Will Stancil

@whstancil.bsky.social

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Minnesota guy

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Yes, it’s fine to be worried about the debate, it’s fine to wish we had another nominee, it’s fine to think about how to make it happen. But the fixation on replacing has become a rationale for waging open war on DEMOCRATS, which over time is doing considerably more damage than the debate did

I think there are many people who saw the debate and came away from it believing that he is not in a good mental place and will be unable to win the election. But then they became so fixated on replacing him with someone who could win that they ignored any reality of how it might be accomplished.

Even outside the extremely overheated rhetoric about Biden’s supposed infirmity, his opponent is DONALD TRUMP, who shares every deficiency of Biden’s and many more! Stop assuming that we lose because we don’t nominate the platonic ideal of a candidate!

Will, picking up on Ezekiel Emanuel’s piece in the Atlantic, putting up a candidate with failing ‘fluid intelligence’ is a recipe for deservedly losing, and then, even if he managed to somehow win, a recipe for the first application of the 25th Amendment.

Also, I’m amazed by the media types who are currently openly trying to push out a sitting president - something that has happened once in history, in a historic scandal - and are mad that lots of people are angry and upset. It’s like “Oh right you think you’re supposed to just dictate events to us”

What the media talkers never understood was that the entire reason this anti-Biden crusade was a hellaciously bad idea wasn’t because it’s impossible to theorize a better ticket (it’s easy) but because presidents have supporters and the only way to replace one is war with your own party

It’s really hard to say the juice is worth the squeeze when “the squeeze” is “steamrolling over huge parts of your own party’s base and making clear their voices are irrelevant and unwanted” and the juice is “Kamala Harris”

has Biden actually done anything after the debate that was disqualifying or is the building crisis entirely a bunch of media figures who took an extreme view and now need to force Biden out or eat crow, and have decided the best way to do that is destroy him electorally

I mean is it possible that the most progressive president of my lifetime had a single bad debate night and now bunch of unelected chatterers are going to attack him until he drops out, overruling the normal democratic process

I feel like we may come to regret such a thing! Just a hunch!

Reply to

Dave Weigel

Same stuff, but his followers kept making the threat explicit and he’d reply to me pointing that out by just reiterating the countdown. So I dunno, felt pretty clear to me what the meaning was

Reposted by

Will Stancil

One thing that's clear from the Biden/age story is this: NYT knows how to crusade when it wants to. And NYT is crusading against Biden's mental unfitness for office in a way it's just not doing with Trump. On the pod, @whstancil.bsky.social and I break this all down: newrepublic.com/article/1835...

Trump’s Wildly Unhinged Attack on NYT Should Wake Up Media: He’s Unfitnewrepublic.com With Trump slamming The Times even as it crusades against Biden, a press critic explains how Trump scams the media into adopting a huge double standard on each man's fitness to serve.

there are some folks I know who are really, really going all in on the “Biden is a horrible monster for staying in” thing and I gotta say… what are they gonna do if he doesn’t drop? how do you climb back from that? people just are not thinking ahead, like, at all

people are so hyped on the idea that they’ve really lost sight of what they’re demanding: that they turn their own part’s highly successful president into a Nixon-esque disgrace. yeah, he’s probably not gonna go along with it! and what then?? Dem civil war? elect Trump to prove your point?

my campaign team rejected my request for a 69k fundraising announcement :(

Reply to

The Fig Economy

“I’m doing this because I’m so scared of Trump and in order to prove it I’m going to torch the person currently running against Trump”

“Who until last week I said wasn’t all that different from Trump”

I completely agree but the problem is that people who talk about politics a lot cannot simply consensus nominate a president and all realistic pathways are incredibly fraught, even before you take into account the fact that we’d have to actually force Biden out over his own objections

You’re right that the narrative is constructed. but that cuts both ways. Biden has shown limited capability to push counternarrative. Yes, NYT etc., are pushing this, but ultimately it doesn’t matter: the best candidate would be able to counteract this. Harris may do better there, IDK. Tough call

I mean you’d literally have to turn him into Nixon at this point: booted from office by his own party. How’s that gonna go for that party four months later? Maybe if he decided to exit on his own, maybe it’s doable, but it’s evidently not going to happen and that’s not really surprising

Seeing some people being like “If Biden chooses to resist our efforts to oust him, he’ll tear down the party and he’ll be to blame for the consequences” and no, I’m pretty sure that you would also be to blame for the consequences

There’s a real revolutionary mindset in some of these pundit and Dem circles right now, where “remove Biden” has become an end unto itself, unquestionably correct, and anyone who tries to hold back the tide of history is an obstacle, and this is where revolutions get into trouble frankly

“To make things better we need to pull down the system” - but everyone stops thinking about “making things better” and starts focusing on pulling down the system, and before you know it you’ve destroyed your society to cut the king’s head off and there’s no actual path towards “better”

Reply to

En Buen Ora

What’s funny about this is that the lesson our official politics knowers took from Obama’s focus on Bain was “specifically, try to tie your opponent to a vulture capital firm” not “identify a line of attack that really bites and hammer it into the dirt”

This led to many strained efforts to characterize Trump as a slick-suit capitalist while ignoring the fact that he’s, you know, a criminal rapist and fascist

Yes, an incredibly underacknowledged reality is that social media, with its boom-bust viral dynamics and its instant performance feedback on ideas, has created an extremely demand-driven media ecosystem. Outlets and individuals alike rapidly iterate towards whatever explodes fastest on social

It’s not even being judged by that. It’s being judged by “whatever makes my content popular on TikTok or gets me attention from the NYT”. It’s why we’re getting armchair dementia diagnoses from people whose last hard science class was the gentleman’s C they rocked in 10th grade biology.

I believe that you have an account of any size on a social site you know this is true: you have a pretty sharp intuitive what kinds of posts will do numbers and you feel the pressure to write those kinds of posts, whether you admit it or otherwise

News organizations face a version of the same pressure, they need to do numbers and the way to do that is write stuff that’s viral and they’re getting constant feedback on the tenor and focus of stories and coverage that does numbers and goes viral. They’re drawn magnetically towards it

Reply to

Michael Tae Sweeney

I wonder if there are any other scumbag grifters whose political success is completely mysterious to the pedigreed Ivy League class

tbh I feel like this whole thing is kinda my final victory on the media narratives debate even though it heralds the destruction of everyone smart enough to actually participate in the debate

And then a party insiders being alarmed at the reporting on those party insiders’ alarm at the narrative narrative.

we’re gonna destroy the entire presidential administration because of circular, spiraling media narratives mainly propagating on Twitter and private internet chats, maybe this was a real problem after all

Reply to

Michael Tae Sweeney

I mean lawyers are great at understanding how to frame things to win hearts and minds… just, the kind that litigate crummy personal injury cases to a jury, not the fancy kind whose entire career is filing appellate briefs to Harvard-educated circuit court judges. Guess which kind go into politics

Reply to

Robin Broshi

Here’s the next paragraph (written before Dobbs, by the way)