A big part of the reason America is in grave danger right now is because mainstream journalists will readily signal Biden’s pardons as shady & transgressive — while failing to condemn the endless scorched-earth lies & lawlessness that made them necessary.
Joe Biden wasn't perfect; he made mistakes that at times drowned out his good intentions. With that said, his presidency was — by any common metric of progress — the most successful in at least six decades. But the press treated him like a punchline, & Trump like a comic, so here we are.
On the eve of his inauguration, Donald Trump created a scam currency to bilk his followers, amass billions, and open a direct pipeline for endless untraceable bribes. And because our press is made up almost exclusively of boiled frogs and cowards, folks will barely hear about it.
It doesn’t seem especially confusing what’s happening here: if the cause isn’t material, it’s social. We’ve built social structures - mass media, social media, the internet - that produce massive discontent, irrespective of empirically measurable conditions. And that discontent defines our politics
The thing I can’t get over is how by just about any measure you can find, life in the US is better than the recent past and dramatically better than the distant past, and yet it’s taken as a given that we live in a dystopia. We simply do not, except for how we keep electing dystopian leaders
This only works because Trump's allies control the news information environment. It's not some permanent fixture of how politics work
The next four years are in large part going to be Trump taking credit for what Biden and Harris already did.
Six months from now, when the first detention camps open up and Stephen Baldwin is named special envoy to the Middle East, "But Joe Biden pardoned Hunter!" is going to be a very popular meme.
Trump pardoned his son-in-law's daddy, his campaign manager who lied to protect him, his NSA who lied to protect him, his Coffee Boy who lied to protect him, his rat-fucker who lied to protect him, & his former campaign manager who had just helped him launch an insurrection.
As President Biden pardons his son — a private citizen — it's worth noting that *literally yesterday* Trump appointed a convicted-felon family member whom he'd previously pardoned to a major ambassadorship. I do not expect that these two stories will garner similar coverage.
Hegseth perfectly embodies the MAGA ethos — abuse women; abandon decency; lie for sport — so it’s little wonder that Trump wants to give him one of the nation’s most critical roles.
Not proud that for my first post on Bluesky I will be floating “more like Jared PoliOs, am I right?”