Start thinking of the "moderate" as a Trump-AOC voter, or Trump-Tlaib, if you will.

"Infrequent voters are voting. It's a very low-trust environment. So the traditional left-right spectrum and going moderate on issues, it's not as clear. Anybody saying, 'I can win the election by tweaking positions" slightly is selling you something," says @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social.

White House Deputy Press Secretary seen here posting data showing how much more prevalent right wing domestic terrorism is than left wing domestic terrorism... while thinking she's showing the reverse. Apparently she can only read headlines, but not the actual graph with the data.

Some of you have fantasies of bravely going out into uncomfortable zones to have conversations, and I can tell you wouldn't survive the discomfort of living even an hour in an ordinary Black person's body in America.

100%. Let’s stop letting them pretend like this is about some random promise Obama made or Hillary Clinton saying the wrong thing. This is about white supremacy and a centuries long temper tantrum.

It’s really important to understand the idea how racist the idea that a Black person winning an election, contested at the primary and general election level, is somehow a referendum on whether or not racism is a thing.

“Stay woke” was always used by black people to implore each other to be aware of our history and our rights, because our freedom has always been tenuous here. Judah is spot on about how its perversion in the mainstream is a spot on representation of our current moment.

the other half of this that I've never really gotten over: this all but explicitly amounts to valorizing being "asleep". people are really out here wielding "I have no idea what's going on, historically speaking" as a credential

The thing for me is this isn’t some disaffected unsuccessful radical, this is someone who did everything you said they should do, and even they are saying, “okay, this isn’t going to cut it.”

In which a top US Border Patrol official, incredibly, tells my tall and Anglo colleague @chipmitchell1.bsky.social that he's not the type they're looking for as they go about downtown Chicago arresting people based on "how they look" chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

“We are forever innocent, nothing we do can be bad really”

I have been haunted by this statement all day www.kgw.com/article/news...

Buttcracks and Beer Bellies: Is Trump Failing on Immigration because ICE Creates Negative Spectacle? www.emptywheel.net/2025/09/29/b...

“None of this solves the political problem of a fascist building power off the demonization of immigrants. But the unpopularity of it creates political opportunities.”

I need to know what counts as "reading" here because my students are constantly reading--often during class!--it's just all happening on a screen now...

Ezracles: It is important for intellectuals to say what is most useful. Socrates: But is that true? Ezracles: Certainly I believe it to be true Socrates. Socrates: But how can I tell you are not just saying that because you think it useful to do so?

Reports of modernity's disenchantment of the world were apparently wildly premature. "Science" has seamlessly replaced the "supernatural" as the preferred medium of magical thinking.

The Liberal Project spans centuries and is larger than any one country! The fight for individual liberties and true social virtue is not lost we have to reclaim our Truth!!!!

i love this part and i think it very much shows the difference in depth of thinking between someone like Klein, desperately fighting in the here-and-now and arguing to win a battle with compromise, versus Coates' position that he is a soldier in a long war.

Klein is also obsessed with solving Democrats’ “condescension problem” but it’s not condescending to talk about how your political opponents are wrong! That’s kind of how it works.

It IS political fantasy. It IS liberal complacency. Speaking to any grounded truth on the nature of the problem begs harder questions that are uncomfortable, principally those that would require the people who are most complacent to abandon their comforts and embrace an unfamiliar form of politics.

This was what I said to my partner in bed. That the entire premise of what makes people accuse Coates of being a doomer, pessimist etc is that his basic challenges (ie acknowledgement of politics as it actually is) comes from the fact that people expect *someone else* to do the politics for them.

Francis Fukuyama: ‘The neoliberals went too far. Now, we need more social democratic policies’ english.elpais.com/culture/2022...

To the Democratic pollster and data pundit, “moral claims and exercises of imagination, claims about what is possible come with glaring asterisks. New tactics and strategies are by definition unvalidated, and in that sense they are admittedly a risk. But there are risks the other way, too.”

Think it’s very important we situate their claims to desire a “post-racial” nation within their demands to eliminate any policy which would actually address the material effects of racism. They’re wanted a code of silence around systemic racism, because Obama won an election.

