1. You also have to give them a landing. It's tempting, I know, to take the pent up rage out on the only ones who respond to you (like @ProjectLincoln!) or Never Trumpers like @RadioFreeTom or @BillKristol bc they were "guilty" in the past or "waited too long" like @WalshFreedom

2. but at each of the big inflection moments where Trump lost support I've begged non-Rs to consider the fact that if Trump supporters see that they have nowhere to go, they will stay w the only people that DO accept them, & the price might actually be the collapse of democracy
3. which, until Weds, some people thought I was being hyperbolic about. I WASN'T! When the MAINSTREAM of a major political party divorces themselves from democratic norms & values & its supporters turn to a fictionalized world to justify their political party's actions, your
4. country's stability is at risk & one by-product of poor messaging on the Dem side is that extremism on the Right was able to not only take root in the Rep Party, it was able to take OVER the R party & become the party's mainstream- pinnacled w the presidential win via the EC
5. of Donald Trump, w/o the GOP paying any electoral price for their extremism. A healthy Rep Party might have found the courage to reject Trump's nomination & accept the short term costs that would have come w refusing to endorse his 2016 candidacy. But the Rep Party of 2016
6. was already quite "ill" w polarization & hyperpartisanship & was winning elections despite their extremism, which was never highlighted as a campaign issue even while the still-mod Ds were being erroneously classified as a party of socialists & communists in an increasingly
7. strident & intense right-wing media environment that was also being echoed in GOP campaign materials. Together, this environment was radicalizing the GOP electorate- dehumanizing Democrats & artificially inflating the stakes of campaigns to the point that GOP voters began to
8. become increasingly radical. The chickens came home to roost in the 2016 Rep primary when Donald Trump decided to run. His candidacy tapped into all of the dark undercurrents GOP politicians, media figures, and campaign strategists had been playing w- a fire that burned out of
9. control bc party primaries attract very small electorates and thus can advantage more ideological candidates although traditionally- the best known, best financed candidates win. Trump was a celebrity, that was very imp to his success.
10. Ironically, it was a commitment to pluralism & democracy by party leaders in that cycle who felt that since the voters chose Trump, their choice had to be honored w the party's nomination even though our poll of VA Reps in April of 2016 found shockingly high receptivity
11. to a brokered convention- w somewhere near 50% of surveyed Rs supportive of it, & maybe even higher though I can't recall what the exact % was except that I was floored by it- it played a big role in my falling into the trap in '16 that Trump was such a threat to democracy
12. there might really be more than 10pts of crossover Rep voter support for the Dem ticket in VA (there wasn't though- in the end HRC received almost exactly the modal 10pts of R crossover vote here & it was the LAST time I ever believed in crossover voting >10pts in prez
13. elections aside potentially the weirdo states (WVA, MD, MA) & ever so slightly AZ, where we HAVE seen some >10pts crossover I suspect is due to McCain Rs but which has really only emerged post Trump's actual win. Having been studying polarization as a grad student & doing
14. my dissertation on polarization, along w other scholars I was watching polarization & hyperpartisanship tear through the GOP like a wildfire- seeing its moderate wing get completely wiped out in just a couple of election cycles via ideological primaries till the people being
15. called its moderates were the people that 2 cycles ago had wiped out the moderates! And political scientists, empowered w a amazing quant tool called NOMINATE were showing the world the asymmetry between Rs & Ds- the ideological purge was only happening on the Right
& now anyone can use the NOMINATE tool bc its been put into an easy app on a site called Vote View (I used to have to make little gifs w the raw data to show Congress moving apart which did make me look cool on the job market!). Voteview is an amazing tool- very user friendly
16. which I've posted often on here & am putting here again so you can check it out. I'm also showing you the distribution of members in the 103rd and 116th Congresses. Each dot represents a member of the House or Senate(red Rs, blue Ds) & you https://t.co/0FGUaFjhKe
17. can see how the members are distributed relative to each other very differently over the two+ decades (earlier decade on the right) You'll note the space in the middle where there are no dots have grown and that in the images on the left, the most current session of Congress,
18. there are red dots that touch the cap of the "egg" when there weren't ANY that did so (or even any in that area of the graph!) in the Congress from the 1990s. Generally, after the end of segregation in the South, we only interpret the left/right part of these graphs but you
19. might notice, there is variation of the members on a Y axis too and NOMINATE produces 2 measures of ideology for each member with the one running on the X axis understood to be the liberal/conservative dimension and the only one used. BUT bc the data includes all members
20. of Congress & all non-unanimous votes from the 1st Congress till the current day a 2nd dimension (Y axis) exists for everyone although the belief is that the Y axis is non-interpretable beyond 1960s when segregation ended & race stopped being an explicit issue coming before
21. Congress. Don't forget, until recently, the GOP was at least pretending to be racially liberal by voting en masse to renew the Voting Rights Act every time it came up & only when Trump came along did it move from dog whistle politics to full bullhorns on race & ethnicity
22.(though the dog whistles were PLENTY obvious to anyone that chose to see them). So, the Y axis placements are generally not interpreted but is included so it can be plotted. These 2 congresses are separated by about 25yrs but are WORLD's apart in terms of the
23. voting behavior of men & women serving in the House & Senate- which serves as a proxy for ideology here. NOMINATE is nice bc it doesn't do what the websites that attempt to classify members ideologically does which is to make subjective determinations regarding various votes,
24. often choosing particular bills to include. NOMINATE is not subjective- it includes ALL votes & the program doesn't even know its coding votes or legislators- all it sees is a series of 0s & 1s and is concerned w how those 0s & 1s interact w each other, spatially. Its really
25. smart! Whether its capturing member's sincere ideological preferences or not, one thing is clear, it documents significant behavior changes in our Congress over what we argue is the polarized era AND verifies that the change is primarily isolated in the GOP. I threaded on
26. today bc the super pac launches Monday and is focused on drawing attention to the radicalization of the Republican Party- from the top (electeds/leaders) the bottom (average Rep voters) & how that has destabilized democracy in the US- placing continued stability of democracy
27. at threat. BC Trump was assisted so widely with his effort to steal the 2020 election by his Rep Party peers- including congressional party leaders who went so far as to hold that charade of the certification of the EC vote under the false premise of potential election fraud
28. the threats we are facing will extend beyond Trump's tenure in office & will require Americans to be diligent and aggressive in fighting the GOP, trying to force the party back to the mainstream. Along w the pac, I'll be releasing an analysis of polarization via my @substack
29. @The__Cycle expands on the topic of this thread, shows that the Rep Party has polarized significantly over the past couple decades and is significantly more radical than the Dem Party. It is very important that the American public be brought up to speed as to what is at stake
30. in the 2022 midterms- winning 2020 will not be enough and people who wish to see America navigate this dreadful period need to buckle in- the work is just beginning. Happily, what we've seen from GA is the deep well of possibility!

