Month: July 2023

You have to love that puts President Trump in quotes…

I don’t know who has told him this garbage or if anyone has. He might have just heard something in passing and turned it into this preposterous narrative. And it is true that the more he says this the more his cult will be convinced that he’s the one living in reality while everyone else is involved in a massive conspiracy to destroy Deal Leader. That’s how brainwashing works.

But the fact is that he is completely unhinged on this subject and you have to wonder what’s setting him off right now. Maybe it’s this:

28% of Republicans and 31% of Independents say a conviction would make them less likely to support Trump.

The good news for him is that most people don’t want to see him in jail. I think that’s ok. You can’t put secret service agents in jail with him and they are required to protect him. Years of house arrest would suit me just fine, along with restrictions on his use of internet and television.

Law schools that give preferences to minorities and women in admissions and hiring risk getting sued by America First Legal, the conservative legal group warned in a letter to 200 U.S. law schools following last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision on affirmative action.

America First Legal, a nonprofit group headed by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, said on its website that it sent the letter threatening to sue the law schools if they extend any “discriminatory preferences” based on race, gender or national origin. The group also said decisions based on factors in an applicant’s biography that could serve as a proxy for race—such as socioeconomic status—is also unlawful.

The letter, dated June 30 and reviewed by Reuters, came one day after the U.S. Supreme Court held that giving some minority college applicants a boost over others based on their race violated the U.S. Constitution.

“You must immediately announce the termination of all forms of race, national origin, and sex preferences in student admissions, faculty hiring, and law review membership or article selection,” the letter said, adding that law schools “must” announce policies prohibiting preferential treatment before the start of the school year.

Who the hell do Stephen Miller and his grubby little minions think they are? The last I heard we have a judicial system and you need to have standing if you want to sue someone. Is the new rule that everyone can just bring a hypothetical case against anyone just in case they might violate what some jerk like Miller decides is the interpretation of the law? Even that awful wedding website business wasn’t thin bad.

But then it appears there is a coordinated strategy to intimidate colleges and universities before they take any actions at all:

Ohio GOP Senator JD Vance demanded 10 colleges and universities preserve their communications after their “expressed open hostility” to the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action ruling.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action at institutions of higher learning is unconstitutional in a case involving Harvard University’s application policies that adversely impacted Asian students’ admissions. Schools can, however, weigh race as a factor if the applicant has discussed how his or her race has impacted their life.

Following the decision, several presidents of top American colleges — including the entirety of Ivy League universities — announced their institutions’ commitments to “diversity” on campus in light of the ruling.

“I write to express concern about your institutions’ openly defiant and potentially unlawful reaction to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, which reaffirmed the bedrock constitutional principle of equality under the law and therefore forbade invidious race-based preferences in college admissions,” Vance wrote college presidents in his Thursday letter.

“As you know, the Court has instructed you to honor the spirit, and not just the letter, of the ruling,” he continued. “Going forward, the Court explained, ‘universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.’”

Vance noted that “within hours of the decision’s pronouncement,” the presidents and their “institutions expressed open hostility to the decision and seemed to announce an intention to circumvent it.”

I’m pretty sure we are heading toward an open declaration that hiring or admitting racial and ethnic minorities at all is discrimination against white people. They are clearly hostile to diversity at all. These people long for Jim Crow and they aren’t trying to hide it.

It’s awful

NeverTrumper Tim Miller has some interesting thoughts on Supreme Court reform:

How Normal Is This Court, Really: A Meditation From a Conflicted Man 

People on the right bristled at a frank comment from President Joe Biden as he exited a press conference last Thursday: “This is not a normal Court,” he said. In their view, this was an example of Biden betraying his promise to be a steward of our norms and institutions and taking an unnecessary swipe at a SCOTUS that has executed constitutionally sound, conservative jurisprudence. 

Here’s a version of this position that was posted by an pseudonymous anti-Trump conservative I follow on Twitter: 

Supreme Court rules against racial discrimination in college admissions. A position supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans. Biden responds by questioning the normalcy of the court. This is not a normal President.

Preparing for today and tomorrow has been the whole point of the recent campaign to try to undermine the legitimacy of the court majority. They cannot defend their legal positions so instead they do this and we get deafening silence from much of the norms crowd.

