Matthew Sitman
@MatthewSitman
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writer (matt.sitman at gmail dot com) // au courant lefty podcaster ( @KnowYrEnemyPod with @samadlerbell ) // editorial board @dissentmag
New York, NY
Joined August 2012
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So, for a long time I've wanted a space to write for regularly, so I'm starting a Substack called Friends and Enemies, a mix of my reading notes on the right, my weird religious ideas, plus the literary gossip y'all love. Will post at least once a week:
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When I was a kid, a family in our church fell on hard times, people were bringing them groceries. My Dad insisted on bringing them ice cream in addition to staples. Everybody deserves some ice cream, he said, and everyone else is going to give them cans of soup
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Amy Coney Barrett’s father, an attorney for Shell Oil for many years, must be so proud of her!
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Listen, the Thomases are a team. When I was a Heritage intern as a young conservative, Ginni brought in Clarence to visit with the interns. The idea that there’s some wall of separation btw their respective, uh, professional activities is willful naivety
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The idea that throwing trans people under the bus would mollify the right instead of emboldening the right is delusional
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Times Sq lit up in the background is a hell of a thing to see as you're asking New Yorkers to conserve power
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Sometimes I think about this. He’s a good guy. Who does that?
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This morning I randomly remembered the time Reagan told the BBC that there was no word for "freedom" in the Russian language lol
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Thomas and Alito especially are clearly people who have nursed massive resentments most of their lives, and now have a chance to let it all out. The shoddiness of their work is itself an expression of their power
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We're going to end up bombing the shit out of half the Middle East rather than telling Israel to stop incinerating children, absolutely evil and deranged
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This is a genuinely insane thing for a Catholic archbishop to say
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Hating women’s bodily autonomy so much you destroy their ability to have more children in the name of being “pro-life”
These stories are not going to stop. It is a form of state-sanctioned torture to make women endure this.
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Pack it up boys, they found the fatal flaw in the case against Trump
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Yesterday was the 3-year anniversary of the Las Vegas mass shooting, the largest perpetrated by an individual in the history of the United States. I remain amazed at the way it's been mostly forgotten, and no one seems to care that we have no idea why he did it
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The DeSantis human trafficking operation, the more I read about it, really seems like they were like, "we'll send you to Massachusetts, where they'll help you, wink wink"—and then the people were mostly quite nice, and the right absolutely lost their minds
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I’m going to submit Buckley’s 1986 NYT article saying people with AIDS should be required to get tattoos indicating that, but change all the references to Monkeypox
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One of the most important tasks of our time is to see extremely obvious things and not pretend they’re anything other than they are because our brains’ have been poisoned by the idea that telling the truth and holding corrupt, lawless actors accountable is “partisan”
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I think that as I've gotten older, and thus seen a bit more of the world, noticing all the various ways a life can go wrong—a person can fall on hard times, the unexpected disaster that lays you low, etc—the more my politics have just become about alleviating the suffering we can
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Huh, I wonder what happened in 1980?
I consider this chart to be the clearest indictment of our country’s path over the last several decades: In 1980, the U.S. had a typical life expectancy for an affluent country. Today, the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy of any affluent country:
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There's such a massive lane, politically, to de-scamify the country, which I do realize would mean, probably, changing the essential character of how we operate. But everything is a scam, everyone is out to rip you off, nothing works here
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One thing I notice when I read American history—the Hoover bio we did an episode on recently comes to mind—is how often in the past relatively young people rose to positions of importance, in ways that are simply unfathomable now
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Me: the conservative movement is smaller than you think
Every conservative writer on Twitter: *raises hand* I’ve been to the Nazi artifact collector’s house too
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My theory is that Bernie broke so many lib brains because their politics is based in self-congratulations: we’re not like the dumb, racist conservatives. For someone to say that’s not good enough is deeply threatening
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Wait, the New York gun law that the Supreme Court struck down was *108 years old*?
