Bart Bonikowski

@bartbonikowski.bsky.social

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Assoc Prof of Sociology and Politics at NYU studying nationalism, populism, and radical-right politics using surveys, experiments, and computational text analysis. Affiliate Faculty at NYU's Center for Data Science.

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Biden is not owed good press by a long shot. But the amount of coverage his age is receiving relative to that of Trump's very real past and promised future actions strikes me as one of the greatest media mis-prioritizations since the run-up to the Iraq War.

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Bart Bonikowski

Trump said “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.” But Project 2025 is run by Trump's closest aides, raising concerns about cognitive fitness for a candidate who seems unable to recall those around him. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/troubling-...

Troubling Signs of Cognitive Decline as Trump Struggles to Recognize Closest Aidesdonmoynihan.substack.com "I know nothing about Project 2025" statement triggers new concerns about his fitness to serve

“[…] the media know how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the Republic. So for the most part they don’t.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Why is the pundit class so desparate to push Biden out of the race? | Rebecca Solnitwww.theguardian.com Yes, Biden had a bad debate – but so did Trump. The media is once again repeating the mistakes of 2016

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Bart Bonikowski

“As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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Bart Bonikowski

In the exact same nine day period that Biden and his White House and campaign have been flailing, Trump has offered voters a window into his own mental state and vision for term 2 It’s not great! www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

QAnon Memes, F-Bombs, and Tribunals: As Biden Faltered, Trump Amped Up the Crazywww.rollingstone.com Trump quietly had his own week from hell while the media was hounding Biden

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Bart Bonikowski

The key here is that "very important people" don't seem to be bothered by this. It all is horse-race politics up to this precipice: who is winning, who is losing the day? There is no there there in American political journalism at places like the NY Times. They cannot rise to the occasion.

An aspiring dictator & convicted felon w history of treason may win the presidency. Profoundly corrupt SCOTUS justices undermined the constitution and gave him immunity from prosecution for past & future crimes. This is all political journalists should be writing about 24/7. We’re at the precipice.

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Bart Bonikowski

Hillary headlines in 2015. Don't let the media fool you again. Image Courtesy of angry_staffer.

The public is not responding to the debate. They are responding to the irresponsible media coverage of the debate. We are back in “but her emails” territory and there is nothing reasonable people—and actual experts—can do about it. Extraordinarily frustrating and depressing.

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Bart Bonikowski

So this is now six public appearances which don’t count

I just watched the medal of honor ceremony they held just now and Biden was fine.

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Bart Bonikowski

A convicted felon is applying for the only job in the world that lets him do as many crimes as he wants.

Leave it to the impartial, apolitical, all-wise judges—appointed for life and purely on merit to a completely non-activist judicial institution—to turn 4th of July into an occasion for national mourning. You ruined hot dogs. And democracy.

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Bart Bonikowski

This Originalist™ court has effectively immunized both the president and all federal law enforcement officers from any meaningful accountability. Because if there are two things the Founders cherished, it's the power of a king-like executive and armed agents of the government to act with impunity.

If you need a break from the dumpster fire of democracy and like me, have kids who have been screaming all week “daddy, play Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso one more tiiiime,” the following may be just the medicine for you: www.them.us/story/sabrin.... @samanthaallen.bsky.social, you made my day.

I Asked a Grammarian to Help Me Unpack “That’s That Me Espresso”www.them.us The nonsense line in Sabrina Carpenter’s summertime bop is open to interpretation.

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Bart Bonikowski

I don't want some egghead bureaucrat telling me whether there's poison in the water I drink. Ideally I'd want that decided by a 29yo judge who went to a "biblical law school" and does not believe dinosaurs existed, and then to have that decision reaffirmed six years later by the Supreme Court.

The commentariat needs to go for a walk and take some deep breaths. The idea of ditching an incumbent president w an astoundingly impressive track record in the midst of a booming economy is preposterous. Focus on the authoritarian felon threatening our democracy. And maybe freak out about SCOTUS. 🙄

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Bart Bonikowski

It is worth reading through this thread. If you'd told the most optimistic progressive environmentalist in 2020 that this was coming within four years they would have laughed you out of the building.

