they should all be perp-walked out of Congress into waiting black vans, while OANN films the same for EVERY major news media outlet and network prime time talking head spewing the very commentary they have alleged against POTUS -
A-1

Happy New Years y’all...

I was going to take a little nap until morning but that can wait 😅

So much has bothered me but nothing more than how everything has been manufactured, everything...

We are literally living in an illusion...

That new attack piece about Seth Abramson is full of easily debunked false claims. Whenever the mainstream media gets annoyed at an indie pundit like Seth, it just publishes a bunch of bullshit about him, and most people mistakenly believe it. They've done the same thing to me.

The sad part is that when the author of that piece tried to smear a bunch of mainstream media journalists for daring to compare notes with him, they all responded by lying and said they've never compared notes with him. Even though Abramson has proof that they have.

This is the EXACT same strategy that certain mainstream media outlets used against me in 2017-2018. First they lied about me. Then they attacked my mainstream media associates for associating with a "fake news" pundit like me. Then some in the media felt compelled to disown me.

Sadly, it didn't matter that I had overwhelming proof that everything said about me in those attack pieces was false. When you defend yourself, no matter how factually, the average observer merely decides you're being "defensive" and therefore guilty as charged.

Ask yourself why the mainstream media is choosing now to dishonestly attack Abramson. The media's ratings are way down now that Trump is gone. Abramson presumably still has his entire niche audience intact. So the media gets jealous and takes it out on him.

1. Short thread - on the various claims we're seeing from Republican politicians over the last few days that the Democratic push for accountability is "divisive." Damn right it's divisive - that is what it has to be.

2. It is intended to enforce a clear division between those who accept and are committed to democracy and those who are willing to turn to violence when the vote doesn't turn out the way that they want it to.

3. One of the basic implications of Adam Przeworski's theoretic work is that democracy is made out of mutually reinforcing expectations, and those expectations are fragile. If some actors think they would be better off defecting from the democratic bargain, they will.

4. In other words: democracy and armed factionalism are far closer than we think, or we would like them to be. This means that it is incredibly important to police the boundaries between them. Allowing some to turn to violence can lead to expectation collapse and cascading ruin.

5. When we allow the divisions to become blurred, that means that we are running the perpetual risk of things getting fucked up. If a major faction turns to violence, and no-one responds, things can get really fucked up really, really fast.

Thread. 1) Thirty or forty years ago, supporting free speech was understood to be a non-negotiable core value of the liberal left.

2) Pop culture endlessly celebrated liberalism’s uncompromising support of speech rights — from The People Vs. Larry Flynt to Field of Dreams to The American President.

3) Think of “President Shepard’s” speech in “The American President” about how “America isn’t easy” and citizenship requires we “acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil.”

4) That started to change long before Trump. As “The American President” came out, Bill Clinton was pushing the first Internet censorship laws.

When the PATRIOT Act passed, every Democrat but one in both houses voted yes. Russ Feingold, Independent Bernie Sanders, and three Republicans voted no.

(THREAD) The main problem with that @DanDrezner piece in the Post is that it's an international politics prof writing about the field in which I'm a professor—communications. No one in communications would *ever* compare the blogosphere to either Twitter or Substack. Here's why.

1/ Back in the mid-aughts, I was a Koufax Award-nominated political blogger (I don't know what Drezner was doing then; I first heard of him about a year ago). So I was into the blogosphere pretty deep, as I also ran a second high-traffic blog that was focused on the art world.

2/ The "blogosphere" was an outgrowth of MySpace and LiveJournal, inasmuch as in the heady early days of the internet people suddenly realized that they could engage in private diaristic writing—a very specific subgenre of writing—in the public square, and it was suddenly "okay."

3/ So the blogosphere as such had *nothing* to do with journalism, which needless to say was in a different state just 15 years ago (note: unlike Drezner, I also teach writing and journalism at the university level, so this thread is squarely "in my area," unlike his Post piece).

4/ The blogosphere was a manifestation of the transformation of the public-private binary at the dawn of the internet—and *also* connected to the "creative writing" explosion (what I did a PhD on); in the aughts, creative writing was the fastest-growing discipline *in the world*.