I assume we at The Bulwark are part of the “norms” crowd he is referring to, and while I don’t speak for everyone here, my view is that critiques of this Court and discussions of reform are totally legitimate and within the bounds of standard political discourse. 

For starters, the size of the Supreme Court has changed several times before; the current number of justices was not set out on stone tablets delivered from on high. Lifetime appointments are written in the Constitution, but they’re opposed by a majority of Americans. Norms-abiding Republican legal luminaries like Don Ayer have expressed openness to adding more justices to the high court. 

Personally, I think there would be value in hearing all kinds of different arguments for how we might best redesign the system so that every SCOTUS appointment doesn’t turn into a partisan deathmatch where fundamental rights hang in the balance. To the extent that “normal” people think about this issue at all, I suspect this kind of openmindedness is pretty typical. 

These kinds of conversations make even more sense when you put the Democratic agita over the current Court into a fuller context. The reality is the GOP stole a Supreme Court seat. That might sound overwrought, but if you strip away all the talking points and all the bullshit, it becomes clear that in any fair system, either Merrick Garland should have the Gorsuch seat or a Biden appointee should have the Barrett seat. The situations were exactly the same, and the McConnell Senate blocked one appointee while jamming through another.  The fact that they did it without even having majority popular support adds to the distrust, as I’ve written about before. 

If this were a situation where because of term limits the left could get another shot at one or both seats in 4 or 8 or 12 or, hell, even 20 years that would be one thing. But those were lifetime appointments of young judges. So if you are a conservative who thinks Cocaine Mitch deserves praise for the extreme lengths he went to to take those seats, then you can’t clutch your pearls when the left looks at ways—within the Constitution and the law—to try to balance the playing field. 

But despite all the reasons a person who values institutions might sincerely think the Court would benefit from some reforms, there is one prominent institutionalist who disagrees: President Biden!

That’s right. He might have made a little jab about the Court’s normalcy in the wake of a decision he found disappointing. But then he went on Nicolle Wallace’s show and said he opposes reforms because he worries it will politicize the Court in a way that isn’t fixable. Here’s Biden: “I put together a group of constitutional scholars to try to expand the Court . . . [and] the judgment was, ‘That doesn’t make sense because it can become so politicized in the future.’”

On the one hand, I’m not sure that’s right. Our current system might be hopelessly politicized already, and the Court is partly responsible. Moreover, it’s hard to say that expanding the Court, if it could be accomplished, would exacerbate the ills of our politics; predicting the downstream effects of changes like that is a fool’s errand.

But there’s something to be said for Biden’s argument. As imperfect and enraging as some of the present Court’s decisions have been, the Trump appointees have demonstrated a willingness to buck GOP partisans desires on some cases touching major issues like LGBT rights, immigration, and, most importantly, democracy/voting rights.

Given all that, maybe the best long-term answer to the problem presented by the Court’s current 6-3 conservabloc is to follow Biden’s lead and ride it out, let elections take care of themselves, and hope that with John Roberts’s pseudo-moderateness and the possibility of a Democratic president replacing SCOTUS’s oldest current member, there might be a path away from the extremes. Or maybe that’s naïve wishcasting and more dramatic action is called for.

But regardless of whether Biden is right about Court reform, the unmistakable reality is that he is the only one acting with even a modicum of proportionality in the debate. He is trying to do right by SCOTUS even after they ruled against him on a series of major issues! I don’t even need to ask, but: Can anyone imagine Trump doing that? In fact, of all the leading players in American political life right now—McConnell, Trump, DeSantis, McCarthy—it is Biden who has by far shown the most willingness to sacrifice partisan gains for the sake of protecting democratic institutions including the Court.

In spite of his good intentions and continued norms-loving rectitude, he finds himself in the sour spot on this issue: upsetting progressives who want more radical action faster, and catching heat from the dwindling number of reasonable Republicans for being “divisive” even as he resists those on his left flank who want to rebalance a court that the right went to extreme lengths to stack in their favor. 

Maybe staring every day at a big painting of Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office reminds Biden that this is the sort of issue that can almost sink a presidency.

It did almost sink a presidency — but it also had the effect of moderating the court. I’m not sure that would happen with the collection of corrupt wingnut weirdos and theocrats that make up the current majority but I suppose you never know.

