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This is a good piece on fissures within the GOP but I think it mischaracterizes the Trump presidency as “populist” & repeats a story about how conservatives & the GOP expelled the far-right in the mid-1960s that is actually far more complicated. /1

I don’t think the sharp opposition between “hard-edge populism” & “conservative orthodoxy” holds. Many of the Trump administration’s achievements were boilerplate conservatism. Its own website trumpets things like “massive deregulation,” tax cuts, etc. /2

https://t.co/N97v85Bb79


The claim that Buckley and “key GOP politicians banded together to marginalize anti-Communist extremism and conspiracy-mongering” of the JBS has been widely repeated lately but the history is more complicated. /3


This tweet by @ThePlumLineGS citing a paper by @sam_rosenfeld and @daschloz on the "porous" boundary between conservatives, the GOP and the far-right is relevant in this context.


This is a separate point but I find it interesting that Gaetz, like Roy Moore did In his failed Senate campaign, disses McConnell. What are their actual policy differences? MM supported taking health care away from millions, a tax cut for the rich, conservative judges, etc. /5
So, just before Christmas, Government what it called a "response" to this New York Times account of cronyism in pandemic spending.

And I said, when that "response" - which you can read here
https://t.co/gLEJzuqoAx - was published that every single notional rebuttal by Government of a claim made by the New York Times was false, misleading or both.

And it's time for me to make good.

Here's the first "rebuttal" by Government to the New York Times' claim that: "The government handed out thousands of contracts to fight the virus, some of them in a secretive V.I.P. lane."


A number of points might be made.

(1) Government cannot say the NYT got it wrong. (2) the NAO found the VIP lane (later renamed the high-priority lane) "sat alongside" the normal lane. And I have shown elsewhere VIP contracts were handled by different teams all the way through.


(3) Although Govt says "offers of support raised by Opposition MPs were dealt with expeditiously" the NAO report does not record any referrals made by an Opposition MP leading to a contract - and the Government response telling does not say any did.
Trump is the federal government. the 1st amendment was specifically supposed to prevent government interference with the press.

demanding that media publish the presidents words with no editorial interference is exactly what the founders were worried about when they created 1A.


free speech absolutists demand (checks notes) that the NYT allow Trump to write all its headlines.

the first amendment was not meant to allow the president to seize control of all media. it seems weird that you have to explain this to free speech defenders.

this is what happens though when you fetishize the speech act and completely lose track of what freedom of speech was supposed to do in the first place.

the president is literally the person the 1A is supposed to *protect media from.* It's supposed to allow media to criticize him and have an editorial policy independent of the government!
Pleased to learn that a federal criminal grand jury's subpoena to Twitter to get my personal info was quashed by the judge, despite my association with sketchy accounts like @Popehat and @associatesmind, whom the court refused to do any favors.
(Thread ...)


This started in 2017 with a Twitter thread about the interesting case of John Rivello, who was indicted for assault with "a deadly weapon, to-wit: a Tweet", where the tweet contained an allegedly seizure-inducing GIF and was sent to a known epileptic, @kurteichenwald.


Someone replied to the thread with a sarcastic dig at an FBI agent involved in the case (Nathan Hopp), and then someone else replied to that with a smiley-face emoji.
https://t.co/RcOphROvOP
https://t.co/X48C4ORZsI


Because that last, single-emoji reply was by someone the FBI was investigating (in a matter completely unrelated to Rivello), the feds reacted by demanding Twitter hand over all its information on everyone in the thread (for the suspicious act of being replied to by randos).


Twitter, through @PerkinsCoieLLP partner John K. Roche, admirably fought this subpoena on behalf of its users, three times: before a USMJ, then a USDJ, then the MJ again. The result was this sealed 35-page opinion (now