Ok, so, having read this, I’m not really persuaded there’s a lot of “there” there.

The biggest concrete takeaway from the evidence presented is that @yuhline’s family is rich - which is something I didn’t realize about her & that I’m not a fan of.

But the rest is… vague?

https://twitter.com/willbredderman/status/1557366385055092737

There’s a lot of National Security Think Tank types quoted in the article putting up a lot of smoke about @yuhline’s parents working in senior roles at a Chinese state-owned superconductor company.

The intent seems to be to Red Bait somehow or question her patriotism.

The other thing I’ll say about fundraising is that YES it is TRUE that the candidates taking corporate money will always outspend grassroots challengers.

But money has diminishing returns, & those first fundraising thresholds are VERY important & impactful. The difference between raising $10k and $100k is the difference between being just a name on a ballot & actually having a campaign operation.

The difference between $100k-$250k is suddenly being able to afford to do a bunch of rounds of mailers & digital ads.

More candidate documentaries should show the candidate spending hours and hours doing call-time asking everyone they have ever met in their life to give them $200.

https://twitter.com/Vedthalegend/status/1557186466350092288

“Hey! Yeah, it’s me… we hooked up a couple years ago and I ghosted you. Anyway I’m running for Congress! Yeah, as a progressive. We have a big deadline coming up and we’re up against huge corporate super pac spending. Can you chip in $200 to support our movement?”

I think it is simultaneously true that:

1) playing whack-a-mole with various pipelines & FF infrastructure projects was never going to meaningfully make a dent in carbon emissions, even if successful

2) these campaigns’ primary virtue was the created lots of climate activists

https://twitter.com/philaroneanu/status/1557047897941856259

It’s important to remember key context that past top-down technocratic climate attempts like Kyoto failed in part because they failed to incorporate the needs & priorities of frontline, Indigenous, & poor Black & brown people, who revolted against deals that screwed them over.

People are dunking on that NYT profile of reactionary converts to Catholicism, because it’s a “phenomenon” consisting of just a few people.

But it’s also true lots of subcultures that get alot of attention as a Big Important Trend are really just a handful of people in practice. Beatniks were, like, 5 writer dudes who made friends at Columbia.

The Harlem Rennaisance was maybe 50 people who regularly went to this one rich lady’s parties.

Elites get cultural attention disproportionate to their numbers, because they are elites.

I understand what pointing this out is doing, but I also think it’s been very unhelpful for democratic norms long-term that we’ve created a dynamic where only Republicans are allowed to head law enforcement agencies, be Special Councils, etc that investigate Republicans.

https://twitter.com/SawyerHackett/status/1556782928235053059

It should be seen as perfectly legitimate for the people in nonpartisan positions enforcing the law (or in highly politicized positions conducting oversight for that matter!) to be Democrats, Democratic-appointees, or dare I say it Progressives.

Dems need to stop being cowards.

With respect to @JaredHuffman, disagree.

It was nearly the entire Democratic caucus, led by leadership, and urged on by the President himself, that went along with the hostage-taking corporate saboteurs who demanded we give up the primary leverage we had over Manchin: BIF.

https://twitter.com/SiegelScribe/status/1547759830697328641

It was the Democrats, led by leadership, who have consistently raised money for and endorsed the very people who have sabotaged our future and condemned us to immense suffering, while attacking and dismissing the countless ordinary people working to prevent this catastrophe.

Congrats to the “unbreakable nine” House Democrats whose selfishness destroyed our greatest chance to prevent immense, escalating suffering from climate change. Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Carolyn Bourdeaux (GA, Filemon Vela (TX), Jared Golden (ME), Henry Cuellar (TX), Vicente Gonzalez (TX), Ed Case (HI), Jim Costa (CA) & Kurt Schrader (OR) got what they wanted - the destruction of the entire Democratic agenda, in exchange for a highway bill.

I’ve also never forgotten a piece I read in the Atlantic years ago, interviewing a coal miner to ask why people want to be coal miners if it’s such a shitty job, and the response was that it provides access to masculine dignity & respect to people who otherwise can’t get it.

https://twitter.com/bszern/status/1547002236169076739

It’s harder than it once was to be a traditional masculine single-breadwinner for a family, without a college degree.

It’s no coincidence that two of the careers that still offer that mode of existence - the military & the police - are so attractive for those who seek that.

It’s a bit besides the point, but one of the things I find frustrating about the High School Football Coach who makes his players pray is that I think it’s ridiculous that public education tax dollars go towards hiring football coaches in the first place. And more broadly, this frustration is a great example about how a lot of policy choices were made 60-80 years ago which have profoundly reshaped the structure of American society for the worse, but in a bunch of way that are interlocking & therefore hard to undo.