Biden is an institutionalist for better or worse. But Miller is right to condemn those Never Trump conservative lawyers for criticizing him when he’s the guy who is actually taking his lumps from the court and accepting his fate. These guys like what the court is doing and they don’t care that Mitch stole the majority from the Democrats to get it. So are they really the great believers in norms they pretend to be or is it just that Trump is an embarrassing buffoon and they want to replace him with someone a bit less personally repugnant?

They’re super white too…

Those numbers of Millennials and Gen Z are just astonishing. NBC News reports:

Republican primary voters are older, whiter and much more conservative than the electorate at large.

That should surprise no one who follows American politics, but our most recent national NBC News poll captures the profile of what the GOP primary electorate looks like.

Thirty-nine percent of Republican primary voters are age 65 and older, compared with 25% of the overall electorate and 25% of Democratic primary voters, according to the poll.

Eighty-nine percent of GOP primary voters are white, versus 72% of all voters.

And 67% of Republican primary voters say they are conservative, including 41% who are “very” conservative. 

That compares with 36% of all voters who are conservative, including 18% who are “very” conservative.

There are two slight — but significant — changes to the composition of the Republican electorate since the 2016 election cycle, when Donald Trump won the party’s presidential nomination and the White House, per the NBC News poll’s historical results.

One, the GOP is slightly more diverse than it was in 2016, when 92% of all Republican voters were white (versus 89% now). 

And two, the share of the GOP electorate without college degrees is larger. In 2012, 48% of Republicans didn’t have college degrees. By 2016, that percentage had increased to 58%.

Now it’s 63%, according to the NBC News poll

That last is actually bad news for Trump:

One of the most significant developments in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election has emerged largely under the radar. From 2016 to 2022, the number of white people without college degrees — the core of Donald Trump’s support — has fallen by 2.1 million.

Over the same period, the number of white people who have graduated from college — an increasingly Democratic constituency — has grown by 13.3 million.

These trends do not bode well for the prospects of Republican candidates, especially Trump.

They have lost many college educated over the past 8 years. And the ranks of the non-college educated is shrinking. It’s a bad formula for victory.

Not exactly news, but this analysis pulls it all together:

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, looking to shift his run for president into a higher gear after an early series of missteps, spent the last two weeks rolling out an immigration policy and holding town halls with voters. But rather than correcting course, he stumbled again this week, raising questions about where his campaign is heading.

First, Mr. DeSantis’s team was forced to battle allegations, including from fellow Republicans, that it had shared a homophobic video on social media. Then, a top spokesman for the main super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis acknowledged that former President Donald J. Trump was the race’s “runaway front-runner,” while Mr. DeSantis faced an “uphill battle.”

“Right now in national polling we are way behind, I’ll be the first to admit that,” the adviser, Steve Cortes, said in a livestream Twitter event on Sunday. It was an admission notably at odds with the confidence that the governor’s advisers usually project in public.

To top it off — in a visual representation of his recent troubles — Mr. DeSantis got soaked by a rainstorm as he marched in an Independence Day parade alongside several dozen supporters in New Hampshire — the crucial early nominating state where his super PAC, Never Back Down, stopped running television advertisements in mid-May.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump hosted a rally in South Carolina that attracted thousands of people over the holiday weekend, a reminder of his enduring popularity with Republicans despite losing in 2020 and now facing at least two criminal trials.

The race is still in its early days, but Mr. DeSantis’s rough week highlights the challenges his underdog campaign faces as it seeks a coherent strategy to break through against Mr. Trump.

So far, Mr. DeSantis has tried to undermine his chief rival by subtly contrasting their ages, temperaments and records on issues like the coronavirus pandemic without saying anything too unkind about the former president, whom he almost never mentions by name. He has also attempted to move to the right of Mr. Trump on issues like abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, at the same time as he argues that he is the Republican candidate best placed to attract swing voters and defeat President Biden.

But Mr. DeSantis, who has not shown that he is a natural campaigner, has failed to take off in the polls, and his carefully choreographed public events have offered few headline-generating moments, as his campaign, until recently, has worked to shield him from potentially awkward unscripted interactions with voters and the news media.

The wobbly launch of his presidential campaign makes for a stark contrast with the confident way Mr. DeSantis has governed Florida, where he silenced opposition within his own party and crushed Democrats at the polls during the midterm elections. It also has given hope to other primary candidates, several of whom have jumped into the race in recent weeks, that they can replace him as the party’s most plausible alternative to Mr. Trump.

