It's rather pathetic to watch Democrats and leftists gloating about the fact that the Republican Party seems to still allow for a tiny amount of dissent and debate while their own party is an absolute authoritarian borg that demands lockstep allegiance from its members.
"Ha ha their party has a populist faction that is effective at challenging establishment leadership and extracting concessions. What losers! Pass the popcorn amirite?"
Dec 7, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Just to catch everyone up, a former FBI official who was deeply involved in Russiagate and who was then planted at Twitter was discovered to have combed through the Twitter Files, without telling Elon Musk, before they were released to @mtaibbi and @bariweiss. Can't make this up.
According to Musk, he didn't become aware of this until Sunday, after the files were made public. The official, James Baker, was then fired by Musk.
The current liberal disinfo campaign is to make you think that talking about immigration and its demographic impact on the electorate — something liberals have enthusiastically done for decades — is now an off-limits conspiracy theory & anyone who engages in it should be censored
They are trying to make you think that doing this is engaging in something called "The Great Replacement Theory" so that they can tar their political opponents as extremists who spread racist conspiracy theories and disinformation.
Apr 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The momentum behind student debt cancellation is a good example of how the Left isn't designed to shift power to the working class. It's designed to shift the Democratic Party toward the interests of the educated professional class by using the veneer of populism and radicalism.
There are many kinds of debt and many forms of economic hardship. Are we to believe that the highly-educated, professional-class-dominated Left chose student debt randomly out of a hat? Is it a coincidence that this may end up being its only tangible policy success?
Jun 19, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
After 2016, the Left traded in its populism in exchange for getting to be the well-funded, progressive NGO-Media-Activist arm of the Democratic Party. "Leftism" and "Socialism" became the updated branding of this elite-driven, big-money-funded liberal politics & media apparatus.
The rise of AOC and The Squad were instrumental in forging this new political synthesis.
Jun 17, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you could shoplift a podcast subscription online Leftists would change their tunes real quick
I've never seen the standing desk Left get so mad at a tweet. The reason they get so mad when you criticize their lifestyle-brand-as-politics is because it's literally the only thing differentiating them from their MSNBC watching parents.
Jun 16, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The reason why the Liberal-Left has to believe CRT in public schools is a fake news conspiracy is simple: It's obviously really unpopular with the public, and it's a very energizing issue for conservatives and Republican voters.
I think deep down most liberals are at least a little embarrassed of this stuff and uncomfortable with it — the silly jargon and rhetoric, the deranged and toxic ideas, the Robin D'Angelo grifter types, the cringe HR department struggle sessions, etc.
Apr 21, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The current national conversation on race is a political front for a predominantly white, wealthy, educated professional class that is eager to assert its cultural & socioeconomic hegemony, but whose liberal pretense forces it to do so in the guise of altruistic social justice.
The animating belief propelling this culture war disguised as racial reckoning is: "We are the ones who possess the moral authority and moral credentials to manage the affairs of this country and to be its elites."
Jan 4, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The funny thing is that Dore's #ForceTheVote wouldn't have even happened if the Squad just did what they were hired to do, which is organize a challenge to the speakership. The M4A floor vote thing was just a last ditch stand-in for that.
That's why all the influencer nerds trying to nitpick this to death about procedure and utility of a vote are missing the point. But that's their job: Drain the politics out of a conflict and pretend it's about procedure, pragmatism, etc. Always obfuscate and protect the brand.
Sep 23, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It's silly to pretend that we don't use religiosity as a signal of political ideology and affiliation. We of course do, because it is:
*Which* religion, the *denomination* of the religion, and *level* of religiosity all play a role in bias, because they all correlate with political ideology and affiliation. These are all signals.
Sep 15, 2020 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
Let me try to decode the Cuties thing: The Cuties thing is all about an aggrieved class wanting to expose their perceived elites to be immoral demons.
Populist, anti-elite sentiments are always driven by the desire to cast the opposition as the immoral class (which is natural, morality is how we govern our world). This is what is behind QAnon's obsession with pedophilia — the desire to expose an elite cabal as morally depraved.
Sep 10, 2020 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
So I have an analogy that I think is useful for understanding our current obsession with victimhood — one that I think is more constructive than the common critiques. In the modern discourse we’ve created, a victimhood claim is like paying mafia protection money. I’ll explain.
When it comes to victimhood culture, I think people focus too much on what claims of victimhood allow people to *attain* and not enough on what it allows people to *avoid*. For people who want to understand political culture right now, the second is much more illuminating.
Sep 6, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The idea that this stuff will all go away if Biden wins does seem a bit naive to me. In fact people may take away the lesson that it's a winning form of politics and the basis for a durable political coalition (insert Trump wrong gif).
It's not like this is just some emotional outlet or form of catharsis for people angry about Trump. There is an entire incentive structure that's become embedded into institutions, from management on down. Those incentives don't just go away.
Sep 4, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I've never read an interesting tweet about Trump.
News about Trump can often be interesting or entertaining. But tweets about Trump are by far the most boring tweets.
Sep 3, 2020 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Social media has rotted your entire political project, Micah...
A strong data point in support of this is the professional left's penchant for employing slogans that do the exact opposite of what any rational, outcome-focused political project would do.
This is so insanely dishonest. Let me explain, in four tweets, why Pelosi bears such a huge part of the blame for millions of Americans being devastated and hung out to dry by the failure to pass another stimulus package.
Failure to pass another stimulus is not due to *lack* of bipartisan consensus, but because of it. Republicans are ideologically incentivized to not pass a stimulus (anti-spending), and Democrats are politically incentivized to delay or not pass one (hurts Trump's re-election).
Aug 22, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
What liberals should be most worried about right now is that these people are currently funnier than them, and also that they take QAnon more seriously than most QAnons themselves
Trollability index should be a part of any political handicapping metric worth its weight in salt
Aug 21, 2020 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Maybe it's stupid of me but I never in a million years would have thought they would just re-run the Love Trumps Hate campaign.
The entire convention could have been programmed four years ago, and it would have looked exactly the same. It almost seems like it's an attempt to replay 2016 with a different outcome — to erase the memory completely. A form of trauma therapy.
Aug 19, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
A lot of professional activists and influencers are invested in convincing you that the *real* work of politics is in year-round lobbying, protesting, making noise, and organizing (whatever that is). It isn't. It's convincing people to vote for the right person during elections.
There is a deep strain of anti-political anti-electoralism on the left, even in those whose job it is to work in politics and elections. They use politics as a platform for their never-ending "movement organizing."
Aug 17, 2020 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
I think it's clear at this point that the American Left has really become more of a "hyperliberalism."
AOC calling for a Goya boycott, the rise of Antifa moms, Joy Reid "supporting" the very symbolic M4A issue now because it no longer confers political power, and lefties joining every silly online panic — total and complete fusion. Cultural liberalism has swallowed the left.
Aug 15, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
My most problematic belief is that woke theory is a way for non-intellectual people to be intellectual.
To put it in less personalized terms: A way for a precarious cultural class to secure and increase its only source of status and potential mobility.
Not that I think it should be a problematic idea. There is nothing inherently good about being intellectual. It's not the same thing as intelligence.
*Which* religion, the *denomination* of the religion, and *level* of religiosity all play a role in bias, because they all correlate with political ideology and affiliation. These are all signals.