President Trump's Comments at 75th Anniversary of D-Day Landing at Normandy (VIDEO)

At USA Today, "'He can be a statesman': Trump's Normandy speech well-received by critics, Scarborough says, 'I hope he means it'."

(Fuck Joe Scarborough.)

Visting Normandy American Cemetary

This is a phenomenal essay.

Very moving.

From Rachel Donadio, at the Atlantic, "Nothing Prepares You for Visiting Omaha Beach."

On the 75th anniversary of D-Day tomorrow, President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron will participate in a commemoration at the Normandy American Cemetery. I visited this part of Normandy recently and it left an indelible mark. https://t.co/4ulsjFeDIv

— Rachel Donadio (@RachelDonadio) June 5, 2019

Lindsay Lohan Nude for Playboy Magazine

At London's Daily Mail, "Lindsay Lohan steals Marilyn Monroe's style as she goes NAKED in retro-inspired Playboy shoot... complete with peroxide blonde tresses, vampish nails, sky-high heels and nothing else."

Lindsay Lohan steals Marilyn Monroe's style as she goes NAKED in retro-inspired Playboy shoot https://t.co/TXSt7MwDZp

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) June 6, 2019

Women Taking Selfies

At Drunken Stepfather, "TOP 10 SELFIES OF THE DAY."

The Quietest Generation: Yellowed World War II Records Vividly Show Valor That Veterans Concealed

This is such an interesting story.

At the New York Times, "Their Fathers Never Spoke of the War. Their Children Want to Know Why":

NEW ORLEANS — All his life, Joseph Griesser hungered to hear the story of his father’s Army service in World War II.

What he had were vague outlines: that Lt. Frank Griesser had splashed onto Omaha Beach on D-Day; that his lifelong pronounced limp had come from an artillery blast. But the details? They remained largely unspoken until the day his father died in 1999, leaving Mr. Griesser wishing he knew more.

“He never talked about it; I just knew he was injured in the war,” said Mr. Griesser, who lives in Stone Harbor, N.J. “We went to see the movie ‘The Longest Day’ together, but that was pretty much the extent of our conversation about the war. I think he just wanted to put it behind him.”

Many of the Americans who fought to crush the Axis in World War II came home feeling the same way — so many, in fact, that those lauded as the Greatest Generation might just as easily be called the Quietest.

Where did they serve? What did they do and see? Spouses and children often learned not to ask. And by now, most no longer have the chance: Fewer than 3 percent of the 16 million American veterans of the war are still alive, and all are in their 90s or beyond.

But that has not kept their children and grandchildren from wanting to know their stories, especially as the 75th anniversaries of the D-Day invasion and the other triumphs of the war’s final year have neared. And a growing number of them are turning to experts to help glean what they can from cryptic, yellowed military records.

“We have people calling every day to try to find out about their fathers,” said Tanja Spitzer, a researcher at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. “They regret that they didn’t do anything when their parents were alive. We get a lot of apologizing about it. For them, it is very emotional.”

Ms. Spitzer tells them it is not too late. Among the nation’s many staggering accomplishments in World War II were the billions of pages of personnel files that War Department and Navy clerks amassed to keep track of everyone in uniform. Most of those records still exist, stored in a climate-controlled facility in St. Louis by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The repository is immense, with enough boxes of files to stretch more than 545 miles. The boxes hold everything from the mundane, like payrolls and medical screening forms, to the heart-tugging: photos of young recruits, letters from worried mothers, medal citations. Researchers can use them to recreate the individual stories that many troops never told.

“We can tell a lot,” Ms. Spitzer said. “If you know what you are looking for, you can really create a full picture.”

Responding to the growing interest, the museum created a research team this year focused solely on piecing together profiles of veterans from the archives, joining an array of military historians-for-hire who work with families like the Griessers.

“It’s a lot of sons and daughters, wishing they had the conversations that were too painful to have when their fathers were still alive,” said William Beigel, an independent historian in Redondo Beach, Calif., who has been researching World War II veterans for 20 years. He said demand has been surging as the ranks of living veterans have dwindled, and he now gets as many as 25 requests a day.

*****

Dolores Milhous remembers her father, Lt. James E. Robinson Jr., only as the tall man who came through the screen door and hoisted her onto his shoulders shortly before he shipped out. When he was killed in combat in the spring of 1945, she was 2 years old.

