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Will Stancil Profile picture
Will Stancil
@whstancil
I research metro policy and civil rights, focused on housing and schools. Proud member of Do-Something Twitter. Running for MN House! https://t.co/Q5xzs7kUmw
🥥🌴🌊☕️Coffee&Robots🤖🌊🥥🌴🇺🇦 Profile picture eDo Profile picture For thou art an holy people unto TMHYah thy Elohim Profile picture Mike T Profile picture Perpetual Mind Profile picture 21 subscribed
Jul 18 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Not to state the obvious but the GOP’s obsession with mass deportation doesn’t come from any interest in improving policy outcomes but because it’s a rationale for large-scale state terror against a population the GOP dislikes. It’s a pretext to hurt people for fun Anti-trans laws? Impossibly vast deportation programs? Attacks on college campuses and protesters? What it all has in common is that it’s a pretext to target a perceived set of enemies and derive pleasure from their pain
Jul 10 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
The religious zeal that surrounds the anti-Biden obsessives is really frightening. Not even the slightest hint of doubt about the remarkably reckless course of action they're demanding. Being a few points behind in the polls after two weeks of saturation-level media panic isn't great, but Trump was much further behind in 2016 and still won. There have been last-minute candidate switches before and they ended in disaster.
Jul 3 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Let’s explain this in very simple terms:

-the media right now is publishing many stories about how Biden should drop out

-those stories are pushing his polls down among swing voters, endangering his campaign

-why shouldn’t/couldn’t they publish the same stories about Trump The main difference here is not that Biden and Trump have different swing voters - that doesn’t make sense.

The difference is that when Biden does something bad, media says “he should drop out” over and over, but when Trump does, media says “his voters won’t care” and moves on.
Jul 1 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is an open threat from a far-right account with 2.5 million followers. This is where we are: these fascist goons are so emboldened by our rogue Supreme Court and Donald Trump that they're openly threatening to kill liberal politicians. Image This guy appears on stage with top Trump luminaries. He is indistinguishable from the worst kind of homicidal Trump troll. These people have just given themselves the power to prosecute, jail, and assassinate their enemies - the point of my tweet - and now are planning to do it.
Jun 28 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
We’ve spent eight years waiting for the political elite in this country to wake up to the fact that Trump is a true authoritarian threat who must be confronted directly before he destroys the foundations of constitutional government and here we are, still waiting He’s a liar, a thug, a demagogue, and he wants to be a tyrant. You have to fight people like that DIRECTLY: you say what they are, you put them in jail, you keep them out of politics, you resist them with whatever it takes. You don’t rely on them losing a policy debate
Jun 17 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
every single day false memes suggesting biden is senile get pushed out by the RNC, are instantly shared across half a dozen national news outlets, are repeated by through hundreds of sinclair outlets, and get hundreds of millions of social views

