shikha sood dalmia
@shikhadalmia
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President, Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA). Founder n Editor @UnPopulistMag . classical liberal fighting populist authoritarianism
Washington DC
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Both excited and nervous about
@ismapolicy
's
inaugural conference to defend liberalism today. Wish us luck and see you there folks:
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Barack Obama's speech is the most Enlightenment Liberalism statement I have heard! He has hit every fundamental note: equal dignity for all, pluralism, toleration for those with different lifestyles and values, freedom, justice, and compassion for political opponents.
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This is the most libertarian speech I’ve heard from anyone in the duopoly and certainly more than the current Libertarian Party. Yet you’ll find more libertarians who are Trumpists or MAGA adjacent.
Walz keeps this up and he will win the election for
@TheDemocrats
The
@GOP
@realDonaldTrump
and
@JDVance
should be very concerned right now
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That libertarians did not oppose an authoritarian wannabe like Trump whole hog is among the most bizarre political developments of last six years. There are 3 explanations: 1)The fusion w/ the right led to an obsessive preoccupation with the liberal enemy
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Indians feeling schadenfreude over riots in the US should bear this in mind: These riots are protesting injustice against a persecuted minority. Delhi riots that killed 50 Muslims were retaliation against a persecuted minority demanding justice. BIG difference.
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Obvious point: Ukrainian nationalism is good because it is uniting the country against an invader who's come w/ soldiers and tanks. Populist nationalism is bad because it is against imaginary "invaders," ie immigrants, who come to provide services and live in peace as neighbors.
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A moving firsthand account of the Chinese protests from
@bariweiss
's Substack. The Chinese people are realizing that basically they are all potentially
#Uyghurs
for their state:
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The Republican bench at the RNC consisted of Eric and Don Jr. The Dem bench at DNC: Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Pete Buttigeg! Which party practices affirmative action for the meritless and virtueless?
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This tendency in rightwing pundit class to brand every pro-immigration position, no matter how sensible, as emanating from lefty activist class is truly unfortunate. That is adding fuel to the cruel border populism on the right and is the real impediment to rational/humane reform
Here's a
@DLeonhardt
discussion in which
@DouthatNYT
and others suggest the Dem immigration agenda is hostage to the left "activist class." This is deeply divorced from the party's real positions. You won't hear such language about DeSantis' extreme plan.
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This is a really disturbing piece by
@RanaAyyub
. (She's as fearless as
@gaurilankesh
who was shot pointblank.) She notes no Muslim, not even the most rich n powerful is safe in India. Hindu politicos, OTOH, get away with murder, literally!
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Some libertarians who spent 4 years refusing to see any evil in Trump are now freaked out about every run of the mill thing that Biden does as a threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How many snatched babies are tax cuts worth?
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After watching the Libertarian Party implode into Yuck Land, it is clear to me that the libertarian movement's crying need right now is not for an intellectual leader but a moral leader.
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The trouble is that there is another human type who also doesn't play by the rules: A mafia boss. Trump is in that category. Theil's failure to distinguish between the two reflects not an intellectual confusion (Theil is very smart and erudite) but a profound moral confusion.
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The Western elites who ignored Modi's record and fawned over him and legitimized him need to now vehemently condemn his attack on India's Muslim minority and constitution. They owe this to the protesters putting their lives on the line for their country:
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My GOD. It is hard to exaggerate the anti-Muslim bigotry that Modi is inflaming in this speech. It is difficult to translate the full cultural context, but he is warning Hindu women that Muslims are demanding not just sovereignty over India, but they are coming for their familes'
Modi is inciting voters by saying Muslims produce more children, and if people vote for the opposition, only Muslims will benefit.
Is he fit enough to be the PM of a secular democratic country?
Why is Modi so scared that he has to stoop to this level?
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Unfortunately, this moral confusion is endemic in the libertarian right.
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@DavidAFrench
I think the moral and strategic necessity is for a proportional and focused response that spares Palestinian civilians. Or it'll lose moral legitimacy especially given the unprovoked state and settler violence in West Bank that was the pretext for Hamas' actions.
