Matt Welch
@MattWelch
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Editor at large, @Reason. Co-conspirator, @wethefifth (https://t.co/Eo383JJtwt). Writer, https://t.co/QfvM57UIaB. Note spelling of last name.
Joined February 2009
The long and dishonorable tradition of America engaging in regime-change military interventions was super-charged by tariff-loving 19th century Republicans, beginning with Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, and Hawaii.
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When a news article fulfills your most urgent political desires, and is based 100% on anonymous sources of unstated motivation, be skeptical.
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Eric Swalwell has received 0% of the vote in 24 consecutive national polls.
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They say political comedy is dead but Democrats keep trying to explain inflation.
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The new president in his inaugural addressed denounced lies & the manipulation of facts, and vowed to always level with us. Let's hold him to that, shall we?.
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Investigators also discovered bullets, in his body, shot by a reckless and belligerent intruder who illegally entered his property.
DEVELOPING: Search warrant: Marijuana found in Botham Jean’s apartment after deadly shooting
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The Conservative Hoax Machine tried to smear Dr. Anthony Fauci as a sex criminal. But then the alleged victim recanted, saying that Jacob Wohl had "charmed me into taking money to do this." @NancyRomm has the goods.
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Banning menthol cigarettes and paying off affluent kids' student loans during a stagflationary period is a choice.
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"I served with him for a decade, and I saw what he is. He's not a trustworthy person," @JustinAmash said, about Kevin McCarthy. "He'll do whatever it takes to maintain power. He's a compulsive liar. Always has been."
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"He shrunk government," says Gov. Kristi Noem, speaking about Donald Trump. The government is nearly $1 trillion larger on an annual basis than it was when he took office. Trump did not reduce, let alone shrink, government.
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Don't play the age-20 game unless you are truly ready to lose.
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The positive test rate in NYC has been stable since mid-June—below 1.5%, usually below 1%. Our neighborhood is like 0.5%. They’ve had three months to focus on this one big job of reopening schools. And they have utterly botched it, throwing families of 1 million kids into chaos.
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Public elementary school in Brooklyn that both my daughters used to attend announced at 6:40 pm tonight that it would be closed tomorrow, in part because the staff “is not reporting to the school building.”.
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WHICH scientists was he listening to when he kept police tape around outdoor playgrounds well into the fall? Which working people were empowered by that?.
In a naked partisan power grab, extreme right-wing Republicans are trying to recall @GavinNewsom. Why? Because he dares to listen to scientists and fights to put power in the hands of working people. Let’s have Gavin’s back:.
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New ad for homeschooling just dropped.
Our COVID-Busters are out in full force cleaning & disinfecting to make a safe return to the classroom possible. Good luck to all NYC students & staff on your first day back!. #BacktoSchoolNYC
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The Viking Funeral phase of this presidency will be something to behold.
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The hero America needs.
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I have written many critical things over the years about @SenJohnMcCain; you can easily find them. But not in this thread. Instead, I wanted to share a few observations of possible interest that I’ve accumulated over the years following this fascinating American character. 1/.
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The last $4 trillion brought to you by those who fancy themselves as fighting socialism.
$23,006,336,134,064.42 (+) #NationalDebt.
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Only four countries (including the U.S.) have as many Coronavirus fatalities as the state of New York.
‘Of Course I’m Not Objective’: Chris Cuomo Lauds Big Brother Andrew in a Congratulatory Farewell as ‘Best Politician in the Country’
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This the future libertarians want.
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"Before Omicron, a typical vaccinated 75-year-old who contracted Covid had a. similar risk of death—around 1 in 200—as a typical 75-year-old who contracted the flu. Covid now appears to present less threat to most vaccinated elderly people than the. flu"
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(Turns on NPR). “. but some worry that pods are exacerbating ineq—“. (Turns off NPR).
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Also, we will grow the federal government faster than the party we accuse of being socialist.
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Janet Yellen, 2022, about the IRS's $80 billion hiring spree: "Contrary to the misinformation from opponents . small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.". Treasury Inspector General, 2024, as.
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“If we don’t take the right actions, schools could become superspreaders in September,” @NYGovCuomo said today. Just unhinged hysteria at this point.
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Congratulations to all the journalists who decided that a fact-challenged conspiracist was the future of their industry.
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left me, just when I needed you most.
You.
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I think FDR's internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent was a somewhat lower moment.
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"She's annoying," the 11-year-old says about Elizabeth Warren. I ask why. "She reminds me of Hillary Clinton.". Tulsi Gabbard comes on. "Ooh, I want her to be president!".
