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a luminous presence shaped like Seth D. Michaels Profile picture
a luminous presence shaped like Seth D. Michaels
@sethdmichaels
Voted People Magazine's Seth D-est man alive. He/him. Comms @UCSUSA; everything here is personal, not official. Grappling with time and the mercury line.
Sep 14, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
less than an hour incidentally, the solutions that aren't "crazy" are ones that acknowledge the origins, scale, and urgency of the problem, which is to say exactly the solutions that Shapiro et al want to squelch by calling them "extreme."
Aug 20, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
thread on today's Bannon indictment. it's grift all the way down. to ask whether the grift is a betrayal of the ideology is to misunderstand the ideology, which underneath the "populist" drag is really just "rich people can do whatever they want to extract money from regular people and nobody should be able to prevent it"
Dec 20, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
these people exist, they drive me crazy, and they're wildly, catastrophically wrong. but i'd caution against assuming this is a creation purely of politicians or donors; a lot of Dem *voters* feel this way, too. and when i say "wildly, catastrophically wrong" i don't just mean "this isn't how you get to single payer/GND/job guarantee." i mean it doesn't even succeed by its own metrics of obtaining political cooperation or securing modest victories.
Nov 18, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
try it this way:

"is Donald Trump a car thief?"

"i don't know. i do know he broke into and drove off in a car that wasn't his. but i'm not in his head enough to know if he thought the car was his, or maybe he disliked the owner." the decision to actively promote racism because you derive some personal political benefit from it is, itself, racist; it is a demonstration of the low value you place on the safety and comfort of your targets.
Nov 5, 2019 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
a thread of three good, important reads relating to coal and pollution: from @eilperin and @brady_dennis, a look at the Trump administration's rollback of rules on pollution from coal plants: washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…
Sep 10, 2019 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
"None of this precludes the existence of non-racist conservatives, to be sure. It just makes them some of the least influential people in their movement." - @zakcheneyrice nymag.com/intelligencer/… @zakcheneyrice "they made clear that their support for the president was not in spite of his inflammatory rhetoric, but because his chosen targets often match their own....Republican infrastructure has been remade to reflect that marriage." - @AsteadWesley nytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/…
May 29, 2019 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
really good piece: slate.com/news-and-polit… McConnell and Trump's judicial handiwork could, quite intentionally, result in a country with the segregation and economic feudalism of the pre-New Deal era. the open door to a markedly more racist, undemocratic and oligarchic society is not, strictly speaking, Trump's doing. it's a longstanding priority of establishment conservative politicians and organizations, their *reward* for looking past Trump's cartoonish corruption.
Feb 21, 2019 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Betsy DeVos, Alex Acosta, Elaine Chao and Wilbur Ross all had scandals this week that would be multi-day stories under a regular administration Acosta: miamiherald.com/news/state/flo…
Sep 28, 2018 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
a feature i love about the NYT/Upshot polling project: the little link in each district write-up that takes you to a detailed map with the district outlined nytimes.com/interactive/20… click on "this interactive map" and you get great context
Sep 12, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
every argument like this needs to contend with the fact that President Trump was chosen by the anti-majoritarian “moderating” institution over the preferences of the popular will. “we can’t trust the people because they’ll elect demagogues” is a weak argument when the people don’t choose the demagogue but the intervening political mechanism overrules them
Jul 16, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
it turns out propaganda works! the successful inflation of MS-13 into a perceived nationwide existential threat justifying a massive increase of ethnically-selective state force should make everyone nauseated and terrified.
Apr 25, 2018 • 9 tweets • 1 min read
there’s a temptation to say that Trump’s corruption and friendly deals with corporate lobbyists is hypocritical in light of his promise to “drain the swamp,” which I’ve come to think is an overly generous reading of what he means by “swamp.” “the swamp” is not rich white guys in suits who can buy their favored policies. “The swamp” is Medicaid, DACA and environmental justice.
Apr 11, 2018 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
Paul Ryan is lowkey the most cynical politician in Washington plenty of politicians have agendas that will objectively make poverty more common and more difficult to manage, but it takes a special creature to promote that agenda on a dewy-eyed tour announcing he’s focusing on fighting poverty
Jan 12, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
have i already gone off on you on my "broccoli and cheese theory"? it's basically this Republicans sold a lot of broccoli (small-govt, austerity, upward redistribution) by seasoning it with cheese (racism, attacks on "cultural elites")...