Folks. Let's not look at the news over the past two days and reflexively tilt to, "JOE BIDEN NEEDS TO EXPAND THE SUPREME COURT!". It doesn't work like that. Elections have consequences and, when you lose, you lose. This was a 50+ year effort and it's not getting undone quickly... If you feel bad about the results of the court's decisions, the only recourse you have is to organize and vote. The court is basically saying that, if you want these rights codified, they need to be based on laws passed by Congress specifically tailored to the issue at hand...

At the end of the day, the Titanic Missing Billionaire Submarine story is a perfect distillation of 21st Century capitalism: A small group of very rich people assume a clearly irresponsible risk. It goes predictably wrong. Scores more in public resources are used to save them... Privatize the "thrill" of "discovery" and offer it to the monied few who have the resources and access to both assume large amounts of risk while simultaneously disavowing said risk when making decisions. Because they assume that, if it does go bad, someone will save them...

The irony is not lost on me, as a Black man in America, seeing white people up in arms and claiming that there's a "two tiered" system of justice. But here's what I don't think they get; Hunter Biden or Donald Trump, rich white guys get away with shit ALL THE TIME... There's not one set of rules for Trump and one set of rules for everyone else. No. In America, the amount of money and status that you have is directly proportional to the amount of due process and severity of the punishment you receive. Rich white people get special treatment...

It's not about not getting someone who aligns with your political beliefs. If you waste your vote in 2024, you might get someone who is openly hostile to your existence. How do you say to a member of the LGBTQ community, "I'm sorry Trump's back in office, but Cornel West said..."

https://twitter.com/damnelace/status/1669108278389796867

How do you say to a woman seeking an abortion for a septic pregnancy, "Yeah, I know Trump and the Republicans banned all abortions. But Cornel West was the true progressive in the race." You're missing the pragmatic side of politics. If not the imperfect, you get the alternative.

Progressives, listen up. Those of you back in 2016 who just couldn't bring yourselves to vote for Hillary Clinton, here's what you got:
-A botched pandemic response that killed +1MM people
-Roe overturned
-Affirmative Action banned
-Tax cuts for billionaires.

Consequences...

https://twitter.com/damnelace/status/1669101420291710977

Is Joe Biden perfect? No. But MILLIONS of student loan borrowers in professions like education and healthcare have had their loans wiped off the books. THAT'S A PROGRESSIVE WIN. MILLIONS of Americans will have access to broadband internet. THAT'S A WIN. Getting something >nothing

Cornel West is now running at the Green Party candidate for President because Cornel West wants Donald Trump back in the White House. Why? Because even though Trump is bad for everyone generally, he's good for West's left wing grievance politics and thus, West's pockets... And let's be clear, Cornel West is all about his money. Why do I say this? Because for all of the speechifying and gesticulating he's done in the name of progressive causes, he's always positioned himself to profit. Book sales. Tenured professorships. Paid appearances...

It is political malpractice and generally non-Machiavellian for any of the other Republican candidates for president to be defending Donald Trump. They all want the same thing. Why wouldn't they passively (or actively) root for that man's legal demise? Defending him is dumb... Maybe I'm missing something, but I come from the school of thought that when your adversary is drowning, you throw them an anvil. Going out in public and defending Trump vociferously effectively makes him the incumbent in their primary. They're ceding the role of leader to him...

Dear Conservatives,
This was the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC. Wholly owned and operated by Donald Trump while he was the sitting President of the United States it hosted events and stays by lobbyist, foreign governments, ideological activists and influence seekers. While I know that you think it's worth ginning up a storm over a debunked Joe Biden corruption allegation, it's worth noting that this hotel, The Trump DC, was a place for people seeking to influence then President Trump on policy issues could pay him bribes...

A reminder; after attempting to violently overthrow the results of a free and fair election, Donald Trump knowingly left the White House with boxes of state secrets that, when asked to return, he lied about having. He then moved those boxes of secrets around strategically... To prevent them from being returned to the government. He lied. He instructed his lawyers to lie. And his family members were complicit in helping him commit his crimes. This isn't the same as co-mingling personal and professional emails on a private server...

Here's the thing about running for President; if you're a serious candidate, you have a window. Four, maybe eight years where you've got enough buzz, juice, and profile to carry a campaign. But once that window closes, it's typically shut for good. It doesn't come back... It's political malpractice of the highest order for 2024 Republican presidential candidates to not capitalize off of this Trump indictment. Fact is, if you want the big chair, you can't play nice or try to placate Trump's base. This is when you go for the jugular...