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Here is a joint letter signed by Noam Chomsky, J.K. Rowling, David Brooks, @bariweiss, Wynton Marsalis, Salman Rushdie, @kmele, and 140-odd other people, in case anyone's in a mood to argue.
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It is now official NYT policy that for some words, intent does not matter, and it only takes one strike to sink a 47-year career.
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One billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since Bernie first started to use the phrase "race to the bottom" to describe international trade agreements.
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Beginning to think we shouldn’t have given middle schoolers cell phones, and we shouldn’t have given journalists Twitter.
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"You cannot break up a cult from the inside," @JRubinBlogger writes. "You must leave it and then draw others away, compelling them to reflect and shed their delusional beliefs." Forget politics for a moment, let's talk cults -- is that true, cult-wise?
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He gets 99% ratings and annual awards from the most hardcore fiscally conservative national advocacy groups. But since supporting impeachment and leaving the GOP, @justinamash no longer gets their support.
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What does it say about our political/media/civic culture that the NBA thing is blowing up way bigger than this?
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That’s it, that’s the 2020 video.
Curfew in Barcelona last night. The juxtaposition of the man on the piano playing “Eternal Flame” by The Bangles and the scene unfolding behind them is quite something.
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Imagine if the Democrats who control Congress & the presidency:. * repealed the federal prohibition on marijuana. * eradicated all federal programs encouraging civil asset forfeiture. * changed/limited the federal legal definition of qualified immunity. Fuck slogans. Change law.
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If I hear one more got-damn politician cluck about "following the science" while continuing to support child-harming policies based on superstition and/or public sector union muscle, I'm going to lose the last of what remains of my California mellowness.
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Get the fuck away from Powell's, assholes.
Antifa have forced Powell's to close their store today and employees have evacuated the customers inside out the back door. They're protesting them selling Andy Ngo's book on their website. They announced earlier they wouldn't put it on the shelves.
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I think the deliberate collapse of the use/mention distinction with certain radioactive words is bad for the New York Times, bad for journalism, and bad for society.
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Wow.
8700 Covid tests in NYC schools this week and 1 positive. 0.01% rate. Families and teachers need to know schools are STILL the safest place to be in NYC. Its time to plan for a full reopening.
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PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” was “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats,” BTW.
@AnnieLinskey @rebeccaballhaus @EmilyGlazer @siobhanehughes White House meetings would frequently be canceled. In 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a POTUS meeting needed to be rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the aide said.
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She ordered statewide masking on all 2-4-year-olds in congregate settings all the way up to March 2022.
This! "@KathyHochul has been the best advocate for New York City students and educators in a generation." #AFTvotes
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There has been more "deep state" on the Fox networks this week than on an entire season of The X-Files.
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Today both of my kids are in school buildings for the first time in 391 days.
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Willie Nelson played at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He SPOKE at the 1980 DNC. To portray his political involvement as recent is as dumb as making a trend story out of a few asinine comments on social media.
Willie Nelson is playing his first-ever political concert for Beto O’Rourke. Some fans are abandoning him.
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There is zero joy in Robin DiAngelo's worldview. Everything is pinched and sour, the road is neverending and dreary, fraught with the potential for missteps, no pot at the end of the rainbow. But that doesn't mean there isn't unintentional comedy!
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We visited this Kibbutz just north of Gaza a year ago, listening to a mom talk about what it’s like to scramble kids into a bunker quickly enough when the air-raid siren goes off. Today, I am hearing, 15 of the people in this small community have been murdered.
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He’s had nearly eight decades to understand this. He’s never going to understand this.
If we are a nation that can pay baseball players hundreds of millions of dollars, don't tell me we can't afford to pay teachers the salaries they deserve.
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I think you should keep trying until you write the single worst analogy in human history.
A liberal: someone who locks his door at night and then screams because @POTUS wants to secure the border and lock America's door at night.
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Fun fact: This will be the 75th consecutive DNC appearance by James Taylor.
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My view on Pete Rose's lifetime ban is that it was supposed to last a lifetime. Now that that's done, get him into the Hall of Fame, where he belongs.
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This is beautiful.
Thousands of Berlin residents showed up at the central train station with sign boards offering refugees fleeing Ukraine a place to stay
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The remake of Parent Trap is lit.
This is fine under the "half your age minus seven" guideline.
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History, I predict, is not going to treat Tucker Carlson kindly.
