1. "What a minute," yo might ask, "Isn't Milei a self-proclaimed libertarian, even an anarcho-capitalist who who wants to abolish the state? How can he be using police power to repress free speech & protests?" Well, the history of anarcho-capitalism has the answers.

https://twitter.com/davidrkadler/status/1735666098127733129

2. The term anarcho-capitalism was coined by Murray Rothbard, this elfin looking guy, tweaking an earlier formulation by his friend Karl Hess (a Goldwater speechwriter turned anti-war activist). Rothbard was a pioneer in coopting language of anarchy for authoritarianism

1. Fun fact: New Criticism was an outgrowth of a group called The Fugitives or Southern Agrarians. Their governing ideology was a celebration of hierarchical & traditional societies like the pre-Civil War south & pre-industrial Europe. Guess what they thought of Blacks & Jews?

https://twitter.com/CaitlinPacific/status/1719907385572274627

2. This is a complicated story but the New Critics were Southern white reactionaries who idealized pre-industrial life & Christian hegemony, whitewashed slavery, and embraced formalism in criticism as a way of exalting an idealized order untouched by historical change.

I've literally been reading racists right-wingers (notably Samuel Francis and Pat Buchanan) since Yglesias was in kindergarten. It's a big part of the work I do. Yet I somehow manage to avoid praising them as interesting parts of the discourse even as analyze their work. The key thing here is that Yglesias thinks of the revanchist & racist right as part of his universe of discourse, people who are wrong on some stuff but worth engaging with. By contrast, for him left & left-liberals beyond the pale.

1. Oppenheimer, Barbie and the contradictions of German-Jewish whiteness: Notes for an essay. (Jack Kirby will make a cameo here). 2. What's the real thread unifying the Barbenheimer phenomenon besides the coincidence of an opening date. I'd say both films are about the fraught experience of the children of immigrants in putatively melting pot society.

1. While researching Young Americans for Freedom I came across what is, I think I can say this confidently, the worst music every sung by humans: the ersatz folk songs belted out by young rightwingers in 1960s in a desperate attempt to copy the folk revival.

2. This music is evidence of the strong anxiety created by the rise of the counterculture & New Left, which the right felt had to matched by an counter-attack. Janet Greene, for example, was often touted as the right's answer to Joan Baez.

1. The obvious reason why this strategy of "progressive policy" denuded of class solidarity wont work is that the rich have intense class solidarity, which is why liberal rich are always outgunned in numbers & intensity by right-wing rich. For every Soros there are 100 Kochs.

https://twitter.com/DanteAtkins/status/1678802712790458368

2. You often hear this in liberal & even left-liberal circles: "why can't liberal billionaires fund X" (X being a left counterpart to Fox News or The Federalist Society or ALEC. The answer is there are very few liberal billionaires & they are generally committed to status quo.

1. What if ... Jack Kirby created Norman Podhoretz? Is it possible that the greatest of all comic book artists had, in the early 1940s, a visionary insight into the future career of the godfather of neo-conservatism? A strange but true tale of upward-mobility & class betrayal. 2. The best thing Norman Podhoretz ever wrote in his first memoir "Making It" (1967) on his tortured relationship with his highschool teacher, given the Kafka-esque name Mrs. K: a snob who wanted to transform this "filthy little slum child" (Podhoretz) into a gentleman

1. Strong Know Your Enemy podcast notes the massive right & far right lean of masculine self-help lit (Peterson, Hawley, Mansfield, Rogan, Tate etc) & asks what is liberal/left response? One answer is in popular culture: Springsteen, Spielberg etc dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your… 2. One way to look at careers of figures like Springsteen, Spielberg or even Fred Rogers is that they are trying to answer & model questions: "how does one be a good man? A good son, brother, father, etc.?"

1. In terms of the fascism debate: this guy was a fellow at a think tank that was very influential during Trump era (Claremont) & now runs his own think tank. So it's hard to deny this sort of aspirational fascism is a real thing on the USA right.

https://twitter.com/Byzness/status/1660851914429411328

2. Of course, aspirational fascism doesn't necessarily translate into being able to actually execute fascism. I take the point of the critics of the fascism thesis that there is no modern mass party in 1920s/1930s sense.

1. The late Jeffrey Epstein was many things, one of which was that he was a Harvard man. Despite being a college drop out, once he had money he was easily able to get both a position (visiting fellow, dept.of psychology) and cronies at Harvard. 2. Because of recent Wall Street Journal reporting, Epstein's multiple ties to Harvard will be revisited. The university itself tried to bury the issue in a 2020 report that was an exercise in self-exoneration.