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1) Super happy to report that The UnPopulist, launched less than 9 months ago with a few 100 subscribers, crossed the 2,000 mark this weekend. It's mission is to use libertarian/classical liberal thought to defend liberal democracy from the threat of populist authoritarianism.
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This not a dog whistle. It's open, unadulterated racism and xenophobia.
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"The libertarian case against Trump is so over-determined that it's hard to know where to begin" and yet so few have made it. My attempt:
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2) Suspicion of democracy because it does not offer the direct level of accountability like markets. 3) A Nietzschean contempt for institutions and rules that constraint the heroic individual.
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Orban is attacking churches in Hungary. But CPAC has chosen Budapest for its 2022 confab, signaling the ominous direction in which it wants to take the GOP. Excellent piece by
@h_david_baer
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Excellent post by
@DamonLinker
that points out that among the cohorts that gravitated toward the far right in Italy were those who claim to be religious but don't practice— or those for whom religion is not the source of morality but identity.
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@JVLast
features
@tomgpalmer
's
#TheUnPopulist
essay on Jordan Peterson w/ this insightful observation: "If you see a person in the public square who says some things that line up with your priors, but also seems maybe kind of crazy . . . they’re crazy."
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Why would libertarians clamoring for criminal justice reform describe the defund the police movement at this juncture a "woke excess." Defending the police state to own the libs?
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Peter Thiel embodies all of these. He was attracted to Trump precisely because he is a larger than life figure who does not play by the rules that apply to mere mortals.
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Libertarians have no qualms about calling Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders and Biden socialists. But use the "f" word -- as in fascist -- to describe Trump and MAGA and ooohMG...a thousand pedants bloom!
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The green-card backlog that is making certain nationals wait over half a century is the root cause of this sitaution and a complete national scandal. These documented dreamers need relief.
But so do their parents!
Imagine coming to the U.S. *legally* as a baby & being told you'll be separated from your family & deported at age 21.
This is the little-known reality for hundreds of thousands of kids. I spoke to some of them to hear their stories.
My latest
@reason
:
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The right-wing, paleolibertarian objection to the 1619 project was that it was riddled w/ inaccuracies but they were OK w/ an unvarnished but accurate teaching of American history. Apparently not! The mention of slavery by Jefferson is wokeism.
via
@TPM
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The major political divide going forward, and the only one that matters, will be between the defenders of liberal democracies and their vandals. All previous disagreements will cease to matter. There will be new alignments between past foes and ruptures with past friends.
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Really unfortunate that
@bariweiss
and her publication are using Hamas' horrific attacks not just to flog her pet crusade against wokeness but also endorse anti-immigration restrictionism in the West (not just in Israel, mind you). Never let a good crisis go to waste!
"A lot of people woke up on October 7 as liberals and went to bed as conservatives. What changed?"
@KonstantinKisin
on the day the delusions died.
Must-read:
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Immigrants have faith in the American dream even if Americans don't!
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Tucker Carlson holding an autocrat like Orban as a model for America shows that the right hates America for its freedoms.
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The rightwing coded crap that even more respectable libertarian publications straining to slam the Dems for anything, everything, while minimizing Trump and MAGA craziness should once and for all put to rest the notion that they are neutral and equal opportunity pox-on-both your
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A shellacking for Georgia Republicans should warm libertarian hearts because it means a rejection of politicos sucking up to a ruthless strongman who gives no shits about the constitution, checks and balances, individual liberty and glorifies violence.
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The notion that an armed citizenry is a hedge against tyranny is only true till it comes across a tyrant it likes. Then it is the friend of tyranny -- as Trump fully realized when he expressed disapproval of disarming rallygoers on Jan 6.
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As various right-wing factions descended into illiberalism post-Trump, the Libertarian Party should have held the fort given its anti-authoritarianism. Alas, says
@AndyCraig
at The UnPopulist, it is now just another rightwing faction allying w/ tyranny.
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Bernie Sanders has condemned the feting of a human rights abuser like Modi by Biden. The Squad is boycotting Modi because of his assaults on core liberal values like pluralism, toleration and free press. Progressives seem like the most classical liberal force in America right now
I encourage my colleagues who stand for pluralism, tolerance, and freedom of the press to join me in doing the same:
@AOC
#ModiNotWelcome
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Michael Moore and Tucker Carlson should become business partners. Moore can sing the praises of Cuba’s health care system while Carlson waxes eloquent about Russia’s subway system.
