Trump said over the weekend that Joe Biden is the most corrupt president in history. Uh huh. Check out his latest grift with his good pals the Saudis:
The LIV Golf League’s season-ending team championship will be played at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami for the second straight year.
LIV Golf League officials announced Monday that the $50 million team championship will be played Oct. 20-22 at Trump National Doral, which is owned by former U.S. President Donald Trump.
The three-day team championship was originally scheduled to be played Nov. 3-5 at Royal Greens Golf & Country Club in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. LIV Golf League officials have been working to move it back to Trump National Doral, where it was staged in the league’s inaugural season in 2022. The Jeddah event, now scheduled for Oct. 13-15, will be the final regular-season tournament.
The Republicans are relentlessly investigating Hunter Biden’s alleged influence peddling from years ago. This is not of interest to them. Hmmm.
It’s still a long way until the first Republican primaries but unless something changes quickly, it is looking more and more grim for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and more and more secure for former President Donald Trump. The polls in the early primary states show that Trump is still polling at least 20 points higher than DeSantis who still isn’t catching on.
DeSantis appeared on Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo’s show this weekend and insisted that he’s floundering because the News Media doesn’t want him to be the nominee which isn’t true at all. If anything they were champing at the bit for a real horse race against Donald Trump because that would make excellent copy. But it is reasonable to ask why has been sinking in the polls over the last few months.
The consensus among the pundit class seems to be that he’s just unlikable so the more people see of him the less they like him. I suspect there’s some truth to that. But it may just be the contrast between him and Trump, the political superstar. As Kate Briquelet of the Daily Beast reported from the Moms for Liberty presidential cattle call after Trump’s keynote speech:
“He has so much charisma,” a man told me in the elevator afterward. “The guy is just electric! I love DeSantis, he’s my guy, but he doesn’t have the same charm.”
I long ago chalked up this inexplicable attraction to Trump to the fact that his following still views him as a celebrity, which he was before he got into politics, and now they have turned him into a superhero. He really isn’t seen as a politician at all. Poor, dull Ron DeSantis can’t compete with that.
There’s no doubt that Trump’s cult of personality is very powerful and it almost has a life of its own. But there is more to it than just his personality. It’s about his message as well.
We know all about Ron DeSantis’ message by now. He’s been relentlessly pushing his “anti-woke” agenda and enacting it in every way he could manage in Florida to show that he is the guy who will make the MAGA crowd’s internet memes come true. There is nobody out there who takes the culture war as seriously as DeSantis and he doesn’t just confine himself to a few hot button issues, he embraces all of them and there is literally nothing else he seems to care about.
Yair Rosenberg in the Atlantic submits that DeSantis turned Florida into a right wing hellscape and obsessively said the word “woke” for a year and half as his strategy to win Iowa which is full of white conservative evangelical voters. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true but it’s yet another example of his general ineptitude. It’s certainly possible that he could ride the culture war to a win in Iowa just as President Cruz, President Huckabee and President Santorum did but let’s just say it’s a little bit short-sighted to create your entire persona and record for the purpose of winning the state that specialized in producing also-rans. Since 1980, a GOP candidate who won Iowa (aside from incumbents) only went on to win the nomination twice.
And anyway, it appears that Trump is likely going to win Iowa because the conservative evangelicals like him too.And it’s not as if he isn’t a hardcore culture warrior too. Despite DeSantis’ attempt to paint him as soft on “the gender issue” which seems to be the issue that has the Iowa evangelicals all riled up, he’s got some nasty anti-trans policies he can point to, like his order to expel transgender members of the military when he was president and his orders to redefine sex discrimination to exclude protections for transgender people in education, housing, and employment, as well as health care. And he’s announced that when he is returned to the White House he will “revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual mutilation of our youth and ask Congress to send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states” and has even gone so far as to promise, “on Day One, I will sign an executive order instructing every federal agency to cease the promotion of sex or gender transition at any age, they’re not gonna do it anymore” which even the anti-trans warrior DeSantis hasn’t proposed.
Trump is also taking credit for reversing Roe v Wade and is fine with the “parents rights” movement pushing Christian education in public schools. He and DeSantis spar over the pandemic response but that issue is rapidly losing salience. In other words, DeSantis can’t really get to Trump’s right no matter how hard he tries. When Trump says stuff like “‘Democrats are pushing the transgender cult” on young people while “persecuting Christians” and “demonizing patriots'” it goes straight to the wingnut lizard brain. Nobody does it better.
