University of Minnesota just broke a bunch of ties with the Minneapolis Police Department
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Will Stancil
@whstancil
I do metro policy research, focused on fair housing, school integration, and demography. Proud member of Do-Something Twitter.
Minneapolis, MinnesotaJoined June 2009
Will Stancil’s posts
I was told not to tweet this until the houses adjourned for fear of jinxing it, but the Minnesota legislature just completed what is probably the most productive session anywhere in the country since probably the New Deal. Sweeping bills and reforms across every area of life.
One thing you see a lot on here is people pointing out the contradictions in the putative views of Trump’s GOP. COVID is a Chinese plot but also a hoax. The insurrection was antifa but also a tour of patriots.
I genuinely have no idea what combination of factors has convinced Biden to abandon his traditional moderation for pugilistic anti-Trumpism and confident unilateral policymaking, but… isn’t this GREAT? Doesn’t it feel BETTER to be moving around, trying things, throwing punches?
Democrats should recognize that:
-The Post Office is very popular as an apple-pie-and-baseball American Institution
-You couldn't ask for a better talking point on Trump's awful crisis response
-A plan to save the USPS could easily include vote by mail
-The House literally doesn't have the votes to adjourn
-As long as it doesn't adjourn, the House is required to take endless speaker votes
-No one can win those votes
-So Kevin McCarthy is stuck in endless repeating, inescapable loop of failing to become Speaker over and over
The politics of “nothing will fundamentally change” has led to quite a lot of things changing pretty fundamentally
Bodycams show us almost everything the MPD told us about Amir Locke's killing is a lie. The officers snuck into the apartment, did not announce themselves, surprised him, he did not aim a weapon at officers. The shots fired were, of course, from them. Also, he was not a suspect.
Got to be one of the most racist things on US TV in 50 years. Carlson talking about white women "as the key to reproducing the white race," and claiming black people are targeting white women for that reason.
Adds that a black anchor "can barely speak a coherent sentence."
Protip: If you're a Democrat and you want to say you passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, pass the bill on party lines and then just literally say "I passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill" and then if someone calls you on it point out that most Republicans support it
Remember when it came out 12 hours ago that Trump had directly, personally commandeered the Pentagon contracting process to steer $400 million to a GOP donor, which would have been the biggest US scandal in a third of a century, and then this morning everyone forgot about it?
Doesn’t inspire a lot confidence for the future that a sitting Supreme Court justice was caught in a bonkers series of corruption scandals and seemingly nothing has come of it; even the opposing party was like “Well, wouldn’t want to impair the dignity of the Court too much”
Imagine being employed, just doing your job, and then a red-pilled megabillionaire creep buys your company, fires you, and brings in Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss as hired guns to hunt through your work documents for ways to smear you and incite the far-right call for your execution
Mar-a-Lago search showing how modern US conservativism can be reduced to three views:
1. whining about their victimhood
2. demanding special treatment to reverse victimization
3. if special treatment is denied, asserting a right to commit violence and break rules in response
I've received several excited texts about it from random friends. It feels like there's an incredibly clear lesson here which is that PEOPLE REALLY LIKE IT WHEN THE GOVERNMENT JUST DIRECTLY PROVIDES NEEDED SERVICES WITH NO RED TAPE twitter.com/dylanmatt/stat
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Fine, here’s what I think is going on:
White men have long been a minority in US society (currently 29%), but until very recently, they controlled all the ladders of ascent into cultural, political, media, or economic relevance.
The thing I can’t stop thinking about is how different it would be if some far-left radical had tried to assassinate McConnell. It would be covered as devastating for Dems. They’d spend a week denouncing themselves. The midterms would be understood to be lost.
nate silver's Very Bad Tweet perfectly reveals how the school reopening moral panic has worked: people say "we have to do cost-benefit analysis on covid mitigations," which sounds very reasonable, and then they say "okay, let's assume the cost of school closures is infinity"
This is the mind-blowingly racist neo-Nazi account that Elon Musk just followed. Literally one of the most racist accounts on this entire website:
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Elon Musk is now following i/o (@monitoringbias)
Bari Weiss is literally in the middle of a breathless "Twitter Files" thread describing Twitter implementing the exact policy that Elon Musk said he was going to institute three weeks ago.
