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James Surowiecki Profile picture
James Surowiecki
@JamesSurowiecki
Author of The Wisdom of Crowds. Contributing writer for Fast Company and The Atlantic. Editor at The Yale Review. I wrote The Financial Page for The New Yorker.
14 subscribers
Nov 7 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The fundamental lesson I hope Dem politicians take from this election is that they should not adopt positions unless they can defend them, honestly, in a one-on-one conversation with the median American voter, who is a white, non-college 50-yr-old living in a small-city suburb. I don't mean that Dems have to adopt the same positions as that median voter. I mean they have to be able to make the case for their positions to that voter in a coherent, honest fashion, rather than trying to obscure the position or pretending they really don't hold it.
Oct 16 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It's tough to interview Trump: he lies so relentlessly, and with such abandon, that you either have to spend half the interview fact-checking him and pushing back on his lies, or else just let him lie to your audience.
cnn.com/2024/10/16/pol… With most politicians, you figure they'll fudge a few facts, gild the lily to make themselves look better, dodge a tough question or two. That's manageable as an interviewer. But Trump will lie about anything and everything, which is hard to deal with.
Sep 30 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Dinesh D'Souza bucking to get sued for defamation again. His tweet is a lie. The people in the ad in question are not actors, and are in fact Republicans and former Trump voters who are supporting Harris. Story here:
savvymainline.com/2024/09/29/far…
The lies in D'Souza's tweet - which he's left up, even though he's been informed that it's false - came from a collection of lies in a tweet by Bad Hombre, who constructed a totally false conspiracy theory based on a mis-identification of the people in the ad. It got 59K likes. Image
Sep 16 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
What Vance says here is v. important - he thinks all Americans should not be in the same insurance risk pool. That would mean that older Americans who aren't yet 65 and Americans with pre-existing conditions would have to pay much more for health insurance than they now do. There were two core principles at the heart of Obamacare: guaranteed issue (everyone should be able to buy insurance) and community rating (adjusted for age, everyone should pay the same price for insurance). Both of those principles are very popular with Americans.
Aug 23 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
🧵The director of Project 2025 was chief of staff of Trump's Office of Personnel Management.

The author of the Project 2025 chapter on national defense served as acting Defense Secretary under Trump.

The author of the chapter on homeland security was head of DHS under Trump. Image The author of the Project 2025 chapter on the intelligence community worked in national intelligence under under Trump.

The author of the chapter on dismantling the EPA was chief of staff for the EPA under Trump.

The author of the chapter on HHS worked in HHS under Trump.
Aug 15 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The thread of comments to my tweet is hilarious. It's made up almost entirely of people who trust their vague memories of what grocery prices were like in January 2021 over the Bureau of Labor Statistics' systematic monthly data. They're speaking their truth - it's just not true. Image Swann's also correct that lots of people are just lying, mostly because they thibk the doomerist "grocery prices have doubled!" narrative is politically useful. Image
Aug 3 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is Trump unilaterally making up new conditions for a debate with Harris. It's not him agreeing to anything. After Biden withdrew, Trump was under no obligation to debate Harris under the conditions he'd agreed to with Biden. So it's fine that he's proposing new conditions for a debate with Harris. But It's not him announcing he's "agreed to debate" Harris.
Jul 19 • 9 tweets • 1 min read
This has become a typical Trump ramblefest with the usual "best in the history of the world" nonsense, but much more low energy than normal. He's picked it up a little at the end.