But unlike DeSantis, Trump understands that the base isn’t just about the culture war defined by the outrage of the day or some far right think tanker’s obscure jargon laden hobby horse like “DEI” or “CRT.” Sure, he’ll go along with it. (Remember how he would blurt out that he was going to do away with “Common Core” during the 2016 election?) But his themes are much simpler and much broader. He understands that what moves the Republican base is grievance writ large and he speaks directly to that.
Much of the Trumpian rhetoric that penetrates the national consciousness is about his personal legal travails and his persecution complex — but that plays into the grievance in new ways in this campaign. He claims he’s being indicted “for you”, his loyal followers, and that he’s the only thing standing between the government and them. That’s the superhero/messiah appeal.
And he knows that what drives the base isn’t really sincere concern about “woke ideology” or Christian morality. (That’s obvious since he is a corrupt libertine, pathological liar and they love him anyway.) What drives them is loathing of their perceived enemies and it applies to whatever those enemies are doing whether it’s supporting Ukraine’s fight to repel the invasion by Russia or teaching that slavery was bad and had longterm consequences that still reverberate today. The details don’t really matter. Whatever the “other side” is against they are for and vice versa, without regard to the substance.
Donald Trump understands this. He told them in his announcement speech, “I am your retribution” which is what they really care about. DeSantis’ laundry list of “anti-woke” achievement miss the big picture. None of that really resonates unless you can tap into the emotional wellspring of resentment and sense of injustice that fuels the MAGA right. Trump does that instinctively because he is one of them.
The Republican base yearns to be a movement (some might call it a cult) rather than a political party and under Donald Trump they’ve completely moved beyond politics as we used to define them.. DeSantis is just another politician — and that’s the last thing these people want.
One of two pipe bombs discovered adjacent to the Capitol on January 6, 2021. (FBI photo)
Florida man Cesar Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2019 for sending over two dozen inoperative pipe bombs to perceived enemies of then-President Donald Trump. None exploded. No one was injured. His intended victims were lucky.
Politics in the U.S. is not yet full-on blood sport, but there are days it trends that way. Taunts, red hats, belligerence and semi-autos are at any moment inches away from mayhem. People have had to go into hiding over viral accusations disseminated both by social media, propaganda outlets such as Fox News, and political figures such as Donald Trump. The right-wing media complex has yet to feel enough pain in its pocket to pull back from provoking its audience to credible threats of violence. In the case of the Jan. 6 insurrection, it was actual violence.
One victim of Tucker Carlson gets a profile this morning in The New York Times:
What’s known about the man — a two-time Trump voter named Ray Epps — is that he took part in demonstrations in Washington that day and the night before. He was captured on camera urging a crowd to march with him and enter the Capitol. But at other points, he pleads for calm once it becomes clear the situation is turning violent. He can be seen moving past a line of Capitol Police at the barricades, but never actually goes inside the Capitol.
Federal prosecutors have not charged Mr. Epps with a crime, focusing instead on the more than 1,000 other demonstrators who acted violently or were trespassing in the Capitol. The Justice Department’s sprawling investigation into the attack remains open, however, and Mr. Epps could still be indicted.
Yet for more than 18 months, Mr. Carlson insisted that the lack of charges against Mr. Epps could mean only one thing: that he was being protected because he was a secret government agent. There was “no rational explanation,” Mr. Carlson told his audience, why this “mysterious figure” who “helped stage-manage the insurrection” had not been charged.
Epps and his wife have had to sell their Arizona business and go into hiding in another state after receiving death threats from people who believe the conspiracy theory. The couple plans to sue Fox News for defamation:
Now lawyers representing Mr. Epps and his wife are proceeding with plans to sue Fox News for defamation. “We informed Fox in March that if they did not issue a formal on-air apology that we would pursue all available avenues to protect the Eppses’ rights,” said Michael Teter, a lawyer for Mr. Epps who sent the network a cease-and-desist letter asking for an on-air apology and a retraction. After Mr. Teter did not hear from Fox about his request, he began to prepare the suit. “That remains our intent.”
Mr. Epps declined to comment on his potential suit. A Fox News spokeswoman declined to comment.