“DeSantis’s argument is electability,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who holds regular focus groups with G.O.P. voters. “But he is undermining the electability argument by running to Trump’s right. He is alienating college-educated, suburban voters who want to move past Trump,” as well as the independents he would need to beat Mr. Biden in a general election.

Ms. Longwell said Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to differentiate himself from Mr. Trump without directly criticizing him risked leaving the Florida governor without a natural constituency in the primaries.

“You cannot go around Trump,” she said. “You have to go through him.”

National polls show Mr. DeSantis trailing Mr. Trump by roughly 30 points — a gap that has widened significantly since Mr. DeSantis began traveling the country this spring to introduce himself to voters.

He defended his grotesque anti-LGBTQ ad yesterday, saying it’s fair game to accuse Trump of being soft on transgender people which is as sick as the ad itself. (And anyway, Trump changed his attitude once in office — remember his transgender military ban?)

Mr. DeSantis has also become known as a provocateur, successfully drawing criticism from liberals and using it to gin up support from his base. But a recent attempt that seemed devised to garner such attention — a video that condemned Mr. Trump for expressing support for L.G.B.T.Q. people — appeared to backfire over the weekend, leading to criticism not only from Democrats but also from other Republicans, including the largest group representing gay, lesbian and transgender conservatives.

The video, taken from another Twitter user and reposted by Mr. DeSantis’s rapid-response campaign account, relied heavily on obscure conservative memes.

Richard Barry, a former New Hampshire state lawmaker who attended a rainy Fourth of July breakfast visited by several presidential candidates, said he was eager to support someone other than Mr. Trump. But Mr. DeSantis has turned him off, he said, citing a criticism some voters have leveled against Mr. Trump — a sign that Mr. DeSantis is not yet differentiating himself from the former president in a meaningful way.

“He has a street kid attitude that says, ‘It is my way or the highway,’” Mr. Barry said of Mr. DeSantis. “He doesn’t listen to people.”

Hey, he’s just trying to give the GOP voters what they want. But they like their hate to be fun. And nothing about DeSantis is fun.

Tom Cruise gets endless rehearsals. We don’t.

“Well, this is more than a little terrifying. Shouldn’t we all be paying a little bit more attention?” asks Dan Froomkin.

It’s like something out of Mission Impossible. Recent Wagner mercenaries’ moves against Moscow leave the West wondering about Vladimir Putin’s fate, the stability of the Russian state, and the security of the Russian nuclear arsenal (Washington Post):

And in recent weeks the drumbeat has intensified, with some well-connected Russian strategic analysts and think tank experts openly proclaiming the “necessity” for Moscow to carry out a preemptive tactical nuclear strike on a NATO country, like Poland — to avoid defeat in the war on Ukraine and to revive Western terror of Russia’s nuclear might.

Since the Wagner rebellion, Sergei Karaganov, a former Kremlin adviser and influential Russian political scientist, has doubled down on calls for Moscow to do so. In an earlier article last month headlined, “A Difficult but Necessary Decision,” Karaganov argued the risk of a retaliatory nuclear strike on Russia, and nuclear Armageddon, “can be reduced to an absolute minimum.”

No sane American president would put the United States at risk by “sacrificing conditional Boston for conditional Poznań,” he wrote, referring to a city in Poland.

A hawkish Moscow-based military analyst, Dmitry Trenin, supported Karaganov, arguing that “an unambiguous — and no longer verbal — signal should be sent” to Washington.

Karaganov and Trenin sound like Mission Impossible villains. Zealots. Karaganov believes Russia was “chosen by history” to destroy the “Western yoke.”

You picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue, right?

Many Russian nuclear arms experts gasped in horror at the calls from Karaganov and Trenin. One, Ivan Timofeev, called it “extremely dangerous.”

There is no indication that Putin would deploy nukes save in the event of an existential threat to Russia.

But a worrying question is what would comprise an “existential threat” to Russia in Putin’s mind, given his profound conviction that he is the state’s sole guardian and protector.

It’s all a lot easier to live with in the dark of a movie theater when you know Ethan Hunt and his IMF team always save the day. The world does not get rehearsals.

