I think there's a general tendency that people dislike traitors/apostates more than people who have always been on the enemy side. In 2008/2012 Republicans kept attacking Nate Silver because they didn't like public polling results, and as a result Nate developed a generally left-leaning fanbase who assumed he was one of them. This fanbase then felt betrayed whenever Nate refused to endorse the most leftwing (or COVID-cautious) opinion on anything. That's why he came in for far more vitriol on Twitter than generic right-wingers saying far more right-wing things.
I remember reading the Paul Fussell book about class/status back in college, and one of the insights is that people make more severe distinctions between groups closer to them than they do with groups farther away. And the way it works is curious...oftentimes the greatest animosity is reserved for people who are just one or two tiers away from you socially rather than people worlds away.
I think some version of that is at play here. If you're (say) an urban professional who is elite-educated and gay and a foodie and broadly part of the blue-tribe sphere (Nate) but you challenge the contours of that or dare to question left orthodoxies, you are treated very harshly. People who are otherwise a lot like you will treat you with marked vitriol.
I guess this is also similar to the whole "narcissism of small differences" thing. And I guess the progs would dispute the smallness of those differences. But I have to say, in my own life, I have been subjected to more preening abject nastiness from the left than from the right and I presume that's because I read as left in many ways and if you deviate from that on any key issues or challenge any sacred cows, you are told to "TURN OFF FAUX NEWS" and are called racist and fascist and a bootlicker and whatever else. It's something to behold. It's why I gave up on spaces like reddit and Twitter.
It's the same with racism. Go to any country and discover the ethnic slurs or jokes that exist in that language. They're all about the people in the neighboring country, not some group on the other side of the world. People are most prejudiced against groups they have most in common with (and in some contexts, are in competition with). Sidenote: this is also why the "prejudice is caused by ignorance" view is doomed to fail - people tend to be actually pretty familiar with the groups they despise.
I don't think I understand what you mean. What does it mean to "like outcomes"? And isn't Nate's entire career based on using data to project outcomes?
First, left-wingers "having a vision of a just society" is what I mean by "like outcomes." This is in contrast to merely prescribing a set of a priori means that might lead to undesirable outcomes, such as conservatives do when they demand we stick to established processes that are creating undesirable outcomes.
Second, it's becoming more and more clear Nate doesn't actually care about the data, unless it's a means of proving himself correct.
I'm guessing you may also be experiencing something that has happened to me over the past five years. I have always been similarly situated to you---often describing myself as a libertarian who more often than not sides with the liberals when faced with binary choices, but usually finds my exact policy positions unaccounted for by either political party, or their corresponding ideology.
What I've experienced is a not just a knee-jerk reaction from many on the the left to characterize everything even a shade to their right as right-wing--though I've certainly gotten that more than a few times--but also a new and aggressive anger at anyone who thinks policy involves trade-offs, or that the underlying values in dispute between left and right are reasonable to compare. Even when I've *sided* with the liberals on various things, the mere fact that I asserted the question was s balancing-test between legitimate competing values or resource allocation drew me a lot of heat.
And I'm not talking about abortion here, or even school closures during COVID. I'm talking about things like soft infrastructure spending on early childhood education (which I support, on balance, but usually with said caveats about trade-offs) or even sillier things to disagree with like "Mitt Romney might have been a successful president and might have been very popular, because he has a lot of popular mainstream ideas, has some past successes, and seems like a smart, decent person."
And I get the idea that some people believe (I think I might as well!) that the current GOP holds a handful of policy positions so counter to basic democracy/republic values that you shouldn't vote for them in national elections until they are punished enough to alter ideology. But that has translated for many people into the idea that *all policies promoted by the GOP are also bad, or even evil* which is plainly both not true, and also makes *policy* discussions that much harder to separate from partisan electoral discussions.
It's extremely frustrating, especially when, as you say, you just want to discuss things as policy, or even just comment on process/institutional considerations, and everyone needs to read partisan strategy into it and go from there. There are many people left who still care about the former and not all that much about the latter.
It's because the right-wing's overall goal is to bring Christian Fascism to America. There is literally nothing to ally with them on unless you agree with that overall goal. Given that goal is antithetical to the Constitution and to the spirit of America, I feel pretty good calling anyone that gives comfort to MAGAs or in anyone sides w/ Trump a traitor.
It doesn't matter one iota if they occasionally have a good policy position, because their goal is still to install a fascist theocratic dictatorship in America and bring us back to a time when only landowning white males had any say in the running of society. That goal is a non-starter, and it's why no one should ever vote for any member of the GOP ever again.
Malcolm your comment is absolutely insane. Not just ridiculous, but insane. I have been a GOPer most of my adult life. My position re the auth/lib/right/left grid is identical to Silver's, though I tend to vote republican because I consider the Democrats more authentically authoritarian. I have known many, many conservatives. There is not a single one that wants to create a christian state, fascist or otherwise, in the US. If you actually believe what you wrote above, you are a nut.
Prof Chill, you are being naïve. When Trump talks you should listen, We take him at his word. If you think the 2025 manifesto plus Trump's vindictiveness is not an issue with democracy, you should think again.
This is not to say that there are not some republican policies that i would support, there just don't seem to be any worth of support now.
Why are you claiming that democrats are more authoritarian? Because republicans are incompetent? DeSantis will certainly change that...
The people who hate Trump taken him literally, but not seriously.
The people who love Trump take him seriously but not literally.
It’s sad that you don’t understand this.
(My personal view is that policy and actions matter far more than words, and Trumps policies and actions in fact were those of a mainstream Republican (other than spending and demagoguing about entitlements just like a typical Democrat, which is regrettable). All the talk of fascism/etc - especially after four years of concrete evidence - is a combination of manufactured hysteria, projection and those indoctrinated by same.
Yes I concede. You are correct. I have seen the error of my ways. Trump’s Supreme Court nominations conclusively prove that he is a threat to democracy.
Even worse, the 3 justices he named are embarrassing.
I cede all to your vastly superior knowledge, reasoning and explication of same.
And Q.E.D, you have completely refuted Silver’s key point in his post.
Lol. Not sure what you have in mind. I don't have particularly wild views generally. I am center-libertarian similar to Nate. But Trump is a fairly wild person by anyone's measure. He committed numerous crimes against America, and for the most part, we watched him commit them. From fake electors to 'finding votes'.
It is weird that we are thinking of re-electing him, but the world is a weird place sometimes.
I agree with you otherwise that his actual policies were fairly plain-jane. The biggest thing he did besides try to overthrow the government is cut taxes.