It is unclear whether such a suit would possess enough merit to move forward.
The family members of the federal attorneys prosecuting former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case are “at risk” due to death threats, former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade warned on Saturday.
[…]
Prosecutors handling the case are now facing threats and harassment, according to a Washington Post report published on Thursday. The newspaper reported that some Trump supporters have posted the names and personal details of individual prosecutors online despite DOJ efforts to keep that information hidden.
McQuade told Newsweek in a statement on Saturday that threats to prosecutors risk “the lives of public servants” and send “a dangerous message about the rule of law.”
“This is not normal,” McQuade said. “From time to time, prosecutors do get death threats, maybe based on someone they’re prosecuting, but I think we’ve reached a whole different era when we’re sort of crowdsourcing these threats. Any time former president Donald Trump says these things about witch hunts and hoaxes, calling for the defunding of [the Department of Justice], there is the risk that someone out there is going to hear that and take matters into their own hands and go after these line career prosecutors.”
Authorities have never captured the person who left pipe bombs at the Democratic and Republican national headquarters properties ahead of Jan. 6, 2021. Those devices were viable, says the FBI.
People like Trump, Carlson, and others are playing with fire. What’s even more nuts is that Trump’s campaign for president is viable.
Being on the field and in the game (rather than a heckling spectator) means that, even if you get politically run over sometimes, you don’t feel like road kill. Small consolation, maybe, but it’s something. And sometimes you get personal credit for the wins. Keep hope alive, Jesse Jackson might say.
E.J. Dionne suggests that hope is more than a sop, but “a demanding virtue, not a sunny disposition.” Also, it’s practical, he writes. (It gets me up every morning.) Meaning it’s not naive to seek out “a rendezvous with hope“:
Carol Graham, my colleague at the Brookings Institution, has made the study of well-being her life’s work as an economist. Nodding to the reality that “The Power of Hope” reflects an unusual preoccupation within a discipline often referred to as “the dismal science,” Graham opens her first chapter with nice understatement: “Hope is a little-studied concept in economics.”
It shouldn’t be, she argues, because hope is relevant to so many of the outcomes economists seek, including upward mobility, a well-trained dedicated workforce, better health and the economic growth that flows from all of them. Hope’s opposite, despair, is now an enormous, measurable problem.
“Despair in the United States today is a barrier to reviving our labor markets and productivity,” she writes. “It jeopardizes our well-being, longevity, families and communities.”
In “A Commonwealth of Hope, Wake Forest University’s Michael Lamb considers St. Augustine’s view of “both the limits and possibilities of politics.”
Like Graham in the policy sphere, Lamb highlights the high cost of despair in politics, which he argues “can license apathy or fatalism, encouraging citizens to withdraw from politics rather than stretch toward difficult political goods.”
His valuable warning: “When despair becomes a habit — a vice — it can further entrench the social and political problems that prompted pessimism in the first place.”
One sometimes encounters glass-half-empty progressives sporting “a plague on both your houses” cynicism toward politics. A dark cloud in every silver lining. I avoid them. They’re downers.
“Democracy cannot work if citizens are demoralized and demobilized by such despair,” Dionne writes.
My working career was built around industrial construction projects. Some went better than others. Some clients were easier to work with than others. But there always came a point, months in, in which everyone was sick of it, ready to be done and move on. But eventually you could drive down the interstate and point to new facilities where people got jobs and think, I did that.
At one political event where people were doing the “and what do you do” thing, I told a woman I’d been working with a biotech firm whose hot product was a multiple sclerosis drug I named. She said she had MS, was taking [product name], “and it’s really working well for me.” My job did not suck that week.
Each new political cycle feels like that. Fresh hope for making people’s lives better. And new projects. I have one now that, if it gets funding, could pay off in 2024 election wins in North Carolina. I’ll think, I did that.
Here’s my bold statement for 2023: Social media companies in the United States need to be regulated.
Before you start agreeing and explain why it’ll never happen… you should know Meta didn’t launch Threads in the EU. Because of the EU’s REGULATION. It would have led to massive NEW fines and Meta doesn’t want MORE massive fines. It was recently hit with an order to stop sending EU users data to the US for processing and was fined almost $1.3BN for breaching the GDPR’s requirements on data export.
