Would love to hear Jake Tapper explain.
Dynamism personified.
227 followers 796 following 1,048 posts
view profile on Bluesky
Would love to hear Jake Tapper explain.
I am begging, BEGGING, any media outlet that wants left/liberal readers to stop trying to insert shit sandwiches into your publications. No one wants your “counter-intuitive” takes.
Someone working with @schatz.bsky.social should really get him the fuck off Twitter. Just straight brain rot here for a guy that has been one of the best in DC.
We have to fight the media sources that launder them. Trump’s undermining of our elections is only possible because outlets like the NYT and CNN have a maximalist orientation towards credulity.
The fact that most media institutions no longer punish sources/institutions for lying to them is a big reason why we are here.
This is the Democrats problem, they have gone all in on poll-tested, focus group-tested messaging but this is entirely the wrong model to be using.
We don’t need some asshole from Newbridge, NJ to tell us how to live our lives.
Just today, I had my teenage children gather round as I told them tales of this bygone era and the brave Jake Tapper who blew it wide open.
If you are okay with this, if you think this is justified, if you think people living on the street have brought this upon themselves, if you think this is good leadership, you may be able to fool yourself that you care about others but you don’t fool me
In their defense, the one thing we remember about the last time fascism was ascendant was how committed everyone was to being civil.
Every post by an ordinary person on my Bluesky feed: Trump’s fascism and RFK’s insanity are going to fucking kill us. @nytimes.com: Lotions, what can’t they fucking do?!?
I think this explains a lot as this was the same dynamic during Bush’s second term. I also think MeToo and BLM offered elites a choice- acknowledge that merit is mostly bullshit or protect your legacy produced fiefdoms. They chose their fiefdoms.
I don’t think this should preclude Dems from doing good things, but we’ve got to figure out how to fix the gross imbalances in the “WHAT ABOUT TEH DEFICIT!!!” discourse.
I do think there is a huge complicating factor here. If Democrats were to do this, the super smart and deeply savvy pundits would absolutely burn the country to the ground but will do/say nothing when Trump does it.
The conversations about Newsom on this platform have been fucking exhausting and this gets it exactly right.
I think this has always been the “plan”. Obvious bad faith by the GOP/Trump that depends on mainstream news outlets to legitimize it. Future NYT headline: “Questions Remain About Mail-in Ballots as Congress Refuses to Seat Contested Election Winners”
If the AI bubble really is bursting, please take this lesson from it: Nothing marketed to you this relentlessly is ever worth it. If it was, they wouldn’t need to beg you.
This is just embarrassing from @nytimes.com. Because they can only understand Ivy League type schools as “college”, they assume that the rest of us do to.
It’s obviously impossible to identify the “one thing” that got us here but the collective decision by prominent media outlets to just be okay with Trump’s outrageous dishonesty can explain a lot of variance in that DV.
I forgot you guys exist. You suck.
More of this.
I am firmly in the “Gavin Newsom can go fuck himself” camp, but this is good messaging and Democrats should definitely engage in more of it. Places where democrats are in charge are better places to live and we should be aggressively saying this.
The original post has the interesting distinction of being doubly wrong! First, the idea that this was something Harris did is 100% untrue. Second, the underlying premise that the “language game” can be won is nonsense. There will always be language that Republicans will identify as “out of touch”.
This approach is focused on winning individual battles/skirmishes, but will not and cannot help you win the war.
This right here is what’s destroying Democrats, an antiquated view of how communication and message effects work. By purely focusing on short-term changes in individuals, we are missing the broader picture.
This completely uninspired response was made possible by focus group testing.
If you’re left writing for the post, you are either a straight villain or an obsequious worm.
Weird that they didn’t include “tax credits” on this list.
Once again: to all those assholes who pretended and/or those fools that believed Rufo was a good faith actor- fuck off forever.
Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and the rest of them believe that the op-ed pages of the @washingtonpost.com and @nytimes.com are sober minded and the accumulation of these messages just poisons them.
It’s not hard to see why so many of the leaders/consultants in the Democratic Party have broken brains. So much of what they see in the “serious” media tells them that they are at fault.
To be considered “savvy and serious” by these outlets you must show that your brains have been replaced by butterscotch pudding.
I’ve wondered why the elite media broke so hard for Trumpism and I think this provides some explanatory power. BLM and MeToo demanded that they question their assumptions on “merit” but they chose to undermine these movements rather than engage in some introspection.