This is what Steven Pinker calls "The Left Pole". When you're at the North Pole, anything next to you is South. When you're at the Left Pole, anything other than you is right.
I tend to think of the (traditional) political spectrum to be shaped like a horseshoe. When you are far enough to one side you can't see over the horizon, so you treat the furthest you can see as the opposite side, even when they are pretty far over on your side.
The number of people who use the terms RINO or DINO unironically tend to provide evidence that this thesis is correct.
“But what I find remarkable is that is that Molloy can’t even seem to imagine someone doing journalism for reasons other than trying to advance a political narrative for partisan reasons.”
That is why no one trusts corporate media anymore and why substack will continue to grow.
From her own website: Between 2018 and 2021, Parker was editor-at-large at Media Matters for America, a non-profit progressive media watchdog. There, she wrote about the role right-wing media played in the rise of Donald Trump and the creation of alternate perceived realities. Her work has also appeared in places like The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, VICE, and The Verge.
Ironic that she complains about alternate perceived realities when she has written for all the leftist propaganda platforms. Given that she has blocked me without ever interacting with me, she has clearly brought MSM culture to Substack ;)
More or less what I expected, really. I don't always agree with your positions, but I'm exhausted seeing how many replies to your tweets take you in the worst faith, or attack you for something spurious (i.e "predicting" a Clinton win in 2016). I hope moving on from 538 can relieve that obnoxious element from your online life, though I kind of doubt it will.
Agree! Idk how much Nate reads the comments but I'm always impressed by his humility, straightforwardness, attention to detail, and lack of an agenda. Seems to me like the last type of person that ought to be getting attacked.
He frequently has a “help Dems win” agenda. And much of the time (but not always) he’s open about that.
The difference is that he doesn’t *always* have that agenda with everything he does, and that is what is confounding to the Molloys of the world.
But you are beyond naive if you think that none of what Silver writes has any political agenda at all. It’s not a hard leftist agenda, to be sure, but it is the center-left, help-Dems-win agenda that is 100% consistent with what he wrote in this post about his views (including how he could never vote for Trump, and how only in theory could he vote for some Republican over some Democrat).
I share the frustration with the kind of worldview that sees hidden agendas behind everyone who disagrees with them. Or deliberately raises the spectre of someone having a hidden agenda in order to discredit them. (In fairness, the article linked to did also engage with the arguments in the original piece.)
I have no reason to doubt Nate’s description of his political beliefs. But also, importantly: even if he *had* been a DeSantis supporter, it wouldn’t have made him *wrong* to say Biden’s age is an issue! Even Republicans with an agenda can be right about things; something can be true even though someone you hate is saying it!
IMO People these days view politics as a team sport and the purpose of all political discussion is to win and discredit the other side. Facts and policy discussion are just a means to the end and the end is to score points for your team/audience and against the other side. It doesn’t matter if what you say is true and/or valid. If it makes her own side look bad then it’s just rewarding points for the other side and thats unacceptable. She saw you were attacking her own side and saw herself as a goalie of sorts to defend her own side.
Parker Molloy has some issues with recognizing biological reality and why it might be relevant sometimes. People with this particular viewpoint tend to be very rigid about keeping people on the left in line on all issues. Any divergence, or even attempts to have nuanced discussion, will result in being labeled a right-winger.
It seems to me this comment is engaging in exactly the same kind of behaviour Nate is criticising here, i.e. ‘this person disagrees with me, therefore they are evil’.
(For what it’s worth, I have never heard of Parker Molloy until reading this blog.)
Agreed. Also, as a nonbinary person with a lot of trans friends, I have seen no evidence of a "trans cult" - just a bunch of quirky young people who argue with each other a lot. We are also not all progressives; my political leanings are very similar to Nate's. (The majority of trans people I know don't like talking politics, but often need to pay attention to policy because it affects them personally.)
That said, if there were a trans cult, it would probably revolve around worshiping Shirley Manson or Taylor Swift
I read all these articles, and I wouldn't really say any of these contain evidence of a "cult." What I do see evidence of is cancel culture. People get cancelled for having right wing views of all kinds. I support free speech, and while I disagree with Roisin Murphy's stance on puberty blockers, I don't think her performance should have been cancelled by the BBC. The same thing probably would have happened if she had, eg, talked about how much she loves Trump.
The Naomi Shaefer Riley article jumps from "a lot more young people are transitioning nowadays" to "these young people can't all be trans, something nefarious must be at work."
The article makes a lot of claims about what people are seeing on TikTok pre-transition. Yes, there are absolutely people on TikTok who give advice to young trans kids. In my experience, these people aren't coordinating in any way. The vast, vast majority are just regular young adults who had a rough time coming out, and are trying to help kids who are having the same experiences. I have never heard of any of these people giving advice that amounts to "threaten to unalive yourself if your parents don't affirm you." A few people probably have said this, but it's definitely not the norm. (Also...people have said just about everything on the internet)
Up until a couple years ago, I worked as an educator in one of the most progressive states, and I knew lots of trans kids; my mom still does. I can say from experience that:
- I 100% have encountered kids who are depressive and even suicidal before transitioning, and then become happier and much more well adjusted after transitioning. In my limited experience, it's the norm for kids to become happier after transitioning.
- I never knew any kids who got surgery. I only knew a couple on any kind of medication. This is mainly because surgery, and even medication, for young people are still SUPER RARE - less than 300 minors got top surgery last year (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/). It's much, much rarer for a minor to transition and then de-transition than it is for a minor to self harm because of gender dysphoria.
As for the claim that "why are all these kids suddenly transitioning? Not all of them can be trans, right?" Well...anecdotally, I went to high school in the late 2000s. There were no trans kids in our school. I'd never even heard about being nonbinary. Homophobia wasn't super common, but it definitely existed (and, again, this school was in deep blue suburbia).
I didn't start identifying as nonbinary in high school, because, well...I didn't even know that was an option. Even if I had, I probably would have been too scared. Since high school, a couple other people in my friend group have transitioned. I think if my friends were in high school now, in 2023, we all might have transitioned as 17 or 18 year olds.
tldr -- while I do believe there's a small % of young people who transition and regret it later, I'm much more concerned with the bigger # who end up depressed, self harming, or worse because they can't come out of the closet. They can't even be exposed to adults who are trans -- there are many states where I'd need to pretend to be another gender in order to legally be allowed to teach public school.
BTW, I probably am not going to reply to this thread any more...I have a flight to catch later today, and this already took up a lot of my time
Oof. You guys couldn’t help but attempt to shoehorn the other writer’s personal identity into this and then attack them on that basis, I guess. There’s the people who read Nate for his respectably nuanced and informed takes, and then there are the assholes.