[last lines]
Benji Dunn: How close were we?
Ethan Hunt: The usual.
Ilsa Faust: [incredulous] Usual?
Ethan Hunt: [chuckling] Please, don’t make me laugh.

The right is relentless. The left needs to be.

Several small stories this morning worth attention.

Lin Wood retired to avoid being disbarred (NBC News):

Lin Wood, a high-profile Georgia lawyer who embraced and promoted former President Donald Trump’s bogus 2020 election claims, told the state bar he was retiring amid disciplinary probes.

“I understand that this request is unqualified, irreversible and permanent,” Wood, 70, said in a letter to the State Bar of Georgia seeking to be transferred to “Retired Status.”

“I further understand and acknowledge that if granted Retired Status I am prohibited from practicing law in this state and in any other state or jurisdiction and that I may not reapply for admission,” he wrote in the letter, which he posted on his Telegram account.

Jack Smith is looking closely at state-level efforts to muck about with 2020 electors (TPM):

Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed the Arizona secretary of state’s office as recently as May for information related to the unsuccessful lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and the Arizona Republican Party about supposed errors in the 2020 election. As you’ll recall, Arizona was a hotbed of conspiracy theories tied to the effort to overturn the election after President Biden flipped the longtime Republican stronghold state, leading to Trumpworld outrage, a phony and expensive state election “audit” and the lawsuits.

The previously unreported subpoenas were revealed in a new report by the Arizona Republic Wednesday, which found that Smith’s office also spoke with Republican state lawmakers this spring about events post-2020 election.

[…]

Smith is reportedly interested in documents “related to discovery, proposed exhibits and communications with opposing attorneys,” in the Republic’s words. An outside counsel for the secretary of state’s office reportedly complied with the request from Smith. As the Republic also notes, it’s unclear if Smith’s office has contacted former Republican Gov. Dough Ducey with similar requests. It was Ducey who reportedly silenced his phone when Donald Trump tried to call him while he was certifying the results in the state in 2020.

Florida seems to have a problem “governing within the bounds set by the United States Constitution,” said a federal judge in a small victory against voter suppression (Democracy Docket):

On Monday, July 3, a federal judge temporarily blocked provisions of Florida voter suppression law, Senate Bill 7050, which was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in late May. 

One of the blocked provisions bars noncitizen volunteers from conducting voter registration activities on behalf of third-party voter registration organizations (3PVROs) — groups that engage in community-based voter registration. The other blocked provision criminalizes routine retention of voter information for any purpose except voter registration, thus making it a felony to maintain voter information for other activities such as get-out-the-vote efforts.

[…]

“This case arises from Florida’s latest assault on the right to vote,” wrote Chief Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida at the onset of the order. Walker, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, also struck down the most harmful provisions of Florida’s 2021 voter suppression law, Senate Bill 90, in March 2022.  “[T]he challenged provisions exemplify something Florida has struggled with in recent years; namely, governing within the bounds set by the United States Constitution,” he continued.

[…]

Finally, Walker held that the voter information retention ban — which exposes 3PVRO volunteers to criminal prosecution if they violate the provision — is “unconstitutionally vague” because it fails to “provide notice of what is prohibited” and authorizes “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” Walker added: “The statute’s text is so devoid of meaning that it cannot possibly give people of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what information they are allowed to retain and for what purposes they may do so.” 

In a particularly symbolic victory, which came down on the eve of Independence Day, Florida voters prevailed. Walker concluded his order by acknowledging the backdrop against which this voting rights win transpired: “Tomorrow, Floridians across the state will commemorate our Nation’s birthday…And amid these patriotic festivities, some may feel moved, for the first time, to embrace their solemn privilege as citizens by registering to vote…In doing so, they would embody those democratic ideals that, for nearly two hundred forty-seven years, have made our system the envy of the world.”

Having to play Whac-A-Mole with these clowns is tedious. Sadly, the right seems to have endless resources for screwing with democracy. Their lack of faith in the red, white and blue should be disqualifying in the eyes of voters, but isn’t. Not when money is power, and money mixed with unquenchable thirst for more money and more power is a toxic brew that holds the right’s attention long term. Not so on the left.

