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David Austin Walsh Profile picture
David Austin Walsh
@DavidAstinWalsh
Historian. Postdoc @Yale Program for Study of Antisemitism. Book: TAKING AMERICA BACK: THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT AND THE FAR RIGHT // Yale Press // Spring 2024
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Sep 21, 2018 • 16 tweets • 2 min read
Prediction: Next week will solidify autocracy in the United States. Trump will use the Rosenstein story as a pretext to fire him, and then fire Mueller.
Sep 20, 2018 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Serious question: what does “legitimacy” mean in this context? What does treating the Supreme Court as an “illegitimate” institution look like? It strikes me that if the criteria for “legitimacy” is popular democracy, then the current federal and many state governments (I’m looking at you, North Carolina) are “illegitimate.”
Sep 18, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
SPOILER ALERT: Remember how, at the end of “Sorry to Bother You,” Cassius repeatedly went on national TV to warn people about WorryFree and nothing happened? I feel like we’re going through that right now. nytimes.com/2018/09/18/us/…
Sep 16, 2018 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Oh, Lord.

Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged accomplice in his alleged attempted rape, is the author of “God and Man at Georgetown Prep.” Oh, and here’s a Daily Caller column where he blames the liberals and the gays for introducing their effete and immoral sexual agenda into the Catholic Church. dailycaller.com/2011/01/27/geo…
Sep 15, 2018 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Let me state this unequivocally: The political transformations required to accomplish this are impossible. So what does that mean for the future? motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/… It means that the politics of the 21st century--and beyond--will be first and foremost the politics of living on a dying planet.
Sep 15, 2018 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
A few quick takes on Andrew Sullivan’s latest attempt to defend the long conservative intellectual tradition. nymag.com/daily/intellig… I’m not gonna dive too deep into this since @SethCotlar has already done a bang-up job.
Sep 15, 2018 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Great article by @jason_tebbe here, though I do want to add one particular bit of nuance that's missing: the power of technology to make nostalgia easier than ever. tropicsofmeta.com/2018/09/12/nos… I've taught undergraduate students who are more into the Rolling Stones than I am, despite being born in 1998.

They get it from their Gen X. parents, sure, but it's been made easier by growing up in an all-digital music era.
Sep 14, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of this is received authenticity politics, combined with a hazy understanding of class dimensions when we're young.

In my case, I thought we were working class because we had working-class neighbors and my parents didn't have the house or fancy degrees my classmates did. I didn't realize at the time that we were solidly middle class, but because I went to a (public) magnet school my classmates had mostly upper-middle-class parents... and the *upper* class went to tony private schools.
Sep 14, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
This is an important point, and speaks to *another* problem: looking at national and statewide election results as the sole criteria of "meaning."

Political power is complicated and cannot be reduced to a single metric.

Take the North Carolina governor's race in 2016. If we viewed it in a vacuum, we might come to the conclusion that Cooper's narrow victory was a bellwether for changing politics in the state, and that moderate white Southern Democrats were the wave of the future.
Sep 10, 2018 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
I don’t have much more to add to the masterful responses to @RuleAndRuin by @SethCotlar, @TomSugrue, and many, many others.

So here's a brief thread on a specific objection I have to one of Kabaservice's arguments. Kabaservice brought up Dinesh D'Souza in his POLITICO article as an example of a liberal strawman: Someone who has gotten a lot of attention from critics but really wasn't that important to serious conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s.
Sep 5, 2018 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Some McCarthy defenders are sliding into my mentions, so let me briefly address these two pretty standard McCarthyite talking points. One, on Venona: Yes, Soviet intelligence had actively penetrated parts of the American government in the 1940s and 1950s.

The evidence is pretty conclusive that Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, Julius Rosenberg, and others passed info to the Soviets.
Sep 4, 2018 • 25 tweets • 6 min read
This was not how Joe McCarthy was “done in” and demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of McCarthy’s place in American political history. (THREAD) First of all, McCarthy was not simply some “fringe” figure that came and went out of the blue.

McCarthy was a conservative Wisconsin Republican who rode the right-wing wave in the 1946 midterms to his Senate seat.
Aug 31, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Me 2008: "We are the change we've been waiting for!"

Me 2018: "HOLY SHIT THE NAZIS ARE BACK!!!" Prompted by this reporting of the resignation of--wait for it--IAN SMITH from the Department of Homeland Security.
Aug 28, 2018 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
To expand on this point... the acquiescence of Obama-era liberals to an authoritarian seizure of power is astounding and will utterly damn them in the eyes of the future. Yes, there’s dynamism on the grassroots. The left is more dynamic than it has been in a generation!

But within the remnants of liberal power at the federal level, it’s been largely business as usual.
Aug 28, 2018 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Perceptive thread on how Silicon Valley caves to bad-faith claims made by right-wingers. In fairness to Facebook and Google and their absolute spinelessness when it comes to this sort of thing, it’s not like legacy media has a much better track record.
Aug 28, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
TIL that in 1961, Young Americans for Freedom officially condemned both the activities of the American Nazi Party *and* the National Student Association, the latter for its liberal bias. The USNSA's great sin was apparently offering material support for the civil rights movement.
Aug 24, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
We are so painfully, profoundly, catastrophically screwed, and it's just going to keep accelerating. Catastrophic ecological collapse is probably nearer than any of us think.

To personalize this, it means not just "in my lifetime," but "before I hit 50."
Aug 24, 2018 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
So, some thoughts on this interview by Manafort juror and Trump supporter Paula Duncan to Fox News on the trial. foxnews.com/politics/2018/… I'm not going to try and speculate what this means about future cases -- @brianbeutler has already done so and I agree with him. crooked.com/article/donald…
Aug 24, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Oh, I absolutely believe that Greenwald is a Russian agent of influence. Is he on the payroll of Moscow? Probably not.

Does he effectively serve the Kremlin's interests through his position in American politics and media? Of course he does.
Aug 23, 2018 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
My prediction for the end game of all of this through this time next year:

Kavanaugh is confirmed, more indictments start coming down, Democrats win control of House but not Senate. Mueller either finishes his report or is sacked after the midterms and the bulk of his material ends up in public anyway.

Either way, incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing bordering on treason by the president.
Aug 23, 2018 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
What if I told you that even conclusive findings of criminal conspiracy would not be enough to topple the Trump regime? I'm admittedly no expert in authoritarianism, but I *do* know that authoritarian regimes commit crimes ALL. THE. TIME.

That's kind of their thing. Financial crimes, political crimes, crimes against humanity...