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Sean T at RCP Profile picture
@SeanTrende
Jan 29, 2025 • 9 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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The move to allow podcasters and bloggers into the Press Corps is part of a broader shift on the Right, that really starts with @elonmusk's acquisition of X. Before that, when conservatives complained about bias and censorship on social media, the left/lib response 1/
was "well go ahead and build your own social media site." Which everyone knew was very difficult. And then there would be moves to get whoever hosted the new site to refuse to host it and the response would be "well build your own hosting platform" and so forth. 2/
Musk's acquisition of Twitter/X really looks increasingly like an important turning point in the conservative approach, which in the face of this became "well what can you do?" It was a realization "no, actually we can take these institutions and make them ours." 3/
And what you're increasingly seeing is a frontal assault on the institutions that buttress the left. So in Trump's first term, using a (pretty shaky, imo) interpretation of the 1st Amendment, we established you can't kick a reporter out for his bias. 4/
The Right's response now is "ok, fine, we'll just flood the press corps with new right-of-center podcasters and bloggers. Give your statue of liberty speech in a room full of Alex Berensons and catturds and see how it goes over." 5/
You saw trickles of it with academia with moves on tenure in WI, but it's a war in FL. "You won't voluntarily diversify your faculty ideologically? We'll do it for you, and in a far more severe way in the other direction." 6/
"And the diversity apparatus that we think is a cloak for hiring a bunch of far-left professors? That's simply gone." 7/
"We can't fire unfriendly civil servants? Fine, but we're not going to roll over either. We're going to make life as miserable for them as possible and give them every possible incentive to leave." 8/
In other words, there's just a monumental shift in attitude in dealing with unfriendly institutions on the Right, and I think in all the trees sprouting up everywhere it's really easy to lose sight of the forest being built. 9/9

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More from @SeanTrende

Sean T at RCP Profile picture
Jun 30
Before going on the Court, Barrett had an influential article to the effect of "How do you do originalism after 100 years of a non- or anti-originalist Court?" Not the actual title. Slaughter (and the tariffs case) illustrates the difficulty of this dilemma nicely. 1/
Slaughter seems, on its face, obviously correct, and more-or-less consistent with the way the Court interpreted the law through 1930. The executive gets to oversee implementation of laws, and gets to oversee personnel in the executive branch. 2/
Except where the Constitution limits the exec. by requiring Senate approval. And people sort of understood the idea that one of the dangers of expanding the federal government's powers was that the executive would implement it; he became more powerful as well. 3/
Read 15 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
Jun 11
So I thought it was sufficiently clear from the first sentence that I don't buy into the LA fraud story, but apparently not. I don't, which means there's not much interesting to say about it, but I do have one important thing on the Washington Times story and its statistics. 1/
Almost all statistical analysis you'll see in popular print has an assumption embedded that you're sampling evenly from the same distribution. Think of it this way: If you're doing a poll of Texas, you only want to poll Texans. If you accidentally mix in people from RI, 2/
You're mixing in apples and oranges. Most of our math follows from this. Or, if you want to get more basic about it, we assume you're sampling from a bag of skittles, where things are more-or-less random, not from a Snickers bar. 3/
Read 11 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
May 19
Given that @jaycost and I are doing a presidential ratings podcast (among other things -- check out @aei_STpodcast!), I hate to get ahead of myself but: FDR is genuinely a God Tier president. I say this as someone libertarian-ish, so I don't really *want* to. But it's true. 1/
People underestimate how grim things were on March 4, 1933. The Depression wasn't a single event: It was a slow moving cascade of disasters, with plateus in between. 1932 was a sort of plateau, until the end, when another series of bank failures hit. 2/
This was probably the worst of them. Other crises like late '30, early '31-'32, were bad, but this one was nationwide and catastrophic. Understand this: ***When FDR took over, the financial collapse was accelerating***. After we'd already lost a quarter of GDP. 3/
Read 16 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
Sep 25, 2025
I read @chrislhayes "Twilight of the Elites" book for an upcoming book project and it's extremely good -- it is a shame it was overlooked. One concept from it hit hard: The idea of fractal success. There may be a few overachievers in my timeline so read on. Hayes idea grows 1/
from a trip to Davos.He relates that when you go, you're excited to be among the movers and shakers, and you get off the plane and you're greeted by nice people who give you swag and escort you to your bus that takes you into the Swiss mountains. But as you deplane you notice 2/
there's another group who flew first class. They get greeted by people in red coats, and get escorted to private cars. Suddenly, you aren't so special. Later you learn that there was another, smaller tier above them, who come in on private jets and take helicopter rides. 3/
Read 10 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
Feb 8, 2025
People are going to react strongly to this comparison, so I really do mean this narrowly. But when you read about first 100 days of the New Deal, you hear about Congress just being totally overwhelmed with new legislation and orders, things being broken or rebuilt every day. 1/
I wonder if the sense was the same as we are feeling today (and yes, a lot of people ((mostly) Southern) Democrats and Republicans alike, were concerned FDR was trying to make himself a dictator). That's not (at all) to predict this will be as successful as the New Deal 2/
or that it will be remembered nearly as fondly. That's just the only time I can think of where so many things have been blown up so radically quickly in politics. 3/3
Read 5 tweets
Sean T at RCP Profile picture
Jan 21, 2025
To understand the Right re J6: They believe that the reason the dividing line between J6 getting prosecuted and, say, Portland rioters not is because norms are set by liberals to protect liberal ingroups while allowing the prosecution of outgroups. 1/
This is also the dividing line between Trumpy populists and GOP establishment types; the latter says "well we should prosecute the goons in OR too" while the former says that is hopelessly naive bc, again, the lines are set by liberals to protect their ingroups. 2/
This isn't a defense of the populists at all. This is just to explain the "burn it down" mindset: "it" is a rigged game with rules set by liberals. If this sounds like left critiques of the past decade, well, it's why we're getting this horseshoe effect of, say, RFK & Trump. 3/3
Read 5 tweets

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