30 December 2020 #MAGAanalysis #Overturn

Comments on @OptimisticCon's Article - Part 2

We'll pick up with Slide 6 shortly, but we have a couple of stops on the way to make first. Here we go!

10 January 2020 #MAGAanalysis #TheGreat2021Purge

Thou Shalt Not Speak Truth

We begin today's work with a notification I found on @AnnVendersteel's Parler account (under that handle) just now. You'll see, the purge progresses. I quote in full below.

Prepping for today's thread, the story of the CURRENT CYBERWAR is clearly overwhelming. J.E. Dyer @OptimisticCon links us to this story. Just one quote to

29 December 2020 #MAGAanalysis #Overturn

Comments On @OptimisticCon Article:

The key supporting effort appears to be underway on Trump’s operational timeline

As we emphasized yesterday, J.E. Dyer commands us: "But do hold the line."

25 January 2021 #MAGAanalysis #MythicalTrump

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Yeah. I watched the original Star Wars movie in the theaters when it came out, and I can't tell you how many times I

25 December 2020 #MAGAanalysis Christmas Edition

The Great Reawakening - A Renewed Dream Of America

@GenFlynn tells me the JOY of the MAGA Movement has returned. Our Xmas gift is A Renewed Dream For America. In case you didn't know, it's his birthday too, he's a Christmas baby!

Election Litigation Update - Gohmert.

Reply brief is in. Let's have a look. They are, mercifully, underlength. They had 50 pages available, the PDF is 43 and some of that is cover page, signatures,

Interesting table of contents. Looks like they're packing a lot in, until you realize that much of the material that's important - like their response to the "you sued the wrong person" material and "injury in fact" take up very little space.

Looks like they decided to skip the table of authorities. Presumably GoogleDocWord ate it too bad for them to fix. This will certainly further endear them to the judge.

This is going to be interesting - leading off a reply brief with a "here's what our cause is about" is certainly a strategy. It's even a bold strategy.

Shall we dig deeper, Cotton?

"We live in a democratic republic in which the Vice President, who will more often than not be a candidate in the election, has the sole and unchallengeable power to decide who wins the election" is a hellofa take.

At my office in Congress I have an original ballot of Mandela’s election as reminder to never take democracy for granted. After yesterday’s senate vote, I turn back to Mandela’s first speech when released from prison 31 years ago this week. Here’s what we can learn (THREAD)

GRACE: “I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all.”

Robbed of 27 years of his life, no one would have faulted Mandela if he emerged from prison with anger. But instead, with his first words of his first speech in decades, he chose grace. 2/13

HUMILITY: “I stand before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people.”

Mandela was revered by millions as a leader of conscience. But in his second sentence, he made sure to set the tone for humility and service. No individuals stand above the people. 3/13

SOLIDARITY: “I salute the working class...religious communities..the endless heroism of youth.. the mothers and wives and sisters of our nation”

He focused on the contributions of the many and showed respect to those often overlooked. He showed the vitalness of coalitions. 4/13

URGENCY: “Our struggle has reached a decisive moment.”

Mandela used the speech to set the tone for the work ahead. His release was not the climax, but instead just the possibility of change. No assumptions could be made of what comes next. 5/13

(THREAD) The main problem with that @DanDrezner piece in the Post is that it's an international politics prof writing about the field in which I'm a professor—communications. No one in communications would *ever* compare the blogosphere to either Twitter or Substack. Here's why.

1/ Back in the mid-aughts, I was a Koufax Award-nominated political blogger (I don't know what Drezner was doing then; I first heard of him about a year ago). So I was into the blogosphere pretty deep, as I also ran a second high-traffic blog that was focused on the art world.

2/ The "blogosphere" was an outgrowth of MySpace and LiveJournal, inasmuch as in the heady early days of the internet people suddenly realized that they could engage in private diaristic writing—a very specific subgenre of writing—in the public square, and it was suddenly "okay."

3/ So the blogosphere as such had *nothing* to do with journalism, which needless to say was in a different state just 15 years ago (note: unlike Drezner, I also teach writing and journalism at the university level, so this thread is squarely "in my area," unlike his Post piece).

4/ The blogosphere was a manifestation of the transformation of the public-private binary at the dawn of the internet—and *also* connected to the "creative writing" explosion (what I did a PhD on); in the aughts, creative writing was the fastest-growing discipline *in the world*.