To elaborate, the only substack I have ever been banned from is that of Freddie DeBoer (for whom I was a Founding Subscriber, paying him $200/yr).
Freddie wrote:
>There are innumerable other ways that race and gender identity are not remotely similar. Attempts to analogize them are almost entirely driven by a desire to insult and delegitimize trans people, and we're not going to be doing that here.
To which I replied:
>Why do you persistently refuse to recognize that there are real legitimate issues of women's rights when men are legally permitted to declare themselves to be women?
Freddie banned me for that comment.
Call that "transphobic" if you want.
In any case I find the word "transphobic" to be highly LOL inducing. It's such a stupid accusation.
I support women's sex-based rights, which you can read up on here:
Close. But if you’ve read him over the years, he’s center-left with that libertarian streak. Which is what he said with all his words in this piece, even if not with his dot on the chart.
Of course, if you are a Democrat in 2024, and consider anyone to the right of the *current* center of the Democrat Party but still identifies as a Democrat as “centrist”, then yes Silver fits that definition. If this were 2008, it probably *would* indeed be fair to describe the moderate side of the Dem party as centrist. But that is not the case for at least most Dems today, and particularly is not what Silver described.
A lot of fiercely partisan commentators - nothing wrong with being one, inherently - also have an instinct to not just disagree with independent commentators, but to deny the existence of independent commentators. It moves them into the opposition basket.
It's one thing if, say, a movement conservative who plays to a movement conservative audience is critical of Democratic policy proposals on this or that. It's a kind of "sun sets in the west." But an independent commentator with a more mixed audience?
For the fierce partisan, this is something to deal with. "Here's why you're wrong" is one way (and in a more higher discourse sense, the ideal one), but "this so-called independent commentator is just a movement conservative commentator in disguise" is another one. And it's also a bit easier because, if that sticks, you just move on to arguing against the movement conservative as you always do. And if your framework is that these issues are very important, and that these intellectual debates seem small potatoes against the substantive policy impact of the other side winning (or something to that flavor), it makes a certain kind of sense.
(This is true of both left and right, but frankly I think the one with stronger cultural positioning is more likely to engage in this tactic; was something I noticed in the Bush era from the other side, more on the left now, in time will switch again)
A lot of us ex progressives would agree with Nate's positions.
Trump is uniquely bad because trying to actively steal qn election is off the scale.
I have found you can get through to lukewarm Trump supporters by asking them to honestly answer if they think because of Trump's narcissistic personality- wasn't he always going to not accept defeat
That said: The Dems/left are nearly as bad l.
The response to Nate just mentioning Biden's age - illustrates their mindset.
We all know it's not just the number around his age. He can barely string a coherent sentence together.
His claim that climate change poses the same or more danger as nuclear war - is about as nonsensical and wide of the mark as you can get.
The left are now the end of days fundamentalists - no amount of empirical evidence like us never being safer from the climate/weather makes any difference.
They live in a counter factual world- where we are all doomed from future weather ( always in 10 years) and Biden's mental facilities should be airbrushed out.
Your description of the left accurately illustrates a large swath of the privileged, online left who live in their nihilistic bubble as a means of excusing their personal underperformance.
However, Biden, and the Dems in Congress and Senate actually passed a massive bill to help transform the energy sector of our economy in the direction of securing us a robust, clean-energy future built on the back of resurgent American manufacturing and, for lack of a better word, stuff-making. They're serious people who have developed a vision of what the next decade of American dominance looks like, and are working to shape the country that direction.
That's the difference between Democrats and Republicans these days -- Republican politicians walk the talk of their online cultists, prominent Dems (for the most part), don't.
I would really like to buy this distinct separation, and I think even until 2019ish that would be definitive. But I just don't know, some of the wacky stuff has some pretty mainstream backing - Biden's science department seems to be taking 'indigenous knowledge' seriously; they've pushed some pretty dubious education equity stuff; California seems to be a state government ever-so-slightly endorsing a particular experimental medical procedure for trans-identifying youth that Europe is in the process of rejecting; etc.
I actually agree with your description of Biden's positives (if anything, I only wish he had pushed a bit harder for that child tax credit which effectively reduced child poverty - stuff like that is why I'm a D). And the grassroots Rs are also pretty crazy, I could even grant moreso. But I'm not quite sure this line works.
At the state level, it definitely breaks down. CA, OR, and WA are doing some whacky, horrible stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm not brushing off the far left's influence, it's real here on the West Coast where they have overwhelming majorities.
The clearest example I can give is in the Senate, where a single Senator, a retired ex-football coach with no qualifications, is putting the country in the greatest national security peril we've had in a decade by refusing to allow scores of people in the military to literally access the intelligence they need to do their jobs. There's nothing comparable in magnitude and unseriousness on the left.
And I'd follow you down the senate path, too, Grant, in condemning that irresponsible senator... except that the democrats have placed an enormous vegetable with absolutely no business or work experience of any kind into their ranks, and are so worried about stepping on the vegetable's toes that they have stretched the dress code of the greatest deliberative body in the world to allow him to wear a track suit to work. Bullshit abounds on both sides. Neither can take succor in their high ground.
As deep a trench as I towards Earth's core in my expectations of the Tubs, he dug so far beyond that that I think he might be approaching the crust from upside down. A truly manificawful performance.
Must be weird to be an Auburn/TTech/Cincy fan thinking about this colossal dingleberry, not that I think any miss him.
The system favors conservatives; they get more power relative to the number of votes they get than do liberals or progressives. That's important because it means Republicans can gain full control of the federal government with minority support, whereas Democrats need more than a majority to do the same. That results in an equilibrium in which the Republican party is further from the center of the country than the Democratic party. In practice, what I think that means is that a Democratic trifecta is not going to impose California policies; their swing state and district members will balk. The Republican party is far less responsive to that same logic because they don't have to reach as far into the middle to win elections.