@philipaklein
@shikhadalmia
This is one place I honestly didn't expect the horseshoe theory to come in to play.
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If Latinos in Florida helped deliver the state to Trump by rejecting Biden's "socialism," can the GOP please retire the myth that Hispanics will usher Big Government, esp given that their own candidate is doing a pretty good job of it?
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@RadleyBalko
is literally the best criminal justice reporter on the planet and a man of great moral integrity who is in it for all the right reasons: Not fame, not fortune, just sticking up for the powerless facing systemic injustice. Please subscribe to his new Substack.
So after nine years, I'm being let go by the Washington Post. This is disappointing but not surprising. In recent years, the Opinion leadership has made it increasingly difficult to do the reporting & in-depth analysis I was hired to do -- in favor of short, hot takes.
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One glib libertarian advise is that we should all forget about politics and just live our lives. The trouble for brown-skinned immigrants under Trump was that politics would not leave them. That's a privilege only the secure majority could enjoy!
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@nickgillespie
@reason
I don't even know where to begin...but I've been gobsmacked that libertarians who've been crying tyranny over every regulatory overreach, every tax increase, every instance of nannyism are now suggesting that a man who is the closest thing to a tyrant that this country has ever
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Thank you, my friend. We've never met but you have influenced me immensely.
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This is the stupidest argument. Because if a country is like a collectively owned house, then no one has the right to stop someone from inviting a person to their "house."
Freedom of movement is not an inherent natural right. You don’t have a right to enter property that does not belong to you unless you are invited.
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You go, Biden!
NEWS:
@JoeBiden
just opened a new front against Trump, slamming him over the European Union ban on US travel.
"Because Trump can’t do the most basic parts of his job, the US is now viewed as posing a global health risk," Biden says in a statement to me:
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If you care more about Georgetown's cancel culture and less about the Jan 6 hearings you are not a libertarian, you are a right-winger. Note: I did not say that there is no problem in universities. Just that your lopsided priorities speak volumes about your commitments.
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1) In my view, there is no better example of conservatism’s profoundly deleterious effect on libertarian principles than
#RoevWade
. This ruling kicked off the culture wars. Because libertarians were fused with the right, they became witting or unwitting rightwing culture warriors
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Many things to disagree about w/ Biden administration. But this right here alone justifies my vote for him: "It treats immigrants primarily as assets and not as either criminals or vague threats to native wages or cagily constructed communitarian ideals."
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When you flirt with toxic masculinity as a party, you attract toxic males as your candidates. Duh! Great piece by
@SykesCharlie
via
@msnbc
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Actually, polarization is not the most corrosive political force today. Both sideism that pretends that fascism and ordinarily flawed politics are the same is.
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Trump would have stranded all the Afghans who helped the US out of sheer indifference. Biden is doing so out of sheer incompetence. Trump was despicable. Biden is pathetic.
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America's massive over-reaction to 9-11 did more to damage it than the attack itself. We launched futile wars, erected the DHS leviathan. Islamic extremism is impotent as a worldview. The attackers genius was that they wielded America against itself.
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For the nth time, Donald, a trade deficit does not mean that we are making a loss. It just means we are buying more goods than selling.
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Want to stop shootings of police officers? Tackle the outrageous power of police unions:
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@bernybelvedere
@radleybalko
This way he can pretend to his audience that he has a response when he doesn't and imply that Balko is the one running away. It's all a game.
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The right's demonization of the left is not politics as usual. It is calculated to justify the use of political violence against the said enemy by exaggerating its danger. That's what Marjorie Taylor Greene's "regime" talk is all about
@ThePlumLineGS
:
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Trump talks smack nonstop about literally everyone. But Meghan McCain obliquely noting that her father was repulsed by this man and his antics is the one spreading hate and deepening national divides? Conservatives are now both trolls and snowflakes all in one!
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When you go to your office at
@mercatus
to drop off boxes on a Sunday afternoon in sweats and sneakers and run into the two econ Nobel laureates of 2021! Damn, I wish I'd slapped some makeup on since I'm going to be showing this pic to my grandkids!