When companies’ actions or inactions harm the public, the public demands something be done. In the EU they’ve recognized the harm being done by social media companies and enacted regulation. Short term, companies pay the fine and change their behavior to stop new fines. This is what we want, what the public deserves. Protection from harm.
Here’s the deal, regulations force companies to change their behaviors. If they don’t, they pay a fine. Big fines gets their attention AND, if they are a public company, it gets the attention of the big shareholders who say “Stop the bleeding! Keep that quarterly revenue growing or we will punish you!”
I want companies to take action on threats of violence and hate speech. Meta has already defined what they consider a threat and hate speech and have said what they will do about them. I’m the nerd who read ALL of Meta’s / Instagram’s /Thread’s Terms of Use. and Community Guidelines . Check this part out:
“We remove content that contains credible threats or hate speech, content that targets private individuals to degrade or shame them, personal information meant to blackmail or harass someone, and repeated unwanted messages. violence, deadly disinformation and hate speech.”
Threads Community Guidelines on threats under Meta/Instagram
The good news is that it appears that Meta is trying to moderate the content on Threads. Read this great Media Matters piece pointing out the methods used by RWNJs & Nazis to test the moderation AND the rhetoric deployed to avoid regulation.
[They ] have postedabout the limits of its moderation, while also questioningwhetherMeta will “censor” them — which is a false claim that right-wing media and figures frequentlyemploy against social media platforms with moderation policies.
Meta wants Threads to be #BrandSafe, so they can get advertising revenue, but they get revenue from other ways, like collecting data on people. And, because Meta is so big, they can run Threads without ads for YEARS if they want while Nazis’ & extremists work the system.
“The brands just need a Twitter-like experience stocked with users that they can point their delirious social media managers to. Their champion has arrived.”
And it’s not as if Meta has a great track record with Instagram. From the Media Matters piece.
Back in 2021, the tech companies told Congress that they would deplatform the 12 biggest spreaders of disinformation on vaccines, but one month later 9 of the 12 were still posting. Including RFK Jr on Facebook. This was BEFORE he announced his run for President, which puts him in the “newsworthy” category. BUT even that category has rules for violations of their policies.
Remember when Meta made special “guardrails” for Donald Trump for when he returned to Facebook? If he violates them he MIGHT be banned again! For a month. Multiple violations maybe another 2 years! What Meta DOESN’T have is outside punishments for failing to uphold its own policies. At least Meta is trying. But what about Musk’s Twitter, or Trump’s Truth Social? Rumble or Gab? They don’t care about profit from advertisers. They don’t have shareholders screaming at them for losing money to force content moderation on them.
Trump posted Obama’s address on Truth Social. Taylor Tranto then showed up at Obama’s address
your Contributions are not obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable.
your Contributions do not depict violence, threats of violence or criminal activity.
your Contributions do not advocate or incite, encourage, or threaten physical harm against another.
your Contributions do not violate any applicable law, regulation, or rule.
your Contributions do not violate the privacy or publicity rights of any third party.
If you’ve read Trump’s posts there you can spot the violations.
Truth Social says, “Any use of the Service in violation of the foregoing violates these Terms of Service and may result in, among other things, termination or suspension of your rights to use the Service and removal or deletion of your Contributions.” But they don’t HAVE TO do anything.
Trump remains an extreme danger to others. When will law enforcement take appropriate measures to hold him accountable?
Glenn Kirschner did a podcast this weekend making the case that Trump should be in jail. He makes an excellent argument. He used specific examples and his history as a prosecutor of dangerous individuals.
Trump’s statements on Truth Social provide evidence to support why Trump should be in jail. Some of Trump’s posts SHOULD get him suspended from Truth Social. AND, if he posted them natively on other platforms like Threads, should get him banned from posting there too. TFG posts threats on Truth Social knowing that management ( Devin Nunes!) won’t suspend his rights to post, even when they violate Truth Socials own Terms of Service. When Trump’s threats gets reposted on other platform with added context, it’s news. But too often there IS no added context. It’s often just a straight up repeating of the threats and disinformation verbatim.
So what are we going to do about the need for regulation on social media? In America we know how money rules, but we can’t count on “The Market” alone to stop companies from enabling the spread of threats of violence, deadly disinformation and hate speech.
Musk’s Twitter is NOT brand safe, is losing money, has welcomed Nazi supporters, allows and encourages attacks on trans people, and because there is no outside regulation, it keeps going.