I think there's something to this - though, just as one note, NYT just put up a good piece on how the 2016 electoral college advantage for Trump seems to have been more of an abberation and has leveled out
(Whether they are *behaving* as if it's still true is another question :) )
I haven't seen that piece, but here's what's behind my logic. Biden won the national vote by 4.45% but the tipping point state (WI) by only 0.63% (which is actually a bigger gap than Clinton's 2.09% nationally vs. -0.76% for the tipping point state, which was again WI). But the presidency is probably the easiest of the three for Democrats. The median House district is always to the right of the national vote; by how much depends on the maps and multiple states will have different maps in place next year from last year. Biden will probably have carried more of the districts than Trump did, but if Republicans had had their way he wouldn't have. But the Senate is the hardest. The 50th seat voted for Biden by only 0.24%. 62 seats are to the right of the national vote versus only 38 to the left. (In 2016 it was 64 to the right vs. 36 to the left). It's a substantial disadvantage. It's not hard to see how that leads to 6 of 9 Supreme Court justices being Republican even though Democrats got more votes in 7 of the last 9 presidential elections, for instance. To bring it back to my original point, Republicans can go hard right and stay competitive; when Democrats go left they get killed.
What reality do you live in where the "urban enclaves" hold sway over the rest of the country? Do you not understand how the Senate work? Have you missed the part where GOP candidates have multiple times won the presidency while losing the popular vote?
This country is doomed because half of the people live in an alternate reality bubble like yourself.
False equivalence based on intellectually lazy bothsidesism, like claiming one guy who kills in self-defense is "just as bad" as Stalin.
Multiply-indicted criminal and daughter-groomer Trump left America with the Jan 6. insurrection, soreloser election lies, book banning Republicans, mass COVID death, record job loss, forced birth, the most unpopular Supreme Court ever, lockdowns, tax cuts for billionaires, record corprare welfare, record deficits, open borders, record mass shootings, and climate change denial.
Under Biden's record job growth, record manufacturing jobs, and record infrastructure jobs, unemployment is at historic lows with 4 million more jobs than existed pre-COVID, America has the developed world's #1 post-pandemic recovery, prescriptions are lower than ever, and working class wage growth is outpacing white collar wage growth for the first time ever.
Biden and Democrats are clearly a much better choice than Trump and Republicans.
Hillary conceded Trump's loss the next day, and did not go to cour to try to overturn the election, nor incite a terror attack on Congress to subvert the election.
There's nothing inherently wrong with going to court (or whatever tribunal is appropriate) to overturn election results. It's happened, in very recent memory, when Mark Harris's apparent win in NC9 was voided due to election fraud-- and rightly so. If anything, I think the media is too keen to pressure candidates to concede when they have a legitimate basis to contest an election outcome. That's not "denying the result," it's exercising your legal rights (until those are exhausted, there is no result to "deny"). Certainly Dan McCready should not be accused of "denying the results" of a fraudulent election.
That being said, what does count as "denying the result" is asserting frivolous and nonsensical legal challenges that could only succeed if judges ignore the law, refusing to concede after those challenges are all predictably shot down, and then attempting a coup.
Your argument was fairly reasonable until you blew your entire credibility at the end with the “attempting a coup” statement. No such thing ever happened. The idea that Jan 6th was a coup is absurd. The idea that Trump is directly responsible for the non-coup is almost as absurd.
I think people are much more likely to embrace extreme partisanship, that sees any concern or criticism for their party's standard bearer as evidence that someone is secretly "on the other side" when they are afraid. In this case Molley is afraid that bringing up a legitimate concern (Biden's age) might weaken support for Biden and make him less likely to win the election. But articles like Molley's just end up backfiring a lot of the time. Because if you defend your standard bearer at all costs, your reality based readers will cease to trust you, and you will increasingly attract the type of audience that also wants to twist themselves into knots defending their standard bearer. Take that far enough and you become the left wing version of MAGA, untethered to reality, deeply tethered to partisan loyalty.
This phenomenon has been deeply frustrating to me and is why I gave up on spaces like Twitter and also reddit (and why I swiftly aborted my foray into Threads). My local and state subreddits are full of kneejerking (and circlejerking) progressives who call everything they disagree with racist, fascist, etc. and who spout "GO BACK TO WATCHING FAUX NEWS" if you express even mainstream normie center-left or centrist views.
I think there's a general tendency that people dislike traitors/apostates more than people who have always been on the enemy side. In 2008/2012 Republicans kept attacking Nate Silver because they didn't like public polling results, and as a result Nate developed a generally left-leaning fanbase who assumed he was one of them. This fanbase then felt betrayed whenever Nate refused to endorse the most leftwing (or COVID-cautious) opinion on anything. That's why he came in for far more vitriol on Twitter than generic right-wingers saying far more right-wing things.
I remember reading the Paul Fussell book about class/status back in college, and one of the insights is that people make more severe distinctions between groups closer to them than they do with groups farther away. And the way it works is curious...oftentimes the greatest animosity is reserved for people who are just one or two tiers away from you socially rather than people worlds away.
I think some version of that is at play here. If you're (say) an urban professional who is elite-educated and gay and a foodie and broadly part of the blue-tribe sphere (Nate) but you challenge the contours of that or dare to question left orthodoxies, you are treated very harshly. People who are otherwise a lot like you will treat you with marked vitriol.
I guess this is also similar to the whole "narcissism of small differences" thing. And I guess the progs would dispute the smallness of those differences. But I have to say, in my own life, I have been subjected to more preening abject nastiness from the left than from the right and I presume that's because I read as left in many ways and if you deviate from that on any key issues or challenge any sacred cows, you are told to "TURN OFF FAUX NEWS" and are called racist and fascist and a bootlicker and whatever else. It's something to behold. It's why I gave up on spaces like reddit and Twitter.
It's the same with racism. Go to any country and discover the ethnic slurs or jokes that exist in that language. They're all about the people in the neighboring country, not some group on the other side of the world. People are most prejudiced against groups they have most in common with (and in some contexts, are in competition with). Sidenote: this is also why the "prejudice is caused by ignorance" view is doomed to fail - people tend to be actually pretty familiar with the groups they despise.
This is basically what Scott Alexander meant by "outgroup Vs far-group"...
Bill Maher
That's sure a lot of projecting of assumed motivations, without a lot of data.
It's a lot easier to see that right-wingers don't like data, while left wingers like outcomes.
When Nate uses framed data to project outcomes, he makes no one happy.
And he leaned into it, to make himself feel correct.
I don't think I understand what you mean. What does it mean to "like outcomes"? And isn't Nate's entire career based on using data to project outcomes?
First, left-wingers "having a vision of a just society" is what I mean by "like outcomes." This is in contrast to merely prescribing a set of a priori means that might lead to undesirable outcomes, such as conservatives do when they demand we stick to established processes that are creating undesirable outcomes.
Second, it's becoming more and more clear Nate doesn't actually care about the data, unless it's a means of proving himself correct.
