Adam Serwer 🍝
@AdamSerwer
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Staff Writer, @TheAtlantic Ideas. [email protected]. Order THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT here: https://t.co/JryuLIO8yR 🟡🐺🔴
Joined September 2008
A few years ago I wrote an essay titled "The Cruelty Is The Point" on Trump's approach to politics and policy. On Tuesday, my book sharing that title is being published. Today in the @nytimes, I explain why Trumpist politics didn't end with his defeat.
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Some people out here who think police murdering a black 12 year old with a toy gun is justified suddenly get really into forgiveness and grace when a white teen loses his chance go to Harvard.
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There are no cats in this pic, I just want everyone to know how beautiful my daughter is.
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The president is threatening violence against people who protest him
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When they say they’re willing to die for the economy what they mean is they’re willing to let you die for the economy.
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It's telling that resentment towards wealth in sports is always directed at black athletes and not the vastly wealthier franchise owners.
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“I’m voting for the tax cuts not the racism” isn’t a thing. It’s a package deal.
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That Chance tweet is an example of a larger problem, which is viewing the presidency as a vessel for your hopes and dreams rather than as a job that requires particular skills/talents/temperament/knowledge to do well.
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The “are you triggered snowflake????” crowd is somehow on day 3 of a sputtering tantrum over a razor blade commercial.
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Watching the Roy Moore re-endorsements I'm reminded of the many, many times I've seen white people on cable news arguing black culture is excessively tolerant of criminal behavior.
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The “Biden memorized all the questions and answers” talking point is somewhat in tension with the “Biden has dementia” talking point.
Looks to me that Biden had an idea of what the questions would be, at least areas of questioning.
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White kids in MAGA hats jeering a Native American Vietnam veteran. This era is just a series of extremely heavy-handed metaphors.
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White people insisting their European ancestors came “legally” during a period where the US had open borders and didnt even require immigrants to learn english is one of the dumbest and most harmful myths guiding our current politics.
Enjoying my time in Ireland. Visited County Cavan where my ancestors were evicted from their land in 1845. That forced them to come to America legally so they wouldn’t starve. Pardon me if I reject the “white privilege” scenario if applied to my family.
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Good morning, Trump is demanding the arrest of his political rivals, Pence won’t commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and Republican Senator Mike Lee thinks “liberty” can exist without the ability of the people to freely choose their leaders.
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The funniest thing about American politics is obscenely wealthy people pretending to hate “elites,” and the weirdest thing is people who go along with it.
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Pretty interesting how in commentary about NFL protests "our troops" are presumed to be white and have no personal stake in racial equality.
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"You don't have freedom of speech at your job", is weird for an admin arguing businesses can refuse gay customers on free speech grounds.
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Wow I guess they’re tearing down confederate monuments in Iowa too.
I've seen enough. Rep. Steve King (R) has been defeated in #IA04.
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I don’t think we are prepared as a society for what happens to public memory when the generations that lived through Jim Crow leave us.
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Whether you support the protests or oppose them, one question you should honestly grapple with is whether there’s an arrest of the officer who killed Floyd without them.
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The question is now: how many Republican officials were profiting off their secret foreknowledge of a mass casualty event while the president and his propaganda network were assuring everyone that the coronavirus was “contained?”.
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It’s sort of wild how many people miss the obvious, which is that Trump’s cruelty appeals disproportionately to *men* across socioeconomic lines.
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A Black man and a Jew winning election to the US Senate in the deep south is evocative of the old civil rights alliance in a way I find . emotionally resonant.
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There are two types of people in interracial relationships : those who would never ever use their partner as a justification for making racist remarks, and bad people.
"I'm married to an Asian" -- Kellyanne Conway downplays White House official reportedly calling coronavirus "Kung-Flu" and Trump using the term "Chinese Virus"
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I personally saw Ferguson police use crushing force against protesters for much less than what the Nazis in Charlottesville are doing today.
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The first big vote by mail controversy was FDR wanting to help the troops vote but the Dixiecrats freaking out that doing so could help enfranchise black people. Anyway just a random historical fact obviously unrelated to anything today.
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Robert E. Lee was a traitor, a brute and a slaver who wouldn't even trade black union soldiers taken prisoner for the lives of his own men because he saw black people as property to be owned.
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The funniest thing about the bunker story is Trump’s fear of looking weak means can be baited, over and over, into denying that he hid in a bunker and thus reminding everyone he hid in a bunker.
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I genuinely do not understand framing the fate of legislation that will affect millions of people as the subplot of a story about an individual senator’s self-actualization.
Kyrsten Sinema’s allies have some free advice for anyone trying to bully the wine-drinking triathlete into supporting Biden's $3.5 trillion budget bill: She doesn’t play by Washington’s rules — and she's prepared to walk away.
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MLK on the theory that somehow advocating for equal rights turns people into white nationalists
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“If a homeless man makes me uncomfortable, the sentence is death” is the kind of argument I think people should be embarrassed to make in public.