What do they think the scheme is? Senate Dems leak this to the Times to what end? How do they think this actually helps Schumer?
Obviously, fuck whichever “Democrats” are doing this, but we should also step back to see the “Democrats in Disarray” framing that the Times is engaging in here.
This DC based newspaper seems to counter your top line assertion here. You should read it!
Fuck you, “crusade against crime”.
I forget the particulars, but when Trump first heard rumors about the “pee tape” existing, his initial response was to stop it from getting released which you don’t do if you know it doesn’t exist.
I think about this point that @eschatonblog.com recently made a lot. The fact that Russian intelligence might have something on Trump is a fairly compelling explanation for his behavior but it is not something we are allowed to say in “polite society”.
I really wonder how @jaketapper.bsky.social deals with this. He really showed his ass with his focus on Biden, so his relative silence on Trump’s decline is so glaring.
You can identify a number of problems with the Democrats (particularly the leadership), but they are often facing an obviously rigged game.
Why did this take days to make the paper? I understand the reporters were working on this but it seems the Times should have started with this angle rather than letting a hack like Maureen Dowd just let ‘er rip.
If one thinks that Trump is not going to stop moving forward on his authoritarian path until he is stopped from doing so, then the stories told by the mainstream media this week in response to Trump’s attack on DC suggest that they are more likely to play the role of accomplices than truth-tellers.
Weird how this just happened. I wonder if anyone is responsible for these changes?
I do watch Myers’ A Closer Look and I typically come away wishing he focused on the media’s coverage of Trump.
I largely *think* they focus on Trump and GOP because they are manifestly dangerous which leads them to ignore the role media plays.
You can tell how much he truly dislikes him.
To compare, I love Seth Myers but in this 12 minute video about Trump, the only time a news outlet is mentioned (@cnn.com) it is to celebrate their fact checking of Trump. Yet, they are responsible for a) furthering the myth that cities are dangerous and b) downplaying Trump’s cognitive decline.
Wait…did Peter Baker say something that almost wasn’t mealy mouthed?
The greatest act of political satire in my lifetime was Colbert’s appearance at the WHCD in 2006. Yes, it was a roast of Bush, but it was also an absolutely scathing indictment of the press’s handling of Bush and his administration.
To wit, one of Jon Stewart’s best moments was when he went on @cnn.com’s Crossfire and told the hosts that their show was “hurting America”. CNN canceled shortly after.
What made The Daily Show and Colbert Report stand out wasn’t their critiques of politicians, it was their focus on the failings of the news media.
What made The Daily Show and Colbert Report stand out wasn’t their critiques of politicians, it was their focus on the failings of the news media.
I wish more people with a large platform were engaged in this (e.g., late night comedians). Focusing on what Trump does is not really changing things, focusing on how Trump is enabled by media outlets really might.
It’s the circle of life, Trump makes a claim, the Times repeats the claim, Trump and Republicans say the claim is true because it is in the Times.
*on* Fucking QWERTY keyboard putting three vowels next to one another…
100% but for an industry which outwardly prides itself on getting to the truth, you’d think they’d did a little deeper in this claim.
Just to put a finer point on this, every mainstream outlet would run with a much, much thinner premise if this were any Democratic president and it would take virtually no time to find examples from a year ago.
“Trump, Still Stinging from Epstein Links, Shuts Down FBI’s Sex Trafficking Investigations” is a totally reasonable headline/frame for this but we’ll never see it because media institutions want Trump to succeed.
Get on that soapbox! Trump is an immovable object when it comes to criticism from people like us. Where we do have leverage is in consistently demonstrating how the fourth estate is failing us.
This is something that most reporting on Trump repeats uncritically while the ONLY “tangible” evidence that Trump is good at negotiating is because he says he is.
Please, for the good of humanity, stop believing that there is inherent value in engaging with obviously counter-intuitive premises.
It’s so fucking maddening. The only “real” evidence we have that Trump is good at negotiating is that he says he is.
Slate really polluted discourse in horrific ways. It’s been 20 years but the urge to valorize counter-intuitive takes has only led to platforming obviously stupid ideas.
I hate these people so fucking much. Maureen Dowd and the leadership of the @nytimes.com could be using their considerable influence to dismantle the myths that created this lurch towards fascism but instead they carry water for it.
Maureen Dowd is not someone anyone should take seriously.