I'm guessing you may also be experiencing something that has happened to me over the past five years. I have always been similarly situated to you---often describing myself as a libertarian who more often than not sides with the liberals when faced with binary choices, but usually finds my exact policy positions unaccounted for by either political party, or their corresponding ideology.
What I've experienced is a not just a knee-jerk reaction from many on the the left to characterize everything even a shade to their right as right-wing--though I've certainly gotten that more than a few times--but also a new and aggressive anger at anyone who thinks policy involves trade-offs, or that the underlying values in dispute between left and right are reasonable to compare. Even when I've *sided* with the liberals on various things, the mere fact that I asserted the question was s balancing-test between legitimate competing values or resource allocation drew me a lot of heat.
And I'm not talking about abortion here, or even school closures during COVID. I'm talking about things like soft infrastructure spending on early childhood education (which I support, on balance, but usually with said caveats about trade-offs) or even sillier things to disagree with like "Mitt Romney might have been a successful president and might have been very popular, because he has a lot of popular mainstream ideas, has some past successes, and seems like a smart, decent person."
And I get the idea that some people believe (I think I might as well!) that the current GOP holds a handful of policy positions so counter to basic democracy/republic values that you shouldn't vote for them in national elections until they are punished enough to alter ideology. But that has translated for many people into the idea that *all policies promoted by the GOP are also bad, or even evil* which is plainly both not true, and also makes *policy* discussions that much harder to separate from partisan electoral discussions.
It's extremely frustrating, especially when, as you say, you just want to discuss things as policy, or even just comment on process/institutional considerations, and everyone needs to read partisan strategy into it and go from there. There are many people left who still care about the former and not all that much about the latter.
It's because the right-wing's overall goal is to bring Christian Fascism to America. There is literally nothing to ally with them on unless you agree with that overall goal. Given that goal is antithetical to the Constitution and to the spirit of America, I feel pretty good calling anyone that gives comfort to MAGAs or in anyone sides w/ Trump a traitor.
It doesn't matter one iota if they occasionally have a good policy position, because their goal is still to install a fascist theocratic dictatorship in America and bring us back to a time when only landowning white males had any say in the running of society. That goal is a non-starter, and it's why no one should ever vote for any member of the GOP ever again.
You could not have proven the point of the article any better.
Malcolm your comment is absolutely insane. Not just ridiculous, but insane. I have been a GOPer most of my adult life. My position re the auth/lib/right/left grid is identical to Silver's, though I tend to vote republican because I consider the Democrats more authentically authoritarian. I have known many, many conservatives. There is not a single one that wants to create a christian state, fascist or otherwise, in the US. If you actually believe what you wrote above, you are a nut.
Prof Chill, you are being naïve. When Trump talks you should listen, We take him at his word. If you think the 2025 manifesto plus Trump's vindictiveness is not an issue with democracy, you should think again.
This is not to say that there are not some republican policies that i would support, there just don't seem to be any worth of support now.
Why are you claiming that democrats are more authoritarian? Because republicans are incompetent? DeSantis will certainly change that...
“We take him at his word.”
The people who hate Trump taken him literally, but not seriously.
The people who love Trump take him seriously but not literally.
It’s sad that you don’t understand this.
(My personal view is that policy and actions matter far more than words, and Trumps policies and actions in fact were those of a mainstream Republican (other than spending and demagoguing about entitlements just like a typical Democrat, which is regrettable). All the talk of fascism/etc - especially after four years of concrete evidence - is a combination of manufactured hysteria, projection and those indoctrinated by same.
Such as his terrible, embarrassing Supreme Court picks?
Like his disasterous tax policy?
His terrible foreign policy surrenders?
His hatred by the majority of the world?
His attempt to overthrow the government?
Is this the concrete evidence that is manufactured hysteria and projection?
You can take him at his word or not.
You can see his actions.
Either one should preclude anyone from supporting him.
Yes I concede. You are correct. I have seen the error of my ways. Trump’s Supreme Court nominations conclusively prove that he is a threat to democracy.
Even worse, the 3 justices he named are embarrassing.
I cede all to your vastly superior knowledge, reasoning and explication of same.
And Q.E.D, you have completely refuted Silver’s key point in his post.
Trump is a liar, a traitor, and a monster but saying he wants anything "Christian" is crazy.
He obviously bribed Christians with a couple SCOTUS seats, but that's not nearly the same thing.
“Trump is a liar, a traitor, and a monster”
Indeed, you have just successfully refuted Silver’s post and proven it incorrect.
Lol. Not sure what you have in mind. I don't have particularly wild views generally. I am center-libertarian similar to Nate. But Trump is a fairly wild person by anyone's measure. He committed numerous crimes against America, and for the most part, we watched him commit them. From fake electors to 'finding votes'.
It is weird that we are thinking of re-electing him, but the world is a weird place sometimes.
I agree with you otherwise that his actual policies were fairly plain-jane. The biggest thing he did besides try to overthrow the government is cut taxes.
Yeah, the problem with polarization is few people actually know anybody on the opposite side of the aisle any more.
I don't know any Trump voters, and none of them know me.
My guy, please stop reading MSNBC, my God
This is what Steven Pinker calls "The Left Pole". When you're at the North Pole, anything next to you is South. When you're at the Left Pole, anything other than you is right.
I tend to think of the (traditional) political spectrum to be shaped like a horseshoe. When you are far enough to one side you can't see over the horizon, so you treat the furthest you can see as the opposite side, even when they are pretty far over on your side.
The number of people who use the terms RINO or DINO unironically tend to provide evidence that this thesis is correct.
I'm sure this comment section will be sane, sober, respectful, and [dodges tomato]
“But what I find remarkable is that is that Molloy can’t even seem to imagine someone doing journalism for reasons other than trying to advance a political narrative for partisan reasons.”
That is why no one trusts corporate media anymore and why substack will continue to grow.
Except that Molloy is a substacker, not corporate media.
From her own website: Between 2018 and 2021, Parker was editor-at-large at Media Matters for America, a non-profit progressive media watchdog. There, she wrote about the role right-wing media played in the rise of Donald Trump and the creation of alternate perceived realities. Her work has also appeared in places like The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, VICE, and The Verge.
Ironic that she complains about alternate perceived realities when she has written for all the leftist propaganda platforms. Given that she has blocked me without ever interacting with me, she has clearly brought MSM culture to Substack ;)
That’s one way to admit you were wrong!
More or less what I expected, really. I don't always agree with your positions, but I'm exhausted seeing how many replies to your tweets take you in the worst faith, or attack you for something spurious (i.e "predicting" a Clinton win in 2016). I hope moving on from 538 can relieve that obnoxious element from your online life, though I kind of doubt it will.