Will Meta enforce their own policies? If they don’t, how do we pressure them to be enforced? Do like the EU did and pass regulation! While it’s NOT happening we need to tell the stories of violence, incitement & hate speech coming from RWNJs that are being left up to spread. Show the harm that is being caused because of it. File lawsuits. Work on legislation in the US. Point out that it exists in the EU. Learn from them. It’s not an impossible task.
Companies make decisions every day about who is protected and supported by their products and services. Part of the role of government is to step in and stop the entities that are causing harm to the public.
Oh, btw I did join Threads so I could report violations of their community guidelines… threads.net@spockomichal spoutible.com/spocko Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum has said he would vote for Donald Trump again as president but draws the line at ever conducting business with him. https://t.co/JrKsgU8VLf
Trump is honest and trustworthy enough to run the most powerful country in the world but you couldn’t trust him or his people to do business with your software company. Is this guy for real?
These people are so far gone it’s beyond all reason. Luckily, this cipher isn’t going to be in the race very long but it’s instructive to hear him speak anyway. They are all so tribal that they are willing to twist themselves into pretzels to stay in the GOP fold for Dear Leader but grasp at these straws to show that they are somehow different. It’s pathetic.
I hope you enjoy looking in the mirror Bergum. If it looks a little bit distorted, check your conscience.
He may not try to overturn an election but if you think this guy wouldn’t use his power to go after his enemies you are mistaken. He hasn’t changed:
GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie weighed in on the investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the plea deal reached in the case, calling the probe as well as the U.S. attorney who oversaw it not truthful or incompetent.
“U.S. Attorney [David] Weiss has to explain himself and he has to explain himself in public,” Christie told Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday. “You know, the fact is that this investigation of Hunter Biden in Delaware is either a lie or it’s incompetent. There’s no way that it should take five years to get to a two count misdemeanor tax plea and then to dismiss the gun charges.”
Christie, himself a former federal prosecutor, also blasted Democrats for pushing for stricter gun laws while they “won’t even enforce the gun laws that exist,” adding that the president’s son “should have been charged under those gun laws.”
Biden’s son agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanors for failing to pay income taxes in 2017 and 2018. He also agreed to enroll in a pretrial diversion program for possessing a firearm while being an unlawful user or addicted to a controlled substance.
Many Republicans have railed against the plea deal made between Hunter Biden and federal prosecutors, with some pointing to former President Trump’s recent federal indictment and calling it a double standard. Trump pleaded not guilty to 37 federal counts of mishandling classified documents and attempts to keep them from the government.
Christie launched his bid for the White House last month to join a growing number of GOP candidates willing to challenge former President Trump in 2024. He has also been a staunch critic of the former president since he lost the 2020 election.
It’s fine with me if he spends his time tearing into Trump. It doesn’t seem to be doing him any good but it’s lots of fun to watch.But I can’t say that I’m upset that he’s not going to win. He’s a bullying jerk and always has been and I’m sick of these guys. With the exception, maybe, of Asa Hutchinson, that is a defininf characteristic of every single GOP candidate, including that creepy ghoul Nikki Haley who keeps telling her audiences that Biden is going to drop dead any minute. She’s just a loathsome as Trump and DeSantis.
Don’t ever forget who Chris Christie really is. From 2015:
Like more than 70 million other refugees from Twitter, I downloaded Threads — Meta’s new Twitter clone — and immediately started “threading.” This wasn’t an easy decision. I generally believe that through a toxic combination of avarice and incompetence, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have done tremendous damage to the world. My most recent book was subtitled “How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media are Destroying America.” So, it’s safe to say that I am not exactly a Zuck stan. But despite my trepidation, I started using Threads.
Compared to other erstwhile Twitter replacements — Mastodon, Bluesky, Post, etc. — Threads was a huge success. It was easy to set up and even though I joined only a few hours after it launched, many people and media outlets were already posting on the app. The utility of a Twitter-like product is dependent on two interconnected questions — one, will enough interesting people share interesting content; and two, is the audience large and engaging enough to make sharing feel worth it? Because Threads leverages Instagram’s user base of two billion people, it was able to bring both influential and interesting people and an audience to the table from the outset.