The best line by far has been "Kid Rock, sometimes referred to as ... Bob." I actually thought Trump was winding down, but instead he was just getting going. Actually interesting that he's spending so much time talking about his unpopular policies, like 100% tariffs.
Jul 16 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It was a terrible interview by Lester Holt, but this is what Biden's debate performance did: it ensured that he's going to be asked about his competence over and over. Biden knows that. So he has to be able to shift smoothly from these questions to what he wants to talk about. Dems can complain all they want about the media focusing on Biden's cognitive abilities, but it's not going away. So he needs to get dexterous at answering the questions, and then pivoting to make the case for himself.
Jul 15 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The myth making is out of control. George H.W. Bush flew 58 combat missions as a pilot against the Japanese, and successfully completed a bombing run in a burning plane before having to bail out had to bail into the Pacific Ocean, where he floated for hours before being rescued. Image JFK swam 3 1/2 miles through the Pacific while towing a crewmate after a Japanese destroyer smashed his PT Boat. John McCain spent 5 years in a North Vietnamese POW camp, enduring torture, because he refused to let the NVA release him before men who had been shot down before him.
Jul 9 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Historically inaccurate and ethically repulsive. James Madison, the single most important figure in the writing of the Constitution, said that even having a Congressional chaplain was "a palpable violation of equal rights as well as of Constitutional principles." Christian nationalism is miles more offensive than that.
Aug 13, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you want to know why Republican primary voters keep nominating guaranteed losers like Doug Mastriano and Don Bolduc in potentially winnable races, it's in part because they think their crazy views are shared by a large majority of Americans. Image If Republican base voters had an even vaguely accurate view of public opinion, they would never have nominated so many hard-right MAGA candidates in winnable swing-state races in 2022. But they have an incredibly inaccurate view of public opinion.
Aug 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1. One thing that's crucial to remember about Trump's attempt to pressure Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" is when that call happened. It did not happen, as many ppl seem to think, while Georgia was still counting or even re-counting votes.
alternet.org/more-than-a-do… 2. Instead, Trump's call to Raffensperger (during which he threatened him with criminal prosecution) happened on January 2. At that point, Georgia had already re-counted and hand-recounted all its votes, certified the election results, and its electoral votes had been cast.
Jun 25, 2023 • 11 tweets • 1 min read
Pro-appeasement politicians are scrambling to salvage their position, so they've decided to lie about what ppl were saying about Prigozhin. Exactly no one was calling him "a liberal reformer." Other than maybe Ted Cruz, JD Vance is the most cynical demagogue in American politics.
May 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Lying through it. I will never understand why DeSantis didn't hold a big kickoff rally in a Florida football stadium. It would have been covered live by cable news, and would have sent the message, "I'm a normal guy who likes the same things you do," which is a message DeSantis needs to send.
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Reading "Trust the Plan," Will Sommer's book about QAnon. It makes clear how absurd it is to argue that YouTube, Twitter, etc. should be obliged to publish the kind of conspiratorial, defamatory, harassing content (often aimed at non-famous ppl) that Q supporters specialized in. American law is ill-equipped to deal adequately with online defamation and conspiracy nonsense targeting individuals. The notion that on top of this, social-media platforms should be required to publish this kind of content is absolutely bonkers.
May 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is just objectively false. It has absolutely not been proven that work requirements lift people out of poverty. In fact, the best studies show work requirements do not increase labor-force participation. Their real impact is to throw eligible ppl off SNAP and Medicaid. Work requirements sound appealing to lots of people. But here's my recent piece for The Atlantic on why they don't work the way Kevin McCarthy says they do.
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
May 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This Trump thing is even worse than expected (and I have a high tolerance for Trump's antics). I mean, setting all else aside, why is the audience packed with Trump supporters in ill-fitting suits?
May 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This story shows how tortured the GOP's claims are with regard to Joe Biden. It says there's something suspicious about Biden meeting with Romania's president and praising his anti-corruption efforts while Hunter was shilling for a Romanian who was being accused of bribery. But surely if the Romanian, Gabriel Popoviciu, had bought influence, Joe Biden should have attacked Romania's anti-corruption efforts rather than praising them, or in some way tried to get Romania to lay off Popoviciu. He did neither, and Popoviciu was convicted in 2016.
May 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
There's no acceptable constitutional justification for a public school to prohibit a book simply because it features a character with two dads if it's allowing books that have characters with a mom and a dad. It doesn't matter if some parents are offended. A book featuring the child of an interracial marriage would once have offended lots of parents (and probably still offends some). It would still have been discriminatory to prohibit the teaching of such a book.
Apr 26, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It's been odd that Disney hadn't sued Ron DeSantis for violating its free-speech rights by retaliating against them for publicly opposing the "Don't Say Gay" bill. Now Disney has sued, and it will be fascinating to see what possible defense he'll mount.
reason.com/2023/04/26/dis… DeSantis unquestionably used the govt to punish Disney for exercising its 1st Amendment rights. Law professor Jonathan Turley, no fan of Disney, wrote last week that DeSantis' moves against the company showed his willingness to "wield state power in bringing them to heel."