More from Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer 📈🔭🍌

1. I think school closures also dragged Ds down in congressional races. To be clear, they wouldn't in a functional democracy not following a herd immunity strategy & normalizing the indifference genocide of up to a half million of its citizens. That "conditional" is a necessary


2. component of the "pandemic backlash effect that we have in the U.S. other countries don't have sizable anti-mask movements, ones so large it impedes states like North Dakota who governor @DougForDakota has "led" them to a point where every single county in his large;y rural


3. state has been governed to "high" infection rates. He must feel so successful that liberty & freedom is so abundantly clear all around him! So yes, in a country that has normalized murdering via indifference its old, medical compromised & in the case of

4. COVID- which is a random killer, which sometimes kills young healthy mothers whose own mothers couldn't let their daughter forgo a baby shower bc its such a special part of the birth experience or bc how do you skip the "1 year" baby party when the baby smashes her cake all

5. over her own head? I get it. Those are once in a lifetime events that can't be replaced. So people have been doing them bc their governors & their president esp has told them to do so, that its no big deal, that actually they'd be FOOLS not to hold that gender reveal party,

More from Crypto

Excited to share our 2020 #Bitcoin review.

2020 will be remembered as the year the long fabled institutions finally arrived and #Bitcoin became a bonafide macroeconomic asset.

Below are the top highlights of each month for Bitcoin’s historic year.

1/


Bitcoin is now at all-time highs capping off an extremely successful year.

But it was by no means stable ride up.

2020 was a historically volatile year.

@YoungCryptoPM and I provided a detailed overview of every month of 2020 in all its

Jan.

3 days into the new year the US assassinated Iran’s top general Soleimani.

BTC surprisingly reacted to the events behaving like a safe haven as the risk of war increased.

The events provided the first hints of BTC potentially having graduated to a legitimate macro asset.


Feb.

COVID-19 reached a tipping point causing markets to crash.

BTC’s correlation with the S&P 500 reached an ATH in the following weeks.

This is when everyone learned BTC was not a recession hedge, it was a hedge against inflation and loss of confidence in fiat currencies.
https://t.co/JB7dJ3qp6M


Mar.

Financial markets in free fall.

The liquidity crisis was so severe BTC experienced one of it’s worst days ever.

Now known as Black Thursday, on March 12, BTC plummeted as much as 50% to below $4,000 at its lowest point on the day.

BTC closed the day down 40%
1/ @MIT discussing the need for blockchain gateways to achieve interoperability across different blockchain networks, and to support the cross-blockchain mobility of virtual assets

https://t.co/PbjQkSlTT3

@quant_network are collaborating with MIT in the creation of ODAP

$QNT

2/ "In order for blockchain-based services to scale globally, blockchain networks must be able to interoperate with one another following a standardized protocol and interfaces (APIs)"

Gilbert founded ISO TC307 which 60 countries are working towards standardizing the interfaces


3/ "We believe that a blockchain gateway is needed for blockchain networks to interoperate in a manner similar
to border gateway routers in IP networks. Just as border gateway routers use the BGPv4 protocol to interact with one another in a peered fashion we believe that a...

4/ blockchain gateway protocol will be needed to permit the movement of virtual assets and related information across blockchain networks in a secure and privacy-preserving manner"

You can read more about the gateway protocol ODAP in this 21 tweet


5/
"We motivate the need for blockchain gateways and blockchain gateway protocols in the following summary:

✅Enables blockchain interoperability:
Blockchain gateways provide an interface for the interoperability between blockchain/DLT systems that operate distinct consensus...

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Tip from the Monkey
Pangolins, September 2019 and PLA are the key to this mystery
Stay Tuned!


1. Yang


2. A jacobin capuchin dangling a flagellin pangolin on a javelin while playing a mandolin and strangling a mannequin on a paladin's palanquin, said Saladin
More to come tomorrow!


3. Yigang Tong
https://t.co/CYtqYorhzH
Archived: https://t.co/ncz5ruwE2W


4. YT Interview
Some bats & pangolins carry viruses related with SARS-CoV-2, found in SE Asia and in Yunnan, & the pangolins carrying SARS-CoV-2 related viruses were smuggled from SE Asia, so there is a possibility that SARS-CoV-2 were coming from