I think this should be a 2 alarm 🚨 🚨fire for national Dems.

Fung has high name recognition, & Rhode Island’s southern CD is more heterodox than you’d expect on paper.

This is a potential GOP reach pick-up seat, & worth groups keeping an eye on, in my professional opinion.

https://twitter.com/TedNesi/status/1541448015529009152

Some noteworthy context in light with the national GOP fearmongering about “CRT” and homophobic “groomers” narrative, the district had a prominent scandal recently where a high school basketball coach was sexually preying upon his male players. GOP activists trying to exploit it.

I think de-growth in the abstract makes some true observations (eg, Earth’s carrying capacity is finite).

My problem is that, in practice, every adherent I’ve encountered mostly invokes de-growth in order to defend their own high-carbon suburban lifestyle & oppose density.

https://twitter.com/Matthuber78/status/1541413406217015296

Taking finite limitations of Earth’s carrying capacity serious, while also opposing massive, extractive inequalities between industrialized countries & the global south, requires a relentless focus on efficiency & therefore transforming society to reduce per-capita emissions.

It’s shameless the extent to which the GOP majority straight-up lies about the facts of the case.

This coach didn’t pray “quietly,” “in private.”

He exploited his position of authority granted to him by the state, while he was on duty, to pressure students to pray with him.

https://twitter.com/mjs_dc/status/1541421622766215172

The whole reason his case even became an issue was because students felt uncomfortable and complained.

There’s a form of Anarchist that believes we need to build networks independent from the government to meet people’s needs the government is failing, & then there’s another form of Anarchist that just seems to hate structure & goes around telling people not to join organizations. Every problem we face right now stems from the fact that we are too disconnected from each her, too disorganized & incapable of taking collective action.

Social media has created a mirage, where people think you can tweet “protest!” & thousands of people will go in the streets.

The dissonance over Pete Buttigieg is not difficult to explain.

He was presented as the candidate of generational change, but his actual policies were not that of young people, they were of the age-50-something suburbanite median Dem. So it was this weird situation where old moderate people were, like, congratulating young progressive people on the excellence of their tribune, who actually had little in common with us & spent his time dismissing the policies we wanted.

Hence resentment.

While everything that’s happened is understandable structurally, I think part of why Biden’s approval has suffered so much is because his setbacks haven’t just been perceived as obstacles, they’ve seemed to directly undermine the core premise of his entire presidency. Like Joe Biden made the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, and everybody basically approved of that, and the public supported him for months.

But then he displayed a remarkable lack of empathy during the evacuation, when *empathy* was supposed to be his defining feature.

The more I read about Mutual Aid, the more I come to the conclusion that there’s three quite-different uses of the term.

1) organized trust-building direct-service work to facilitate organizing

2) de-centralized charity to individuals

3) building anarchist non-institutions

https://twitter.com/merovingians/status/1513954897456209934

An example of the first version is how local DSA chapters have done events where they stand on the side of the road and replace people’s broken car brake lights for free, because brake lights being out is the most common reason for police stops. Builds trust with low-income POC.

.@POTUS should cancel student loan debt.

This isn’t an unrealistic expectation. Regardless of what you think of the merits of the policy, @JoeBiden PROMISED that he’d cancel $10,000.

Joe Biden should keep his promises. That’s, like, the minimum standard.
npr.org/2022/02/09/107… All this bullshit is a distraction from the very simple set of facts:

1) @JoeBiden explicitly promised to cancel $10k of education debt.

2) He has the power to do so, all by himself.

3) He has not done so.

Will this help everybody? No.
But come the fuck on.

What do people mean by “mutual aid”?

Like, what is that in practice, and how does it connect to organizing?

This is a serious question. I don’t know very much about this topic. Like are we talking about the Black Panther Party free breakfasts for kids?

Or is this like a bail fund?

Or something else?

Here’s the thing: if your top priority is to roll-back authoritarian trends in the US, the first thing you need to grapple with in your strategy is that “rolling-back authoritarian trends in the US” is NOT the top priority of most other people. So really what the task is is to incorporate “rolling back the factors contributing to authoritarianism” into the broader compromise platform of a majoritarian coalition.

One factor is there are simply a lot fewer younger vets.

The vet population has a big demographic cliff it’s in the process of falling off of.

16 million Americans served in WW2 - they’re mostly dead now.
6.8M served in Korea.
5.9M served Vietnam era.
Only 4.6M served post-9/11

https://twitter.com/StevenBeynon/status/1512519674818400266

The Veteran population skews very old. The median veteran is lot older than they were between the 1950s-1980s when these physical posts thrived.

Older vets often aren’t interested, or can’t physically make use of a space that’s basically a bar.

The ones who do are the diehards.