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It’s hard to understand this as something other than incitement to kill or attack LGBTQ people
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In my naiveté, I really thought the pandemic might cause us to realize the way all of our lives and health are bound up together, and that things like sick leave, health care, etc are not just necessities for individuals, but things that in a broader sense make our society better
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Today’s young posters don’t know how good this site used to be—imagine seeing this thread in the wild in real time
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Jimmy Buffett lived the American dream, becoming incredibly rich from performing songs about getting drunk and eating cheeseburgers
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This is almost a parody of GOP policy—stoking the culture war with one hand, making their voters (and everyone else) worse off materially with the other
"Disney’s loss of control also hands it a $163 million per year tax break ... “I don’t see how Orange County doesn’t raise property taxes by 20% to 25%,” Randolph said."
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The Pelosi comments really lay bare how retrograde a certain generation of Democratic leadership has become—the very idea of paying taxes that might support social goods that not every individual tax payer will benefit from is viewed with skepticism
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Given how tirelessly Bernie Sanders has championed the Biden administration's agenda and how he's obviously negotiated in good-faith with both Biden and his colleagues in Congress, I'm wondering if we'll get anyone admitting that they were terribly wrong about him?
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My Not-Cool opinion is that, while it does nothing to lessen the consequences of American militarism, it's extremely good these are the impulses of our leaders in the armed forces
“And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator...We take an oath to the Constitution.”
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Thinking out loud, my sense is that the twin disasters of Iraq and the financial crash mean that it can be easy to forget how religious the George W. Bush administration was—stem cells, Terri Schiavo, "partial birth abortion" ban, const. amend. against SSM, Alito/Roberts
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He’s 81 years old and his health is failing, but he still gets up every morning trying to make our country just a little bit worse
Wow. At an event in Kentucky covered by
@WLWT
, Mitch McConnell once again completely froze after a question about running again.
Clearly he is not just “lightheaded” as aides suggested last time. This is serious.
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I’m losing my mind
The SCOTUS Abortion Decision Leak Is What Actual Treasonous Insurrection Looks Like
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I'm sorry but dudes rock
A new social media trend prompting women to ask the men in their lives how often they think about ancient Rome reveals that it crosses the minds of many men on a weekly basis. Even daily. Or more — to the surprise and confusion of their loved ones.
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If this is the response after Roe being overturned—about a highly salient issue to which core Democratic constituencies are dedicated—imagine the response to a bad ruling about the confusing, somewhat obscure issue of independent state legislatures
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The gap between the best and worst Atlantic articles is astonishing
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Guaranteed paid leave seems like such low-hanging political fruit—something that would materially make people's lives better in very obvious ways, as well as appeal to voters from a range of backgrounds. Just incredibly, incredibly dispiriting to see it get the axe
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One of the strange dynamics in our politics is that Republicans aren't deemed responsible for what their elected officials do, while Democrats are held accountable for what every professor, teacher, or random school board member anywhere in the country says or does
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I’ve been sick over the utterly wasted social isolation/lockdown that so many people tried to follow with good will, assuming their government would use that time wisely. It’s really criminal how we’ve been failed.
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Look at what they bury at the bottom of this, as opposed to the inflammatory headline: "More than 99 percent of the system’s roughly 35,000 employees have followed the mandatory vaccination program."
