Lily Mason

@lilymasonphd.bsky.social

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Political scientist at Johns Hopkins, author of Uncivil Agreement and co-author of Radical American Partisanship

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Lily Mason

Violent threats from MAGA don't just appear to be rising in number, but getting more blatant. Typically, they couch threats in "ambiguous" language, to make the post-threat gaslighting easier. Lately, even the deniability is fading. www.salon.com/2024/07/08/s...

"Some folks need killing!": People must take MAGA threats of violence literally and seriouslywww.salon.com A leader of Project 2025 declares the authoritarian "revolution" will be "bloodless" only "if the left allows it"

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Lily Mason

Reply to

E.J. Fagan

No longer an outsider, Heritage brought in a ton of former top Trump insiders as part of Project 2025. His attempt to distance himself from it is absurd. This year's Mandate is even more representative of a Trump admin's priorities than previous years.

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Lily Mason

Appears to be a serious win for the popular front strategy of countering the far right

JUST IN: Polls closed in France. Exit polls show surprise: —Left coalition (New Popular Front) projected first. (!) —Far-right (RN) has lost its bid to take power. Anti-RN front appears to have worked very well. —No bloc close to majority. Follow this 🧵 for results and more:

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Lily Mason

Going by the largest meta-analyses of survey research, college-aged young people routinely show greater openness to free speech and diverse views than other groups. Going by historical and structural trends, higher ed today is more intellectually diverse and tolerant than ever before.

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Lily Mason

This is super important work. And it looks like it's actually having an effect. Normal people learn about Project 2025 and are scared as shitless as they should be. The Nation, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Boston Review and others are doing the work that NYT and WaPo are neglecting.

We need more, but credit where due: both The Nation (June 2024 issue) and Boston Review have run a breakdown of the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document. Media Matters, too. Lots of good work going on digesting this. www.bostonreview.net/articles/ins... www.mediamatters.org/project-2025

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Lily Mason

Stephen Miller now following Trump's lead and saying he has nothing to do with Project 2025. 1. His organization is on the Project 2025 advisory board. 2. He recorded a video as part of Project 2025 training tools 3. You can see Mandate for Leadership, the Project 2025 publication in the background

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Lily Mason

Always worth remembering who isn’t getting 17 front page stories per day highlighting every gaffe and demanding he step down. Just so we’re clear on who is being told they are unfit and who is not.

This was a speech during which he did not have to answer any questions, he supposedly knew where he was going to be several days ahead of time, and this is what he came up with

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Lily Mason

When every single national media outlet is speaking in lockstep with Republican talking points about a candidate for president, that is a fundamental, societal level problem with bad implications for the future of democracy in the US. That people discount that is deeply disappointing.

I focus 90% of my criticism on media ethics and leadership because that is the foundation of how we establish a shared reality. Writing off media effects as immaterial or irrelevant, as if people form opinions about events outside their personal experience without mediation, is deeply ignorant.

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Lily Mason

This was a speech during which he did not have to answer any questions, he supposedly knew where he was going to be several days ahead of time, and this is what he came up with

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Lily Mason

This is called agenda setting and it’s a crucial media function elites in the media only very inconsistently admit they do for rather venal reasons.

“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...

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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Lily Mason

This is excellent, from Sean Wilentz

‘The Dred Scott of Our Time’ | Sean Wilentzwww.nybooks.com The majority opinion in Trump v. United States, the most sweeping judicial reconstruction of the American presidency in history, secures the

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Lily Mason

A second American Revolution, this one aimed at unwinding democracy in favor of a monarchy. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Analysis | The target of the right’s ‘revolution’ is pluralistic democracy itselfwww.washingtonpost.com The president of the Heritage Foundation said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

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Lily Mason

Very much agreed. Here’s how @lilymasonphd.bsky.social & I put our optimism about today’s scary conflict at the very end of our 2022 book. Republican politics have only grown worse, as expected, but our future will be bright if we have the courage and commitment to make it so.

I'm incredibly bullish on America's future. I get it's a bit hard to see these days--the death throes of unpopular authoritarianism is pretty scary and there are real problems in the immediate term--but I definitely think America's best days are still very much ahead.