I refuse to believe that anyone can fail to see the pattern here.
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Voters aren’t drawn to Trump’s politics because of a specific policy view or really even an ideology. They’re drawn to them because those politics say:
“Please, think whatever is easiest. Indulge in your laziest ideas and basest prejudices. There are no rules.
Save one.”
People think of Oz as a laughable opponent - but in large part that’s because FETTERMAN MADE HIM LAUGHABLE, right after the primary.
Walker was, frankly, even more ridiculous, but Warnock wasn’t aggressive in defining or attacking him, and ended up in a much closer race.
me at the start of this ad: ed markey is pretty good I guess
me at the end of this ad: I will march into hell to defend ed markey from dynastic usurpers
One of the craziest things is that it's not over yet. Within a week the Supreme Court is going to declare that the EPA can't regulate carbon emissions, shredding federal efforts to respond to climate change.
If Kagan had been caught taking secret yacht vacations from George Soros every single Republican in the country would have called for her resignation before noon and Democrats would be leading the charge on a sweeping ethics investigation
“I’ve been cancelled because I wrote a book on cancel culture and then couldn’t define the thing I was writing about” - I think this op-ed is the official shark-jumping moment for this particular grift. It’s been mined out
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Beyond shocking that this goes on night after night and it's treated as a goofy political sideshow. It's Klan talk, coming from the loudest media voice behind one of our two major parties.
This is the single bluntest assessment of the Democratic Party I've ever seen a liberal make in a major paper. A true must-read from . washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/
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With no votes to spare, Minnesota Democrats have implemented vast new social programs, enacted protections for groups threatened by far-right states and the Supreme Court, strengthened unions, poured money into schools, replaced infrastructure, and fed every Minnesota child.
Less than a year ago Twitter was the best source of on-the-ground reports during a disaster. Now searching for anything related to Hilary just produces an incomprehensible pile of fake videos and claims, all laundered to the top of search results with meaningless blue checks
This is completely insane. Andy Ngo is a neo-Nazi type. Musk is now directly, personally taking requests from him to ban his enemies. This is the exact kind of political targeting that Republicans spent years (falsely) complaining that Twitter was doing to conservatives.
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Replying to @murphtracks
Elon Musk is actively taking suspension requests from right wing provocateur and fascist mouthpiece Andy Ngo, and has suspended @crimethinc.
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Guys I hear stuff that doesn’t make it into the news, and I just cannot fully convey how bad many of your elected Democrats are. They don’t WANT to fight on the Supreme Court, they don’t WANT to fight on anything, they get up every day and try to figure out how to lose quietly
so much of the right lives entirely inside a cartoon universe of cultural signifiers. like, I know in her head “bud light” equals “no college” equals “straight homophobe,” but how much brainpower does it require to figure out that many gay people probably also drink cheap beer
YOU ARE LITERALLY THE CHAIR OF THE SOLE BODY POSITIONED TO INVESTIGATE THOMAS THAT ISN’T IDEOLOGICALLY ALIGNED WITH HIM
WHY IN GOD’S NAME ARE YOU TRYING TO PASS THIS OFF TO REPUBLICANS
Among other things, if the Dems don't make the Pelosi assassination attempt a story about Republican political radicalism and violence, it will become, instead, a "crime" story about a home invasion. It'll literally help the guys who did it
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What is striking to me is how MPD is being held institutionally responsible for the actions of its officers. Maybe it's because of the violent clash with protesters last night, or maybe people are just fed up with excuses, but there's very little debate over bad apples.
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That’s why Trumpism and fascism reliably attract the worst and the weakest, the dumb, the selfish, and the cowardly. It’s an endlessly flexible vessel for their worst vices, willing to forgive anything and let them do anything in exchange for loyalty to the strongman.
I’ve figured out why Musk and Twitter bothers me so much:
It’s so distinctly the sensation of being bullied
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It’s also why we can’t triangulate or maneuver his supporters away from him. They don’t really want any of what we’re offering, anyway - they want the freedom to do and think whatever they feel at any moment, something no liberal of any description could ever promise.
