allow replies to this tweet, allowing a full and frank exchange of views.
America has 22 times the firearm homicide rates as the European Union.
We are less safe and less free because of how available guns are in this country. healthdata.org/news-events/in…
America makes up about 15% of gun homicides, and together with five other countries constitutes half of gun homicides in the world. vox.com/2018/8/29/1779…
The reason more people in America are dying from guns is because there are more guns in America.
America is the only country with more guns than people. cnn.com/2021/11/26/wor…
New, from me: I wrote about how the emerging debacle at New College (one-third of faculty gone, students can't find classes, housed in airport hotels) reflects the incompetence of populists like DeSantis.
Competence, the ability to perform organizational core tasks, is an underrated quality. It is an especially overlooked quality by people who value other things, like ideological goals, or believe that existing institutions are corrupt, or who have never actually run things.
Fuck Around (left, celebrating the firing of a faculty who criticized the Regents)
and
Find Out: (right, soliciting faculty applications because you don't have enough to teach classes - one-third have left for some reason).
The DeSantis takeover of New College was meant to offer a model of a conservative-run higher ed.
The result is chaos, which is what happens when incompetent people who don't actually care about organizational mission take over public services. insidehighered.com/news/students/…
The NY Times recently featured Chris Rufo to explain how DEI was undermining liberal education.
You know what actually undermines a liberal education?
Losing one-third of faculty.
Not offering core classes to students.
Raging incompetence and blind indifference.
Rufo is seeking to personally recruit replacements. Which is completely at odds with what university trustees are supposed to do. No way that could go wrong, right?
From the internal Texas A&M reports: it was A&M Regents who signaled their opposition to McElroy, at which point the university figured out they would not tenure her.
Seems like the Regents cost A&M $1M. Nice job.
: ... tamus.edu/wp-content/up
Not great when a university President is saying "I'm assuming all texts were deleted" and then tells faculty she was not involved in hiring process. (She has since resigned).