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My new thing is checking the ages of former political leaders I haven’t thought of in awhile to see how much younger they are than the people running the Democratic Party. Today was *John Major,* who is 78
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For the past few months, my
@KnowYrEnemyPod
co-host and friend
@SamAdlerBell
and I have been dealing with a lawsuit from the Young America's Foundation—to be honest, it's been a lot of anxiety and worry. Thank you to the ACLU & our comrades at
@DissentMag
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SMH at woke ideologues like Cori Bush focusing on the boutique concerns of Oberlin graduates like *puts hand to earpiece* not evicting people during a pandemic
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Did an edible and then my parents said we’re going out for dinner—to a “Mennonite” home style place in central PA. Anyway, we’re here
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Also, I know Twitter is a cesspool, people say all kinds of crazy things all the time (including personal attacks and insults), but throwing terms like groomer around indiscriminately is going to get someone hurt or killed
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The most radical thing that could happen on TV today would be to have well-informed people talking about something important for more than 30 seconds at a time
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Which is the point obviously. If you try to feed starving Palestinians, you're taking your own life into your hands. If delivering food turns into a death sentence, fewer people will do it, which is precisely what Israel is hoping for
It's so dark to realize that giving Israeli forces your coordinates to help safely feed starving people actually is just putting a target on your back
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I know it makes me a shitlib who believes in "bourgeois rights" or whatever, but I'm glad we have the First Amendment
BREAKING: France's Interior Ministry to ban pro-Palestinian protests
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I think one thing that's happening is that, because the Republican Party has gone so far off the rails, there's a resistance to speaking and writing honestly about that because to do so *feels* like you're being almost absurdly pro-Biden or pro-Democrat as a kind of by-product
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The left of the Democratic Party has goals that require actually building legislative majorities to achieve; chaos, dysfunction, and shutdowns are, on the other hand, the tools of nihilists of on the hard right of the GOP. I think comparisons should take that into account!
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I think you could argue that the single best feature of Twitter is that it reveals that elites otherwise obscured by social distance, handlers, and marketing are in fact total idiots
@alexnpress
I think it a minority opinion but really think it’s good when the most powerful people on earth post! Murdoch’s feed was just incredibly revealing.
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The thing about this tweet is that it's not cynical enough; the hoodie wearing has actually garnered more outrage
Whether it's John Fetterman wearing a hoodie or Bob Menendez taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, both men have done a great deal to diminish the norms of the Senate.
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You mean the candidate who literally has never won more votes than his Democratic opponent?
GOP source tells me “if it wasn’t clear before it should be now. We have a Trump problem”
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My first column for
@gawker
takes up something I've been thinking about for a while now: the anti-social impulses animating the right, why it strikes me as part of their strategy, and (some) of what we can do about it
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Pretty much every time someone important, or at least in a position of power, has to resign I'm struck my how mediocre they are, how they're actually very easy to replace, and that it's an utter fantasy to think that the people running our society in any way do so bc of merit
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Fun facts: Barry Goldwater voted against the 1983 legislation that made MLK Jr Day a holiday.
One current senator also voted against it: Chuck Grassley
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A few more lectures from octogenarians should turn this around
Biden Job Approval, Among ages 18-29:
Approve 27%
Disapprove 71%
.
@pewresearch
, Adults, 1/16-21
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It doesn’t excuse or erase what he’s done, at times, in his political career. But as a son who has fucked up a great deal, I can’t tell you how what it’s like to read this
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Credit where credit is due: Sen. Mike Lee told us he doesn't believe the United States is a democracy. His honesty about what that means—the right for Republicans to overturn an election—is blessedly without euphemism or evasion
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The AOC tweet about AIPAC is important. We know who AIPAC will go after in the next round of Democratic primaries. It's good for the left to go on the offense, call them out for their pathetic embrace of Jan 6 election deniers, and, generally, try to set the terms of debate
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There is no “dustbin of history”; there is only the constant fight for decency and love against barbarism
A teen's death in a Wisconsin sawmill reflects the growing number of children and teens around the U.S. working in hazardous jobs meant for adults.
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The truth is I actually do think about the Roman Empire with some frequency
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Gang, you're right, Manchin's stated rationale doesn't make sense—we got him. Logic puzzles for the win
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Campiest president in living memory, at least
“When Trump descended into rage, his staff resorted to summoning an aide, nicknamed the Music Man, to play favorite show tunes they knew would soothe him, including ‘Memory’ from the Broadway musical ‘Cats.’”