What's kind of amazing is that we're actually living through a huge technology revolution where our entire power grid is being replaced by solar panels and battery storage and you hear less about it in the press than you did about the totally fake "tech" of NFTs

I’m increasingly convinced that one of the biggest problems with the current political moment is the widespread tendency to understand the world in binary terms and draw simplistic inferences about social groups (and then recursively about individuals). Everyone is looking for villains and heroes.

Reasonable take. Note: “The content of the speech is no part of the calculus.” Some may have interpreted the NYU Soc letter (etc.) as a tacit endorsement of specific political positions. It was far from that (we’d never agree!). It was about admin overreach & the role of campuses as loci of dissent.

If you missed it, this is an extremely sensible statement of adult principles for handling protests. Far too mature and non-performative for many administrators, regrettably.

31 faculty members from the NYU Sociology Department released this statement about the forceful suppression of peaceful protest (including the arrest of faculty and students) by the NYPD on April 22. Free speech and political dissent at universities must be protected. Get the cops off our campuses.

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Bart Bonikowski

Dear University Presidents: They are coming for you. They don’t care if you give in to every single demand, roll over and play dead. They are coming for you. Stop treating this like a good faith inquiry from civic minded leaders. It’s a hit job.

@ABC: House Speaker Mike Johnson is calling on Columbia University president, Minouche Shafik, to resign unless she can improve what he called her failure to handle the anti-Israel protests on campus. https://t.co/wBc23nV01f

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My new piece in Harvard Business Review describes our work using AI to perform conflict mediation on social media, and how it inspired a new intervention by NextDoor which resulted in a 15% decrease in toxic content! hbr.org/2024/03/gena...

Interesting new AJPS on voters’ sanctioning of anti-democratic incumbents. Regardless of partisanship, people dislike backsliding but don’t change party support. (Given paper’s focus on Poland, turnout among pro-democratic opposition wld have been useful DV.) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I greatly enjoyed speaking with @kairyssdal.bsky.social and @kimberlyadams.bsky.social about right-wing populism on Marketplace’s Make Me Smart Podcast. There is a lot more to say, but this covered many key points. www.marketplace.org/shows/make-m...

The global rise of right-wing populism - Marketplacewww.marketplace.org And what the economy has to do with it.

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Bart Bonikowski

Do please fuck right off with this.

Conventionally decorous fascism is apparently preferable to a chaotic and complicated Republic.

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Bart Bonikowski

It's been clear for 25 years, but today really underscored that the only consistent principle among the court's conservative judges is the desire for conservative outcomes. Federalism, originalism, textualism -- they're all just a means to an end, readily abandoned when inconvenient.

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CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Caltech CSSPP is thrilled to announce a call for abstracts for the Conference “Navigating the New Frontier: The Political and Economic Implications of AI,” on September 13-14, 2024 at Caltech. Send your abstract by March 31st! lindeinstitute.caltech.edu/events/csspp...

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Fox News buried the Alabama frozen embryo ruling imperiling IVF, giving it just 6 minutes of coverage through noon today. www.mediamatters.org/cable-news/f...

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Excited to share my latest paper out at PSRM "Attitudes toward automation and the demand for policies addressing job loss: the effects of information about trade-offs" with Peter Loewen, @bartbonikowski.bsky.social, @sborwein.bsky.social and @blakelw.bsky.social.Open access here: bit.ly/49gEWg3

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Bart Bonikowski

Some thoughts on Navalny's death. spectator.co.uk/article/russ.... The key point is this. Yes, Putin killed Navalny. But it's *not* Putin alone. It's the ugly subservience of the silent majority. No one but the Russians themselves are responsible for this sad state of affairs.

Russia has died with Navalnyspectator.co.uk It was brave. It was foolhardy. It was almost unbelievable. After his near-fatal poisoning by the Russian Federal Security Service, Alexey Navalny returned to Russia. He was taken away as he disembark...