Matt

It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks

[Pedro L. Gonzalez @emeriticus]

Whenever an election doesn’t go their way, these people cry fraud and convince their audience that the results are illegitimate. If your goal were to design a political movement that would drive people insane and undermine the American political system, it would end up looking like the modern right.

[Kareem Rifai 🌐 @KareemRifai]

Krystal Ball boosting a known fabricator who went on to literally defect to Russia:

[Carl @HistoryBoomer]

I'm often told, "Woke isn't real."

This was woke.

Woke prioritizes the idea that some identities are oppressed, and we must constantly focus on ending that oppression.

So, demonstrating after George Floyd's death becomes more important than a disease that will kill millions.

I'm not saying that racism and other bigotries aren't real, of course. But making them a singular focus and downplaying other problems (a worldwide pandemic!) in order to fight "white supremacy" was ridiculous.

It's even worse when you realize that those protests may have done more harm than good. "Defund the police" led to police forces pulling back on enforcing the law, and thus may have led to a spike in murders (the "Ferguson Effect").

[Cameron 🇺🇸 🗽🦅 @CameronCorduroy]

"liberals need to stop demonizing their political opponents"

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

I love how MAGA apologists who ignored or even celebrated Trump’s character flaws now suddenly discover them and pretend to be brave truth tellers. When it would have cost them, they happily promoted the cult. Now they’re like “oh my God it’s a cult! Why can’t you see it?!”

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

This is an official government account in a democracy.

This is what Orbanism looks like. The president bragging, via AI video, that he forced a comedian who mocked him off the air and ‘into the trash’.

[Matt @mattfantry]

@jaylessblame @chests @JeremiahDJohns Jay, it's not your fault.

[Jacobin @jacobin]

Mayor Zohran Mamdani mocks Ronald Reagan’s infamous quote.

“I can think of nine words more terrifying than ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help…’”

“I worked all day and can’t feed my family.”

[Giancarlo Sopo @GiancarloSopo]

There’s nothing edgy or remotely interesting about this. It’s well known that the photo was staged. It’s listed that way in the Library of Congress and in Rosa Parks’ own autobiography.

That civil rights leaders “told her to create a situation where she’d be arrested” is a fabrication. It also overlooks the larger moral truth of what was happening at the time: a regime of state-enforced racial humiliation that a woman of conscience refused to obey.

An intellectual coward’s idea of an exposé. No different from the Churchill or WWII revisionism — a kernel of a fact, load-bearing lie, packaged as “we’ve been lied to about everything.” Everyone associated with this should be embarrassed.

[Sir Humphrey 🇺🇦 @bdquinn]

Boy, it's hard to be optimistic about the trajectory of American politics.

The Republican Party is a slavishly devotional personality cult around an unfathomably awful man.

The Democrats have a pincer of a sclerotic establishment vs. a policy illiterate progressive base.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

I'm glad that the author of "Rent Control Is Fine, Actually" calls themself Unlearning Economics, bc it's good to just state things clearly, such as the open animosity that many left economic populists have for the field of economics and economists themselves.

Economists aren't gods, and economics isn't a divine truth, but economists are good--better than most--at something critical for making public policy: They're good at identifying tradeoffs. "Rents are too high, so freeze them" is compelling politics. But in the absence of other pro-supply policies, if you make it illegal to increase rents, landlords will stop upgrading units and convert them to condos, which reduces the supply of units for rent, reduces mobility, and drives up rents for everybody else.

The left econ populists have some clear, and clearly stated, policy ideas:

- Rents are too high, so freeze them.
- Electricity is expensive, so stop rate increases.
- Homes are too expensive, so ban institutional investors.
- Power prices are rising, so ban data center construction.

... All these policies feel like solutions because they're brisk, they name enemies, and they take on the most visible source of frustration. But they are much better as villain-naming exercises than they are as a complete public policy. On their own, each creates other problems: less housing built, less clean electricity built, abdicating energy policy by encouraging AI firms to build data centers abroad in unsavory countries with more emissions, etc.

I can't think of a single economic populist idea that wouldn't be helped with a little dose of economics, which is why it's troubling when I see the left participating in, and even celebrating, the great unlearning of economics.

[Dominic Pino @DominicJPino]

Imagining explaining to the Founding Fathers that the president imposed tariffs without an act of Congress and then removed them at the request of the King of England

[Destiny | Steven Bonnell II @TheOmniLiberal]

I love how @MattWalshBlog presents this conspiracy like it's impossible but fully believes that several thousand democrats came together to rig the 2020 election in a way that left zero traces and was ruled against by every single judge it was brought in front, half of whom were Trump appointees, lmao.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

I know it's a bit downmarket these days to point out Trump's crookedness and hypocrisy but MAGA simply cannot stop speedrunning the plot of Animal Farm, becoming everything they claimed to despise about the previous regime, except more so.

Like, for four years, a central attack on Joe Biden was that Hunter was trading on the family name. They even launched a congressional investigation, iirc.

Now they either say nothing or enthusiastically cheer on the president's kids as they run a cryptocurrency exchange, a bitcoin mining operation, a luxury real estate brand, and a social media company, all of which are getting money from foreign governments and sovereign wealth funds.

Here Eric Trump is appearing on TV as an adviser to a company that just won a $24 million Pentagon contract! And Fox Business is like: "way to go, Eric, we're proud of you, you really knocked this one out of the park."

[Taylor Kessinger 🐙 @nashintasapaino]

Pictured: Republican objections to Virginia's redistricting

[Matt @mattfantry]

@micsolana @BridgetPhetasy

[Patrick S. Tomlinson @stealthygeek]

Gerrymandering is undemocratic and evil.

And it's essential the party that has repeatedly tried to ban it keeps doing it until the party that historically abused it gets curb stomped so badly they cry uncle and agree to the ban.

These are not contradictory positions to hold.

[Jack Hunter @jackhunter74]

Trump: I’m gonna wipe out an entire civilization.

Pope: That’s wrong.

Vance: The pope should stick to questions of morality.

[Bo Winegard @EPoe187]

Like splotches of mold on a wall, the crudity and outrageousness of Trump's violations of decorum suggest a deeper, more pervasive disorder beneath. It is not "pearl clutching" to care about the surface because the surface reveals the decay inside.

[J.J. McCullough @JJ_McCullough]

It was always pretty obvious that at some point the loyalty test was going to be demands to literally worship him.