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This is a good piece on fissures within the GOP but I think it mischaracterizes the Trump presidency as “populist” & repeats a story about how conservatives & the GOP expelled the far-right in the mid-1960s that is actually far more complicated. /1

I don’t think the sharp opposition between “hard-edge populism” & “conservative orthodoxy” holds. Many of the Trump administration’s achievements were boilerplate conservatism. Its own website trumpets things like “massive deregulation,” tax cuts, etc. /2

https://t.co/N97v85Bb79


The claim that Buckley and “key GOP politicians banded together to marginalize anti-Communist extremism and conspiracy-mongering” of the JBS has been widely repeated lately but the history is more complicated. /3


This tweet by @ThePlumLineGS citing a paper by @sam_rosenfeld and @daschloz on the "porous" boundary between conservatives, the GOP and the far-right is relevant in this context.


This is a separate point but I find it interesting that Gaetz, like Roy Moore did In his failed Senate campaign, disses McConnell. What are their actual policy differences? MM supported taking health care away from millions, a tax cut for the rich, conservative judges, etc. /5
Trump is the federal government. the 1st amendment was specifically supposed to prevent government interference with the press.

demanding that media publish the presidents words with no editorial interference is exactly what the founders were worried about when they created 1A.


free speech absolutists demand (checks notes) that the NYT allow Trump to write all its headlines.

the first amendment was not meant to allow the president to seize control of all media. it seems weird that you have to explain this to free speech defenders.

this is what happens though when you fetishize the speech act and completely lose track of what freedom of speech was supposed to do in the first place.

the president is literally the person the 1A is supposed to *protect media from.* It's supposed to allow media to criticize him and have an editorial policy independent of the government!
Abbott is pushing a lie to protect incompetence. There is no Federal oversight of the Texas Grid, ergo fewer regulations (sound familiar) - so point one: state legislature needs reform. 2/


2. Point 2: there were clear signs the grid would get overloaded under extreme cold conditions. Why? Due to a vacuum of regulations mandating winterization of turbines and power generators. This from sources, in Texas!

3. Point 3: Of the power shortfall that hit Texas, over 80% was due to problems at coal and gas fired plants. Power generators were just not winterized. Decisions to do so have been ignored since the 1990s.

4. Point 4: these are winterized wind turbines in Denmark. The ocean is frozen. The turbines are generating.


5. #Texas| the main issue is: catastrophic governance at the State level (no Federal oversight of the Texas grid) failing to allocate funding to winterise the Natural Gas, Coal and Wind Turbine elements that contribute to the grid. (~ 80/20
So, just before Christmas, Government what it called a "response" to this New York Times account of cronyism in pandemic spending.

And I said, when that "response" - which you can read here
https://t.co/gLEJzuqoAx - was published that every single notional rebuttal by Government of a claim made by the New York Times was false, misleading or both.

And it's time for me to make good.

Here's the first "rebuttal" by Government to the New York Times' claim that: "The government handed out thousands of contracts to fight the virus, some of them in a secretive V.I.P. lane."


A number of points might be made.

(1) Government cannot say the NYT got it wrong. (2) the NAO found the VIP lane (later renamed the high-priority lane) "sat alongside" the normal lane. And I have shown elsewhere VIP contracts were handled by different teams all the way through.


(3) Although Govt says "offers of support raised by Opposition MPs were dealt with expeditiously" the NAO report does not record any referrals made by an Opposition MP leading to a contract - and the Government response telling does not say any did.