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Gun idolatry is the opposite of responsible gun use.
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Conservatives' love affair w/ Trump is shocking because they exist to defend existing institutions that Trump vandalized. And libertarians' is shocking because they exist to resist authoritarianism and he was an instinctive authoritarian. This will never cease of amaze me! Ever!
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How does one go from being anti-war to anti-freedom (which is what Zelensky is fighting for)? Why every libertarian is not celebrating Zelensky for resisting a brutal tyrant is beyond me. He's a classical liberal hero:
No great surprise here. To put Time's P-O-Y in perspective, in 2020, it was jointly shared by Joe Biden & Kamala Harris; in 1972, jointly shared by Richard Nixon & Henry Kissinger...
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Who built the cages is Trump's rejoinder? If he had torn them down it would be one thing. But he filled them!
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As it turns out, it is not easy to sell a nasty, negative vision of America going to hell. Excellent piece by
@ThePlumLineGS
and not only because it links to
@bonniekristian
's piece in
#TheUnPopulist
:)
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Why the Right's Identity Politics Is More Dangerous than the Left's: The left has badly overplayed its hand by insisting on a forced program of diversity. The right's program of engineered homogeneity might well be worse. via
@reason
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Literally everything NeverTrumpers like me had worried about and got reviled for, often by our own comrades, came to pass on Jan 6. More in fact because even I didn’t think he’d go this far. Yet there is no feeling of vindication. Just horror!
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Great piece: "The irony, of course, is that under Orbán, it’s impossible for a Hungarian equivalent of Carlson—a loud television pundit, critical of the government, watched by millions of people—to exist."
Tucker Carlson is part of a long tradition of self-loathing international tourism. Americans and Europeans who hate their own societies have long been seduced by authoritarian alternatives: the USSR, Venezuela, East Germany - and now Orban's Hungary
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Some people saying we can't opine on the firing decisions of employers because we don't know the full circumstances now have all kinds of opinions about the NYT's firing of Donald McNeil. It's only cancel culture when outfits other than our own do it, no?
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Have to totally part company with my libertarian friends. In fact, tomorrow
#TheUnPopulist
will run a piece arguing that the U.S. is far from doing "enough" to help Ukraine ward off an authoritarian bully.
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Maybe its me, but Twitter 2.0 's determined replatforming extremist and hate groups is a bigger scandal than Twitter 1.0's ham-handed efforts to deplatform them.
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Anyone surprised that a corrupt mayor like Kwame Kilpatrick pardoned but not a single figure on the libertarian wish list? Reality Winner, Ross Ulbritch, Ed Snowden or Assange. Can we just admit that there is literally no redeeming value in this thug's thugocracy?
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Plea to libertarians on Cheney's ouster by the GOP: Please, please pretty please for a nano second stay focused on the fact that one major party has officially embraced a despot over liberalism, something you were put on this earth to oppose!
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Shouldn’t a Muslim woman hurling sexual insults be reassuring to conservatives worried about Muslim assimilation? At least she won’t push sharia on them ;)
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Usually, I tell good men to quit politics. This one, I hope sticks around.
@justinamash
please find a path forward outside this horrid duopoly! "Our politics is in a partisan death spiral. That’s why I’m leaving the GOP."
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The real question is where was the Indian government when Muslim terrorists were terrorizing you? And after failing to protect you, why did it terrorize innocent Kashmiri Muslims? That you failed to stick up for them shows you are not a defender of human rights, just your own.
'Where were the advocates of human rights when my rights were taken away?’ asks noted columnist Sunanda Vashisht at the US Congressional hearing on Human Rights.
'Abrogation of Article 370 is in fact a restoration of human rights’, she says. A must watch.
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The right-wing peddlers of Great Replacement Theory aren't worried about more Democratic voters. They are only worried about more brown people. Take a listen:
A strange thing about MAGA populists: They keep saying their "pro-worker" agenda appeals to nonwhite working class people. But then they say migration is a dastardly plot to create Dem voters. By your own lights, wouldn't these people vote GOP?
