1/20. Democracy is precious and exceptional.

2/20. Democracy is undone from within rather than from without.

3/20. The occasion to undo democracy is often an election.

4/20. The mechanism to undo democracy is usually a fake emergency, a claim that internal enemies have done something outrageous.

5/20. A tyrant cares about his person, not the Republic.

Some moaned. Others moved very little. At least 20 said, “I can’t breathe.” Most were mentally ill. Many were obese. More than half had drugs in their systems. More than two-thirds were either Black or Hispanic.

As a former conservative activist and journalist, it has been so frustrating to see my former compatriots spreading wild and unchecked claims about "voter fraud." @jacknicas of the NYT took a deep look at claims of "dead" people in Michigan voting. Link in next tweet.

While examining claims made by right-wing activists who are not credible individuals is a thankless task which elite media editors despise, this is vital and important work in this age of fake news. Here's the link:

As the co-creator of NewsBusters, the most prominent anti-media website, I was part of a decades-long tradition of complaining about media elites being "unfair" to conservative views. There is still much to that argument, but eventually I saw that I was missing context.

What I did not realize until I began expanding my work into creating actual media and reporting institutions such as the Washington Examiner (I was the founding online editor) was that U.S. conservatives do not understand the purpose of journalism.

This became evident to me as I saw that conservative-dominated media outlets were MUCH more biased than outlets run by liberals. The latter had flaws that arose from a lack of diversities (note plural) but they operated mostly in good faith. That's not how the former operated.