“Mother always talked about him,” said Ms. Milhous, 76, who lives in Dallas. “But there was so much I didn’t know — things I wished I asked before Mother passed away, but I hesitated because it made her so sad.”

Knowing that the memory of her father would only erode further as it was passed down to her five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, she asked the museum researchers to look for his file.

They returned with a stack of 240 partially burned pages from the archive, detailing a stunning story she had known in outline but not detail: Her father, a slight 25-year-old with a slim mustache and a Texas accent, had turned the tide in a battle involving thousands of men, and was posthumously awarded the military’s highest award for heroism, the Medal of Honor.

Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day

A new edited volume, with Rick Atkinson.

At Amazon, Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day.

Liel Leibovitz on the Ahmari/French Debate Over Conservatism

A big story on Twitter right now is Steven Crowder getting demonetized by YouTube, after a homosexual dude known as @GayWonk got his feelings hurt and mounted an all-out jihad against Crowder, claiming "homophobia," "racism," and who knows what else?

The Other McCain blogged on this a couple of days ago: "Totalitarian @GayWonk Is Attempting to Silence Conservative @SCrowder."

Meanwhile, I'm very interested in the debate Sohrab Ahmari kicked off with his blistering essay at First Things. I blogged about it here: "Our Existential Struggle."

I'm on Sohrab's side, but boy is this debate getting testy.

I'll have more, no doubt, but definitely read this piece from Liel Leibovich, at the Tablet, "Why Jews Should Pay Attention to the Recent Debate Rocking American Conservatism":

One of the best entries to the fun conservative debate of the moment. Among other things, it looks at whether NeverTrumpism is as civil as it loudly claims to be. https://t.co/HS3JyYCnEG

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) June 4, 2019

You don’t have to be conservative, or particularly religious, to spot a few deep-seated problems with the arguments advanced by French, Stephens, and the rest of the Never Trump cadre. Three fallacies in particular stand out.

The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”

To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.

Now that this story has been thoroughly investigated and discredited, it seems fair to ask: Is championing a loony and deeply corrosive conspiracy theory proof of anyone’s superior virtue? The fact that these accusations were false implies that the Never Trumpers who made them early and often were among the political pyromaniacs, and are therefore deserving of the very obloquy that they heaped on Trump. And what about people like Carter Page, a blameless ex-Navy officer who was defamed as an agent of a shadowy, ever-expanding conspiracy headquartered in Moscow?

Conspiracy-mongering doesn’t seem like much of a public virtue. Certainly, the Never Trumpers should have known better than to join in the massive publicity campaign around a “dossier” supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence officer rehashing third-hand hearsay and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You can still find many faults with Donald Trump’s behavior in and out of office, including some cardinal enough perhaps to merit impeachment, without buying in to some moronic ghost story about an orange-hued traitor who seized the highest office in the land with the help of Vladimir Putin’s social media goons. All that should go without saying, especially for people who ostensibly devote their lives to elevating and enriching the tone of our public discourse.

It is therefore particularly strange to find that David French lent his considerable conservative credibility to the Russiagate lunacy. Here he is, for example, mocking those calling Russiagate a hoax by accusing them of being complicit with Trump receiving oppositional research from a foreign power—which, ironically, is precisely what the Clinton campaign had in fact done, in compiling the “dossier” in the first place. And here he is cheering for the now highly contested BuzzFeed story alleging that Trump instructed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress, an allegation that is contradicted by the Mueller report itself. And here he is dismissing the suggestion, by then backed by mounting evidence, that Russiagate may be a hoax or itself some kind of conspiracy.

It is true that French took care to sound unfailingly fair, a lone voice for reason in a political reality inflamed by lunatics left and right. The thing he was being reasonable about, however, was an FBI investigation that emerged out of a blatant politically motivated forgery. Now, it’s perfectly plausible that French was carrying on his arguments in good faith, even when overwhelming evidence to the contrary was always there for a slightly more curious or skeptical journalist to discover. What’s disturbing, from the public virtue standpoint, is that French has yet to admit his own failings, which are compounded by his less-than-courageous misrepresentations of what he actually wrote: In his reply to Ahmari, he strongly denied he had promoted the collusion story, a point of view that’s difficult to defend when your byline appears on stories like “There Is Now Evidence That Senior Trump Officials Attempted to Collude with Russia.”