I went to Threads because I wanted Twitter circa 2010-2020. I wanted to follow the news, hear politicians, pundits, and experts respond to the news, and offer my own opinions on both. Don’t get me wrong; Twitter was far from perfect in that period. It was filled with abuse and harassment. The rules to the extent there were any, were applied in unfair and unpredictable ways. But because I made a living following, writing, working in, and talking about politics, Twitter was an essential tool.
No longer.
Elon Musk rendered Twitter largely unusable. The app is constantly buggy. The decision to take away verification badges from everyone under a million followers and those unwilling to pay $8 a month undermined Twitter’s primary purpose for most users — following the news. Twitter thrived during big, fast-moving news events. But during the search for the Ocean Gate submarine and the coup attempt in Russia, it was largely impossible to discern what information to trust, an obvious problem when you click on a tweet, and the first several replies are from Elon fans who paid $8 to get a blue checkmark and make their tweets more visible. Anecdotally, at least, the decision to pay for increased relevance seems to correlate with being a particularly rude dipshit.
It’s too early to make any bold declarations. Threads will likely be better than Elon-era Twitter, yet I am skeptical it will solve the problem we all need solving — the news and information crisis.
The Death of the Current Events Monoculture
There is no question more important in politics or media than “how do people get their information?” In the Social Media era, information was found on major platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The content may have been originally created by the New York Times or the local paper, but the platforms were the delivery mechanism. Even less politically engaged folks bumped into the news as they scrolled (particularly on Facebook). That is no longer the case. Facebook deprioritized news in its algorithm in recent years and Twitter is broken. Instagram and TikTok have never been optimized for distributing news.
People seeking news no longer have a central place to go to follow current events. There is no current events monoculture.
My job is to follow the news closely, and it has become incredibly difficult – and nearly impossible – to stay informed with context and nuance. I can no longer count on the algorithms and the tastes of the journalists and others I follow to surface the news for me. There is no delivery mechanism of consequence.
The chasm between the political junkies and the non-news consumers widens still. This change has real implications for a Democratic Party that depends on persuading less politically engaged voters (and doesn’t have the existing media infrastructure of the Republicans).
Our national news vacuum is one reason I started creating information guides for my subscribers – like this one on the Biden Economy and this one on the Trump Indictment to help provide accurate, easily understood information amidst our algorithmic hellscape.
Threads is Not the Solution
Meta/Facebook helped create the problem by sucking blood out of the business of journalism and building a platform optimized for outrage instead of accuracy. They have no interest in solving the problem. Adam Mosseri, the Meta executive in charge of Instagram, posted the following on Threads on Friday morning:
Mosseri’s comments came as a harsh surprise to the political Twitter refugees who had migrated to Threads for news and politics. He went on to explain in a follow-up post:
Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise. But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.
News and politics invite controversy. Controversy requires the platforms to take a stand on questions of accuracy and intent — to render judgment about what stays up and what comes down. Mosseri is being unusually honest — it’s all about the bottom line. Meta has a more Republican user base than any other major social media company. They do not want to litigate the absurd statements and conspiracy theories spouted by the twice-indicted, twice-impeached frontrunner for the GOP nomination.
These platforms evolve over time. They adjust to reflect the desires of the audience (and the advertisers and shareholders). There will be communities on Threads talking about politics and sharing the news. If the people in charge don’t want a carbon copy of the old Twitter, it will not be.
Even if Zuck and Mosseri wanted to build a news and politics platform, it could never achieve the same relevance and impact of Twitter in its halcyon days. The media changed and our consumption habits changed with it.
Like the traditional media, the digital ecosystem is splintering into smaller communities — sort by ideology and interest. The days when we all gathered on a couple of big platforms are gone, much like the days when we all watched one of the four available broadcast networks. Instead of hoping for a return to a simpler past, we must adjust our expectations, habits, and strategies to account for this new, more complicated reality.
Twitter has been invaluable to the work I do and as it falls apart I feel the loss. I’ve never been much of a Facebook user — it just didn’t click for me. As time went on it actually made my work more difficult when I tried to use it. So I’m not particularly enthused about Threads particularly since I read that post Pfeiffer referenced above. They are not going to build it for my needs although I don’t know if they can really control how the thing develops. There’s an organic quality to social media growth that’s quite difficult to control. But it doesn’t sound as if they are going to be interested in creating the various features that power users like me find useful.