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The reaction to Warren’s proposal on student loans helpfully illustrates the extent to which certain political strategies are predicated on making regular people resent each other over public spending that would improve many people’s lives, while the ultra rich clean everyone out.
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The "I went to Yale, I couldn't have abused alcohol" is certainly baffling to any public school kid who made it to an expensive private college and encountered private school kids for the first time.
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Obviously this is a dumb remark, but more interesting is that every Trumpist pundit understands the ravenous appetite their audiences have for belittling the tremendously successful black people they see on television, and rushes to meet every opportunity to do it.
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Superman is an undocumented immigrant
BREAKING: An X-Ray image has been released from President @realDonaldTrump’s visit to Walter Reed. Surely @CNN can stop the hysteria now!
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Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but I think removing episodes with offensive content from availability is protecting the brand more than any kind of progress. The episodes should stay up and audiences should evaluate those shows accordingly.
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I will never write anything as concise and explanatory about race in America as this.
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One thing I hope we take away from all this “consulting” stuff is that a lot of rich people get paid for being rich and knowing other rich people and not for doing anything reconizable as work.
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The wildest thing about James Comey is that after everything, he thinks the world still needs his advice about how to handle Trump, the subject of the defining mistake of his career.
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Green Book is a perfect best picture for a country in denial about where it is, how it got here and what is necessary to change course.
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Grant did briefly own one slave he freed years before the war; but as a general he smashed the Confederacy, and as president he crushed the Klan. He presided over the ratification of the 15th Amendment. People going after Grant probably just want to break things.
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The reason the president threatened mass murder in response to looting is the same reason the police thought they could kill George Floyd on video and get away with it. Some people are protected by the rules and others are simply subject to them.
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Thanks for throwing us a free subscription drive.
Great News: The boring but very nasty magazine, The Atlantic, is rapidly failing, going down the tubes, and has just been forced to announce it is laying off at least 20% of its staff in order to limp into the future. This is a tough time to be in the Fake News Business!.
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Excited for the World Cup opener between Russia and Saudi Arabia. It's a crucial game; the winner gets to run U.S. foreign policy.
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Black writers spent five years saying what this was, where it came from, and where it could lead. Their critics snickered about “wokeness,” condescended from their columns, think tanks, and tenured positions, and lied to themselves thinking they’d never have to face it.
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I know I give the impression of being a cat bachelor but. no longer true! 🙀🙀🙀🙀💍
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"Confederate soldiers fighting for slavery were apologizing for slavery" is universe-brain stupid
Ben Shapiro: "There was a national apology for slavery. It was called the Civil War where 700,000 Americans died"
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Never forget that the majority of Republicans sought to overthrow the results of a presidential election and install their unelected candidate, the majority of their supporters approved, and their sniveling apparatchiks concocted post hoc rationalizations justifying it.
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Trump won Ohio. He can’t even make the effort to remember which city in the state people were killed in.
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Very easy to overrate the significance of symbolism but I think this is good and important. If Trump loses it won’t be liberals who lead the right away from Trumpism.
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If they get away with this it will be worse next time. I promise you.
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I know it’s a small thing in the context of everything else but multiculturalism is the reason we no longer ban people with names like “Pompeo” from coming here.
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I don’t think prominent military figures are beyond criticism but I’ll just note that the Republican Party held a twenty something SNL comedian to a much higher standard than the president of the United States.
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It plays out like this every time:. Trump: *says something racist*. Republicans: *tortured interpretation of his remarks to reframe them as not racist*. Trump: *no I meant the racist thing*.
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Republicans lost presidential and senatorial elections in Georgia so they changed the rules to make it harder for black people to vote. It’s no more complicated than that. The law doesn’t make it harder to cheat; it is a form of cheating, a word that understates the malice of it.
I was proud to sign S.B. 202 to ensure elections in Georgia are secure, fair, and accessible. I appreciate the hard work of members of the General Assembly to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
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He came back. Thank G-d he came back. Thank you to everyone who tweeted, or emailed, or texted. We left some food out with my sweaty gym clothes. He showed up at 530 am for breakfast, completely ravenous. Burns was staring out the window all night. He knew he was out there.
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I just don't know how you respond to people who feel oppressed by the existence of consumer choices for people who are not them
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I can’t believe the coverup guy hired to cover things up did a coverup.
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Making an unarmed old man who was hospitalized by police for no reason the face of police brutality in the US is just more of Trump’s unparalleled political genius at work.
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The Trump video is really just an expression of how common it is on the right to publicly express fantasies about mass murdering their countrymen, in between complaining about civility and the lack of respect liberals show them.
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Makes a lot more sense when you realize the real number is 55.
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Biden is doing a lot of executive orders early because Trump did a lot of terrible ones during his term, and Biden hit the ground with better lawyers and people who know what they are doing. It’s way less interesting than people would like it to be.
