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David Austin Walsh Profile picture
David Austin Walsh
@DavidAstinWalsh
Historian. Postdoc @Yale. Book: TAKING AMERICA BACK: THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT AND THE FAR RIGHT // Yale Press // April 2024 // https://t.co/Subm8i5Vnv
Joshua Cypess Profile picture Cheri Stahl Profile picture Aviva Gabriel Profile picture Potato Of Reason Profile picture Death Star Of David Profile picture 8 subscribed
Dec 22, 2023 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Just read @samuelmoyn in the NYT this morning and I think @ThePlumLineGS is fundamentally correct in this thread. Voters have already rejected Trump and Trumpism in multiple elections, the response to which *by* Trump was to attempt to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. In purely moral and ethical terms, the case for removing Trump from the ballot is a slam-dunk. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't speak definitively to the legal reasoning in the Colorado decision, but it does seem like a pretty airtight case.
Jun 4, 2023 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
I keep saying, the fascist threat in America was real in the 1930s and 1940s but it was New Deal social democracy that defeated it, NOT the national security state. I’m working on a paper for SHAFR that is putatively about the John Birch Society’s stance on the Algerian War, but is rapidly turning into liberal coup anxieties during the Second Brown Scare.
Jun 4, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Trying to convince Claire to let me wear a bow tie to the wedding this afternoon. It’s… not going well. Don’t think I’m going to win this one.
Jun 3, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
God help me, I’m seeing IT’S PABLO-MATIC today. Haven’t seen the exhibit yet—saving it for the end of the visit to the Brooklyn Museum, which I have never been to before—but seeing some of the other exhibitions, at least part of that review has to based on how didactic political art centered on identity has been done to death.
Jun 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Maybe the lesson to take away from these articles is just that New York City generally sucks? They wrote exactly fly the same kind of profiles of annoying left parties in Manhattan and Brooklyn five years ago, and annoying popularist parties in Manhattan a year ago.
Jun 2, 2023 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
I’m trying to think through the effects on university culture with the looming affirmative action ban.

If I’m understand the intent of its architects correctly, the idea is to use this as a cudgel against DEI and drive its proponents out of higher education entirely. This is predicated on “diversity” as a supply-side phenomenon—it comes from liberal/left institutional capture of the university—and agitation from minority students who would not otherwise be in college without affirmative action.
May 17, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
AI is predictably being treated as a magic bullet by managers and investors to almost completely eliminate labor costs. All of this is reminiscent of the conversations around Hollywood's use of CGI and how CGI has actually gotten *worse* over time, because it's a non-union part of the entertainment industry that is easy to cut costs with.
May 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Angry Baseball Man’s “thorough” debunking boils down to “yeah Reagan gave the state’s rights speech at Neshoba but it wasn’t really THAT big of a deal.” Seriously. His “debunking” consists of insisting that Reagan did not launch his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, it was merely his first general election campaign appearance…. Image
May 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Just met with a landlord who informed me that he will not rent to me because I am married.

When I told him this is a Fair Housing Act violation, he said “I own it, I make the rules.” Well, I managed to talk him into at least considering me and to be fair the apartment looks super nice, but… red flag.
May 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The obvious solution to this is to start actually giving out Cs, Ds, and Fs widely in the humanities again. Chatbot can write *maybe* C-quality work, from what I can tell.
May 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Alright, New Haven pizza lives up to the hype. Combines the New York slice with the Chicago tavern cracker-thin crust. Fucking amazing.
May 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I was reflecting today on why I am so hostile on an emotional level to anti-anti-fascism, and being present at Charlottesville in 2017 and out in the streets in 2020—and seeing the two as very much interconnected—is the reason why. Intellectually I think it’s bunk anyway, but there’s also an element of “c’mon, you’re gonna tell me what I saw isn’t what I saw?”
May 13, 2023 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Heading up to New Haven tomorrow to apartment hunt and landlords have gotten even worse since the pandemic huh. “Before agreeing to show you the apartment let me ask you a series of questions that skirt up to the line of a Fair Housing Act violation to assure myself that you’re not Black.”
May 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Klippenstein got a lot of shit for posting about Feinstein’s staff, but here’s a POLITICO story about one of her staffers who concluded that Feinstein is senile and her CoS is acting as a shadow senator and quit by taking a selfie of himself smoking a joint in her office. ImageImage The full story is glorious. politico.com/news/magazine/…
May 8, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Only after the charter school movement softened ‘em up. Image You don’t get to spend the better part of your career bashing the left—Chait even does it in *this* column!—and crapping on teacher’s unions and then suddenly start wringing your hands with Very Serious Person concern about Christopher Rufo.
May 7, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Okay then. Image Kind of disappointed he didn’t comment on the clay oven.
May 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Counterpoint: it isn’t. I mean, I teach Benedict Anderson all the time in my classes, because he provides a useful analytical framework for understanding *how* nations are created, including through—per Hobsbawm—ritual and commemoration.
May 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This is now the third story I’ve read about softening Black support for Biden in 2024, and every one of them so far largely elides class and generational differences among Black voters. This was true in 2020! When you actually break down the primary returns Sanders actually *won* the Black Millennial and Gen. Z vote in many (although not all) Southern primaries.
May 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Yeah but America’s state ceremonies are objectively less ridiculous, and this was true even when Trump was president. Ritual and ceremony *are* important in politics, which is why U.S. presidential inaugurations, or CCP congresses, or VE Day in Moscow look the way they do.

But those are, I think, on a different level than the coronation of a hereditary monarch with a *purely* ceremonial role.
May 4, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Off the top of my head:

Housing was cheaper, so was higher education and health care, and despite Nixon, Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil crisis there wasn’t the same post-“End of History” stasis that has characterized the neoliberal order. For as awful as the 1970s were, you could still imagine that a better world was possible and work collectively to accomplish it.
May 4, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
A student asked me on Tuesday if I was alarmed by Trump’s plan to put the homeless in concentration camps.

I said that what was *more* alarming is the way in which liberals are increasingly giddy over deploying violence against the homeless. We are at a very dangerous conjecture where reactionary Democrats in NYC and SF are taking the lead in this.

Remember the former Dianne Feinstein intern who mused last month about lynching drug dealers?