Alexandra Erin Profile picture
Jul 17, 2018 9 tweets 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Now, in fairness to David Frum (and other rare phrases) he did turn on Trump fairly early. But there's a thing I want to address in the media and political furor over the #TreasonSummit.
And that is I keep seeing people saying variations on "This is not the typical fake outrage" or "This is not the usual liberal hysteria.", as if we who have been sounding the alarm bell about Trump from the beginning are just a broken clock that happened to be right yesterday.
While new puzzle pieces emerged yesterday in the pattern of Russia interference going back to 2015 and directly connected to Trump, the emerging narrative is that it's a total coincidence that Trump broke bad yesterday in a way that happens to resemble existing allegations.
And a lot of this is coming from the top down, from Republicans who find themselves compelled to acknowledge that Trump yesterday acted against our national interests "and must reverse course" or "must immediately clarify that he REALLY meant the opposite" or whatever.
And I understand at a strategic level why they are pretending that this is an isolated incident. They are still hoping to get out of it without having to *actually* turn on their party's president.
But I have concerns about how that's rippling. I have concerns about the mainstream media grabbing hold of it as a means of insulating themselves from introspection or accountability.
I said yesterday, in my thread urging people not to panic, that nothing that happened was *new*, it was just happening more in the open, in a way it hadn't been before.
But for everyone who ignored it when it was slightly more veiled, slightly more deniable, slightly subtler, there's a huge temptation to act as though yesterday was a radical shift.
And while I certainly don't want to dissuade them from waking up, I see no percentage in entertaining the notion that the problem started when they could no longer ignore it.

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More from @AlexandraErin

Oct 8, 2018
So, electric kettles. Let me see if I can't convert some other white US-born people over.

Here are some reasons:

1. You can set specific temperatures, not just heat things to a boil. Get closer to the ideal temperature for your tea, spend less time waiting for it to cool.
2. If you need boiling water to pour into or over something, not just like a single serving for instant whatever, you've got it in a nice kettle with a spout and an insulated handle.
3. You never have that thing where surface tension has stopped the water from actually boiling even though it's at temperature, and when you move it and disturb the water it explodes all over your hand (Google it, if you don't know this thing.)
Read 10 tweets
Oct 8, 2018
Twitter's specific policy on Dehumanizing Speech is better than I had feared; it's more specific, covering only comparisons to animals (vermin, pests) or tools for a specific purpose. You can give feedback here. Mine focused on implementation. blog.twitter.com/official/en_us…
The Dehumanizing Speech policy being specific is important because if (let's dream big here) it is enforced as written, you can avoid getting suspended for talking about TERFs by saying their beliefs are garbage or their actions are garbage.
My feedback focused on the unequal way in which Twitter's existing policies have been supported. White guys making clear references to genocide, murder, stalking children, etc., get "We have to look at context, this was clearly not serious" replies while their victims get banned.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
For the record, I do hope Brett Kavanaugh's life is ruined. I hope his marriage has been irreparably strained. I hope his social life is in the toilet. I hope he feels no joy at his win. I hope he only stops waiting for the other shoe to fall when it does, like a guillotine blade
My ~*preference*~ would be that he suffer some sort of institutional consequences, even if it was merely not being confirmed to a lifetime position on the highest court in the land, where he will have power over millions.

But the right decided that's off the table.
I hope anyone who comes before the SCOTUS who is even tangentially liberal, left, or Democratic makes an issue out of his participation in the case so that he has to spend his whole career justifying and defending his presence on the bench.
Read 8 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
Well, @RadioFreeTom thinks saying "No problem." implies there's a problem so forgive me if I'm not crowning him a king of situational analysis. What he's calling Trump's "rhetorical excess" is largely projection. The idea that we win by *not* pointing out what they're doing...
...just gives Trump and his party the full benefit of that projection, in that they get to smear their opponents while being insulated from accurate accusations. We've been ceding control of the narrative to them for decades now and it hasn't worked.
The reason @RadioFreeTom wants the Democrats to settle down and be good little children is because up until two hours ago HE WAS A REPUBLICAN and when this is all done he hopes there's a slightly more couth and presentable version of the Republican Party that's still in charge.
Read 6 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
We've got GOP voters talking about drinking liberal tears with their beers, we've got a GOP president lying his backside off to his rally and then telling Jeanine Pirro he wants to hold women "liable" for talking about rapes... I don't see the centrists asking them to be civil?
Isn't it weird how absolutely no pundit wrote an editorial saying that Lindsey Graham's fire and brimstone sermon isn't going to win over the middle? Isn't it strange that no one tells Chuck Grassley that his angry interruptions are going to hurt his party?
There was a lot of talk about whether or not Kavanaugh's vitriolic testimony would hurt him but I didn't see a lot of neutral or centrist-identified people saying that it *should*.
Read 5 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
So let me tell you another reason we need to not back down, not sit down, not be quiet: coward that he is, Donald Trump is at his most dangerous when he feels like he's on top of the world.
The horse race headlines are saying that Donald Trump had his best day as president, and I'm sure he felt it. He just came through a knock-down, drag-out fight and won a battle that people had been telling him to drop for weeks, so right now no one can tell him anything.
If he gets it in his head that maybe he should fire Rosenstein? No one's going to be able to talk him out of it. He might even do it just to extend the high, or see how far he can take it.
Read 8 tweets

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