The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021): “This list documents the verbal attacks Mr. Trump posted on Twitter, from when he declared his candidacy in June 2015 to Jan. 8, when Twitter permanently barred him.”
Politics
I’m pretty strongly liberal — about as far left as one can go without falling into libertarianism. Posts collected under this tag will likely reflect that viewpoint.
Photos: The Inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.: “Gathered below are scenes from a unique moment in American history.”
What Parler Saw During the Attack on the Capitol: “A collection of more than 500 videos [that] provide one of the most comprehensive records of a dark event in American history through the eyes of those who took part.”
Historians Contextualizing the Capitol Insurrection: A Roundup: A list of their publications is below, in alphabetical order by author’s last name. This is a dynamic document, and will change as historians publish more pieces.
Twitter permanently suspends President Donald Trump: citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.”
2019-2020 Tech company donations to Republicans who voted to overturn the election: Google Docs spreadsheet, found via Kottke.
ITV on the Trump Insurrection
Archiving here for the future: A good seven-minute overview of yesterday’s events in Washington, D.C., produced that evening when much was still going on. Original by ITV News, found on YouTube.
Meet The Black Women Who turned Georgia Blue: “Yep, it was Stacey. But don’t forget about Nsé, Helen, Tamieka, Melanie, LaTosha and Deborah.”
Trifecta
I hoped, but didn’t expect, that Georgia would come through. I am so happy to have my expectations proven wrong and my hopes realized.
As I write this, Warnock has been declared the winner, and Ossoff is leading by more votes than Biden won GA’s presidential ballot by. This is momentous: GA elected a Democrat President, two Democrat Senators, and flipped one House seat blue (which GA with a 6-8 Republican majority in House seats).
Which means that, for the first time since 2011, Democrats will hold the House, Senate, and Presidency.
And Mitch McConnell will finally lose his Majority Leader position and, with it, his ability to block legislation from being passed (somewhere upwards of 400 bills passed by the House stopped at his desk).
And we need to make that count.
Democrats need to do everything they can to pass legislation that actually helps as many people as possible, to right the imbalances that have mounted over the past years, and to trumpet their successes so that we hold on to this advantage when the 2022 midterms come around.
The first two priorities that come to my mind are COVID-19 relief and expanding voting protections and accessibility, but there are many more.
There’s still a lot of work to do, of course, especially considering the number of judges that Trump has been able to seat throughout the country. But at least now, we have a good chance of actually being able to get things done.
Halfway Between the Truth and the Lie
Rebecca Solnit’s essay “On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway” is excellent.
…the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.
Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to.