French and the other self-appointed guardians of civility, then, should do us all a favor and drop the civic virtue act. They’re not disinterested guardians of our public institutions; they are actors, working in an industry that rewards them for dressing up in Roman Republican drag and reciting Cicero for the yokels. This is why Bill Kristol, another of the Never Trumpers, could raise money for his vanity website, The Bulwark, and why he could expect his new creation be lauded on CNN as “a conservative site unafraid to take on Trump,” even as the site was staffed by leftist millennials and dutifully followed progressive propaganda lines. Like anyone whose living depends on keeping on the right side of a leftist industry, they understood that there’s only so much you can say if you care about cashing a paycheck—especially when the president and leader of your own party won’t take your phone calls.

The Never Trumpers, of course, aren’t the first Americans to hide cold careerism behind a wall of virtue-signaling. It’s why so many in the professional punditry went the way of Never Trump: More than anything else, the decision to align oneself with a movement that, ontologically, vows to reject the president a priori, no matter what he might say or do, regardless of your own supposed political beliefs, is a way of affirming one’s professional class loyalties, thus ensuring that your progeny will still be accepted and acceptable at Yale.

Which, really, wouldn’t be much of a problem if the Never Trumpers were all as genuinely committed to gentility as David French. Sadly, they’re not, and you needn’t go much further than Stephens’ column to understand why. Stephens and Ahmari are friendly. It was Stephens who helped Ahmari get his first job at The Wall Street Journal. And Stephens is thanked in Ahmari’s recent memoir, a candid, thoughtful, and deeply moving account of his journey to Catholicism. And Bret Stephens is a gentleman, in a way that Donald Trump surely is not. Yet it is possible to imagine Stephens as the wrong kind of gentleman when reading his column contra Ahmari: Sounding every bit like a bigoted member of a 19th-century gentleman’s club railing against the papists, Stephens casually and cruelly robs his former protégé of the intricacies of his faith-based argument for the pleasure of painting him as “an ardent convert” merrily rolling along on his way to a Handmaid’s Tale-like future for America.

To tell an Iranian immigrant that he doesn’t understand the way American liberalism works because he ended up on the side of faith rather than on the side of deracinated cosmopolitan universalism isn’t just an impoverished reading of America’s foundations or a blatantly condescending comment; it’s also indicative of a mindset that seeks to immediately equate any disagreement with some inherent and irreparable character flaw.

On the subject of dissenters, the Never Trumpers eternal and immovable contempt merely apes that of their newfound pals on the left, for whom the president is a Nazi, the Republicans are perennially in the throes of a War on Women, and anyone who doesn’t fully subscribe to the latest lunacies of the identity politics-driven college campus cult is a racist creep. You may believe such an approach to politics is effective, but to pretend it is somehow morally superior is dishonest at best and, at worst, nefarious—a sleazy attempt to portray anyone who disagrees with you as not quite clean enough to be admitted into the league of enlightened gentlemen.

So much for the cocktail party chatter. The larger problem here is that at no point do Stephens, French, et al. deliver a concrete explanation of how they propose conservatism go about opposing, to say nothing of reversing, the new social and moral order that the progressive left has been busily implementing in America for a decade or more. At best, they claim that there’s no real crisis after all.

Presumably, the Never Trumpers and their ilk were simply manipulating the rubes and making bank when they denounced tenured radicals and liberal judges and the like under Clinton and Obama. In reality, they are perfectly content to live in a culture in which universities reject scientifically sound peer-reviewed papers for fear of offending the transgender community; in which pro-Israel speakers are routinely shouted down on campuses, and people with unpopular views are physically attacked; in which large technology platforms actively censor speech; in which journalists giddily defend the doxxing of a private citizen who created and shared a video they didn’t like; in which faith and those who practice it in earnest are dismissed as benighted bigots; in which the whims of unelected bureaucrats trump the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Never Trump was therefore a misnomer; they were simply elitist progressives who did an awkward kind of dance before arriving at their predestined home in the Democratic Party.