My most controversial post-ejection take is that treating voters as adults with agency and telling them the truth isn’t looking down on them, while telling voters things you know to be false to validate their feelings in an attempt to manipulate them is considerably more condescending.

To say he is not meeting the moment would be an understatement. Shameful.

So considering he reposted that AI medbed thing last night there's a nonzero chance his own advisors have been showing him AI Fox News clips in the oval office and he thinks they're real

The AfD continued its losing streak today in Germany's most populous states. In all three cities where the party had reached the runoff for mayor, it lost in a big way. In Gelsenkirchen 67-31, in Duisburg 79-21, and in Hagen 72-28. More please!

My general belief is that Dems need to spend more time thinking about what they believe and less about what they think some imaginary swing voters want them to believe. Political strategy will stem from an authentic set of beliefs.

It’s Coates ft Klein

Actually @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social has a much better claim to represent Jewish New Yorkers than Jonathan Greenblatt. Several mayoral polls show that Mamdani enjoys majority-or at least plurality-support among New York Jews. The only Jews who voted for Greenblatt are the donors on the ADL board.

It’s not only childish but also a way to avoid reckoning with the reality that you cannot have a democracy if it depends on only one political party winning every single election

It’s the difference between someone who tells you what they believe versus someone who thinks they can second guess themselves into saying what they think you want to hear. This is also what sinks the student essays that attempt to pander to what they think the prof believes

Two things that are worth thinking about here: 1) The fact that this conversation is only ever had among cis people. 2) The fact that Ezra Klein absolutely knows better than to ask Ta-Nahesi Coates the equivalent question about white supremacists.

Champions of free speech when Trump was out of office are now demanding govt sanction, firings, and surveillance of their critics. It’s time to change our conception of the First Amendment or the loudest voices shouting “free speech” will continue to be the ones burying it. #Velshi

i find the idea that we should win every fight, every time, to be an incredibly childish way of looking at politics, and even if i think klein deserves credit for having TNC as a guest to (mildly) criticize him, that part, and his comments about pro-life politicians, really stood out to me.

Ta-Nehesi Coates is one of the few political commentators in this country who I can listen to without feeling like I'm being talked at by overgrown children

Ezra is right to call attention to his own struggle over how best to respond to that. But I think it also reflects a certain lack of preparation that, as TNC points out, Black Americans and other marginalized and vulnerable groups have never been able to afford.

"And they are adamantly opposed to recognizing bad faith, so they let themselves be used, over and over, in an endless attempt to find reasonable common ground with political forces bent on division."

to be clear, Klein said this in response to Coates describing Black Americans having the history of being lynched and how that is also political violence. it’s bonkers to just move on like “well if we count that legacy of violence that marginalized groups have experienced, it makes things bleak”

Incredibly funny things are about to happen...

Przeworski says it cleanly, clearly, and convincingly. What then must we do? www.dissentmagazine.org/article/how-...

This isn’t how the right operates either, by the way

This is exactly what I wrote would happen if people bought the Trump campaign’s “mandate” claims. The fact that the election was called that night—when some believed it would be a few days—cemented this idea of a massive Trump victory for people like Klein.

Klein has had a lot to say about The Groups being undisciplined and suffering from mission creep. He’s critiqued writers and activists for shrinking the proverbial electoral tent. It really feels like he’s doing the same shit with abundance. He’s undisciplined and does his advocacy a disservice.

Most people who write about politics, right or left, have internalized the concept of the Trump supporter as the authentic american Volk and so many of their conclusions proceed from that bsky.app/profile/qjur...

I’m not sure that Klein’s view is even a good prescription by his preferred metric of ensuring better electoral outcomes. It seems to me that a significant part of the Democrats’ electoral problem is precisely that voters don’t believe that they stand for anything.

Who gets to have “legitimate concerns” that must be addressed and who has to just suck it up?

One additional thought: when pundits and consultants call for compromise on issue X or Y, but don’t call for the extremely obvious effective strategy of having Schumer and Jeffries resign, is it because they don’t want to lose access? This is why Coates’s honesty and integrity is so unique.