This is what he wants to do.

No matter how this trial plays out, the US will remain divided between those who choose truth, Democracy, and rule of law and the millions who reject these things.

1/

The question is how to move forward.

My mantra is that there are no magic bullets and these people will always be with us.

Except for state legislatures, they have less power now than they have for a while.

2/
The only real and lasting solutions are political ones. Get Democrats into local offices. Get people who want democracy to survive to the polls at every election, at every level.

It’s a constant battle.

3/
Maybe I should tell you all about Thurgood Marshall’s life to illustrate how hard the task is and how there will be backlash after each step of progress.

4/
Precisely. That's why Thurgood Marshall's life came to mind.

We are still riding the backlash that started after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

That's why I keep saying there are no easy fixes.
https://t.co/qEXUc6wHx5

5/
Later today or tomorrow: What I learned from writing the biographies of Susan B. Anthony and Thurgood Marshall.

We spend out lives trying to push forward.
They spend theirs trying to us push backward.

6/

https://t.co/sL1kj5tHFB
My view: Doomsayers who think that the US is in the grip of something new that we've never seen before are a bit out of touch with US history.

For a great many Americans, the past five decades are a vast improvement over previous ones.

7/
From the political psychologists I've learned that there are no magic bullets.

For example, Richard Hofstadter explains that what he calls the dangerous and politically paranoid have been with us since the founding of the nation.

8/
People without a grounding in history and political psychology are vulnerable to two things: Hope porn ("Y" will solve our political problems) and doomsaying (If "X" happens, all hope is gone.)

Democracy was dead in 1850 for a lot of Americans.
It was reborn.

9/
Hope didn't exist for a lot of Americans during the Great Depression. There was no social security, no 40 hour workweek, no minimum wage, no GI Bill.

Kids had to go to work and had no hope of finishing high school.

College was for the wealthy.

10/
For most Americans, there was no hope of social advancement.

Then along came FDR and the New Deal.

Hope was reborn (and a middle class was born).

How did he do it?
He did it with a large electoral majority.

11/
Part of how he got his electoral majority, unfortunately, was that he had the support of the South because Blacks were not included.

If you want me to end this on a positive note, millions of people voted in 2020 in Georgia who would not have dared try to vote 70 years ago.

12/

More from Teri Kanefield

January 6th will be a freak show. Biden will become president because the only way to stop it would be for the House to agree, and that won't happen.

Going forward, the GOP becomes even more dangerous and radicalized.


A few hopeful points:

The GOP could very well lose control of the Senate.

Because these GOP Senators will force a vote, the GOP may fracture, with moderates forced out. While this radicalizes the party, they lose


A few reasons. As @ProfBrianKalt points out, refusing to seat them because they say the election wasn't valid gives credence to the lie that the election wasn't valid.

Moreover, there's no authority to refuse to seat an elected rep for telling lies. .


. . . which is what refusing to seat them would amount to.

The Democrats say, "You are doing really bad things so we won't seat you."

See the problem with that?

(1) It's illegal. The House doesn't get to decide who is seated. The states send their own reps.

moreover . . .

(2) If you say, "The House gets to refuse to seat a person who tells a lie about the election," where does that lead?

If things continue this direction, the political divide will not longer be liberal v. conservative.

The divide will be pro- democracy v. anti-democracy. . .
It looks like 45 Republican Senators voted against holding an impeachment trial for Trump.

I hope nobody had high hopes that the GOP would do the right thing.

The GOP remains the Party of Trump and is hardening into an extremist anti-democratic

They are the anti-rule of law, anti truth party.
https://t.co/e6EME39xNn
Fortunately, they're outnumbered.

Not by much, but they're outnumbered.


Hi, everyone.

A lot of these doomsday comments are annoying me.

Have you all learned nothing over the past few years?

You might want to duck because, I'm about to go on a tear . . .

The same people telling me we're doomed and democracy is dead are probably the same people who told me (1) Trump would make himself dictator (2) The Supreme Court would keep him in office and (3) he would never leave the White House.

Nobody owes you a democracy . . .

My mantra the past 4 years: democracy will survive if enough people want it to, and are willing to do the work.

Did the doomsday people happen to see that the vote was 55-45 in favor of holding a trial?

I think the problem is there has been so much peddling of hope porn. . .
KM asks why the GOP leadership is terrified of losing.

(Both Lindsay Graham and Matt Gaetz said if the GOP loses this election, they'll never win again.)

GOP is a minority party. If they lose power, they lose the ability to manipulate systems to keep minority control.

1/


The fear is also explained by Richard Hofstader, who wrote the classic work⤵️

Hofstadter reviewed American politics from before the founding of the nation through McCarthyism. He noticed a pattern among an impassioned minority on the fringes of the political spectrum.

2/


He called their behavior the “paranoid style” in politics.

Those embracing the paranoid style of politics believe that unseen satanic forces are trying to destroy something larger in which they belong.

3/

According to Hofstadter, the “something larger” to which they belong is generally phrased as “the American way of life.”

They “feel dispossessed” and that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind.”

4/

They therefore adopt extreme measures. They will stop at nothing to prevent what they see as an impending calamity.

Remember, Hofstadter published this in the early 1960s.

5/

More from Law

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Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.