So who knows? I’m sure I’ll use whatever works well for what I do and I think Pfeiffer is right that the days of the social media platforms mono culture are over. We’ll have to see what comes next.
Loss of the ability to laugh at oneself is the first warning sign of fundamentalism. It’s a personal maxim that has served well. Not unrelated is a shtick that comes in handy now and again. Jab your finger in the air toward someone as if punctuating an argument, and declare confidently, “Oh yeah? Well, I’m not as smart as I think I am.”
Let’s back up.
Heather Cox Richardson in her “Letters from an American” installment for July 9 observes that on this date in 1868, Americans ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. It eradicated the infamous Dred Scott decision by a Supreme Court then controlled by states’ rights advocates and “southerners and Democrats … adamantly opposed to federal power.” The drafters meant to ensure that southern states who recently fought a war to preserve slavery could not reimpose it under color of law in their legislatures.
They did anyway for the next 100 years under Jim Crow until the post-World War II Supreme Court flexed the equal protection and due process clauses to dismantle it.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
Whose ideas are being forced on whom is clearly at issue today. Particularly among a humorless, religious right faction as sure of its own righteousness as it is of the depravity of any who disagree. It is another “unpopular minority” bent on taking over national government. Through insurrection, if necessary, as the world saw on January 6, 2021. Humility is not a virtue with this crowd.
It is not often I reference David French, formerly a staff writer for National Review and a southern evangelical. Once opposed to same-sex marriage, he is, however, not so rigid as not to change his mind. It seems French, too, is put off by the Christian right’s fundamentalist fervor and embrace of authoritarianism (New York Times):
When I was a younger lawyer, conservatives foughtspeech codes that often inhibited religious and conservative discourse on campus. Now, red state legislatures are writing their own speech codes, hoping to limit discussion of the ideas they disfavor. When I was starting my career, my conservative colleagues and I rolled our eyes at the right-wing book purges of old, when angry parents tried to yank “dangerous” books off school library shelves. Well, now the purges are back, as parents are squaring off in school districts across the nation, arguing over the words children should be allowed to read.
Years ago, I laughed at claims that Christian conservatives were dominionists in disguise, that we didn’t just want religious freedom, we wanted religious authority. Yet now, such claims are hardly laughable. Arguments for a “Christian nationalism” are increasingly prominent, with factions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals all seeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts Christians in charge.
The dominionist paranoia that enemies on the left are “coming after” their children and their families views censorship as protective, French writes. The threats come from without. They would be wise to attend to their own scripture in which Jesus says in the book of Mark, “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.”
French references G.K. Chesterton’s acknowledgment that what’s wrong with the world might be him. “The doctrine of original sin rejects the idea that we are intrinsically good and are corrupted only by the outside world,” French writes. “Under this understanding of Scripture, we are all our own greatest enemy — Christians as fully as those who do not share our beliefs.” Awareness of our own flaws must “temper our confidence that we either can control or should control the public square.”
The framers constructed the Constitution around the idea that, as James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
One need not be a cultural anthropologist of American Christianity to be aware of molestation among fundamentalists and Catholic clergy, as well as within religions communities walled off against corrupting influences from the outside. Evil lurks inside the walls as well.
French concludes:
This recent legacy of scandal and abuse should be more than enough evidence of the need for existential humility in any Christian political theology. This is not moral relativism. We still possess core convictions. But existential humility acknowledges the limits of our own wisdom and virtue. Existential humility renders liberty a necessity, not merely to safeguard our own beliefs but also to safeguard our access to other ideas and arguments that might help expose our own mistakes and shortcomings.
Who is wrong? I am wrong. We are wrong. Until the church can give that answer, its political idealism will meet a tragic and destructive end. The attempt to control others will not preserve our virtue, and it risks inflicting our own failures on the nation we seek to save.
Fundamentalism of any flavor, left or right, is not about what one believes, but how. It is rigid, dogmatic, unforgiving, especially of nonconformity. It is humorless and cannot admit error.
Humility is underrated. None of us are angels. People’s drive to dominate others prevented the equal protection and due process clauses from having teeth for 100 years. The same old-time political religion still resists tolerance of others’ views as it does treating all persons as created equal, and with an equal right to share in governance. That expression from our public scripture never took root in many hearts.