I feel like people are losing perspective. A billionaire subsidized millions in luxury travel for a Supreme Court justice, then BOUGHT THE JUSTICE’S PARENT’S HOUSE, AND LET THEM STAY IN IT WHILE HE PAID FOR IT. Short of envelopes of money, how much more crooked could you get?
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Ultimately what Trump offers - what fascism offers - is a philosophy of total emotional and psychological indulgence. Believe whatever makes you feel best. Live your politics examined.
I have this exact dream a lot, and I feel like this article’s focus on adult anxiety omits the more puzzling question, of why so many people have dreams that are not just thematically similar but literally identical theatlantic.com/family/archive
I'm sorry, the military was contingency planning for a coup and we're finding it out as a book teaser so that our coziest political journalists can make a little more cash on the side?
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The nation’s top military leaders discussed a plan to resign one by one rather than carry out dangerous orders in the event of an attempted coup by then-President Donald Trump and his allies after the November election, new book reveals cnn.it/36y5b30
People keep saying "Science shows vaccinated people are safe, so why should mask mandates apply to them?" But it's not a science question, it's a policy question. We don't assign different speed limits to different drivers depending on their skill, because everyone would cheat.
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“You must support the leader. You cannot abandon the leader. Support for the leader absolves you of the burden of rationality and the sin of inconsistency. Indeed, faith in the leader can be proven by embracing irrationality and rejecting consistency. Prove your faith.”
The MN Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, after winning a trifecta by 321 votes, have embarked on a whirlwind tour:
-legal marijuana
-lead remediation
-universal school lunches
-stronger labor
-trans protections
Basically they’re governing like they’re Republicans. This is the way
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Replying to @billglahn
Recall that MN Democrats hold their 1 seat majority by only 321 votes.
The state's congressional delegation is evenly split 4 to 4.
Well Fetterman had a stroke and stutters some, but Doctor Oz wants abortion to be between women, doctors, and your state senator, so really, who can say which is worse
The debt ceiling, the presidential race, the media, everywhere you see the basic problem in US politics: there’s a violent, hyperactive fascist minority, and then a liberal majority represented by inert, ancient seatwarmers who refuse to accept that they’re in any kind of fight
I'm sorry for being repetitive, but today, a famous woman accused the president of the United States of violently raping her two decades ago, a story that was corroborated by two witnesses.
It has not been a headline in a major paper for one second of the day.
Unbelievable. Republicans passing legislation through the Democratically-controlled Senate because Feinstein is just… gone. SHE MUST RESIGN.
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Feinstein’s indefinite absence makes Joe Manchin the decisive vote again. This Republican-led measure just passed by a single vote. twitter.com/SenatePress/st…
“Biden refuses to stop caring about troubled and politically burdensome son despite being president” is an extraordinary testament to the strength of his parental love and the way media continually suggests we should perceive it as a scandal is horrible
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NEW: A day after Hunter's plea agreement was made public, he and his family arrived for a 2-week stay at the White House.
Then on the day Hunter appeared in court, aides intentionally left space in the president’s schedule so he could monitor the case
washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/
It’s vitally important that people reporting on the MN court ruling note that it CONTRADICTS THE INSTRUCTIONS MAILED WITH THE BALLOT.
See for yourself: here’s a photograph of my ballot, which I have not submitted.
Kyrsten Sinema is repulsive, hated by her colleagues and her staff. She's also a deeply unstable personality who approaches her political responsibilities with a bizarre, flighty contempt. So naturally she's a darling of DC's parasitic tipsheet class
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The anti-woke thing was the permission structure white elites had been waiting for, to start saying whatever they want. In a matter of months everything from open antisemitism to "white lives matter" to criminalizing LGBT people has been broadly normalized.
In every demographic but white evangelicals, the Dobbs decision is somewhere between "unpopular" and "brutally unpopular." The total abortion bans the GOP is rapidly enacting poll at a universal 10%. Even among white evangelicals, they poll a whopping 20%.
Dems, this is a gimme.
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What people need to understand is that these contradictions aren’t a SYMPTOM of Trumpism.
They point to its very core - its emotional, psychological appeal to millions of America. The ability to sustain these contradictions is why Trump was elected, how his movement exists.
Future generations are not going to understand the unique frustration of this era, where one party transparently acts like comic-book villains, and then every other political institution, from media to their opposition party, pretends they have complex, sympathetic motives.
