Tom NicholsVerified account

@RadioFreeTom

Professor, author on Russia, war, nukes, and "The Death of Expertise." Noted curmudgeon. Anti-populist. Ex-GOP. Cat guy. Views solely my own.

Joined January 2012

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    Jan 2

    The military should not be used "to spackle the cracks in a president’s ego, or as a shot of political Xanax to calm the fears of a jittery nation." My latest on civil-military relations in today.

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  2. You know, I just realized that someone will actually think I'm calling a Bolshevik. Man, I can't wait till we can go back to having normal shouting matches.

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  3. Retweeted

    Several former Weekly Standard staffers have a new home at The Bulwark, a conservative site that and plan to "turn into a full-fledged opinion news website." Neighborhood of $1 million in funding has been secured. My story:

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  4. Retweeted
    13 hours ago

    I worked at the National Counterterrorism Center, the CIA, and the Pentagon. can’t possibly be telling the truth with these numbers.

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  5. Really, at a time when the president is unfathomably considering invoking a state of emergency, there can't be a division between right and left. The only issue should be the protection of the Constitution and the rule of law. The rest we can yell at each other about later.

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  6. You know, one of the best things about Never Trumpers, and one of the things that's helped steady us over the past three years, is that we don't respond well to orders to get on board.

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  7. I can't speak for and , but I don't think any of us are trying to hide out as progressives in the way that people like Carlson and others are trying to blend in with Just Plain Folks. I look forward to arguing over tax rates and foreign policy again one day.

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  8. The rest, from this point on, is pretty much just rationalization. I'm sorry that some really brilliant people I've been reading and respecting for years are people I can never take seriously again, but that's how the wheel turns. /11x

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  9. In 1980, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that the GOP was now "the party of ideas." That's over. When it came time to shout back at the mob, too many conservative intellectuals lost their nerve and signed on for what they thought was a survivable detour. They were wrong. /10

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  10. And the more the Trump ship founders, the worse they're going to get. They know the mob will want to blame someone. They know what happened to the Jacobins. They're gonna start droppin' their Gs and showin' their common touch, in hopes that they make it through Thermidor. /9

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  11. And the people they hate more than anyone are people like Wilson or Rubin or Sykes, who didn't sell out, constant thorns in what's left of their consciences. They hate those guys more than they hate Hillary Clinton. /8

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  12. So now you have a new alignment on the right: Elite professors and heirs like Hanson and Carlson, trying to find a new home among people who were never part of their intended audience. It's even weirder and less natural than the NeverTrump/liberal coalition. /7

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  13. So they were left with a choice: Admit they were wrong, or form a new coalition with Rube Nation. Not, mind you, with reluctant Trump voters, but with the full-throated MAGA hats, the last group that wouldn't know how wrong they were or how much they betrayed their own values. /6

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  14. The other thing that happened is that Trump proved to be every bit as bad as we warned he would be. And for the pro-Trump intellectuals, who had doubled down over and over in the vain hope he would recover, this was more humiliating than anything we Never Trumpers could say. /5

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  15. And then two things happened. First, the Never Trumpers didn't come home. Yes, we got smaller as some of the folks lost their nerve in 2017 and 2018. But we're still here and serving as an infuriating reproach to people who sold their political souls at bargain-basement rates. /4

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  16. So they pretended to like what they were doing. They figured that after Trump was elected, bygones were bygones and the right would reunite, and they'd be shown to be right for going to the wall to stop Hillary. They figured Trump would calm down and adults would run things. /3

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  17. Trump forced a decision in 2016: do you go all-in on that "Flight 93" bullshit, or do you continue to be an actual *conservative*? I think people like Hanson and others went all in, thinking it wouldn't be so bad and the stench would be tolerable. They were, of course, wrong. /2

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  18. A more serious answer. I think what's happening is that elites like Carlson and VD Hanson, having traded in their intellectual bona fides for Trumpism, now have to pander to Rube Nation because they're left with no other constituency. This is the crackup of the right. /1

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  19. Watching Tucker Carlson have the vapors about is a reminder: the key to surviving in the Fox shout-o-sphere is to adopt the protective coloration of populism, and to pretend to take the side of people you'd have the maitre d' remove if they were near your table.

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  20. Retweeted

    This is one of those pieces of Mueller news that seems significant but really isn’t. Just means the investigation is ongoing, which....we already knew.

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  21. Retweeted

    Tucker Carlson wants to know: What have the elites ever done for America? I channel Monty Python for an answer:

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