Check out our exchange on this:
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Foreign dissidents, as
@Kasparov63
has noted, are antibodies in the body politic of liberal societies that are able to detect and warn against creeping authoritarianism before the natives can. Bear that in mind as you read this piece by the author of Reading Lolita in Teheran!
"Book-banning is a form of silencing, and it is the next step along a continuum — one that I worry even in the US presages a further slide toward totalitarianism."
@azarnafisi
takes stock of rising totalitarian tendencies in the US. Via
@PostOpinions
:
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DeSantis is trying to one-up Trump on border enforcement. That is terrible. But the real issue is how do we break this spiral of border cruelty on the right? W/ the rise of populism, all the political incentives are for ever more cruelty.
@ThePlumLineGS
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The great
@DeirdreMcClosk
in her debut essay at The UnPopulist asks on July 4th, how much richer might America have been if slavery, Jim Crow and its legacy weren't thwarting the talent of African Americans? Read, share, subscribe:
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Every emotion that
@JonahDispatch
describes he has with the wretched state of conservatism, I share. Who'd have thunk 10 years ago that the the loudest attacks on liberal democratic capitalism would come from the right instead of the left?
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My Latest: The Myth of Mass Immigration: Actually, the Numbers Show That We Need More Immigration, Not Less
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Your occasional reminder that the GOP is a bottomless gutter! This Roundup by
@SykesCharlie
of all the Republicans standing firm behind Walker shocked me, when I thought I had lost my capacity to be shocked.
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This is the most fair and balanced analysis I've seen about the Supreme Court's conduct as well as Biden's largely sensible assessment of the court. By
@Timodc
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Hamas killed 1,400 Israeli men, women n children. IDF has killed over 10,000 Gazans, 40% of them children. Millions more are suffering. People are still quibbling about whether the Israeli response is disproportionate. At some point the grisly math will becme imposible to ignore.
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CNN/MSNBC are an extension of the DNC. Fox of RNC. Why can't a country that has 300 breakfast cereals not manage to generate one truly independent, objective, smart news channel?
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1) Right-wingers making a living off cancel culture are realizing that it is hard to cover the beat consistently. Why? Because their own side practices it too.
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Somehow, I'm not surprised that Mike Johnson wades in the fever swamps of the Great Replacement Theory :) Frankly, that's probably his most respectable position given that one of his policy preferences is to sentence women who get abortions to up to 10 years of hard labor!
Mike Johnson is not Vulgar MAGA. He's Refined MAGA.
At times he sounds high minded about offering asylum to the persecuted. But he also endorses soft great replacement theory and is a big booster of the GOP bill functionally gutting asylum entirely. 5/
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The Venn diagram of libertarians who support Trump but revolt against even private requirements for masks and vaccinations has a huge overlap. In other words, too many libertarians are anti-authority but not anti-authoritarian!
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As it turns out angry, bottom-feeding, racist bigots on air like
#TuckerCarlson
are also terrible humans in their personal lives. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Great roundup by
@SykesCharlie
:
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Marion Le Pen is to the left of Bernie Sanders on economics. Her presence at CPAC shows that conservatism under Trump will happily embrace socialism so long as it can bash immigrants. via
@amconmag
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It is morally corrupt to assert a moral equivalence between the summer violence which, while abominable, stemmed from protests against police brutality and the violence yesterday to overturn an election. The 1st was meant to protect rights and the 2nd cancel them. Stop it.
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Trump will act true to form in the debate and find isolated horror stories about violent undocumented criminals and blame them on Biden -- never mind that the undocumented are far less crime prone than others. Curious to see how Team Biden responds:
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I find that Americans make a big effort to get the pronunciation of names right. I've both mangled names and have had my name mangled many times! In a world where unfamiliar cultures are rubbing shoulders, this kind of thing is not racism, it is natural.
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To libertarians who oppose immigration because of welfare: Creating a police state to protect the welfare state is a lose-lose proposition.
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I can't recall WSJ running an op-ed calling out Donald Trump for all his boasting and self-aggrandizement. But Jill Biden attaches one small honorific and its a national scandal. This is what's called defining outrage down!
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How Biden can future-proof America's immigration system from future Stephen Millers. W/ reference to
@David_J_Bier
and
@AlexNowrasteh
's excellent work:
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