I really don't think people are grasping how big the news is that Mark Meadows flipped, it pleading guilty to federal charges, and was granted limited immunity for his cooperation. Boycott all the Targets you want, the former President's Chief of Staff is going to prison... This matters because, if they have Meadows, that means they've had the cooperation of dozens of other White House insiders who aren't household names who were exposed to all kinds of crimes. The documents case, January 6, they've got the goods and now the dominoes are falling...

What's happening with Twitter's revenue and what happened to Chris Licht at CNN are both examples of why trying to mainstream MAGA is a losing game. No, the country isn't divided 50/50 between MAGA Republicans and everyone else. The far right is just that. An extreme... The idea that ~30% of Americans that are sympathetic to or supportive of right wing conspiracy theories and anti-democratic policy ideas isn't a sign of a burgeoning movement. It means the mainstream media has failed to properly articulate the MAGA threat by legitimizing it...

The same Democrats calling on Joe Biden not to run for reelection are the ones who thought, incorrectly, that he should've blown up the filibuster, expanded and packed the court, and used the 14th Amendment to settle the debt ceiling. People focused on bold actions, not answers.. The efficacy of the Biden Administration has been a result of the willingness to work within the institutions to get results. Every "bold action" that some Dems wanted from Biden would've been stymied or held up in court (see: student loan forgiveness) and nothing would get done.

Three years ago, Black Twitter used this platform to galvanize a movement following the murder of George Floyd demanding an overdue and necessary racial reckoning in America. Three years and $44B later, Elon Musk is making sure that never happens again... When we look at what Twitter has become over the past 9 months compared to what it was in preceding years, it's clear that this platform was too good at amplifying the voices of minority groups and making the broader public aware of the existence of marginalized communities...

Maybe I'm connecting the dots wrong, but here's what I got...
-Russia is losing the war in Ukraine
-Mass protests are roiling Iran
-Bolsonaro loses reelection in Brazil
-2020 Trump-backed election deniers lose en masse in this fall's US elections
-Protests breaking out in China I don't know about y'all, but it looks like the cornerstones of potential authoritarianism aren't having a good year. Not that it's a clean sweep for the alternative, but it appears that the seemingly insurmountable forces of strongman politics are taking big hits globally...

Parting thoughts before I leave Twitter Pt.2: It's probably not a coincidence that, after this platform has been used to give voice to so many movements for social justice and systemic change over the past decade, a rich white man bought it and decided to burn it all down... I can only speak to my perspective as a Black person, but there's a bright red line between the coining of the terms "Black lives matter" and "Stay woke" and the reactionary vilification of those terms and the purchase of this platform by someone threatened by their meaning...

This is a flashing red warning light of poor leadership. The main issue here is that, as a leader, Musk is making a demand of his people that is needlessly vague and offering no definition of what success, a.) looks like and b.) delivers to the employees. This is a threat...

https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674

Let's start at the beginning here with the demand that the team be "extremely hardcore." What is that? What's the metric to achieve that? How does that translate to the work that needs to be done? It's an ambiguous demand of people's time and energy without explaining what/why...

Elon Musk's Twitter and Donald Trump's White House operate with some eery similarities. One of the main ones is ripping out parts and disposing of people deemed "nonessential" because what they do isn't immediately understood. Until there's a crisis... And then it's very much, "Oh, so THAT'S why we needed that, huh?". Sorta like content moderators, comms teams and, yanno, pandemic response playbooks. But what Musk will pivot to, much like Trump, is blaming the people for expecting more while pretending that less is better...

Let's call this midterm for what it is; Gen Z is burying the Reagan Era. Just like Baby Boomers in the 80's figured out that voting for Republicans would get them tax cuts and protect their suburban property values, Zoomers just figured out that "vote harder" actually works... First, we gotta take a step back and see the connections between Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter. Both one term executives who presided over disjunctive periods of American history. Carter with the closing of the New Deal and Trump with the end of Supply Side Theory...

I don't think y'all are ready for how ugly Republican party politics are about to get. DeSantis vs. Trump, McCarthy vs. The Freedom Caucus, 2nd tier Governors vs. delusional Senators. The barn doors just swung wide open for 2024 and they're not worried about governing... We're about to see the GOP fly all the way off the rails. There's zero incentive for them to do anything like policy or work, but there's tons of money to be raised picking fights on extreme positions. This whole thing is about to be an epic shitshow...

To all the "wHy DiDn'T kAnYe GeT cAnCeLeD fOr AnTi-BlAcKnEsS!?!?!" crowd out there, let me explain to you how it works. The oppressor deputized members of the "out" groups that they seek to malign to be their voices of criticism/legitimize their attacks out that out group... In doing so, they can say, "See? We're not racist/homophobic/antisemitic because *this member of that group* is on our team and agrees with us!" And that's their job. Provide cover for discrimination by the majority by being a complicit voice from the minority. That's exchange.