Ahmari, not unlike the zealous left he opposes, has a very distinct idea of where he wants the country to go. He doesn’t want it to end up where objecting to lunatic theories, forged by crackpot academics and defying millennia of lived human experience, gets you called a bigot and fired from your job. He doesn’t want to try and engage in dialogue with people who believe that disagreeing with their opinions causes them some sort of harm and that speech must therefore be regulated by the government or large tech companies. He doesn’t want an America in which color of skin and religious affiliation and sexual preference trump or mute the content of your character. Looking at public schools and private universities, Hollywood and publishing, academia and social media, Ahmari sees the threat posed by progressive doctrine to established American norms and values as entirely real. That he wants to fight it doesn’t make him, as Stephens suggested, a Catholic mullah-in-waiting. It makes him a normal American...

RTWT.

Lindsey Pelas on the Red Carpet

At Taxi Driver:

Lindsey Pelas Enormous Cleavage on the Red Carpet - https://t.co/xPJgD5RMFC - pic.twitter.com/2LSXArQwmN

— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) May 29, 2019

Alexis Ren in the Shower

At Taxi Driver, "Alexis Ren Topless (but covered) in the Shower."

Emma Watson Bikini Photos

She looks good, ready for summer.

At Drunken Stepfather, "Emma Watson - seen in a bikini in Cabo."

And at Taxi Driver:

Emma Watson on Holiday in a White Bikini - https://t.co/xlWZgX1PWL - pic.twitter.com/ep9Mcwkcy3

— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) June 5, 2019

'99 Luftballons'

It's Nena, from yesterday's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM Los Angles, "99 Luftballons."

Starlight
Muse
6:43am

St. Elmo's Fire
John Parr
6:39am

It's My Life
Talk Talk
6:36am

Basketcase
Green Day
6:25am

99 Luftballoons
Nena
6:21am

Wishing You Were Here
Pink Floyd
6:17am

The Middle
Jimmy Eat World
6:14am

Welcome To The Jungle
Guns N Roses
6:10am

People Are People
Depeche Mode
6:06am

Comedown
BUSH
5:53am

Our Existential Struggle

It's the culture war, and it's gotten so bad there's no room for compromise. Some conservatives want to take it to the enemy --- leftists --- and reverse the gun-sights, using the exact same destroying tactics they use on conservatives and the traditional culture.

I can dig it.

If you've been reading anything by David Horowitz the last decade or two, you'll know that the left gives no quarter, and if you want to beat them, you need to be just as ruthless and then some.

Sohrab Ahmari had a piece attacking the NeverTrump wussies at National Review (and elsewhere, really), with specific mention to David French (whom I usually ignore).

Boy, Mr. Sohrab sent all kinds of folks into conniptions of apoplexy.

See, "AGAINST DAVID FRENCH-ISM."

And here's the Google link to the responses.

And don't miss Roger Kimball, especially the second half of the essay, at American Greatness, "Sohrab Ahmari and Our Existential Struggle":

Sohrab Ahmari and Our Existential Struggle | @rogerkimball brings his peerless erudition to bear https://t.co/o1ozphUdW7

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) June 2, 2019

Again, more could be said about all of this, but let me move on briefly to what I think is the other key passage of Sohrab’s essay. It comes at the end. “Progressives,” he writes,

understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

This passage was Exhibit A for Sohrab’s critics. Imagine, consigning civility and decency to the status of “second values”! Praising “enmity,” endorsing our own values and (dread word) “orthodoxy.”

Some of Sohrab’s critics seem to think that such passages indicated that he was advocating a new theocracy. I think he is advocating realism when it comes to our opponents in the culture war. What they want is not tolerance but full-throated approbation, whether the issue is bringing children to public libraries to be indoctrinated by sexual freaks, unlimited abortion, radical environmentalism, or the smorgasbord of toxins populating the ideology of identity politics. What they offer is not tolerance, not debate, but an invitation to submit to their view of the world.

In such situations, dissent cannot succeed if it proceeds piecemeal. It must recognize that what is at stake is, in the deepest sense, an anthropology, a view of what man is. We are living among the fragments of a shattered inheritance, morally and socially as well as politically. The so-called liberals (so-called because no one is more illiberal) are bent on scattering those fragments and trampling underfoot the values they represent.