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Lily Mason

Trump is already promising MAGA that he'll "move" elections. *Why isn't this the top story on every news site in America?* www.threads.net/@bidenharris...

Biden-Harris HQ (@bidenharrishq) on Threadswww.threads.net Trump says he “wants to be able” to override the Constitution to “pick” when elections are held

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Lily Mason

If the right is fighting a "second American Revolution," as Heritage's guy put it, it's worth identifying what they are rebelling against. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Analysis | The target of the right’s ‘revolution’ is pluralistic democracy itselfwww.washingtonpost.com The president of the Heritage Foundation said “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

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Lily Mason

1/ I'm agnostic as to whether Biden should withdraw from the race. It's a genuinely tough question IMO. But I have clarity on one thing: He should absolutely not step down as president. If Harris becomes President, the Vice Presidency is empty. Under the 25th Amendment ...

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Lily Mason

Such pronouncements are often premature and exaggerated, but not today. This is one of the worst things the Supreme Court has ever done. You could reasonably argue the worst in living memory, which is a very high bar. It’s that much of an abomination.

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Lily Mason

Reply to

Julia Azari

also: panicking is going to wear us out. it's like drowning. step 1: what groups are working on court reform already?

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Lily Mason

This is the ball game folks, the authoritarian green light laid out in advance. Congress will not impeach Trump. And SCOTUS now blesses him with extraordinary latitude to do whatever he wants in power. A second administration will not be constrained by Congress, the courts, the bureaucracy or law.

Trump, who tried to overthrow an election, campaigned persistently for his fellow party members to grant him absolute immunity for his misdeeds in office. And they did. If you can't distinguish between "energy in the executive" and a constitutional crime spree, you've given up on US democracy.

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

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Lily Mason

Reply to

b-boy bouiebaisse

all of this for donald fucking trump of all people

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Lily Mason

*supreme court legitimacy has left teh chat*

preliminarily: no change in democrats' diffuse support. supreme court legitimacy is in the proverbial shitter, folks. but, somewhat ironically, even *republicans* are now low key like maybe this thing is off the rails, too.

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Lily Mason

Absolutely wild that the court accuses the dissent of "fearmongering" with "extreme hypotheticals" when the actual basis for the indictment is a coup attempt that led to an attack on the capitol

Which crimes should Biden do first?

Reposted by

Lily Mason

Sotomayor; Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law....With fear for our democracy, I dissent. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p...

www.supremecourt.gov

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Lily Mason

The ole Republican two step. Senators argue you shouldn't impeach but should use the courts, SCOTUS says you can't use the courts.

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Lily Mason

What you would do when authoritarianism comes to America is what you're doing right now

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Lily Mason

Yeah it’s not like we’ll see a repeat of 1968, when the Democrats downshifted to a Vice President at a convention in Chicago that was plagued by protests against the party’s support for an unpopular foreign war and wound up creating an opening for a candidate they’d beat before. Totally different!

YES THAT WORKED SO WELL AND DID NOT AT ALL THROW THE PARTY INTO A DIVISIVE NOMINATION CONTEST AND LOST ELECTION THAT WOULD HAUNT IT FOR THE NEXT HALF CENTURY

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Lily Mason

Love this as an empirical proposition to be tested. Easy enough. Doctoral students: Assemble!

A few years ago, Jon Lovett floated a theory that media treats Democrats like protagonists - to be challenged, accounted, and forced to be behave in growth-oriented ways - while the GOP are treated like antagonists - immutable, expected to disrupt, thematic obstacles. Thinking about that a lot.

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Lily Mason

"the Court has begun to implement the policy preferences of its conservative majority in a new and troubling way: by simultaneously stripping power from every political entity except the Supreme Court itself"

once again i think that mark lemley’s article on the “imperial supreme court” is the most perceptive thing written about the roberts court and its overarching project harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-13...

The Imperial Supreme Court - Harvard Law Reviewharvardlawreview.org The past few years have marked the emergence of the imperial Supreme Court. Armed with a new, nearly bulletproof majority, conservative Justices on the...