You can’t understand this without looking at the larger project of people involved in the Meme Wars of the last decade — It’s been quite a few weeks over at Twitter, where Elon Musk has been busy replatforming big chunks of the alt-right and deplatforming reputable journalists and leftwing accounts, along with handing selective access to Twitter’s internal data to a claque of iconoclastic anti-woke writers. In part one of this post…

The latest in an ongoing battle to control the narrative about democracy in America — If you are a “very online person” or even just a somewhat online person, you’ve probably heard something about “The Twitter Files” in the last ten days or so. I tried to stay away, I really did. But while there’s very little to the stories tweet-threads that have been published…

There’s been a surge in youth voting since 2018, and if it continues it’s going to upend next week’s US election — According to a new national poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School, 40% of 18–29 year olds say they are definitely going to vote in the mid-terms. That is on track to match or maybe even surpass the record level of turnout from young people in 2018. …

Chasing crazy dreams, our would-be Big Tech Emperors are hastening the destruction of any kind of healthy democracy — Five years ago, when Facebook hit two billion global users, no one imagined that we would start referring to the company in the past tense as something that used to matter, with a slumping valuation now lower than Home Depot, the big box store. Nor did anyone think that Twitter…

Support for Trumpism, like support for Nazism, is built on a edifice of self-deception, as former GOP campaign guru Tim Miller’s new book makes clear — If you’ve ever wondered how so many professional Republicans, people who work in politics on a daily basis, have justified their support for Donald Trump and the larger miasma of manipulation, prejudice, lying, cruelty and incompetence that is Trumpism, make time for Tim Miller’s book Why We Did It.

Door-knocking is the best way to earn votes, but for all their vaunted tech savvy, Democrats’ core tools and voter data are a mess — Sunday I spent the afternoon walking the hills of ex-urban Woodbury, NY, about an hour north of New York City, knocking on doors with about 30 other volunteers from my local Indivisible group, NYCD16-Indivisible, along with a smattering of other grassroots activists from Westchester county. …

In Kansas, Idaho, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington, longtime GOP officeholders and business leaders are putting country over party. — What do these life-long Republicans all have in common? Former governors of Kansas Bill Graves and Mike Hayden. Idaho’s former Gov. Phil Batt, former Attorney General and Idaho Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones and former Secretary of State Ben Ysursa. Former Pennsylvania Congresswoman and state Supreme Court Justice Sandra Schultz…

It’s time to artificially limit the supply of content in order to prop up pay rates, the way we did during the Depression for farmers — In 2020, just 184,000 artists made more than $1,000 from uploading their songs to the Spotify platform. That’s out of a much larger universe of more than 3 million artists on the music platform. Spotify is one of the lowest paying streaming sites, offering about 1/3 of a penny per…

并非所有由小捐助者提供支持的民选官员都是民粹主义的煽动者。- 如果金钱是母亲的政治牛奶，那么互联网就是每个政治家最好的朋友。在2000年，可以说这是上次互联网前选举，只有777,000人（所有成年美国人中有四分之一）向联邦候选人，PACS或党派委员会提供了200美元或更多的资金。在…