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I think it’s genuinely insane to tell a foreign country that literally no matter what they do, there will be no consequences in terms of our aid to them
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It'd be lousy if Twitter became a poorly moderated, at times nearly unusable platform owned by a rich guy
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What happens when rightwing groups don’t buy your book in bulk:
Meghan McCain’s New Memoir ‘Bad Republican’ Flops With Fewer Than 300 Copies Sold
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I gasped
Thomas, if this is how it’s going to be, I have a question for you.
In your first memoir, you describe assaulting a girlfriend. If, today, someone witnessed you speaking aggressively to a woman, and assaulted you, would you consider it justifiable given your own background.
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Men will literally expect the Pope to have read their book instead of going to therapy
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I guess the woman who ran the homeless shelter said they probably couldn't stay on the island forever, since it's a small, seasonal community without a lot of resources for that kind of thing, and that clip outweighs literally everything else? lol
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Sinema being in the pocket of MLM/pyramid scheme money is just too perfect
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You know, when you look at where we’re at right now, it makes you wonder if it was helpful to spend the first 45 min of every Democratic primary debate talking about whether or not Medicare4All would “raise taxes”
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"She criticized Scalia for his 'faint-hearted' originalism, and instead argued for a 'fearless' originalism that recognizes no legal duty to preserve non-originalist precedent, no matter how entrenched or widely accepted it may be today."
Very important:
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If they can indict Bob Menendez for being bribed with bars of gold, they can do the same to YOU
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If Twitter goes away, how will writers defend sweeping claims at the start of an article by linking to three random tweets?
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I'm glad to see we're seeing a post-Dobbs surge in pro-family legislation that supports parents and kids from the right!
NEW: House GOP making enormous cuts to safety net price to avert shutdown
Including
1M low-income mothers & young kids excluded from nutrition aid
~70% cuts to home heating $ ahead of winter months
~80% cut to $ for schools w/ poor kids
& much more
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Put the replies to this in the Museum of Mistaking Fandom for Politics
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Imagine being a Kennedy and all the opportunities it affords you. And then what you decide to do with your life is primary a Democrat from the right because you believe a senate seat is your birthright. Incredibly disgusting.
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The enthusiastic hate directed at trans people tonight, talking about people I care for in the most lurid and nasty terms, is disgusting. I don’t think we should concede anything to these bigots
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This aspect of Obama's rhetoric always drove me crazy. Still does. What does "perfection" mean here? Anything more than Obama wanted to do? His reliance on false binaries to make himself seem reasonable was and is so dumb
Still thinking about this line from
@BarackObama
’s eulogy for Harry Reid:
“In a battle between perfection and progress, Harry always chose progress.”
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“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” (Frank Wilhoit)
🚨NEW: South Dakota’s Republican Attorney General, who killed a pedestrian and fled the scene, is investigating South Dakota’s Republican Governor, who called on him to resign, for abusing her position to help her adult daughter by intervening in a state agency’s decision.
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This is disgusting, Hagee is a nasty, terrible man who peddles the worst kind of Christian end-times theology. This is totally unacceptable from any elected Democrats—let alone party leaders. Wow.
NEW: Democratic Party leaders
@SenSchumer
and
@RepJeffries
will be sharing a stage at today's "March for Israel" rally with far-right, extremist pastor John Hagee.
John McCain rejected Hagee's endorsement in 2008 for the pastor's comments saying God sent Hitler to help Jews get…
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It might be useful to think of the Right as trying to turn the entire United States into a safe space for themselves. If you learn something at school that makes you uncomfortable, that's CRT and should be banned. If you're scared, you can shoot (or drive over) anyone.
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Extremely poor mental health lately (not because of the news, though it doesn’t help), especially anxiety attacks. Prayers appreciated.
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Congrats on getting the result, and headline, that you literally controlled for!
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Absolutely terrible. Solidarity with Salman, and all who stand for free thought and expression against its enemies
Andrew Wylie: “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”
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