Sohrab Ahmari’s essay is certainly not the last word in how to respond to this onslaught. But it has the inestimable virtue of understanding that this battle is not fodder for a debating club but an existential struggle.

Perky Lily Mo Sheen

It's Kate Beckinsale's daughter, and she's taking after her mom in the looks department, if not the slutty Instragram influencer department. (*Indifferent emoji shrug here.*)

At Drunken Stepfather, "LILY MO SHEEN TOPLESS OF THE DAY."

And at Celeb Jihad, "LILY MO SHEEN HORNY TITS AND ASS SHOW."

Patriot Anna Timmer Blasts Rep. Justin Amash at Grand Rapids Town Hall (VIDEO)

This was a viral moment on social media, and the woman appeared on Fox News as well.

Thank you all for the love! Unexpected and greatly appreciated. This is a wrap for me for the week, but I'll be back in the Twitter game on Monday!

— Anna Timmer (@VeritasSola) June 2, 2019

David Epstein, Range

At Amazon, David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Timothy P. Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse.

Since Tiananmen, China Has Never Been the Same

A flashback to 30 years ago this week.

At the Los Angeles Times, "I watched the 1989 Tiananmen uprising. China has never been the same":

Former @latimes bureau chief David Holley covered the Tiananmen massacre 30 years ago. This is his memory of the experience: https://t.co/34chwcuUhp

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 1, 2019

In the predawn hours of June 4, 1989, the Chinese army was bringing a bloody end to seven weeks of student-led protests centered on Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s historic center.

From the windows of a deserted coffee shop at the Beijing Hotel, a few hundred yards east of Tiananmen, I could look toward the square and see several hundred soldiers forming lines across the capital’s broad main street. In front of the hotel was an angry and brave crowd of a couple thousand Beijing residents. These protesters were furious at the army for shooting its way into the city center, tanks and armored personnel carriers smashing obstacles, soldiers spraying bullets at crowds blocking its advance. Now I watched as the soldiers periodically fired into this crowd.

For me, what the Chinese call simply “June 4” — a date that fundamentally shaped today’s China — had begun the previous evening.

I was the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief then, and had overseen the newspaper’s coverage of the pro-democracy protests since they began in mid-April. The Times’ team had been taking turns staking out the square, and my shift was to begin at midnight. Before leaving home late on June 3, I learned that the army had begun smashing its way through crowds several miles west of Tiananmen.

I grabbed my bicycle and raced toward the square.

As I pedaled, I passed hundreds of Beijing residents fleeing on foot and bicycle away from the square and the main body of troops approaching from the west.

Soon a single armored personnel carrier came hurtling around a corner, headed toward the square. As it clambered over red-and-white concrete traffic barriers placed by protesters, I nearly kept up with it, weaving my own way around the barriers — which might stop trucks and cars but not tanks and bicycles. Finally the driver stopped when he encountered too thick a crowd on a side street at the northeast corner of the square. It seemed he was unwilling to start killing masses of people by running them over. Once the armored vehicle stopped, someone thrust a thick metal bar into its treads.

The furious crowd threw burning blankets and Molotov cocktails onto the vehicle; a few young men got on top and began banging the hatch. They managed an opening and started throwing burning objects inside. Three soldiers jumped out, scattering into the crowd. I followed one, and watched as he ran in a zigzag pattern while being severely beaten with pipes and sticks. Blood dripped down his face, which held a look of terror. Then two or three students grabbed him away from his tormentors, who almost certainly were not students, and put him into a nearby ambulance.

I interviewed students at the center of the square, who planned nonviolent resistance to the end, and nonstudents, more inclined to fight back, who dominated the fringes. I moved from the pedestrian part of the square onto Changan Avenue, which passes the famous portrait of Mao Tse-tung on Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Then I realized that I was within bullet range of soldiers.

I decided to telephone the bureau from the Beijing Hotel — mobile phones were still a rarity in Beijing at the time. At the hotel entrance, security searched me for cameras or film. I found a phone in the dark coffee shop, and to my relief the hotel operator put me through to my office. I watched the shooting through the windows and periodically phoned in more notes.

Rumors and unconfirmed reports spread among the international reporters, Chinese and other foreigners in the hotel, and many inside came to believe that the sounds of gunfire audible from the direction of the square meant the students who stayed behind were being killed. I figured that was probably what was happening.

Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s successor as China’s paramount leader, had ordered the army to take the square by dawn — and authorized it to do the killing necessary to achieve this. The slaughter ranged over much of the city, mostly along several miles of the western approach roads to Tiananmen.

The Tiananmen uprising came during a fateful year in which communism was under siege in Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall would fall that November; two years later, the Soviet Union would cease to exist. Deng’s fateful decision may have been timed in part to a desire to clear the square before a June 4 election that would end communism in Poland. Deng was not seriously afraid of the students, but he did fear a Polish-style Solidarity movement.

The months of protest in China had been triggered by the death of a popular former Communist Party leader, Hu Yaobang, who lost the party’s top post in 1987 partly on charges of being too soft on protesters. In the spring of 1989, students were planning pro-democracy demonstrations for the 70th anniversary of a watershed protest on May 4, 1919. The students moved their plans earlier by bringing wreaths to Tiananmen Square to honor Hu upon his death.

That was an implicit criticism of the surviving leaders. Yet it was difficult for the police to immediately suppress this because superficially it began as mourning for a top Communist.

Officials under Deng divided bitterly over the protests, which gathered momentum during a visit by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in mid-May.

When Deng decided to use the army to clear the square, Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, the leading economic reformer who was relatively liberal politically, refused to go along.

Word of Zhao’s opposition leaked, and when troops tried to enter the capital on May 20 massive crowds blocked them. The people of Beijing, supporting the students’ calls for more freedom and an attack on corruption, peacefully held their country’s army at bay for two weeks, as the protests morphed into an attempt to force Deng out and perhaps throw power to Zhao. But by then it was too late: Zhao was under house arrest, and Deng along with the other tough old warriors ruling China had no intention of losing this battle...

RTWT.

Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families

At Amazon, Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860.

The Cable-Social Media Feedback Loop

Jonathan Martin is on to something I think, but few reporters outline current politics as such: the powerful role activist media plays in current partisan campaign mobilization.

Check this tweetstorm for the NYT piece, via Memeorandum, "You Don't Have to Be in Des Moines.' Democrats Expand Primary Map, Spurred by Social Media."

NEW: Morning from San Fran, where 14 (!) Dem candidates have gathered for the Calif Dem convention

At the same time, Biden is in...Ohio tonight.

How and why the 2020 race went national - and IA & NH have lost their stranglehold >>https://t.co/Sp2Azp600m pic.twitter.com/YLhPIgFXIe

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

Hope you’ll read the story, but this map from @jsonkao really paints the picture:

the Dem candidates have already visited over 30 states + territories for non-fundraising events.

And the year isn’t halfway done https://t.co/Sp2Azp600m pic.twitter.com/8qNLXPqzee

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

It’s not *just* Super Tuesday.

The nature of Dem coalition & Trump has made ‘20 the mirror of ‘08:

Obama spent 89 days in Iowa and won the nom in part bc he showed there he could win rural whites. Now the candidates must prove they have a message for, and can win, non-whites.

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

It’s hard to overstate how central the cable-social media feedback loop has become to this primary. Staff judge events in part on if cables went live from venue. And they’re fixated on creating settings& moments that can go viral.

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

Warren has won plaudits for her meaty policy proposals, but no candidate besides Biden has benefited as much from Trump. Why?

Because cable TV drives polling and cable is fixated on Mueller

After Warren called for impeachment her cable mentions soared and polling followed...

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

...and then Warren helped herself w a good turn at, wait for it, a *cable* town hall just 3 days after calling for impeachment post-Mueller report

It’s no accident polls show she’s doing best of any non-Biden candidate among the most engaged Dems: they’re glued to cable/social

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

BUT: The early states still thin the field@davidplouffe warns that campaigns are making a mistake if IA and NH aren’t their “the north star”

“If you need to come in third but you came in fifth you’ll say, ‘Shit, if only I had spent three or four more days in Iowa.’”

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 1, 2019

AND:

the new rules from the DNC on debate access will only incentivize candidates to focus more on breaking thru on TV and spending more on social/TV https://t.co/Sp2Azp600m

— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 2, 2019

Mindy Robinson Patriotic

On Twitter:

#NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/iFMcBZnWEi

— Mindy Robinson 🇺🇸 (@iheartmindy) May 31, 2019