Agree! Idk how much Nate reads the comments but I'm always impressed by his humility, straightforwardness, attention to detail, and lack of an agenda. Seems to me like the last type of person that ought to be getting attacked.
He frequently has a “help Dems win” agenda. And much of the time (but not always) he’s open about that.
The difference is that he doesn’t *always* have that agenda with everything he does, and that is what is confounding to the Molloys of the world.
But you are beyond naive if you think that none of what Silver writes has any political agenda at all. It’s not a hard leftist agenda, to be sure, but it is the center-left, help-Dems-win agenda that is 100% consistent with what he wrote in this post about his views (including how he could never vote for Trump, and how only in theory could he vote for some Republican over some Democrat).
Clearly you're a closet bolshie and would vote for Nicolás Maduro for President if given the chance.
No, he's clearly a closet Falangist who would shove his political opponents out of a helicopter.
Absurd, he's clearly a closet Montoneros who would occupy and destroy a FIAT factory.
Lunacy; no true Montoneros would ever have a Substack.
I share the frustration with the kind of worldview that sees hidden agendas behind everyone who disagrees with them. Or deliberately raises the spectre of someone having a hidden agenda in order to discredit them. (In fairness, the article linked to did also engage with the arguments in the original piece.)
I have no reason to doubt Nate’s description of his political beliefs. But also, importantly: even if he *had* been a DeSantis supporter, it wouldn’t have made him *wrong* to say Biden’s age is an issue! Even Republicans with an agenda can be right about things; something can be true even though someone you hate is saying it!
Well it would certainly have made him look a lot more self-interested.
IMO People these days view politics as a team sport and the purpose of all political discussion is to win and discredit the other side. Facts and policy discussion are just a means to the end and the end is to score points for your team/audience and against the other side. It doesn’t matter if what you say is true and/or valid. If it makes her own side look bad then it’s just rewarding points for the other side and thats unacceptable. She saw you were attacking her own side and saw herself as a goalie of sorts to defend her own side.
Parker Molloy has some issues with recognizing biological reality and why it might be relevant sometimes. People with this particular viewpoint tend to be very rigid about keeping people on the left in line on all issues. Any divergence, or even attempts to have nuanced discussion, will result in being labeled a right-winger.
More bluntly, Molloy is a card-carrying trans cultist who wants to ruthlessly suppress anyone who is not in the cult.
It seems to me this comment is engaging in exactly the same kind of behaviour Nate is criticising here, i.e. ‘this person disagrees with me, therefore they are evil’.
(For what it’s worth, I have never heard of Parker Molloy until reading this blog.)
Agreed. Also, as a nonbinary person with a lot of trans friends, I have seen no evidence of a "trans cult" - just a bunch of quirky young people who argue with each other a lot. We are also not all progressives; my political leanings are very similar to Nate's. (The majority of trans people I know don't like talking politics, but often need to pay attention to policy because it affects them personally.)
That said, if there were a trans cult, it would probably revolve around worshiping Shirley Manson or Taylor Swift
Worshipping Taylor Swift is not exclusive to trans people, or indeed left wingers… :) But otherwise agreed.
Of course there is a trans cult. A very small sampling of available analysis:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/naomi-schaefer-riley/transgender-children-craze/
https://nypost.com/2022/05/11/meet-the-parents-of-trans-kids-fighting-gender-cult/
https://pitt.substack.com
And the cult will come after you if you dare to criticize it. Most recent example:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12510045/amp/BBC-axe-Roisin-Murphy-following-puberty-blockers-trans-comment.html
I read all these articles, and I wouldn't really say any of these contain evidence of a "cult." What I do see evidence of is cancel culture. People get cancelled for having right wing views of all kinds. I support free speech, and while I disagree with Roisin Murphy's stance on puberty blockers, I don't think her performance should have been cancelled by the BBC. The same thing probably would have happened if she had, eg, talked about how much she loves Trump.
The Naomi Shaefer Riley article jumps from "a lot more young people are transitioning nowadays" to "these young people can't all be trans, something nefarious must be at work."
The article makes a lot of claims about what people are seeing on TikTok pre-transition. Yes, there are absolutely people on TikTok who give advice to young trans kids. In my experience, these people aren't coordinating in any way. The vast, vast majority are just regular young adults who had a rough time coming out, and are trying to help kids who are having the same experiences. I have never heard of any of these people giving advice that amounts to "threaten to unalive yourself if your parents don't affirm you." A few people probably have said this, but it's definitely not the norm. (Also...people have said just about everything on the internet)
Up until a couple years ago, I worked as an educator in one of the most progressive states, and I knew lots of trans kids; my mom still does. I can say from experience that:
- Neither me nor my mom know of any students who transitioned, and later expressed regret or detransitioned. An average of studies show about 1% of trans people express regret after transitioning (https://apnews.com/article/transgender-treatment-regret-detransition-371e927ec6e7a24cd9c77b5371c6ba2b) This seems about right to me.
- I 100% have encountered kids who are depressive and even suicidal before transitioning, and then become happier and much more well adjusted after transitioning. In my limited experience, it's the norm for kids to become happier after transitioning.
- I never knew any kids who got surgery. I only knew a couple on any kind of medication. This is mainly because surgery, and even medication, for young people are still SUPER RARE - less than 300 minors got top surgery last year (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-data/). It's much, much rarer for a minor to transition and then de-transition than it is for a minor to self harm because of gender dysphoria.
As for the claim that "why are all these kids suddenly transitioning? Not all of them can be trans, right?" Well...anecdotally, I went to high school in the late 2000s. There were no trans kids in our school. I'd never even heard about being nonbinary. Homophobia wasn't super common, but it definitely existed (and, again, this school was in deep blue suburbia).
I didn't start identifying as nonbinary in high school, because, well...I didn't even know that was an option. Even if I had, I probably would have been too scared. Since high school, a couple other people in my friend group have transitioned. I think if my friends were in high school now, in 2023, we all might have transitioned as 17 or 18 year olds.
tldr -- while I do believe there's a small % of young people who transition and regret it later, I'm much more concerned with the bigger # who end up depressed, self harming, or worse because they can't come out of the closet. They can't even be exposed to adults who are trans -- there are many states where I'd need to pretend to be another gender in order to legally be allowed to teach public school.
BTW, I probably am not going to reply to this thread any more...I have a flight to catch later today, and this already took up a lot of my time
Well I have heard of her, have read her writings, and based my comment on that knowledge.