A recent off-the-record conclave of high-dollar liberal donors a friend attended simply reinforced the impression. Lefty millionaires/billionaires would rather throw money at high-profile personalities than into building political infrastructure for the long term. They’d rather bask in the glow of political stardom so they can brag to their friends. Meantime, the right eats our lunch and we play defense.

I don’t know how many of you care about this but it really seems to have reached critical mass over this past weekend and I suspect the end is nigh. You will notice that my twitter feed on the sidebar is gone and I don’t have an explanation for it except that twitter is now so fubared that it isn’t picking up the feed.

I’m still there @digby56 but the writing is on the wall I’m afraid. I’m trying out all the new platforms, Mastadon, BlueSky, Post etc. I’ve kept my handle digby56 at all of them so you can probably find me (or possibly one of the imposters that have crept on some of them…) They all have their good and bad points but they just don’t have the scale. Supposedly Meta is rolling out its new twitter-like platform tomorrow (it’s somehow associated with Instagram) so we’ll see how it goes. I’ll let you know if I land in a particular spot.

It’s a shame. I loved twitter and it was an important resource for my work. But Elon bought it as a toy and he’s smashed it to pieces as spoiled little bully boys tend to do.

Here’s Josh Marshall on the recent events:

The ups and downs of social media platforms aren’t usually a focus of my writing. But they interest me to the extent they intersect with politics and public conversation in this country. You may have heard that over the weekend Twitter went into a kind of extended meltdown, rapidly introducing a series of “rate limiting” restrictions because the platform was having a hard time staying online. Behind the jargon of “rate limiting,” this essentially meant the site was forced to start rationing Tweets and the ability to engage with them, an ominous move for a company whose business is literally selling engagement. The site’s owner, Elon Musk, later claimed that this was in response to various online bad actors overwhelming the site’s infrastructure. The site’s (for the moment) CEO later claimed that it was all done out of the blue to catch the online bad guys unaware and off guard. Giving any advanced warning (even to employees, it turns out) would have given the online bad guys a heads up and allowed them to escape.

This is all such transparent nonsense that it beggars belief that even a company as chaotic and mercurially managed as Twitter under Elon Musk would try to claim it with any kind of straight face. We don’t know the precise details of what happened under the hood at Twitter. But the big picture is pretty clear. And you don’t need to be too versed in tech to understand it at that level. Think of it this way: You have an amusement park with 10,000 visitors a day. You cut staffing and ride maintenance so you can only accommodate 5,000 visitors a day. What happens is elementary: Things start falling apart and you’re forced to limit how many people can come in the front gate. That’s your “rate limiting,” rationing tweets.

Most of the drama about Musk and Twitter over the eight months since he took over the site has focused on his antic involvement in the online culture wars, a kind of public midlife crisis played out on the stage of a $44 billion vanity purchase. Probably the best way to understand Musk is that he’s another rich middle-aged divorced guy whose hot new girlfriend is white nationalism. But there’s a whole other part of the drama. He also made draconian staffing cuts, dramatically reduced the core technical capacity to keep the site online and also simply refused to pay various bills, figuring that he and the site are big enough that vendors won’t have the nerve to cut off services. While this was going on Musk’s public antics have savaged the company’s advertising revenues. They come together in a self-reinforcing cycle of budget cuts and revenue shortfalls. Since Twitter is no longer a public company it’s hard to know precisely what mix of expedients led to this weekend’s drama. But that big picture is clear enough.

The ongoing drama since last December has spawned a number of Twitter clone sites offering a refuge to those who want to escape Musk’s Twitter. But each has come up against the same challenge. What makes Twitter Twitter is that everyone’s there. It’s a classic case of inertia and network effects, a basic problem of collective action. Even if most of the site’s users would like to be somewhere else, those network effects keep most of them locked in place. The increasing instability of the site’s infrastructure has that effect even on those who are indifferent to Musk’s politics and conspiracy theories -— which is certainly the bulk of the site’s users. Most of the sites also lack the vast sums of money required to succeed at it. Musk has clearly relied on this fact and mostly he’s been on firm ground doing so.

I frequently note the subject lists I curate on Twitter — resources I find immensely helpful for keeping up on the news topics that interest me most. You can’t reproduce these on the competitor sites because the people I put on the lists aren’t there. Or maybe one or two of them are on one site and a couple on another. But that’s the same difference. Everybody being there is what makes Twitter Twitter.