dems: "why is biden unpopular??" the other side has built an enormous, nation-spanning propaganda network, where everywhere you turn you see people presenting far-right ideology and anti-Democratic propaganda as truth. Dems have ALMOST COMPLETELY IGNORED this, because they figure their policy is more popular
Jun 10 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Two days ago, a Nazi account posted one of the most racist things I’ve ever seen, using my name. I have a record of it but it’s indecent to share so I’ll try to describe it instead. It started out with a swastika and a voiceover: “This message is endorsed by Will Stancil.” And then: “KILL ALL N____S.” Then it played a song describing in detail all the ways “n____s” should be killed. Behind it was real footage of black toddlers and children being massacred.
Jun 3 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
You call for Trump to step down because you have a winning argument that it’s totally inappropriate for a party to nominate a guy who received 34 felony convictions five months before the election. Half of Americans already agree! Force the GOP to defend him. He’s not actually going to step down (although it wouldn’t be good for Republicans to lose their cult leader to scandal right before the election). But Democrats are half the political system, they have to make the argument he shouldn’t be in the race, or no one will.
May 23 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Trump would get a huge boost, not because anyone cares about "cumulative inflation," but because the massive far-right and far-left hysterical freakout about how prices "feel" too high would instantly cease the moment he won People do not actually have a detailed registry of price increases over time in their heads, they are just continually told that prices are too high (often with fake or exaggerated numbers) by their social media feeds, by the TV, by newspapers. If that stops no one will care
May 22 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
ONE MORE TIME:
-your impression of the US economy is mostly formed from your information diet, because we do not directly experience things like the unemployment rate
-if we DID directly experience those things, public opinion would reflect measurable trends, and it doesn't -most sources of information have been very negative about the US economy even while most measurable trends have been fine to great
-this includes mainstream media, partisan media, and social media
-most information people have about the outside world comes from these sources
May 20 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The basic error that is destroying left-of-center politics is a refusal to accept that politics is driven by human psychology, and human psychology is largely driven by communication with other humans, and does not connect mechanically to measurable conditions on the ground. Things can be bad and people can be happy. Things can be better than ever before and people can be miserable. People can be mad about real things in the real world or fake things they've been lied to about. One day people can not care about something and the next day they care.
May 20 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Dopes who have spent three years ignoring every graph showing a good economy have seen this one (1) graph and decided it proves the economy is terrible. It doesn’t. Household wealth skyrocketed at the end of Trump’s term because THERE WAS A PANDEMIC so SPENDING WAS IMPOSSIBLE. Post-COVID, Americans have been spending down all those accumulated savings, which has led to economic growth and to inflation. Despite this, even after controlling for inflation, household worth is clearly holding steady (at those high post-COVID levels)
May 15 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
THE FILTER TO WHICH THE VOTING PUBLIC VIEWS THE ADMINISTRATION IS YOUR NEWSPAPER this might be the Perfect Political Journalist Tweet in that it explicitly lays out some kind of direct unmediated public engagement with a political figure because the journalist’s brain short circuits if he considers he is himself the thing linking public and politician
May 13 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The reason Democrats are struggling is pretty simple, I think: they fended off the most authoritarian political movement in modern US history and then… immediately retreated to policymaking, completely ignoring those authoritarians taking control of the media environment The party leaders have spent decades in thrall to a poll-driven consultant class that believes, deeply and falsely, that politics is driven by marginal changes in support that are induced by concrete policy and economic factors, stuff that is conveniently empirically measurable
May 10 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Read this thread. Takeaways:
-economic sentiment is decoupling from national conditions, just like sentiment on other issues
-correlates with news coverage becoming much more negative
-there’s an asymmetric ratchet effect, where bad news gets much more coverage than good news As @jburnmurdoch and others point out, the culprit here - both in traditional and social media - is likely audience capture. Digital media gives speakers a very fine-tuned sense of what gets lots of engagement, and doomerism does huge numbers while nuance or optimism doesn’t
May 9 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Rounding up 11 to 15 million means somewhere between 1 of every 25 or 30 people are snatched off the street. That's someone from every neighborhood, every block, every classroom, every workplace. It's a dystopian nightmare worthy of the German Gestapo or Russian NKVD. That's a world where a van of armed agents pulling up and grabbing someone - often a young woman, or elderly couple, or a child - is quite literally an everyday experience in America.
Apr 26 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This kind of right-wing legalistic gaslighting is such a menace. The reason I know January 6 was an insurrection or coup is because I WATCHED IT LIVE. I watched Trump lie for months, give an incendiary speech, instruct Mike Pence to change the result, and send support to the mob. This is Orwellian in the truest sense: authoritarians showing you something and then, gradually over time, chiseling away at your ability to see it clearly, with word games and logical tricks, until the thing that was as clear as day seems like nothing at all. DO NOT fall for it.
Apr 2 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I think one of the worst pathologies of our time is the conviction among so many powerful people that "being reasonable" and "acting powerless" are the same thing - that reacting to events in any way, or attempt to effect change on the world, is inherently unserious. It's a huge part of what has left our politics so paralyzed in response to things like Trump. "Wow, Trump's bad," some of the most powerful people on earth say. "It's crazy that he's running for reelection after attempting to overthrow the government. Hope he doesn't win!"
Apr 1 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Reorienting the legal system to protect white people, regardless of whether it’s done under the guise of anti-anti-racism or whatever, is effectively the restoration of formal white supremacy. It was always inevitable that Trump’s far right would end up here. This is the beating heart of Trump’s politics: taking the inchoate resentment of reactionary white people terrified that they are losing their racial privileges and using it to create a regime where those people can endlessly exact revenge on groups they believe subordinate.
Mar 5 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Biden has been the most progressive policy president in 50 years or more. He's enacted massive stimulus and climate bills, he's governed with a full-employment mindset that has created a booming economy for workers, he's appointed progressives across the federal government. He's made great court appointments, stood up for labor unions like no president in history, and stood by an anti-monopoly FTC chair that has big business howling in anger. He's cancelled tons of student and tried to cancel more. He's done SO MUCH.
Mar 5 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Again, this is not complicated: the fringe of people who are going to sit out this election to punish Biden from the left is quite small. But those people are noisy and contribute to a larger sense of apathy, that both parties are the same. And there are a LOT of apathetic voters "Both parties are the same, this election doesn't matter, I won't vote or will just vote third party" is a very stupid idea that nonetheless seems to have some intrinsic appeal to a lot of people, and has repeatedly caused catastrophic election results (Bush 2000, Trump 2016)