Sorry to be a little rude, but the only viable solutions to climate change involve massive state-scale projects to completely revamp power generation and electrify almost everything, not doing community organizing to put a solar panel on the laundromat
Someone really needs to write a comprehensive takedown of the completely insane myth, now basically accepted as truth in a lot of elite media circles, that the 2020-21 school year could have been normal and undisrupted.
The problem with the Pelosi-Hamilton thing is not that it's cringe, it's that Dems always seem to believe they're playing politicians a TV show with no real stakes, and commemorating an actual coup with guests from a hit musical suggests they still don't get this is all for real.
The thing is, with Taibbi, it seemed that he was handed a bunch of files by Musk and told to write about them. That's PR, not journalism.
But with Weiss, it's worse. He just handed full access to internal account data to a political pundit so she could publicly settle scores.
Klobuchar literally bounced from 4% to 20% on the back of one buzzy debate performance, the idea that Warren or anyone else is out of contention because they underperformed in a single tiny primary is ridiculous
Love that elite America has entered the "purge Netflix" stage of their panic over racism but has somehow, conveniently, never come close to the "talk about school and housing segregation" stage. Probably a coincidence
shocking images of violent tribal warlords entering urban centers while trained security services fail to mount effective resistance or even switch sides
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Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor part accompanied this monumental session with a six-vote margin in the House and a bare one-vote majority in the Senate. The scale of their achievement cannot be overstated.
What happened in Kenosha is Charlottesville 2.0 - a member of the far right travels to take part in civil unrest and kills someone - but Democrats are somehow letting themselves be trolled into acting like BLM protestors did the killing
The reason to get rid of the filibuster, the reason to add DC as a state and secure two permanent Democratic Senate seats, the reason to send every American huge checks with Biden's name and face on them, is "Because we have the votes. Elections have consequences."
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Don’t want to take credit for the insurrection, but want to claim its dead as your martyrs? Go ahead! Say it! The Capitol was attacked by antifa but Ashlii Babbit was a hero patriot.
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You can’t understand Trump’s rise without looking at this deeper psychological appeal. This is his promise to his voters, it’s why nothing his movement says or believes makes sense, and no one seems to care.
Every single wave: “Cases are up but deaths are flat. Is COVID just the flu now?”
Every single wave, three weeks later: “Oh. Oops.”
The fact that "violent crime" is seen as several times as big of a problem as COVID-19 is a giant honking clue that the public's priorities are being driven by media narratives and not their real-world experiences
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NEW: "The public views inflation as the top problem facing the United States – and no other concern comes close." pewrsr.ch/3N9kIJF
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The mistake American political thinkers keep making is to try to link Trump to preexisting ideology. There are ideas associated with Trumpism, of course, but THEY are the symptom: what happens when you let people indulge in whatever fleeting hate takes their fancy.
Isn't this exactly what people said about abortion until a few months ago twitter.com/ryangrim/statu
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At some point the ~80 million Americans worried sick about extremely real, extremely urgent, very long-standing, and enormously threatening problems facing the country are going to need an answer that's not "Ha, you don't understand how DC works, stop living in fantasyland"
Biden is (mostly) a good president and the economy is (mostly) great, but the evidence suggests that PEOPLE THINK Biden is a bad president and the economy is bad. This raises the question of where people get their ideas about politics, because it sure isn’t objective observation.
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The Biden-Trump rematch is tied, 43-43, in our first Times/Siena poll of the cycle.
Another 10 percent volunteered they wouldn't vote or would vote for someone else
nytimes.com/2023/08/01/ups
People are worried about coups, but the thing causing me real despair is the prospect of living for decades in an ever-tightening vice of right-wing gerrymandering and court packing, in which there is no election victory large enough to permit anyone left of center to govern
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I want to do this justice so tomorrow I’m going to add all the high points to this thread, but with the session ending a few minutes ago I wanted to emphasize that something really incredible has happened here. I hope all the DFL legislators sleep well tonight.
First: “COVID is a collective responsibility. Bend the curve. We’re all in this together!
Then: “Okay actually that’s a drag, so time to move on. COVID is over! Everybody clap!”
