Podcaster, author, historian. The History of Rome + Revolutions. "Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution" coming Aug. 2021.
To actually lower temperatures, Republicans leaders need to tell their followers Democrats won the election, have a right to govern, and that, however much we oppose them, they are not in fact monsters hell bent on destroying America.
Instead their message is "Continue indulging in your most paranoid fears. Don't be fooled into complacency. Democrats hate you. Everything bad that has happened is their fault. You are right to be terrified of them and what they are doing."
My dude literally put out a campaign video on Dec 13 portraying himself as supersoldier in combat gear fighting leftists trying to take over the US government and encouraging everyone to join the fight.
If you haven't see Texas Reloaded it's wild. This is our boy being told that though he won re-election, the fight is not over in Georgia. "What are we up against?" he asks.
And he's told by JARVIS-esq mission control: "Far left activists are attempting to gain full and total control of the US government" With the accompanying images:
Ben disagreed with calling Barack Obama a communist, but only because he more precisely identified him as a pure nihilist who wants to destroy America simply for the sake of destroying America.
Ben worked really hard to became the single most influential conservative voice of his generation. And this is a tiny sliver of the aggressively toxic worldview he's been preached all those years.
Fact 1: Over holidays I started showing the kids clips from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Black Knight first. Then French insults. They thought it was *hilarious.* This alone is thrilling dad+kids moment. They get it.
Fact 2: I was talking to The Boy (age 8) about what happened at the capitol and resuming conversations we've had about how the revolutions I write about moved us from hereditary kings/queens to democracy and elections to pick leaders.
10.41 did ~150,000 in the week after it was released, which I consider the active/ongoing listener base. Those back episodes from earlier in the year are all hovering around 250,000 total.
No idea what's going on with the 470,000 number for 10.39. Reckon that means there were ~200,000 very confused people out there like "what the hell is even happening right now"
Is this a great example of "retweeting comfortable lies" or are we being too fussy and pedantic about the difference between "impeachment" and "impeachment AND conviction" which is a not-very-well drawn distinction in common usage?
Which is to say...consequences #1-3 are true if he's convicted and removed from office. #4 is a possible additional penalty, though not guaranteed. But it's not like it's all just a bunch of made-up bullshit.
In terms of linguistic accuracy, sure it's a problem that people conflate "impeachment" with "impeachment+conviction," but that's a very common problem regarding terminology of a legal process not "this is outright misinformation"
The United States has an active faction of political leaders whose fidelity to democratic elections is 100% contingent on whether they win. This is an intolerable threat that must be squarely faced.
The people who raided the capitol last night ought to be punished. But they are foot soldiers. The real threat to the republic is an axis of political leaders (Trump, Cruz, Hawley etc) and right wing media outlets (Fox, OANN on down the line) who have whipped up the storm.
The thing, for me, that is crucial to understand about this moment in American history is how much it is powered by lying. Non-stop lying. The lying, misinformation, and disinformation is *the* salient point.
I’m sympathetic to the project. Whenever I work on problems like “what are revolutionary conditions” or “why do Empires fall apart,” I’m basically doing the same line of inquiry. SBTS has a clear conceit of “similar prevailing factors” being of valid interest.
But let's be clear. What Turchin/cliodynamics provides is an interesting potential tool with a few limited applications. It's not solving, superseding, or replacing history. It's not even really history.
Re: Good Dads, a thing i think about occasionally is most of the rulers who were overthrown in all our various revolutions had plenty of redeeming qualities—personally and professionally.
By all accounts Charles I, Louis XVI, Nicholas II were all devoted husbands and fathers. Loved their kids. Loved their wives. And were in turn loved by their wives and kids.
They were also, in their own ways, fairly conscientious about the jobs they had to do. They might be oblivious, pig-headed, blunder-prone fools, but they *wanted* to do a good job and did actually care about their subjects.
After all this time, I finally got to have a COVID test this morning.
I now feel like I know what my brain tastes like.
My level of French is currently rated at “successfully explain to the nurse that I need the test as part of pre-surgical checklist and have her pull me out of the giant-ass line and take me to the front as a priority”
2 added to My Authors
