EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

What a guy to call someone “incurious”

Young Matt Yglesias

https://media2.giphy.com/media/3oriff8YpKIxspTvsA/giphy_s.gif

Well saying "nothing is popular at the start" is clearly hyperbole.

Today in "if only someone had tried this brilliant idea before!"

A good way to not have everything held hostage by Joe Manchin would be to nominate politicians who are more conservative than Joe Biden and try to win senate races in North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 4, 2021

lol unbelievable

theres literally never been a time when the democrats havent been doing that

The centrist troops who ran against Cornyn and McConnell got crushed IIRC

yeah centrism as practiced over the last 30 odd years is just not too popular right now

Is there any reason to think Theresa Greenfield isn't more conservative than Joe Biden? Was Cal Cunningham a flaming liberal? Not as far as I know. What exactly is the bad choice he thinks the Democrats are making here?

and the only democratic senator in those five states (Sherrod Brown) is markedly less conservative than Joe Biden

Maybe he wants to clone Strom Thurmond circa 1946 and bring back the Dixiecrats.

Hardcore identity politics surfaced in 2016 as an opportunistic anti-Bernie gambit but most of the Young Left took the critique to heart and woke radicalism was very in vogue in 2020 as Sunrise etc hopped on the defund police bandwagon. Adams now bringing it back full circle.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 20, 2021

totally

Sunrise etc

what percentage of americans have any clue who adams is

Who is he talking about? The Dilbert guy?

nyc mayor candidate

Not going to make an argument that this guy was ever good, but it's pretty clear that twitter has steadily fried his brain over the past 6 years or so

the twitter/substack combo has made brain fry irresistible to a handful of famous bloggers

him greenwald taibbi sully are just out there tweeting "big woke identity politics cancelation today" then writing insane emails and making millions of dollars, easy work

Yeah, was gonna say seems like Vox helped rein in some of his worst/laziest impulses.

i think one thing with the aforementioned substackers is despite building careers around being iconoclasts they really all are ultimately elitists and mass movements like blm really just offend their sensibilities

its amazing that matty tries to categorize defund the police as identity politics, its name is literally a policy proposal lol

oh so Iglesias has become one of those people who uses woke ironically/unironically, scare quotes/no scare quotes

It's not just Adams, the fact that none of the top three candidates in the Democratic primary in a famously liberal city are willing to support "defund the police" as a slogan is telling.

amazing that matty tries to categorize defund the police as identity politics

not so amazing if matty firmly believes that the major function of the police is to enforce racial and class norms and that voters clearly understand this and vote according to where they stand within that system of privilege. I've no idea if matty grasps this concept consciously and openly or just unconsciously and implicitly bcz he's a white American.

reasonable point

someone posted a screencap of Yglesias in 2016 essaying about how you can't divorce identity politics from politics because it's the only real and consistent form of politics

but Matty has deleted yesterday's tweet so I can't find it

The contrarian grift is getting competitive so here's Matty insisting Tucker Carlson and Stephen fucking MILLER are not white nationalist extremists: https://t.co/zb11RWpfr1

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) June 25, 2021

He deleted the tweet — the sad part is, I bet it's because he spelled Miller's first name with a "v" instead of a "ph".

The tweet

Deleted already, usually he waits a few weeks pic.twitter.com/tq5787D9dN

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) June 25, 2021

Do you think he has an inner life or is he just an automaton

Anyone defending this fucker past this point is extremely suspect imo

brooks to yglesias is approximately the rate of change pic.twitter.com/ZXZTg49X26

— Whet Moser (@whet) July 3, 2021

tf

lol at "twitter is real life" tbf

hell yeah bud they’re totally buying in on those hard hitting truth bombs you’re selling out of the back of your substack, and def not just a bunch of bloodless freaks who require their worldview reflected back to them while the ocean burns

i know haters itt won't cop to it but klain reading yglesias is a huge improvement over obama reading david brooks. just on monetary/fiscal policy (probably the most important thing the white house has leverage on rn) matt is way more dovish than the median wonk

in general it's kinda wild how online the biden administration are. like economists on staff and in advisory positions are disproportionately ones who have been active on twitter within the past 3 years

Yglesias may be relatively dovish but the Biden team still seems to be fixated on triangulating with increasingly extreme (R) positions which I guess is how we end up at privatizing the TVA.

That, or they’re just using all this posturing to cover for the fact that the core platform of the Democratic Party is still rapacious neoliberalism.

Failing ever upward...

🚨NEW: D.C. journalists @lkmcgann and Mark Bauman are launching a new, DC-based media company with $10 million+ Series A funding
— @mattyglesias will be editor at large
— Have already hired 20+ people, aiming to have ~60 by end of year
— Launching Septhttps://t.co/syKJXKefrd

— Sara Fischer (@sarafischer) July 10, 2021

Guess we'll never get to witness the pure race science era of Matty's substack career.

(Until whatever billionaires are funding this pull the rug out when Biden's not in the White House anymore.)

https://i.imgur.com/XDownVq.png

Not politicians comfortable calling people faggots, politicians who *only just recently* became uncomfortable and thus make people with retrograde cultural views feel comfortable with him. https://t.co/C1dnv4wEaq

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 2, 2021

I think Yglesias's main things right now are "kill single family zoning" and "the DOJ should be prosecuting crimes committed by Trump administration officials instead of gaily letting bygones be bygones"

I'm in favor of killing single family zoning, Matty is good again

Matty is good again

he'll move on to worse crap soon enough

I don’t think people were upset that you engaged in something contentious— I think they were upset that you dropped the F bomb as a straight person. pic.twitter.com/zNcLPbaYcc

— Michael Havlin (@HavlinMichael) August 2, 2021

I honestly hadn't realized that a straight person typing out 'the f-slur' was considered beyond the pale in a context like this (responding to a direct question about the word, obviously not 'using' the slur etc), but lots of people responding to Yglesias here seem think so. I knew that this was conventual wisdom with the n-word but thought that was essentially a unique thing? Is this a recent development, or is are people just mad in this case because it's Yglesias and he's an annoying guy who likes to passive-aggressively troll people on twitter?

I think people got pissed at him because he was the one who broached the subject, and it seemed like he did so specifically because it would allow him the opportunity to use the word (in a "just askin' questions here, guy" way, of course of course of course). It was a typical asshole move.

that's his own affair