What's interesting about that text is Carlson is more candid about his goonish racism & authoritarianism, and more troubled by where it is leading, than his defenders in the post-left like Glenn Greenwald.

https://twitter.com/carolynryan/status/1653576074171760642

One the one hand, this is a pretty terrifying glimpse of someone who is descending into fascist nihilism. On the other hand, it's much more honest account of the impulses behind Carlson's politics than the apologetics of Greenwald, Lee Fang, etc.

1. This is a good way to think about the GOP primaries -- not in terms of individual foibles (like DeSantis' pudding fingers) as funny as those are but in terms of the structural difficulty faced by all Trump challengers even if they run perfect campaigns (which no one does)

https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1639706593292951555

2. The reality is Trump has a lot of built in advantages going in: unbeatable name recognition, money, media coverage & he's hugely popular with GOP voters, a majority of whom think he was robbed in 2020. Hard to beat a candidate like that.

1. This is much bigger than Huckabee Sanders or Arkansas. As NY Times & Washington Post have shown through excellent reporting, child labor is surging across USA, a byproduct of labor shortage, Trump's immigration policy, which Biden has only partially rolled back.

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1634154656778575874

2. Through a series of moves going back more than 3 decades, some well-intentioned (protect kids from traffickers) & some malicious (family separation) USA has a ramshackle system which perversely made it easier for kids to enter alone than with parents & send money home.

1. On Wednesday Politico released this detailed investigative report by @HeidiReports into Federalist Society bigwig Leonard Leo documenting very suspicious financial transactions between non-profits Leo heads & a for-profit consulting firm he also runs. thenation.com/article/politi… 2. The Politico piece has gotten surprisingly little transaction despite the serious evidence it presents of sleaze & fact that Leonard Leo is (along with Charles Koch & Rupert Murdoch) one of the 3 most powerful figures on the right not holding political office.

1. It's worth thinking about the slippage that happens when you take a phrase like Bayesian priors out of its statistical context & use it just to refer to "preconceived ideas" or "ideological starting point."

https://twitter.com/Econ_Marshall/status/1631342969419702273

2. Whatdoes "Bayesian priors" mean here? Based on earlier Chait tweets, it's something like "this is a claim I find plausible even without fact checking because it fits my sense of the world" i.e. "I find trans people icky & think some conspiracy is creating more of them."

1. World War II was heyday of celebrating child soldiers in American popular culture. The total war led to many stories of kid commandos: Simon & Kirby's Boy Commandos, Harold Gray's Junior Commandos in Little Orphan Annie & Jack Jackson's Mystic Commandos (in Chicago Defender) 2. The idea of child soldiers fighting Nazis might seem odd, but it was in keeping with the idea of mass mobilization for total war & a way to get whole population invested in ideological struggle

1. If the Dahl thing bothers you, then you should probably support radical reform of copyright and intellectual property. One possible solution is "moral rights" law saying original itntegrity of work supercedes rights of copyright holder. Or shorten posthumous period. 2. A legal & policy solution to posthumous ceynsorship isn't wild. France, among other countries, has "moral rights" laws that preserve integrity of work. In early 19th century John Randolph of Roanoke tried to get USA Senate to ban bowlderized Shakespeare. As per Guy Davenport

1. As always I learned a lot from this & enjoyed it. There's a tricky tension between empathetic exegesis & necessary critique. This one (as against the Allan Bloom episode) leaned a little farther away from empathy on that spectrum, which suggests another approach to Rieff

https://twitter.com/SamAdlerBell/status/1625948275856617472

2. Bloom offers a parallel (and interestingly given Rieff's personal history, someone who Susan Sontag loathed). Neither Rieff nor Bloom were movement conservatives or even conservative. They were rather pessimistic (sometimes cranky) cultural critics appropriated by the right

1. So I have some thoughts on Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, teenage voyeurism into parental adultery as the roots of filmmaking, Hitchcock, super-heroes, Jack Kirby, anti-Semitism, & Jewish subversion of the Aryan ideal. Spoiler-y so skip if you haven't seen The Fabelmans 2. Brian De Palma (b. 1940) & Steven Spielberg (b. 1946) have much in common, both part of the legendary generation of young turks who took over Hollywood in 1960s/1970s, both straddling line between genre & auteurism, both also as teens spied on adulterous parents

This thread shows 1) Hamilton 68's claims of Russian bots was BS (which always seemed probable) 2) Pre-Musk Twitter execs figured that out 3) communication strategy of twitter was to inform journalists off the record of problems with Hamilton 68 rather than confront it outright

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105

As with much of the Twitter Files, what we get is evidence of bad faith actors trying to manipulate Twitter & Twitter resisting. You can question some of the ways Twitter resisted but it's a hard problem they faced.

Bella created a home-made Snoopy calendar for next year. More home-made Snoopy