Performative public lying is a hallmark of far right authoritarian regimes
Professor of Political Science & Public Affairs & Director of European Studies, University of Wisconsin - Madison. International political economy, international relations, & international finance. 🇺🇸 & 🇪🇺 politics & economic policy. Tradeoffs in everything.
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Performative public lying is a hallmark of far right authoritarian regimes
if you're saying you "may" declare an emergency at some point in the future, it's not an emergency. Emergencies demand urgent action--they aren't something you can say you might deal with in the future. This is another phony "emergency" the trump admin could claim in an effort to consolidate power
We’ve spent more time talking about nonexistent crime in 🇺🇸 cities in the last month, even as we’ve totally erased actual political violence from the National Conversation™️. Hard to overstate how disheartening & deeply unserious this has been.
Both inside the White House and inside the newsrooms
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France borrows in the #2 global reserve currency at an interest rate lower than 🇺🇸 & lower than it was from the 1990s until 2011. Political preferences over lower debt & the political economy tradeoffs involved in higher debt are not a "debt crisis."
👇🎯 The lettuce had a longer shelf life than the reckoning: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Sam, why do you hate your students? 🤣🙏
What could possibly go wrong?
Oh yes, absolutely. But I think the "he's on his deathbed" stuff is still wishful thinking.
I think the latter is true, but the status quo is likely worse than most everyone thought before - or at least since we pretended to forget that he froze on stage last fall & things were worse than we all pretended because Joe Biden was old & Jake Tapper had books to sell.
More framing like this, please www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/u...
“Does the sun rise in the East?” “I guess I see the scientific moment primarily in the story of attempts to destroy or maintain or rebuild laboratories, rather than in more abstract terms.” 🧐🤔🤷♂️🤦♂️
I'm telling you, folks. 500 Electoral votes on this platform.
Unprecedented corruption - 1500x what Hunter Biden made from his paintings and going directly to the president.
“A babka and the Constitution”
Toll The Chime, Wisconsin #Phillies #RingTheBell 🔔
I'm sorry, no matter what personal or ideological gripe one has with universities or the academy, we didn't face the imminent destruction of entire parts of our institutions & the lives of dozens of students suddenly upended because of fascism before Trump. Just stop it with this unserious nonsense.
More like...
Live footage from the West Wing this weekend
👇🎯 Attempts at being clever & contrarian are breaking folks' brains. A bigger problem that 15-25% of every R1 university's budget illegally being turned off almost immediately? A bigger problem than the abuse of state power to turn federal government-university relations into a protection racket?
These are the people everyone should be citing, interviewing, & listening to. Stop platforming the charlatans and parroting their snake oil arguments about things that didn’t happen.
👇🎯 The only real question left is whether they were always like this, or whether turning 40 & the pandemic/inflation/staying at the Nazi Bar too long broke their brains: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
👇🎯 Today in "neither our media nor our political system is designed to deal with a far right authoritarian party"
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was really talking about the English Premier League when he coined the phrase "exorbitant privilege" 👀
I’m sorry but facts don’t care about your feelings. If you are blaming Democrats in 2025 for COVID policy in 2020 you have been brainwashed by Trumpism and the death of expertise. The basic point is that Trump associated COVID with his fate in office. That’s it. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
If you've never read Dave's 🧵, you really do owe it to yourself to enjoy this towering work of staggering genius (the 🧵, not the book, which is...well...read the 🧵)
"...he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them." "...no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust...shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title...from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
For a sense of how crazy this was, allow me to invite you to again consider the over-the-top-we-lost-our-collective-sh*t response we had to Joe Biden completing Trump's plans for leaving 🇦🇫 (bsky.app/profile/mcop...) & to temporarily higher inflation due primarily to global factors beyond 🇺🇸 control.
It's not a currency. It's a shitcoin.
