Conservatives love to complain that everyone is against them: professors, journalists, intelligence officers, social media companies, and so on.

I used to as well until I considered that maybe having problems with everyone else isn't their fault, it's yours.

Thread: Meaning and loss in American conservatism

I've written a lot about how Christian supremacism (expressed and implicit) is the underlying objective of most Trump supporters but the psychology of American conservatism is very important in its descent into madness.

We're seeing it manifested heavily in the present moment as Trump and his followers are forced to contemplate the loss of the presidency but it's important to realize that losing is the psychic core of the U.S. right.

Trump's repugnant demeanor and prior history of political moderation is what made him so reviled by conservative activists and donors in 2015 but his angry victim complex so deeply resonated with the GOP base that this is why he won the primary.

American conservatism has been obsessed with death and loss since it emerged in the 1940s. The utter humiliation of Herbert Hoover and the rapid growth of federal spending and regulation under FDR was an existential moment for the corporate barons who started the U.S. right.

The rise of explicitly atheist Marxist-Leninism was also immensely triggering of long-time fundamentalist fantasies of persecution and death before the return of Christ. Most Christians don't see John's Apocalypse as a literal text but fundamentalists do.

For the past 6 years, I & a few other journalists have been trying to get the mainstream press and political elites realize the major danger posed by the radical right. Unfortunately, moderate and liberal elites deluded themselves into thinking that conservatism wasn't a cult.

There is no secretly powerful "Republican establishment" that will fix things. There are thugs, deluded people, and there are quislings. There is no one else in the GOP. Instead of focusing on the radical right's danger, editors wanted stories about Trump tweets.

Instead of calling out the dangerous radicalism of the GOP, television debate shows and opinion pages invited the enablers of fascism to speak and write about how we all needed to give powerful insane people the benefit of the doubt.

Unlike Trump, who walled off the White House months ago into a fortress, Nancy Pelosi did not take the terrorist threat seriously enough to demand better security. She has the budget and the authority and did nothing similar. Now, fascists are on the floor of Congress.

Of course, it is Trump who bears the responsibility for this but the Capitol Police have totally disgraced themselves by not fortifying the building the way that the Secret Service did to the WH.

This is the view of numerous congressional staffers of both parties.

Thread: Conservative Policy and the Trump Presidency

On the last full day of the Trump administration, I think it's useful to examine why he accomplished so little legislatively. TLDR version: American conservatism has almost no policy program.

The most important thing to know about conservative politicking is that people do not vote FOR Republicans, they vote AGAINST Democrats.

The GOP is dominated by a minority of far-right activists and wealthy donors who have views that their own voters don't support.

American conservatism is premised on the twin ideas that the New Deal & Great Society were immoral and that God himself created America and that we should honor this creation by establishing full Christian supremacism in which LGBT people, atheists, and Muslims have fewer rights.

Because God created America, this means that conservatives believe in essentially no domestic policy of any kind. If it wasn't literally in the Constitution, then the feds shouldn't be doing it is their opinion.

This is not, however, how things used to be in the GOP.

For much of its history, American conservatism was a sort of intellectual parasite on the Republican party which was run by a mix of moderates and liberals. They actually had domestic policies. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon had many policies that actually helped America.

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.

(THREAD) The Whitaker scandal is deepening, as it becomes clear that Sessions' Russia recusal was a coordinated sham and his firing an act of obstruction—and that his replacement is a White House plant inside the Mueller probe. I hope you'll retweet and read on for more details.

1/ From 2014-17 Whitaker worked for World Patent Marketing—which during his tenure defrauded consumers out of $26 million and was successfully prosecuted by the feds. His involvement in the scam confirmed he had loose morals and that the feds would never want to employ him again.

2/ Despite the seeming impossibility of a man with Whitaker's background getting a job at Justice ever again—he'd been found to have used his former title as a US attorney to fraudulently threaten consumers with valid complaints with criminal penalties—Whitaker found an opening.

3/ Within 60 days of parachuting out of World Patent Marketing as it was being fined $26 million by the feds, Whitaker was working for CNN and telling a fellow attorney panelist that his purpose in working for CNN was to get noticed by one man—Donald Trump—and thereby get a job.

4/ Whitaker spent his time at CNN making ludicrous statements about the Mueller probe: there was no obstruction or collusion, he said; Mueller had no authority to look into any aspect of Trump's finances or to subpoena him, he said. All the while, he hoped Trump was watching him.

Trump on climate: I don't believe it. Trump on Khashoggi: I don't believe it. Trump on Russia: I don't believe it. Idiocy? A canny game? Doesn't really matter as much as the underlying intellectual autocracy. In this administration only one opinion matters.

It's an assault on facts and reason. It's an assault on good governance. It's an assault on the bureaucracies that are being discounted. It's an assault on science and history. But it is also an assault on one of the underpinnings of democracy.

We live in a system that is grounded on the idea of collaborative government. Leaders may have a final word but even then, there are typically checks and balances. Hopefully, in this case, such checks and balances may work. But they also are being tested.

The president's position that he is smarter than all the world's scientists, than the entire intelligence community, than experts who have studied any issue all their lives, is, of course, asinine. But his belief that government turns solely on his opinion, is monarchic.

Louis XIV reportedly said, "L'etat est moi." That he was the state. Trump asserting that he knows better than all, discounts all advice, that his brain is enough to chart the course for America alone, is essentially saying the same thing.

Happy New Years y’all...

I was going to take a little nap until morning but that can wait 😅

So much has bothered me but nothing more than how everything has been manufactured, everything...

We are literally living in an illusion...

1/12 Plan for today; we expect the #MOMA bill (Ministerial and Other Maternity Allowances) debate to begin around 12.45pm.
It is still not too late to email if you haven't already done so, but Tweeting about this and tagging MPs will raise more awareness on social media.

2/12 We have the names (in speaking order), of all those who are listed to speak. We suggest you Tweet these MPs (especially if you are a constituent) and make your views known. Use the #MOMA hashtag.

3/12 Minister Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North)
Shadow Minister Rachel Reeves (Leeds West)
Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North)
Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire)
Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth)
Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham)

4/12 Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock)
Stella Creasy (Walthamstow)
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke)
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower)
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings)
Wera Hobhouse (Bath)
Dehenna Davison (Bishop Auckland)
Feryal Clark (Enfield North)

5/12 Shaun Bailey (West Bromwich West)
Sarah Owen (Luton North)
Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham)
Claire Hanna (Belfast South)
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford)
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West)
Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside)

Transition, 'inclusion' etc all have political ramifications. Instead of buying into the remarkably masculinist assumptions of queer theory that the dissolution of boundaries is always good, we should be examining them from the point of group power relations.

Transactivists try to conflate identifying as trans with gay marriage, in attempts to demonstrate the progressiveness of their cause, but the comparators are actually transracialism, trans-abledness, identifying as w/c etc.

The diagram shows the asymmetrical nature of such identifications. Identifying down is colonisation. Identifying up is impossible. The most you can do is improve your individual status relative to your class of origin, which leaves everyone else behind.

It also shows that the classes are occupied. If you identify as disabled, or as a woman, or as black, you are demanding access to spaces and facilities which were set aside for people based on a characteristic which you don't share.

How well tolerated this is gives us a clear insight into which oppressions are tolerated. We're rightly paying a lot more attention to racism, so Rachel Dolezal was fired by the NAACP. Other white women in the US who've tried this have been heavily criticised.