Oof. You guys couldn’t help but attempt to shoehorn the other writer’s personal identity into this and then attack them on that basis, I guess. There’s the people who read Nate for his respectably nuanced and informed takes, and then there are the assholes.
My opinion of Molloy is based on ACTUALLY READING HER WRITINGS.
Haven't you been banned from multiple substacks for being a transphobic asshole?
Nope.
To elaborate, the only substack I have ever been banned from is that of Freddie DeBoer (for whom I was a Founding Subscriber, paying him $200/yr).
Freddie wrote:
>There are innumerable other ways that race and gender identity are not remotely similar. Attempts to analogize them are almost entirely driven by a desire to insult and delegitimize trans people, and we're not going to be doing that here.
To which I replied:
>Why do you persistently refuse to recognize that there are real legitimate issues of women's rights when men are legally permitted to declare themselves to be women?
Freddie banned me for that comment.
Call that "transphobic" if you want.
In any case I find the word "transphobic" to be highly LOL inducing. It's such a stupid accusation.
I support women's sex-based rights, which you can read up on here:
https://www.womensdeclaration.com
https://womensbillofrights.com
Sorry, I will revise my statement to say that you have been banned from one Substack for being a transphobic asshole
Also why simple, nice things like using people's preferred pronouns lead to complications.
For what it’s worth, centrist with a strong libertarian bend is _exactly_ what I would have predicted if asked.
Right? I think anyone who has read and listened to Nate over the years would be able to guess this.
Close. But if you’ve read him over the years, he’s center-left with that libertarian streak. Which is what he said with all his words in this piece, even if not with his dot on the chart.
Of course, if you are a Democrat in 2024, and consider anyone to the right of the *current* center of the Democrat Party but still identifies as a Democrat as “centrist”, then yes Silver fits that definition. If this were 2008, it probably *would* indeed be fair to describe the moderate side of the Dem party as centrist. But that is not the case for at least most Dems today, and particularly is not what Silver described.
A lot of fiercely partisan commentators - nothing wrong with being one, inherently - also have an instinct to not just disagree with independent commentators, but to deny the existence of independent commentators. It moves them into the opposition basket.
It's one thing if, say, a movement conservative who plays to a movement conservative audience is critical of Democratic policy proposals on this or that. It's a kind of "sun sets in the west." But an independent commentator with a more mixed audience?
For the fierce partisan, this is something to deal with. "Here's why you're wrong" is one way (and in a more higher discourse sense, the ideal one), but "this so-called independent commentator is just a movement conservative commentator in disguise" is another one. And it's also a bit easier because, if that sticks, you just move on to arguing against the movement conservative as you always do. And if your framework is that these issues are very important, and that these intellectual debates seem small potatoes against the substantive policy impact of the other side winning (or something to that flavor), it makes a certain kind of sense.
(This is true of both left and right, but frankly I think the one with stronger cultural positioning is more likely to engage in this tactic; was something I noticed in the Bush era from the other side, more on the left now, in time will switch again)
A lot of us ex progressives would agree with Nate's positions.
Trump is uniquely bad because trying to actively steal qn election is off the scale.
I have found you can get through to lukewarm Trump supporters by asking them to honestly answer if they think because of Trump's narcissistic personality- wasn't he always going to not accept defeat
That said: The Dems/left are nearly as bad l.
The response to Nate just mentioning Biden's age - illustrates their mindset.
We all know it's not just the number around his age. He can barely string a coherent sentence together.
His claim that climate change poses the same or more danger as nuclear war - is about as nonsensical and wide of the mark as you can get.
The left are now the end of days fundamentalists - no amount of empirical evidence like us never being safer from the climate/weather makes any difference.
They live in a counter factual world- where we are all doomed from future weather ( always in 10 years) and Biden's mental facilities should be airbrushed out.
Honestly- what a terrible choice.
Your description of the left accurately illustrates a large swath of the privileged, online left who live in their nihilistic bubble as a means of excusing their personal underperformance.
However, Biden, and the Dems in Congress and Senate actually passed a massive bill to help transform the energy sector of our economy in the direction of securing us a robust, clean-energy future built on the back of resurgent American manufacturing and, for lack of a better word, stuff-making. They're serious people who have developed a vision of what the next decade of American dominance looks like, and are working to shape the country that direction.
That's the difference between Democrats and Republicans these days -- Republican politicians walk the talk of their online cultists, prominent Dems (for the most part), don't.
I would really like to buy this distinct separation, and I think even until 2019ish that would be definitive. But I just don't know, some of the wacky stuff has some pretty mainstream backing - Biden's science department seems to be taking 'indigenous knowledge' seriously; they've pushed some pretty dubious education equity stuff; California seems to be a state government ever-so-slightly endorsing a particular experimental medical procedure for trans-identifying youth that Europe is in the process of rejecting; etc.
I actually agree with your description of Biden's positives (if anything, I only wish he had pushed a bit harder for that child tax credit which effectively reduced child poverty - stuff like that is why I'm a D). And the grassroots Rs are also pretty crazy, I could even grant moreso. But I'm not quite sure this line works.
At the state level, it definitely breaks down. CA, OR, and WA are doing some whacky, horrible stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm not brushing off the far left's influence, it's real here on the West Coast where they have overwhelming majorities.
The clearest example I can give is in the Senate, where a single Senator, a retired ex-football coach with no qualifications, is putting the country in the greatest national security peril we've had in a decade by refusing to allow scores of people in the military to literally access the intelligence they need to do their jobs. There's nothing comparable in magnitude and unseriousness on the left.
And I'd follow you down the senate path, too, Grant, in condemning that irresponsible senator... except that the democrats have placed an enormous vegetable with absolutely no business or work experience of any kind into their ranks, and are so worried about stepping on the vegetable's toes that they have stretched the dress code of the greatest deliberative body in the world to allow him to wear a track suit to work. Bullshit abounds on both sides. Neither can take succor in their high ground.
As deep a trench as I towards Earth's core in my expectations of the Tubs, he dug so far beyond that that I think he might be approaching the crust from upside down. A truly manificawful performance.
Must be weird to be an Auburn/TTech/Cincy fan thinking about this colossal dingleberry, not that I think any miss him.
Fair enough - and yes, no defense of Tubervilleian idiocy from me. ;)
The system favors conservatives; they get more power relative to the number of votes they get than do liberals or progressives. That's important because it means Republicans can gain full control of the federal government with minority support, whereas Democrats need more than a majority to do the same. That results in an equilibrium in which the Republican party is further from the center of the country than the Democratic party. In practice, what I think that means is that a Democratic trifecta is not going to impose California policies; their swing state and district members will balk. The Republican party is far less responsive to that same logic because they don't have to reach as far into the middle to win elections.