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Yes, that is one of the central fatal design features
🎼 They're sharing a drink they call Beastliness. But it's better than drinking alone 🎶
Once again, nearly every argument about What Democrats Must Do crashes on the rocky shore of the fact that large swathes of Americans simply believe things completely at odds with material reality. This is true on crime, the economy, & ~every other issue in 🇺🇸 politics. bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Perhaps this was predictable & inevitable. But the scope & scale of it continues to be shocking.
Unions, universities, corporations, banks, churches, nonprofits, etc. etc. Maybe we should celebrate Mancur Olson Day instead of Labor Day or Memorial Day or Independence Day or any of the other Days from which we seem to draw absolutely no lessons for our current politics whatsoever.
"Sam's made Law Review. He's got a big case he's making. He's arguing. He's making an argument."
Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):
Once there was an entire generation of white male Wunderkinder who were going to change the world, & journalism, with their commitment to data, engagement with policy experts, & such. Then they hit their 40s, we had a pandemic & a bit of inflation, & they lost their minds. bsky.app/profile/mcop...
👇🎯 Don't. Grant. The. Premise.
@profsaunders.bsky.social has the IR theory behind this - www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Once again, of the laws creating aircraft carrier-sized loopholes for the president to utter the magic words "national emergency" or "national security" & then rule like a King must go. We can have nuanced discussion about re-delegation later but not now. bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Not that anyone really cares but a bigger and mostly forgotten scandal was COVID funds to schools being redirected to non-mitigation related equipment and repairs that significantly delayed school reopenings
Don't. Grant. The. Premise. Not least because the data suggest it is a Narrative™️ that cannot fail (it can only be failed).
Someone please kill me right now.
👇🎯 Also thinking back a couple of years, to when Jake Sullivan & Katherine Tai told us that the economics of international trade & the global economy were completely different now because of 🇨🇳, & so tariffs were both necessary & good. bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Signs you might be a far right authoritarian party (#3210):
Granting the premise of the far right authoritarian party seems to be Schatz's stock in trade these days: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Now would be a good time for the secondary sanctions we should have put in place years ago bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Great discussion between @davidbeckworth.bsky.social & @robin-j-brooks.bsky.social on the ways in which stablecoins are likely to increase, rather than undermine, dollar hegemony: bsky.app/profile/davi...
As with EMAILS etc., the reason we were so skeptical of all the wagon-circling & angry retorts that we didn't understand journalists' professional obligations to cover Joe Biden's age & mental/physical acuity 24/7 is that the devotion to those obligations had the shelf life of Liz Truss' lettuce.
A mere one year ago, this was The Central Issue Of Our Political Age. It's not even news in today's papers.
Other countries have agency & domestic politics, too 🇨🇦
Eh, the BRICS have been trying to Make Fetch Happen for decades. We’ve got a lot of serious problems right now, & Trump’s policies to 🇨🇳 🇷🇺 & 🇮🇳 are incoherent or outright counter to our national interests, or both. But variations of this photo & story are peak Narrative™️ that cannot fail since ~2009.
The loudest American takes-havers are miserable people who are utterly convinced that every other orderly society is secretly as depraved and heartless as the America that they have built for themselves. Their combination of American provincialism with self-assurance is a national embarrassment.
Allow me to hazard a guess at their basket of media consumption…
No one wants to work in our meatpacking plant at the same “very aggressive” wages we were offering in December. Verily, it’s a complete mystery why we can’t fill these positions 🤔 bsky.app/profile/mcop...
One reason to not grant Putin the privilege of meeting the 🇺🇸 president on equal standing is that he’s a war criminal illegally occupying 1/5 of 🇺🇦. But we were stupid enough to do that, so now he’s emboldened to increase nightly bombings & to try & kill a key leader of our closest allies.
“None of these systems are really designed to withstand being run by people who want to undermine and destroy them. But our mechanisms for keeping those people out of power aren’t strong enough anymore.”
Miraculously, we are seeing that people care about unemployment again in the National Conversation™️ now that Joe Biden is no longer in the White House: bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Where we are as a country
Performative public lying is a hallmark of far right authoritarian parties
Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
Fifty-one of the 85 Federalist papers were written by a guy born in Nevis.