Tucker Carlson: "The real threats we face today may be from within. Leaders who hate the country the govern so much that they seek to make American citizenship irrelevant"
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Here is a thing that everyone who has been in the eye of a media-storm, however small or insignificant, can tell you: It is amazing the basic factual stuff, let alone interpretative analysis, even decorated journalists will get wildly wrong.
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The Great Deplatforming will include many such nonsensical decisions. Those who think it will be applied surgically, let alone rationally, are deluding themselves.
With no explanation other than "repeatedly going against our community standards," @Facebook has blocked me from managing my page. Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified.
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@kittypurrzog My 7-year-old chastised me a couple days ago for assuming that various pigeons were male or female. “Maybe they identify as a ‘they,’” she said. I am not making this up.
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Per Rochelle Walensky today, the "benefits" of vaccinating 5-11-year-olds is that they will be vaccinated; otherwise nothing changes. It's hard to describe how despair-inducing that is to some parents.
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"They used to arrest people for doing stuff like this," Whoopi laments.
This is so deranged. The View calling for Tucker and Tulsi to be investigated by DOJ and suggest prison.
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“None of these people have even been able to tell me what exactly I have said or done myself that they had a problem with."
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Just realized that I revere @pennjillette for at least one similar reason that I revere George Orwell & also @billjamesonline: They are/were constantly working out loud the process of trying to think/act/talk better, truer, smarter, in a world made of fog.
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(The private elementary that we chose because we did not trust the public one to stay open, is so far staying open.).
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Almost made it to age 13 before resorting to the, “This is my house, these are my rules until you leave” gambit. Teen years are gonna be lit.
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Take THAT, Greatest Generation!.
CBO says that U.S. will add $5.8 trillion to deficits over the next two years, bringing debt to 108% of GDP, beating WWII record.
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This is a rotten way to spend one's time as a human, let alone as a journalist.
1. A lot of debate on this tweet of mine to the left. I have deleted it while keeping it here so that it can sit next to @alisoneroman’s tweet. This is photo was sitting on Alison’s MySpace page. you can google it. She has a recent history of being called out for appropriation.
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The dig on FIRE deep on this piece is a journalistic embarrassment.
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This should be embarrassing to many, many people, but isn’t.
"We love the countries of the European Union," says @POTUS. "But the European Union was set up to take advantage of the United States."
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If you escaped the mullahs in Iran three decades ago and became a French or British citizen, you can no longer visit the United States.
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It's happening dot gif. @JustinAmash is seeking the @LPNational nomination for president.
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Weirder still (to me) is that no free-markety health care analysts (that I'm aware of) like it either. It has no intellectual policy support
The weirdest thing to me about the GOP bill isn't the timing or the secrecy. It's that no major org in health care thinks it's a good idea.
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I wonder how many NYT readers will be encountering this fact for the first time today?
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I get that everyone’s irritable these days, but man. The U.S. is an outlier on masking elementary-age kids, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with people who object to that, or who have trouble with their kids’ masks.
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"Trump, who played first base, wrote that 'being a pro was in the equation' until he attended a tryout with 'another young kid named Willie McCovey.'. When Trump was a senior in high school, McCovey was in his fifth year in the major leagues" .
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Funny, I don't recall the "Well actually" takes about Gabby Giffords' public policy preferences when she was still in the ICU.
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"I think it's actually become probably the number one issue in politics in the last couple of weeks.".
Eric Trump claims his social media likes are being throttled and he thinks that’s become the number one issue in politics over the past few weeks
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No, there’s not. Run along now.
Dolly Parton is in the midst of a career revival that has seen her hailed as a kind of secular country-pop saint. But there’s a dark side to Dolly’s ability to appeal to everyone at all times:
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New verb: (To) Leonhardt -- Explain patiently to New York Times readers what many parents have been sputtering with rage about since the summer of 2020.
American children are starting 2022 in crisis. I'm not sure that many people fully grasp the depth of it. 🧵.
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Even the New York Times in November 2020 raised an eyebrow at Tim Walz's "extraordinary step of banning people from different households from meeting indoors or outdoors, even though evidence has consistently shown the outdoors to be relatively safe.".
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*What* profit, precisely?.
Thousands of students are walking out of class to protest conditions at US schools—and challenge adults who are placing profit over their well-being.
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You are very bad at your job and should resign.
New York City has reached the 3% testing positivity 7-day average threshold. Unfortunately, this means public school buildings will be closed as of tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 19, out an abundance of caution. We must fight back the second wave of COVID-19.
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