I think there's something to this - though, just as one note, NYT just put up a good piece on how the 2016 electoral college advantage for Trump seems to have been more of an abberation and has leveled out
(Whether they are *behaving* as if it's still true is another question :) )
I haven't seen that piece, but here's what's behind my logic. Biden won the national vote by 4.45% but the tipping point state (WI) by only 0.63% (which is actually a bigger gap than Clinton's 2.09% nationally vs. -0.76% for the tipping point state, which was again WI). But the presidency is probably the easiest of the three for Democrats. The median House district is always to the right of the national vote; by how much depends on the maps and multiple states will have different maps in place next year from last year. Biden will probably have carried more of the districts than Trump did, but if Republicans had had their way he wouldn't have. But the Senate is the hardest. The 50th seat voted for Biden by only 0.24%. 62 seats are to the right of the national vote versus only 38 to the left. (In 2016 it was 64 to the right vs. 36 to the left). It's a substantial disadvantage. It's not hard to see how that leads to 6 of 9 Supreme Court justices being Republican even though Democrats got more votes in 7 of the last 9 presidential elections, for instance. To bring it back to my original point, Republicans can go hard right and stay competitive; when Democrats go left they get killed.
I hadn't seen it either but Silver linked it.
What reality do you live in where the "urban enclaves" hold sway over the rest of the country? Do you not understand how the Senate work? Have you missed the part where GOP candidates have multiple times won the presidency while losing the popular vote?
This country is doomed because half of the people live in an alternate reality bubble like yourself.
Sure, Democrats get more "votes," but after all, is that what democracy is even about?
What's that you say? It is? No, here's a just-so story to explain why it isn't. I am very serious.
Edit: should have scrolled down to see this guy's deranged ramblings about "Marxism." I guess I fell for the troll.
"Democrats are just as bad."
False equivalence based on intellectually lazy bothsidesism, like claiming one guy who kills in self-defense is "just as bad" as Stalin.
Multiply-indicted criminal and daughter-groomer Trump left America with the Jan 6. insurrection, soreloser election lies, book banning Republicans, mass COVID death, record job loss, forced birth, the most unpopular Supreme Court ever, lockdowns, tax cuts for billionaires, record corprare welfare, record deficits, open borders, record mass shootings, and climate change denial.
Under Biden's record job growth, record manufacturing jobs, and record infrastructure jobs, unemployment is at historic lows with 4 million more jobs than existed pre-COVID, America has the developed world's #1 post-pandemic recovery, prescriptions are lower than ever, and working class wage growth is outpacing white collar wage growth for the first time ever.
Biden and Democrats are clearly a much better choice than Trump and Republicans.
Bro, you're an irrelevant nobody. Who cares what you think of me? 😂
Care to dispute any particular set of facts outlined above?
Great reply there moron.
Democrats spent 4 years denying the results of the 2016 election and still do to this day
Sorry everybody, it looks like my mom's loud facebook friend found substack. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/24/jody-hice/did-democrats-refuse-acknowledge-trumps-2016-victo/
Using the incredibly leftist-biased Politifact to assert that leftists aren’t biased is pretty hilarious
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/politifact
Citing a leftist-biased site to defend a leftist position is not gonna convince anyone who hasn’t already drunk the Kool-Aid
Hillary conceded Trump's loss the next day, and did not go to cour to try to overturn the election, nor incite a terror attack on Congress to subvert the election.
To this day, Trump has a still not coceded.
Stacey Abram’s I believe has still never conceded her first GA race loss.
Gore went to court to context his election results. Then insisted on MULTIPLE recounts, not just one.
Hilary did concede in November 2016, but then almost immediately started complaining and continued complaining she was robbed for years afterwards.
So leftist outrage at Trump re contesting elections is highly selective.
Even more importantly, Hillary announced BEFORE the 2020 election that under no circumstances should Biden concede the election:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clinton-says-biden-should-not-concede-2020-election-under-n1238156
Hillary said in advance of the 2020 election that Biden should not concede even if he lost.
And btw Hillary mostly took back her 2016 concession in the months that followed.
Yes, of course, the double standard that a Dems are allowed to contest election results but GOPers aren’t is indeed well established.
There's nothing inherently wrong with going to court (or whatever tribunal is appropriate) to overturn election results. It's happened, in very recent memory, when Mark Harris's apparent win in NC9 was voided due to election fraud-- and rightly so. If anything, I think the media is too keen to pressure candidates to concede when they have a legitimate basis to contest an election outcome. That's not "denying the result," it's exercising your legal rights (until those are exhausted, there is no result to "deny"). Certainly Dan McCready should not be accused of "denying the results" of a fraudulent election.
That being said, what does count as "denying the result" is asserting frivolous and nonsensical legal challenges that could only succeed if judges ignore the law, refusing to concede after those challenges are all predictably shot down, and then attempting a coup.
Your argument was fairly reasonable until you blew your entire credibility at the end with the “attempting a coup” statement. No such thing ever happened. The idea that Jan 6th was a coup is absurd. The idea that Trump is directly responsible for the non-coup is almost as absurd.
Why did you excavate a five-month-old blog thread to say something this profoundly idiotic?
I think people are much more likely to embrace extreme partisanship, that sees any concern or criticism for their party's standard bearer as evidence that someone is secretly "on the other side" when they are afraid. In this case Molley is afraid that bringing up a legitimate concern (Biden's age) might weaken support for Biden and make him less likely to win the election. But articles like Molley's just end up backfiring a lot of the time. Because if you defend your standard bearer at all costs, your reality based readers will cease to trust you, and you will increasingly attract the type of audience that also wants to twist themselves into knots defending their standard bearer. Take that far enough and you become the left wing version of MAGA, untethered to reality, deeply tethered to partisan loyalty.
Edit *Molloy
It is possible to edit your comments here. :) (like so.)
Not on an iPhone it’s not
Check out the 3 dots to the right.
On my iPhone those options are always there…the dots bring up “more” options. Maybe scroll in that box.
So is this Substack going to be mostly about Nate Silver grievances? That will get old really fast.
This phenomenon has been deeply frustrating to me and is why I gave up on spaces like Twitter and also reddit (and why I swiftly aborted my foray into Threads). My local and state subreddits are full of kneejerking (and circlejerking) progressives who call everything they disagree with racist, fascist, etc. and who spout "GO BACK TO WATCHING FAUX NEWS" if you express even mainstream normie center-left or centrist views.