Whether or not these people are actual foreign agents is almost irrelevant. Their actions are observationally equivalent to & indistinguishable from the actions actual foreign agents would be taking. The consequences of our total Article I constitutional crisis, right here:
As a friend recently put it: the venn diagram of people who assured us the gun violence was worth it because we need the guns to protect ourselves against a tyrannical federal government and the people cheering on Trump as he deploys the military to take over American cities is a circle
Four Seasons Total Fabricating
Again, allow me to invite you to consider what the Only Topic on The Sunday Shows would have been if Joe Biden were still president.
#EisernUnion
"That's one hell of an act. What do you call it?" "The Kakistocrats!"
Folks look at you like you're crazy when you say we're in the midst of the worst Article I constitutional crisis in American history, & well, here we are, hundreds of miles on the interstate past the Goldwater-Rhodes exit that we already should have taken. bsky.app/profile/mcop...
Im Yirtzeh Hashem #RingTheBell 🔔
Today in life under competitive authoritarianism
Either that or crypto
Anyway, you can't really have it both ways. Either we can have low wages/prices, or we can have less immigration. So enjoy the further food price inflation, along with the racist authoritarianism.
Every. Single. Time.
Once again, very few people in business actually believe in free markets and capitalism:
They don't really face a "labour shortage" except in the immediate moment given the supply shock due to the shamefully racist immigration policies. They now face a market telling them that their supposedly "very aggressive" wages are simply not high enough. There a solution to that... 🤔
Once again, behold the unparalleled parsimony & explanatory power of the Dennis Green Unified Theory Of 🇺🇸 Politics
There’s so many issues with switching, one obvious one is that 232 focuses on “an article is being imported” —with a focus on type of traded good. Distinct from rebooting overall trade relations, and certainly not to suggest permitted selective discrimination, finding some well lobbied goods exempt.
The great tragedy of the 🇺🇦 war is that the 🇺🇸/🇪🇺/G7 could have crushed 🇷🇺 economically & fully armed 🇺🇦 in 2022-23 & this all could have been long over by now.
Pure fucking evil. Everyone involved in this shit needs to be held accountable.
We needed secondary sanctions three years ago 👇
Great discussion between @davidbeckworth.bsky.social & @robin-j-brooks.bsky.social on the ways in which stablecoins are likely to increase, rather than undermine, dollar hegemony: bsky.app/profile/davi...
Big news from @mcopelov.bsky.social and me. Founders and token bros read on 👇 Investor Update – Strategic Learnings from The Political Economy of Shitcoins tompepinsky.com/2025/08/29/i...
"In the political economy of shitcoins, fundamentals are vibes, governance is Discord mods, and demand is pure FOMO." "What Pepinsky & Copelovitch make explicit—and what we’ve always implicitly modeled—is that shitcoins are less a financial product than a politico-cultural coordination game." 😆
There is no "national security" rationale - not least one that arbitrarily toggles on & off - for the tariffs. Section 301 tariffs are supposed to follow a legal process based on identified violations of existing trade agreements. All of this violates our WTO treaty obligations. It's all nonsense.
These tariffs now illegally being imposed under the sham justification of IEEPA will still be illegal if they are imposed under the sham justifications of either Section 301 and 232, because they make a total mockery of both the rationale & process of these laws.
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Illegal, seed corn-destroying cuts to area studies & language studies, also here at UW (bsky.app/profile/mcop...). The most disheartening thing is the absolute, utter silence - both internally & externally - of our university leaders about this illegal, see corn-destroying stuff happening. Total 🦗
Of course, but an even better way to dramatically reduce dis/misinformation would be for major media outlets to stop writing articles with these heds, deks, & ledes in the first place.
The problems Eswar Prasad identifies are real, and he is right that middle/low-income countries bolstering monetary/fiscal/regulatory policies could increase the international use of their currencies. But all that is likely to be on the margin of the 👆 systemic-level effects of stablecoins.
More likely stablecoins will reinforce dollar dominance & cause the next systemic banking crisis bsky.app/profile/mcop...