But now something’s different. In the background, clearly sensing the expanding opportunity, Meta (née Facebook) has been prepping a Twitter replacement. Just as this absurd chaos was enfolding over the weekend they announced that “Threads” will go live tomorrow, July 6. It’s hard to know just how this will play out. But if anyone has the cash and network power to put Twitter out of its misery, it’s Meta. Unsurprisingly, since Facebook is terminally uncool and now basically the social network of old people, Threads will be launched as a discussion app that is part of Instagram. It will be its own separate app but in brand and possible account terms it will be part of Instagram.

This opens a number of possibilities. Numerous celebrities have millions or tens of millions of followers on Instagram. If they can simply port that clout to Threads, or if that’s a quick and relatively simple transition, that really does make it a potentially existential, near-term threat to Twitter.

Your guess is as good as mine how it will pan out. I tend to side with the people who think there won’t be a Twitter replacement. Even Twitter also won’t be the Twitter replacement. It’s probably on a glide path to Friendsterization where Musk acolytes and alt-righters will continue to taunt and own an ever-dwindling number of normal people who keep logging in. You’ll have fragmentation without a single place where everyone is. But whatever … I’m not here to do any big think on that front. What’s notable to me is that Elon Musk is clearly the best thing that ever happened to Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg and Facebook became the symbol, if not always the reality, of everything bad about the platforms and social media: the threats to privacy, monopoly, hate speech, inequality, election subversion, society-wide short attention spans. But Musk — through his mix of billionaire grievance and adolescent rage — has managed to make Zuckerberg now appear to be a comparatively benign figure.

I mean, think about it: His big pitch in 2020 was personally cutting a check for various local governments to fund their pandemic emergency election work. That may have been PR to make up for the disaster of 2016. But in comparison to Elon Musk it looks visionary. And there are worse things than doing good things at least in part for the PR boost. There was never anything about Zuckerberg that made you think he set out to do bad things for the sake of it. That’s been Musk’s calling card with Twitter: transgressive behavior, owning the libs. After all the essence of the whole story, the root of everything that followed, is that he was motivated to purchase Twitter because of his enmity toward the site’s most prominent users. Like Trump, predation is his thing.

I’ve seen tons of people cheering on Threads and hoping it deals a death blow to Twitter because Musk is such a loathsome and dystopic figure. No shame: I’m cheering Zuckerberg too. This may be Musk’s greatest accomplishment — making people cheer on Mark Zuckerberg, in its own way a more improbable and challenging feat than creating Space X or developing Tesla.

Sigh. I hate this crap. I just want stuff that works and I don’t care about all the drama. But it’s caught up to me anyway and now I guess I’ll have to deal with it…

The once-liberal NYT editorial board is calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in a sad and misguided attempt to be seen as Serious. ⁦@AGSNYT⁩ is an elitist before anything else. https://t.co/7KjC4Vaatw

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) July 5, 2023

Is this about privatizing social security to further enrich Wall St? Or maybe they want Donald Trump to be president again? I can’t think of another reason why they wouldn’t just say, “raise taxes on rich people” and leave it at that. (That is the answer to this problem if, in fact, there is one.) After all, other countries are somehow able to provide universal health care and retirement benefits for their citizens. France is experiencing massive protest right now over a proposal to raise the full retirement age from 62 to 64. We should be so lucky. The usual suspects are talking about raising our retirement age to 72!

Maybe they should have a chat with Professor Paul Krugman, their own columnist, who exposed the Deficit Scolds just last May (for the hundredth time) during the debt ceiling negotiations. It’s all nonsense.

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman have the story. All these right wingers bellowing about free speech all the time are beyond hypocritical:

At first glance, the plight of Katherine Rinderle, a fifth-grade teacher in Georgia, might seem confusing. Rinderle faces likely termination by the Cobb County School District for reading aloud a children’s book that touches on gender identity. Yet she is charged in part with violating policy related to a state law banning “divisive concepts” about race, not gender.

This disconnect captures something essential about state laws and directives restricting classroom discussion across the country: They seem to be imprecisely drafted to encourage censorship. That invites parents and administrators to seek to apply bans to teachers haphazardly, forcing teachers to err on the side of muzzling themselves rather than risk unintentionally crossing fuzzy lines into illegality.

