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.

https://twitter.com/jeoc42/status/1783903703142973936

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.

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!"

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.

https://twitter.com/sawyerhackett/status/1774753872868753549

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/Tweets_ByJ/status/1765069465031770196

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.

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

https://twitter.com/aufhebenenjoyer/status/1764982210870825242

"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)

It’s forgotten now but Dems spent the first 2.5 years of the Biden presidency intentionally slow-walking or closing down investigations of Trump while sternly declaring that they were “looking forward, not back”

https://x.com/bensiegel/status/1405113725879730184?s=20

The problem here was incredibly obvious at the time: if no one actually did the work of targeting Trump for his many outrageous acts, none of them would stick to him.

Racists will be like “Liberalism is a nightmare! Look at this!” and then will show you a picture of a successful high school graduate being happy

https://twitter.com/zachgrace6/status/1760011077918626276

Elon’s Twitter is infested with these types top to bottom and it’s corrosive to our whole society

In a 18 months, Musk has made Twitter into a place where literal pro-slavery accounts are getting millions of views. It’s functionally the largest, longest, most sustained hate rally in human history. How long until the news media gets the nerve to talk about it? Twitter may not be real life but if hundreds of thousands of diehard white nationalists are using it to communicate, plot, win converts, and radicalize themselves into insanity, it’s going to have real-world consequences

If a reporter has information that Biden is losing it, they’re welcome to report that information. They don’t actually have it - indeed, accounts from people who interact with Biden are generally that he’s quite sharp - so reporters instead repeat political attacks as “questions”

https://twitter.com/rottenindenmark/status/1756675351185633310

The best way to understand political “journalism” is a demand-and-supply model, where outlets understand that certain stories serve purposes that they want served, like achieving artificial balance or providing red meat to partisans. They then strive to engineer those stories

Now that there’s finally some acceptance of the idea that media narratives are what’s steering our politics maybe people are ready for a corollary: our country has gone down this terrible road in part because our elite political correspondents are corrupt handmaidens to fascism Their only value is maintaining the horse race narrative above all else, which makes them impossibly easy to manipulate. And they surely understand they’re being manipulated but allow it to happen because that, too, facilitates the horse race

the big secret about the modern world that is really obvious but no one will admit is that it's social media that is making politics insane

https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1754528875516678193

"why are extreme rightists simultaneously on the rise globally in countries with a diverse range of economic conditions and historical trajectories?"

"why are so many people losing their grasp on reality and retreating into lurid fantasies of bias validation?"

The race science morons love to do this thing where they sort of posture as if they're focused on fine details in the heritability of very narrowly defined traits... and then they're like, see, look at this chart, and the chart estimates the average IQ in African countries as 65.

https://twitter.com/Blastytv/status/1751662781726920869

In other words the data here suggests that the majority of people in African countries are significantly less intelligent than, more or less, the least intelligent person you've ever met. It's beyond absurd, it's disgusting, it's ludicrous.

Scientific racism was at the root of the worst ideologies ever known to humanity, ideologies that led directly to the deaths of tens of million of people and the most inhuman atrocities ever perpetrated. You should have zero tolerance for this filth The right’s growing tolerance for scientific racism is the single most frightening feature of the new reactionary populism. It’s how you know these people will commit the same crimes their historical predecessors did, if given a chance

You need to understand what these bigots’ plan is. They want to strengthen the racist assumption that all black people in important positions are incompetent, promoted due to “wokeness” and “DEI.” If Trump wins, they will try to remove black people from high-skill professions. Notice how they don’t identify specific examples of people who are supposedly incompetent. They’re arguing that any black person flying a plane, working in medicine, attending law school is per se suspicious. They want to get rid of these people, totally segregate society again.

I’m pretty sure there’s lots of foreign interference on Twitter still, maybe more than ever before. But I’m also pretty sure they’ve refined their tactics: instead of fake content, they’re massively RTing and liking real accounts spreading extreme and malcontented views. This has two effects:

First, it somewhat amplifies the spread of these views, since social media algorithms prioritize high-engagement content.

But more importantly, it TRAINS JOURNALISTS AND CONTENT CREATORS, tells them that extreme views will produce engagement rewards.

Guy wakes up, goes to work. His coworkers talk about how bad the economy is. He spends 2 hours on his phone a day. It's full of memes saying Biden is senile. He watches the news at night. It says crime is up. But then there's a 30-second ad saying "Biden good."

Is he persuaded? People are immersed in political information all day long. People think "messaging" doesn't work to change opinions but it's because "messaging," per se, is a tiny, tiny sliver of the political information in your life. It's EVERYTHING ELSE that is shaping our views.

The reason Biden can’t break through is because there’s a massive pulsing torrent of nonstop propaganda flowing into the American political consciousness through a combination of right-wing media and social media, intentionally developed over decades by malign actors It has grown and grown, virtually unchallenged, while the people it targets have largely scoffed at it. Eventually it was always going to have an effect! And now we see it, with a hundred million Americans or more living in a state of constant delusion about the world around them

THOMAS MUST RECUSE, his wife was involved in planning the events that led to Trump’s disqualification

https://twitter.com/norahodonnell/status/1743393290345414755

Democrats, FIGHT on this. There is no downside in saying Trump should be disqualified for trying to overthrow the government, nor in saying that his corrupt defenders on the Court should not be able to protect him.

My view on fascism - which is informed part by reading history but in part by just watching the US around me since 2015 - is that it's a heavily psychological phenomenon that plays on the nature of the human psyche, like pyramid schemes or cults do All of us play host to a wide array of subrational beliefs and feelings and desires and resentments. We want to indulge in those subrational impulses, but it's hard as it gets filtered through the more logical conscious mind. We often search for rationalizations of those impulses

The basic principle I wish Democrats could grasp is this: PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE DIRECT ACCESS TO THE TRUTH OF THE WORLD. They construct almost everything they know - crime rates! economic views! whether or not the president is coherent! - from secondhand reports, mostly media.

https://twitter.com/kendilaniannbc/status/1736036050760343697

If you want to shape how people see the world, you need to do two things:
-figure out which media they’re listening to (it’s probably not one source)
-figure out how to change the messages coming from it so they support your worldview

We're at an inflection point where either Dems will sit down and think about the evidence of the last eight years about how public opinion operates these days (WHICH IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THAN BEFORE), or they're going to simply malaise themselves, and the republic, to death They still can't explain how Trump won, and that was 7 years ago. They can't explain why he gained votes in 2020. They thought Jan. 6 had cooked him, but he's stronger than ever, and they can't explain that either. They can't explain why triangulating doesn't win votes anymore.