Voting to let insurrectionist senators steal millions of public dollars in order to preserve the sanctity of the bipartisan appropriations process (which Trump intends to violate anyhow) evinces judgment so terrible I suspect Kaine would lose a recall election if recalling senators were a thing.

Another thing this email trove has convinced me of is that NYT has been actively and consciously helping Trump since 2015. It wasn't just casual sexism, double standards, and political reporting Kayfabe. They were doing catch and kill

my strong suspicion is that dems believe they’ll coast to major gains in the midterms no matter what, and their awful posture right now on all the horrors is less about winning next november and more about what they’re rhetorically committed to do should they win

I have to hand it to them, it's an incredible bit to publicly lose a game of chicken, admit that's what happened, and then spend the next day lecturing everyone about courage and tenacity

are you really going to imprison the goons terrorizing our cities? you just capitulated in a fight that you were very clearly winning

You guys wanna see (me act like) a dead body?

one of the reasons voters believe the caricatures of the democratic party pushed by republicans is because the democratic party itself believes in the caricatures of the democratic party pushed by republicans

A good way to do this is also to get a few of your friends together and take over your local Democratic Party! This involves going to a lot of boring meetings but it's *very* possible to do in a lot of the country.

Here’s another who was in on it

The caucus’s deference to one another is the problem not just Schumer. They’re not going to elect a leader who will publicly call them out for hiding behind off-cycle and retiring members. Even the handful of progressive senators don’t go after their peers in a meaningful way.

In a functional party system, this kind of capitulation in the face of authoritarianism could mean the end of the Democratic Party. In our system, it could mean the end of the two party system. Neither party can represent the pro-democracy majority. It's time for something new.

Until the sun burns out

The GOP absolutely would have destroyed travel. The Democrats need to stop being the adults in the room and let the country have the government it voted for.

bring back maligning racism as the mark of a stupid person. prejudice is the mark of an idiot. if you believe that shit i bet you also don’t wipe your ass

"Democrats keeping healthcare as their focus has worked tremendously" yeah and here comes the ideological consequences of having no actual fucking values that back it

and i’m generally of the view that simply refusing to operate in a defensive crouch does a lot of the necessary political work. “i don’t agree with him but he isn’t a punk” is a real phenomenon!

He would've taxed you less than that, get rekt morons

…and in another large part by gutter racism

Flying Squirrel Loves It Every Time

The way all of these people convinced themselves that Mamdani is antisemitic is a subject far more worthy of media examination than any of the ‘groupthink on campuses!’ thinkpieces we’ve been subjected to

Tribunals then the wall.

The factional grifters will hate this, but the Mamdani-Spanberger-Sherrill axis actually suggests the outlines of a broad, emerging Dem coalition organized around both anti-Trump *and* affordability politics, not a party bitterly divided against itself.

Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.

"we should run moderates in moderate areas" okay well what about in progressive areas "we should run moderates there too" I see, and who is "we" in this thought experiment

⏳

I had thought most of my naive idealism had been stomped out of me by now, but it’s amazing to me that this level of public animosity could be directed by Democratic leadership toward a sweet and personable young candidate of their own party seemingly exclusively because of his background.

the fundamental central operating premise of this entire dominant ecosystem of what passes for the institutional "left" in this country is that you must carefully calibrate what you believe in light of what you perceive certain demographics to believe. but what wins elections is believing in shit

Another paper showing that a lot of what statistically lies at the "center" looks like this:

The discourse comes out so topsy turvy because of the corrupted information environment. But some of this is self inflicted. Republicans work very hard to fan internal Dem divisions. Dems and libs don’t do nearly as much to egg on things like the fight over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.

Not a dunk on Dave but they’re doing it because they want those candidates to lose and this is how they ventriloquize their views into without being “biased” bsky.app/profile/dave...

Between what came before and what happened tonight, Dems ought to treat encounters with CBS reporters as presumptively hostile and untrustworthy. A small thing, but there’s no way out of this disaster if the party continues helplessly submitting to unequal treatment from ~all mediating institutions.

democrats don't really need to win back rurals (it would be nice but I don't think it'll happen to a significant degree) they need to break through in purple trending light red suburbs and super charge light blue cities to dark blue

We could end this whenever we want. These people are all crooks. We could throw them in prison, take the $ they stole from us and put it into our schools, pay off our debt, send it out in checks to everyone. We could take our country back. They should be terrified of us seeing this.

finally, our great nation gets some accurate representation on the world stage

Yeah my biggest question of this year is, if this is how the right reacts to a 45 minute work DEI training they didn't care for, how on earth do they expect the left to react to this?

As a wise man once said

If you look at the White House demolition story and your first reaction is "no one gives a shit about this, they're worried about their bills" and not "this is the easiest proof point ever that the GOP doesn't give a shit about your bills" I'm afraid you have failed a fairly easy political IQ test

And this is how you can have situationally kind, sometimes even normal-seeming people explain to you in very calm tones why thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people not only have to suffer and die, but should. They've joined a supremacist human spirit—one might say an evil spirit.

The existence of this photograph (which is a real photo of a real person at a Mamdani campaign event) is enough to establish for me that voters writ large have absolutely no grasp of what policy is or how any given policy impacts their lives. It's all vibes.

I think fundamentally as an urban liberal this is where it comes down for me, as a representation issue. Basically we have one party telling urbanites that they are not real Americans while a very small (!!) contingent but with discourse power wants to exclude us from the other party's coalition.

Two things follow: 1. Republicans' agendas and actions are further from the public's preferences than Democrats' are. 2. We mostly talk about the narrow issues where Republicans are more popular and only in ways that flatter Republicans. I'm skeptical that moderating can solve 2.

Sorry but sometimes I jus gotta put my thoughts out there and hope I get proven wrong. I think it’s what it looks like. I think it’s all happening. And I think the time to stop it already passed. I don’t see any way out that doesn’t involve cataclysm & yet I hope for it bc of the alternative.

And the thing is it’s true

harry reid straight up said "mitt romney cheats on his taxes and i can prove it," and he didn't cheat, and he couldn't prove it, and it was a story for almost a month, and the democrats somehow did not learn that they can just say "donald trump is a pedophile"

(5) Stop with the fucking “kitchen table issues!” Yes, people respond well to that line experimentally. But if they actually acted on it then Donald fucking Trump wouldn’t be president right now. Try to have the faintest clue of what sort of apparatus his party network has actually built!

We are also fighting perceptions that we aren't responsible for. Libs of TikTok has more to do with how the general public views Democrats than any Democratic policy platform. You can't answer for every liberal citizen's hot takes, and this dynamic is totally asymmetric.

Every time I read stuff like this, the whole premise of deliverism (people will reward you with votes for doing good things so you should do more good things) is dead wrong. When you have the power you should do good things on their own merits, and it’s disconnected from electoral outcomes.

Merrick Garland

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”