This is every conversation I’ve ever had on universal healthcare with someone who’s against it.
To be an “officially serious person” in elite punditry you have to have butterscotch pudding for brains which is demonstrated by believing premises that are impossible to really believe.
There has never really been solid empirical evidence for it and folks have definitely done their best to find it.
This has all been helped along by the widespread belief, absent any actual evidence supporting it, that the media has a left leaning bias.
Hey, guys. Guess what we’re not talking about any more.
So, in your understanding of the world, Trump is an excellent president and doing a good job governing because he won the last election. Bold claim.
I think this is part of the range of manifestations associated with 2.
This is why I am convinced we are in a race with existential consequences. Either Trump gets to a point where he firmly plants himself as an autocrat or he becomes so unpopular that the collective “fuck that guy” energy he engenders renders him totally inert.
Even after the shellacking he took in 2006 they still covered him as way more popular than he actually was and it wasn’t until the housing cash where they seemed to realize their guy was cooked.
This is exactly how the press treated Bush in 2005-2006. Regardless of his approval ratings, he was cast as broadly popular and when they were this low he was always poised for a comeback.
My banner pic is from a friend of mine who created it based on all the dads I was describing at my kids HS track meet and he had AI create a representation. Well…we that dad apparently just got weird scienced into existence:
I’m not arguing that Dems don’t lose elections. IN FACT, the thing I said which started this nonsense from you is that I said Democrats do a poor job of telling people what they have done because their messaging is shit.
People who live in blue states/areas have a better quality of life, tend to enjoy more freedoms, and live longer. More importantly that gap is growing. That isn’t a political point, it is an empirical one.
You’re confusing two separate things and it is fucking exhausting to have this back and forth with you not getting something that is super simple.
Sweet Christ this is depressing. Your theory to build a mass movement is to use the most time intensive form of communication to fight against deeply entrenched beliefs (where the propagandizing is still active) wherein you would engage in deceit (which often generates boomerang effects).
So your plan to generate this political awakening is to have “in depth convos” where you can’t say what you actually mean?
I would be delighted to see that growth but as someone who does survey research the number of people who self-identify as “socialist” is real low.
The CNA was not in a union.
They don’t though. Like everyone else here has been telling you, the movement you think exists doesn’t exist in the way you think it does.
We obviously can’t assume that this person is/was representative of all WC people but if you’re out here arguing that there is a nascent class movement this is just waiting to be tapped, you should do some more homework.
She then argued that it would be unfair because these people would be making more than her. When I pointed out that she would be see her own income increase considerably, she was still flatly against it because “fast food workers shouldn’t make as much as me”.
I piped in and made the case that raising the minimum wage would be a very good thing for a variety of reasons and this CNA came at me. She talked about how lazy fast food workers are and the fact that this job required no training for that kind of money.
There is an interaction I had years ago with my Teamster cousin and a friend of his who worked as a CNA that I think about all of the time. My cousin had posted something on FB bitching about raising the minimum wage to $15/hour and that he couldn’t believe they would get paid that much.
I’ve noticed of late that there is a pervasive kind of troll going on here which seems designed to make people feel hopeless.
Spent a significant part of my day thinking the very same thing after an interaction on here. It was so goddamn enervating.
Nothing of what I said suggests that in the fucking least. You came here and replied to me and said something that is categorically false. I said you’re wrong. That’s what is going on.
Okay. Once again, that’s not true but whatever.
Yes, on balance. You are much more likely to live a longer, happier, healthy life if you live in places run by Democrats.
What are you arguing here? If you’re saying that Democrats do a poor job of helping regular people when in power, that’s just not true. If you’re saying that they’ve done a poor job of connecting to voters, then we are in agreement.
I’m not saying there aren’t shitty Democrats or that they are universally good when in power, but on balance, lives improve when they are in charge.
This just isn’t true. Whether you look at cities/towns, states, or at the federal level, when/where Dems are in charge they do a much, much better job of improving the lives of the people who live there.
Dems lose because they don’t have any willingness to make emotionally compelling yet simple messages.
From the Orwellian 'freedom-is-slavery' level lies to the military intimidation targeting Black people that will soon clash with dissent, everything about Trump's D.C. police takeover reeks of hardcore fascism Not a distraction. The plan from Day One My new column www.inquirer.com/columnists/a...
Just kidding about that last part. They knew he was and they agreed with him.