Now: “COVID - steps YOU can take to protect YOUR family. It’s YOUR responsibility now! Good luck!”
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Hate China, but annoyed by the scolding liberals and their masks? Call the coronavirus a Democratic hoax - and at the same time, a deadly foreign bioweapon.
I made a chart to show why "vote harder" from Dems is so exasperating. Here is the share of US population voting in each presidential election. Notice anything?
POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IS HIGHER THAN EVER BEFORE. Americans are voting much harder than at any previous point!
This is how it’s supposed to work: you cross the line into open racism and hate speech, and you get bounced from polite society. Letting these poisonous resentments coexist peacefully among us legitimates them, and ultimately spreads them. More of this.
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It really can't be emphasized enough: IT WASN'T LIKE THIS TEN YEARS AGO. Even when a black man was elected president, it wasn't like this. This wasn't how Americans always were.
These ideas are being ACTIVELY spread, from elite validators, in mainstream and right-wing media.
Again, “this guy is very racist but he’s written some good pieces” makes sense when racism is treated as an abstract intellectual demerit, but for actual nonwhite people, racism is a frontal attack on their ability to move in these spaces and tolerating it extends that attack
Feinstein situation just intolerable. Remember when she was removed as Judiciary chair, because she was senile and hugged Lindsey Graham after the Barrett hearings, and then couldn't remember she HAD been removed, so they had to do it twice? It was 2.5 years ago. Still in office.
The “liberal” dudes who brought you “maybe we should hand it to DeSantis on COVID” and “maybe cops are good” and “maybe trans care HAS gone too far” are now agitating for mass re-institutionalization for mental illness and so many people still haven’t picked up on the trick
Veteran Twitter engineers: “Twitter is more complicated than you think. It’ll start to break very soon unless someone is manning the engine room.”
Random right-wingers on the Internet:
Didn't realize there was audio from Feinstein's conversation with press yesterday, when she didn't remember having been absent from the Senate. It's not good. twitter.com/JackInacker/st
Protip: if a political party celebrates a guy who went out like this and killed two people in the street as a hero, it's a fascist party.
Okay, here's my plea to media organizations, especially the Times:
The major story of this election is Trump's unprecedented efforts to lock in a victory through non-electoral means. It's effectively a coup. Please, please treat this as more important than the hors race.
Has anyone written any kind of comprehensive discussion of the Taibbi Sequence, where some nominally left-wing, anti-establishment male writer gradually and predictably becomes a pro-Trump, pro-Putin right-wing goon
Insane. What could possibly be more toxic to public health than letting celebrities dodge the vaccine mandate? Not only does it imply that the vaccines are some heavy burden from which people deserve relief, it corruptly grants that relief to the most privileged.
The last president tried to hold G8 at his private resort, moved White House operations to his other private resort for half the year, and regularly charged the government for stays at his corruption hotel, and you're gonna complain about Biden using government resources to VOTE?
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Biden employed two motorcades, local police protection and the Boeing 757 version of Air Force One to fly from DC to Delaware vote in an election with no high-profile races on the ballot, @Jordanfabian and @jendeben report
bloomberg.com/news/articles/
Not an original observation, but the speed we went from "We simply want to ensure sex ed is age-appropriate" to "We are going to strip medical care from trans people for the crime of existing and ban them completely where we can" is stunning.
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Florida HB1421, a bill which will be heard tomorrow, will ban insurance coverage for all trans procedures.
That includes private insurance.
It appears to do so for everyone - trans adults too.
It also forcibly detransitions trans youth.
It will be heard tomorrow at noon.
Feels like “Texas has gone rogue and starting blocking US commerce” would be a great place for the Democratically-controlled federal government to strategically escalate a conflict, if Dems believed in strategic escalation, which they manifestly do not
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Texas AG Ken Paxton says the quiet part loudly: “The governor has figured out we can stop trade along the border, slow it down, and it will create pressure on Mexico and some of their governors to work out a deal to help us with border security.”
Just blatantly unconstitutional.
Ron DeSantis is proof positive that if a politician has a David Duke agenda, but a Mitt Romney resume, most of the news people will talk about him like he's Mitt Romney, even as he's out here forcing schools to teach about the glories of western civilization