Fixin' to rant here. Fiercely. Come along for the ride. My subject is the astonishing the intellectual and moral energy I've witnessed in the last 48 hours from people absolutely PASSIONATE about figuring out ways to conclude that Tim Walz might, actually, suck. [THREAD] 1/x For illustration, start with a post from the magnificent left comics artist and moral witness @TedRall, reading in full, "WHEN I WENT TO SCHOOL, IN THE MIDWEST, FOOTBALL PLAYERS WERE ASSHOLES AND THEIR COACH PROTECTED THEM."

No biggie, I'm interested in one of the comments: 2/x

The NYT detailing 90 reporters onto the Biden deathwatch reveals yet another American civic institition in its glaring failure to stand up to the stress test of imminent fascism. Alas, it... ...falls into agenda-setting elite political journalists' narcissicism sweet spot: it makes themselves the center of the universe, while denying they have any political agency at all...

I said no more, but I think it might be a useful contribution to expand upon a criticism I've had on @coreyrobin's classic everyone has to read, The Reactionary Mind, since it became such a powerful influence on me upon first reading. It ends making the argument that... ...the American reactionary tradition has reached the end of the line because no one in American politics any longer pursues "revolution" (one of the book's keywords). At the time, my beef was that it doesn't matter whether you and I think revolution is being pursued...

It will be a horrifying fascination to see how much further one of America's political parties has to advance into fascist territory before agenda-setting elite political journalists start to report that one of America's political parties is advancing into fascist territory. Over/under? Maybe when they start getting shot. Staggering how corrupted American journalism has become from own reason for existing. Facilitating citizenship is literally why they came up with the "free press" part of the First Amendment in the first place.

Thread on what May Day is really all about. A little while back I scripted a short interlude on the history of strikes for a doc on a famous one. The doc will be coming out eventually, and will be wonderful, but the interlude didn't work out in the end, so I'm prewenting it here. It's about the simple, blunt fact that before the National Labor Relations ("Wagner") Act made joining unions and striking a right protected by the federal government, those attempted to do so were MURDERED ALL THE TIME--by the state, by vigilantes, by private police.

The most famous Dem economic advisor says rich speculators who had the poor judgement to deposit in an untrustworthy bank have to be made whole. Nothing about the moral hazard this presents, nor the message to the proles who only get $250K in protection. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Only the little people should suffer when there's a "risk to the financial system."

I'm coming down on this shit in my book. I used to be able to point out that there was nothing like the kind of grift I wrote about on the right with the Dems, but this stuff is created using A/B algorithms to tickle people's pleasure centers with no political content whatsoever. ...The policy-based come-ons have no connection to what anyone powerful in the party's actual agenda, so "CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT MEDICARE FOR ALL!" just creates alienation in the long as has people become disillusioned with these things not happening even if Dems achieve control.

If the Supreme Court backs the Independent State Legislature Theory, it's over. America will no longer be able to pretend it's a legitimate democracy. Context: npr.org/2022/12/07/114…

One way to think of the big picture in the railroad labor issue is to compare it to the opportunity Reagan seized in 1981 to fire the air traffic controllers. That, too, temporarily ground a key vector of American commerce to a halt. Reagan ventured the risk... ...to signal that a new sheriff was in town, helping break the back of worker power in the U.S. The contrast to today is that the notion of Democrats taking a short-term risk to send a long-term signal in the opposite signal is pretty much inconceivable--as we've just seen.

Morning riff:

The way young people are saying NO to gender binaries is a miraculous advance for human freedom and dignity. 1/x Like the cracking open of heteronormativity by a previous generation--something many conservatives now accept; this is how social change works-- it is a profound force that is doing away with a colossal amount of unnecessary misery in the world. 2/x

"Sneakers" slaps. When Redford does roguish charm: gets every time. Snappy, classic 1940s screwball-comedy level timing. High-level shit.

For friends across the pond; also historians too ready to draw lines between books politicians claim to have read and those books' "influence" thereupon. Also #liztruss, the latter-day milk-snatcher who tells all and sundry of her "favorite historian": ME.
spectator.co.uk/article/liz-tr… Liz. Can't. Read (Rather, let's viralize that shite: #LizCantRead.)

Hey @LoriLightfoot,, maybe it's not crime that's driving people (and corporations, who some say are people too...) out of Chicago as much as the daily nickle-and-diming speeding tickets that show up in the mail almost daily for going 41 mph in a 35 mph zone? "Just go the speed limit"? Often, then, you would be more likely to cause an accident. This is the reason humans, not robots, should enforce traffic laws.

I've taken some really silly swipes about @samadlerbell and @matthewstitman on this platform in fits of twitter brain and the narcissism of small differences that I feel terrible about, because now that I'm delving deeply I cherish @knowyrenemy so deeply. Listening them think and feel together represents the fruits of humane learning at its very finest.

As I've noted, the tactic of our more fascist state governors' petty little ethnic-cleansing exercise resembles nothing so much as... npr.org/2022/09/15/112… ...the 1961 racist trolling project known as the "Reverse Freedom Rides." npr.org/sections/codes…

Am I misreading or is @Timodc on pp. 11-12 of "Why We Did It" slyly insinuating that Mike Pence is a closet case? "...the brainteasers I was playing with closeted myself parallel what I saw in my future corner GOP friends during the Trump Era. I would see relief on the faces of people who left his orbit and come clean, just as clearly as the pain on the faces of peoplelike Mike Pence who..."

Reminds me of what happened when news leaked that the wartime Office of Strategic Services was becoming permanent as the CIA. One GOP rep: "This is another indication that the New Deal will not halt in its quest for power. Like Simon Legree it wants to own us body and soul.” 1/x

https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1556793230028587009

Another called it “another New Deal move right along the Hitler line." The reactionary Chicago Tribune editorialized that it would be a U.S. "gestapo."

I found this article thoughtful, fair- minded, and productive. theintercept.com/2022/06/13/pro… The smartest part of the article is the point that trashing culture is destroying the strength of activist organizations at just the moment many ARE being led by women and POC, with see-no-evil critics of the phenomenon thus abetting their disempowerment: tbe Glass Cliff.

In Oakland in the 60s, it was common practice for cops to in Black neighborhoods to apprehend people on Friday evenings outside the bars that served as banks where factory workers could cash their checks, to shake them down for cash--straight up. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener's A People's History of Los Angeles present excellent documentary evidence that a major function of the police was preventing Black peoples from being in "white" areas outside of certain hours, in just the way South Africa's passbook system functioned.

So fascinating how cunningly Reagan's economic ideology encodes in aristocracy in the guises of liberty. "U.S. tax policy... is restraining business growth because it attempts to redistribute earnings from the most productive to the least” means the rich are rich ONLY... ...by dint of their superiority, the poor are poor ONLY by dint of their inferiority. And if we try to tinker with that natural order, we'll ALL be poor, by dint of restrained growth. (Fascinating source, account of a 2/79 speech in an alt-monthly covering Montana.)

A "savvy" acquaintance of mine notes this news, describing it as an "own goal" by the Church. My response is the opposite... theguardian.com/us-news/2022/m… This is how an institution behaves when it's serious about power and changing the world: the way, on certain core principles, the Democrats SHOULD behave. The Church has been working this strategy...