“Teachers are fearful,” Rinderle told us in an interview. “These vague laws are chilling and result in teachers self-censoring.”

In short, when it comes to all these anti-woke laws and the MAGA-fied frenzy they’ve unleashed, the vagueness is the point.

As CNN reported, the district sent Rinderle a letter in May signaling its intent to fire her for a lesson using “My Shadow Is Purple.” The book is written from the perspective of a child who likes both traditionally “boy” things like trains and “girl” things like glitter. Its conclusion is essentially that sometimes blue and pink don’t really capture kids’ full interests and personalities — and that everyone is unique and should just be themselves.

The district’s letter, which we have obtained, criticized Rinderle for teaching the “controversial subject” of “gender identity” without giving parents a chance to opt out. She was charged with violating standards of professional ethics, safeguards for parents’ rights and a policy governing treatment of “controversial issues.”

But Rinderle and her lawyer, Craig Goodmark, argue that the policy on “controversial issues” is extremely hazy. They point out that it prohibits “espousing” political “beliefs” in keeping with a 2022 state law that bans efforts to persuade students to agree with certain “divisive concepts” that don’t reasonably apply here.

After all, in that law, those “divisive concepts” are all about race. Among them are the ideas that the United States is “fundamentally racist” and that people should feel “guilt” or bear “responsibility” for past actions on account of their race. It’s not clear how this policy applies to Rinderle’s alleged transgression.

What’s more, we have learned that this action was initiated by a parent’s troubling email to the district, provided to us by Rinderle and her lawyer, in which the parent notes that teachers were told to avoid “divisive” concepts. The parent then writes, “I would consider anything in the genre of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ divisive.”

That is a highly debatable point. Even if some might consider anything related to “LGBT” as divisive for students in fifth grade, should this really be treated as self-evident? And should it really lead to a teacher’s firing?

“This particular email initiating a termination is absurd,” Goodmark told us. “This is one parent’s view of what’s ‘divisive’ being adopted by a whole district.”

Asked for comment, the district declined to discuss specifics but said it’s “confident” that its action is “appropriate” given Rinderle’s history. The district’s letter to her says students and parents have previously complained about her choices of subject matter and class conduct.

We think it’s reasonable to debate whether parents of fifth-graders deserve a heads-up on a lesson about a book like this. And we understand that a parent might not want their fifth-grader to undergo such a lesson. These matters will be litigated during Rinderle’s hearing in August.

Nonetheless, it’s absurd that Rinderle is charged with flouting policy on “controversial issues” via such a ridiculous utilization of state law. Her predicament illustrates the danger teachers face in trying to navigate policies that seem designed to be hard to follow: The incentives strongly encourage some to avoid challenging topics (lest they face a fate such as Rinderle’s), and others to go searching for transgressions on absurd pretexts (as a parent did here).

“This is the shocking new normal in American public schooling,” Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America, told us. “In many states, a widening circle of content can get someone in trouble. More and more educators are getting the message: There’s a target on their backs.”

Last weekend, at the national summit of the absurdly named right-wing group “Moms for Liberty,” GOP presidential contenders all raged against wokeness, demonstrating to the base how attuned they are to the hunger for more laws cracking down on open discussions in classrooms.

“We’re not going to have the sexualization of our children in our schools!” fumed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Former president Donald Trump outdid DeSantis, vowing to “liberate our children from the Marxists, lunatics and perverts.”

The essence of this mania is that it is forever hunting for new offenders on the flimsiest of pretexts. As GOP legislatures put the force of state power behind this push, they are creating an array of blunt weaponry, which in turn further encourages parents and local officials to sniff out new sexualizers of children, new Marxists, new lunatics and new perverts wherever they can be found. Whatever becomes of Rinderle, the scalps will assuredly continue piling higher.

This makes me so sad. They really want to go back to the creepy gender-conforming of the 1950s. It won’t work, of course. People aren’t going back to that. But a lot of people are going to suffer anyway as these fucked up people get their thrills torturing vulnerable people, especially their own kids. It’s just sick.

Of course keep in mind that they have always been hostile to teachers, a unionized group the majority of which are educated women and a pathway to the middle class for racial and ethnic minorities. They have been attacking them as public employees for decades, taking over school boards and starving public schools of funds. The war on knowledge and education is long running. This is just the latest battle and they are taking no prisoners.