1: Trump has just run one of the most hysterically alarmist presidential campaigns in history.

The whole thing was an attempt to use a baseless crime panic to build a red wave, propel his anti-immigrant crackdown, and reintroduce cartoonishly regressive law and order policies. 2: The crime panic's main function, of course, has been to get him reelected.

It’s why he killed an immigration bill earlier in the year that accommodated nearly every Republican demand and was negotiated by conservative stalwart James Lankford.

theunpopulist.net/p/trump-is-ped…

1. During the VP debate earlier this month, JD Vance spent the entire evening audaciously attempting to recast himself, and the MAGA philosophy he champions, as the embodiment of common-sense normalcy.

It was preposterous.

🧵 2. Vance’s aim was to project a cogency and coherence onto Trump that is fundamentally alien to him, and a governing seriousness onto MAGAism that would be wholly absent in a second Trump term.

As @JVLast said, Vance sought to come off as “an entirely normal political persona.”

1: It is difficult to overstate how utterly unhinged the right’s reaction to Tuesday night’s presidential debate has been.

I have never seen a collective freakout about the media this embarrassingly frivolous.

🧵 2: Let’s use a sitting U.S. senator as our starting point.

30 minutes in, Mike Lee asked who else was annoyed by ABC. Hours later, he ran a poll getting 10K votes at 93% disapproval for ABC. Then, last night, he suggested that we “reexamine the laws” regarding TV broadcasting.

1: Since replacing Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, @VP Kamala Harris has attracted ungodly levels of racist disparagement posing as solemn concerns about her qualifications and merit.

🧵 2: It’s all just a recycled outrage campaign from before—a rehash of the same treatment she got when Biden picked her to be VP.

Only, instead of “She’s a DEI candidate!” … it was “She’s being picked due to identity politics!” then.

1: On Sunday, Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from the 2024 race.

Following that announcement, there was an immediate consolidation behind Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee.

Republicans criticized both developments as undemocratic. They’re wrong.

🧵 2: The following is just a sampler. There’s a million other examples of Republicans—along with some brain-addled Democrats—claiming this was all undemocratic, or that it was tantamount to a coup against Biden, or that Harris lacks democratic legitimacy.

So turns out End Wokeness, one of the most reprehensible scumbags on this entire site, is Jack Posobiec, a neo-Nazi pizzagate pioneer.

Checks out. Ryan Mcbeth’s video breaking it all down:

1: In a much-discussed essay, @ezraklein argues that @JoeBiden is too cognitively compromised to run an effective campaign for reelection.

I think Ezra’s wrong, but even if we grant his argument, the media deserves a significant portion of the blame for getting us here.

🧵 2: Before I set out why the media’s to blame, I want to respond to Klein’s contention that Biden’s camp declining primetime interviews is necessarily indicative of a fear that his interview performances would indelibly confirm he’s in steep decline.

theunpopulist.net/p/musk-peddles…

1: A couple days ago, the @Chiefs won the Super Bowl.

@JoeBiden, activating the Dark Brandon meme, alluded to an internet conspiracy theory that is brain-meltingly dumb.

Here’s a very quick account of why conspiracies this preposterous are proliferating on the right.

🧵 2: This particular theory, pushed by right-wing dimwits like @VivekGRamaswamy, @bennyjohnson, and @JackPosobiec—who collectively boast 6.5 million followers on here—is that Taylor Swift and co. are a deep-state psy-op to re-install Biden.

Why did they go full Tinfoil Mode here?

lmao at the copefest in response to Elon hiring someone with a connection to the WEF.

These people were really expecting Elon to hire one of their own, an unbathed memesmith from inceldom, to run Twitter

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657050349608501249

😂😂😂

It's completely surreal that the GOP electorate is all in on a guy who got himself impeached twice, spectacularly lost reelection, fomented an insurrectionary riot to overturn an election, was recently indicted on 34 felony counts, and has now been found liable for sexual abuse. The most absurd thing of all is that each of these things has made them love him even more. What a completely ridiculous political culture.

The self-congratulatory tone is well deserved if and only if you believe being able to mobilize your listeners into hysterical overreaction to a beer giant's microtargeted marketing campaign is a virtue rather than an obvious vice. <vomits uncontrollably all over Walmart's self-checkout lane>

"Let no man deny that I've made a big impact here"

The DeSantis vs. Disney saga has caught some people by surprise.

Here’s a 🧵 that explains how it is both a genuine departure from, but also entirely consistent with, past forms of conservative activism against a major cultural entity. DeSantis vs. Disney represents an escalation from past conservative crusades against cultural entities believed to be furthering a “leftist” agenda.

And yet, Disney has been boycotted before.

So what’s new here?

belvyland.arcdigital.media/p/republican-f…

I have a high view of @JohnRWoodJr, who is an unfailingly decent person. But I think a mistake John makes here is thinking that his valuing of intellectual diversity, which is commendable, requires him to concomitantly value the specific commentators he mentions here. It's good that John wants to be regularly exposed to, and indeed learn from, a variety of intellectual traditions. But that doesn't at all mean he has to value any particular figure that is broadly associated with those traditions.

Alternatively, the fact that they namedrop Peterson and Shapiro, who are professional outrage-stokers politically and financially incentivized to paint an apocalyptic picture of American civilizational collapse, might explain why their conception of America has soured. I screenshotted @MsMelChen here in order to get the full thread in view.

Nice gesture—no reason to deny that. But just like Tucker’s Trump texts, anecdotes like this don’t really matter, since whatever virtues he displayed here did nothing to disincline him from enthusiastically becoming the most relentlessly toxic media figure since Rush Limbaugh.

https://twitter.com/njhochman/status/1650639535208890370

The hagiographic mania that has taken over the hard right in the wake of yesterday’s news is nauseating, since the person being celebrated is limitlessly repugnant and a key driver of right-wing brains being as broken as they are.

Good riddance—from Fox News at least—to the most destructive media personality since Rush Limbaugh. I wrote in Belvyland about how much of a liar and hypocrite Tucker is. Read this in honor of his Fox News departure.

belvyland.arcdigital.media/p/the-tucker-f…

As the Last Good Blue Check™, endowed with a reply visibility boost, I understand what I have to do now. I understand the awesome responsibility that comes with this role.

I will vigorously ramp up my dunking—not for me, not for my own inner satisfaction, but for my country. And as my replies to the worst discourse villains algorithmically float upwards in righteous ascent, they will also function as de facto Community Notes—just without the air of sanitized neutrality that keeps them from also functioning as iconic posterizing moments. Let us pray.

In the past month, I’ve waded into Amy Wax discourse on two fronts: first, arguing that, despite being an incorrigible racist, she should get to keep her job; and second, lamenting that there’s an online subculture that values her racial offensiveness for its own sake. Wax has said things that are manifestly contemptible. Still, academia is best served by upholding an extremely robust conception of intellectual freedom. This protects Wax, yes, but it also protects profs who say things that the *other side* can use to mobilize against them.

Elon what have you done to me 😭 Apparently Elon has been ensuring, in an around the clock, real-time fashion, that certain big accounts promoting Block the Blue are punitively awarded blue checks. What is this place now?

https://twitter.com/bencjacobs/status/1649896029159051265

These people are utterly astounded, in a pathetically self-congratulatory way, at their own ability to stir up an unstable collective to completely lose their minds over a drinkmaker’s microcampaign to sell more beer to certain demographics.

https://twitter.com/bernybelvedere/status/1647231376507252738

🤔

https://twitter.com/bernybelvedere/status/1646347978846633990