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Sometimes when people say "woke" they mean "liberals being self-righteous and vicious about trivial things" and sometimes they mean "integration," or "civil rights laws" or "black people on television" and it's convenient not to have to explain what you actually mean.
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Yes Trump incited a mob attack on another branch of government. Yes their goal was overturning the presidential election. Yes it came within moments of lawmakers being killed by the mob. But here’s why the libs’ hysterical reaction to this is far more dangerous . 1/965.
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The cruelty is the point. The cruelty is the point. The cruelty is the point.
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This shit isn’t a game. It isn’t entertainment. It isn’t about you feeling strong and tough.
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The thing about Trump, and all of this, is that it was easy to get it right. You just had to open your eyes to see. The folks who got him wrong simply did not want to.
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If Rapinoe gets a hat trick she replaces Trump as president. Look I don’t like it either but it’s in the Constitution and we should trust in the framer’s wisdom.
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I’m so angry about the Burr thing I can’t say what I actually want to say about it.
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Four years ago the press and the right erupted over the *appearance* of a possible conflict when Lynch met with Clinton, arguing improper political influence on prosecutions. Now the Barr/Trumpist position is: political influence on prosecutions is great and we need more of it.
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Since the census case, Roberts has taken a a very dim view of the Trump administration’s bad faith. It matters to him a lot.
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If the president drops nuclear bombs on New York and California to neutralize their electoral votes because he believes it is in the national interest, it is not impeachable, according to Alan Dershowitz.
Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz: "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment."
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Biden: *condemns violence*. Media: Why won’t Biden condemn violence????. Trump: *Encourages violence*. Media: And now a panel of three newspaper reporters and a GOP operative will discuss whether Trump’s embrace of chaos is the greatest tactical move since Napoleon at Austerlitz.
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My Mom fled Jim Crow Florida with her family as a girl. Her and my Pop were married two years after the Loving decision. Yesterday I got to see Mom celebrate her retirement from the top of the Museum of African American History and Culture that she helped build. Love you mom.
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That halftime show was some wild shit to see if you were a teen in the 90s. And no I won’t be explaining.
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Republicans doing all this work to falsely accuse Schiff of fabricating conduct the president has admitted to, only for the president to commit the impeachable offense again on camera.
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Gonna get a lot of hot takes soon about how Bernie is as much of a threat to liberal democracy as Trump, and it's going to be as ridiculous as it sounds. Disagree with Bernie's policies all you want, he's not asserting the right to imprison his political opposition.
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Beyond all the other ideological assumptions it’s loaded with, “I’m shocked by the idea of war in Europe” betrays a real lack of basic understanding about you know, the history of Europe.
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The Tubman thing is among the least damaging bad things the Trump administration has done, but the fact that they put so much effort into preventing a *wholly ornamental* gesture against white supremacy tells you a lot about where they're coming from.
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I worked on this story for four years and he just. tweeted it out.
Trump just approvingly shared a video that includes one of his supporters yelling “white power”.
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If it weren’t a right wing militant group aligned with the president they’d be using live ammunition.
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Strong, thoughtful case for ousting Greg Abbott from Dan Crenshaw
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I think no one is ever gonna fall for this one ever again.
Susan Collins tells @tedbarrettcnn she’s still undecided on the Bill Barr nomination for attorney general.
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Here is my response to Alito, who demands to be seen as apolitical while acting politically, who demands civil discourse while he smears his critics, and who describes the press as sensational for rejecting his mischaracterizations of verifiable facts.
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Always cool when an American president advertises their hypothetical capacity for genocide
WATCH: President Trump says that he could win the 18-year Afghan War in 10 days, because he has plans that could wipe Afghanistan off the face of the Earth and kill 10,000,000 people, but "I don't want to go that route."
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You can’t really walk back enthusiastic expressions of bloodlust. Thank you!.
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This is obstruction of justice
Robert Mueller confirmed that President Trump asked staff to falsify records relevant to the investigation
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Warren didn’t win, but preventing Bloomberg from buying the democratic primary was really significant.
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“And a white man get paid offa all of that.” —Kanye West
Presto! Trump campaign now fundraising off the Kanye tweets. This text to supporters links to campaign MAGA hats for sale.
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If only there was some kind of role in society, some sort of profession, whose role it was to determine the facts of a political dispute.
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The “fuck your feelings” president is a very sensitive snowflake, and that’s rather representative of the fragility of those who think of themselves as embodying phrases like “fuck your feelings.”.
And there you have it. Trump — mocked by world leaders in a global huddle caught on video — is now heading home without a press conference.
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Roof’s actions were completely consistent with the cause of that flag and all the “service, sacrifice and heritage” associated with it. The Confederate flag represents treason in defense of human bondage and white supremacy, it always has, and always will.
Nikki Haley says the Confederate flag was about "service, and sacrifice, and heritage" until Dylan Roof "hijacked" it
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