Our CA team has gone through every one of Harris's policies and evaluated them. There's stuff that will help people's lives (if carried out), a lot of mediocre half-measures, huge gaps, and some terrible things. But Trump is a nightmare on another level.
The differences between a Trump and Harris presidency: An unprecedented deportation program with armed ICE agents breaking down doors and tearing families from their homes in unfathomable numbers, total right-wing capture of the court system, ending every environmental protection
Workplace safety rules will be decimated (remember, the right doesn't believe you should have water breaks in the heat), Israel will be given a full green light to "resettle" Gaza, all federal efforts against climate change will cease, international treaties will be ripped up...
There will be a war on what remains of abortion rights (if you believe the right won't try to ban it federally you're the world's biggest sucker), protests will be ruthlessly cracked down on (with the military probably, as Tom Cotton advocated), journalists might be prosecuted...
Organized labor's progress will be massively set back, with Trump letting policy be dictated by billionaire psychopaths like Elon Musk who think workers are serfs. JD Vance endorsed a plan for a massive war on teachers' unions. Public health will be overseen by RFK antivaxxers...
If you think things cannot be worse, I would encourage you to expand your imagination. Trump is surrounded by foaming-at-the-mouth authoritarians who believe they are in a war for the soul of civilization and want to annihilate the left. I am terrified and you should be too.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The book JD Vance blurbed is truly deranged, praising Pinochet for throwing ppl out of helicopters, encouraging the Great Men of our time to exact eye-for-an-eye justice against the "communists," ban all teachers' unions, & quash "unhumans" with the methods of Franco / McCarthy
guys I think JD Vance might be a fascist...
It recommends using the "terror" tactics of Mao's China, publishing blacklists, and stopping the "squads of unhumans," saying reason must be discarded. Also warns you might be married to one of the "unhumans."
This is a remarkably soft way of reporting that the president is a serial liar of Santos-level proportions, having said he:
- was selected for the Naval Academy
- was arrested as a civil rights activist
- drove an 18-wheeler
- was the first in his family to go to college
he also claimed to have a scholarship he didn't have, to have a degree he didn't, to have been arrested on his way to see Nelson Mandela, to have been asked by Golda Meir to be her liaison to Egypt, to have gone to the Tree of Life synagogue, to have an uncle eaten by cannibals
I mean nobody cares because Trump is so much more full of shit that nothing matters anymore but it's crazy you can be a serially dishonest Santos type fabricator and yet be the one with "integrity"
it's going to take a while for Americans to fully realize the scale of the evil we're responsible for, if we ever do
That ISIS attack in Moscow seems like the most depraved, despicable thing human beings are capable of... and then I remember that the carnage we've created in Gaza is hundreds of times worse.
of course we reassure ourselves that there's an important moral difference, but that moral difference doesn't mean very much to the 8-year-old whose whole family is dead, does it?
Editorial board of Haaretz, Israel's leading newspaper, says Netanyahu himself is squarely responsible for the disaster, having ignored the potential consequences of escalating aggression toward Palestinians.
In other words, this is not some "fringe leftist Hamas-sympathizing" take, but what reasonable Israeli observers see quite clearly. Right-wing policies escalate the cycle of violence and make Israel less secure.
Somehow in 2023, Foreign Policy continues to publish defenses of the totally unjustifiable US atrocities against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The argument is bullshit, though many Americans refuse to believe their country would have committed a horrible crime. The idea is that Japan would not have surrendered ON OUR TERMS without the bombings, not that they would still have been a threat, which they weren't.
Interestingly, this FP article departs from the usual apologia because it does NOT say a bunch of Americans would have died in a land invasion. It says we would never have conducted such an invasion; we would just have starved the Japanese to death!
Exciting @curaffairs news! We've got a new project, the Biweekly News Briefing. It's a fun but comprehensive analysis of global events, delivered to your inbox twice weekly. It costs a small monthly fee (to pay for research) but the 1st one is free here: currentaffairs.substack.com/p/thursday-jun…
This is an experiment for us in doing things that are a little more topical. We need about 1,000 paid subscribers to sustain it at the quality it needs to have. You can get a two week free trial of it here: currentaffairs.substack.com/subscribe?coup…
It's frustratingly difficult these days to get good news analysis. So many sites are cluttered with ads, you're blocked by a dozen different paywalls. I've long wanted a comprehensive news digest that offers solid summaries of everything important. So we're trying to make one!