Thursday, April 20, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- that hollow thump you're hearing is the sound of a narrative imploding

And the hits just keep on coming.

While there's no question Ron DeSantis is having a cruel April, his apparent collapse has less to do with recent developments and more to do with people finally acknowledging how flimsy the original narrative was, a product of motivated reasoning and wishful analytics (which a lot of us called out at the time).

Republicans were looking (as they have been since 2015) for a way to lose Trump and hold onto his supporters. The establishment press (particularly the NYT) was looking for a GOP candidate whom it could cover without embarrassment, perhaps even one they could both-sides without inviting mockery. These strange bedfellows all convinced themselves that DeSantis was the savior they were seeking. 

I can't think of any candidate who received a comparable build-up starting not just before the election but years before the campaign. The idea Trump was basically done and Ron was all but a sure thing became a foundational assumption of the standard narrative. If the pundit class had any capacity for self-awareness, they'd be having a rough April too.

None of which is to say that DeSantis won't get the nomination -- Trump is a spectacularly self-destructive old man with a terribly unhealthy lifestyle and Ron is still next in line -- but the most likely path to the nomination looks nothing like what expert opinion was telling us a few months ago.





Another bit of bad luck for DeSantis came when Disney fired the stupidest CEO in the Fortune 500. With Chapek, Ron could come off as a Trump-style bully (red meat for the base). Now Disney is slapping him around and his response is petulant and weak.




And in other GOP news...



“I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar: ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more...” ― Dashiell Hammett



 

And they call us Arkansans poor white trash.







When defending the indefensible, always start with positive framing (also useful for access journalism).



Remember when Republicans disliked Russian stooges?





 

 Musk/Tesla/Twitter



 

Elon has always been best understood as the sophomore who keeps coming by the freshmen dorm rooms because he can bum their weed and impress them with deep thoughts from the philosophy class he audited.




Nice to find someone who's read the classics.
Speaking of things they should have seen coming.


Step 1: Have a rich daddy.

Swifter than most.


When bad things happen to stupid, annoying people.

 

Back in my teaching days, my classroom was always the one with the chess boards. I feel vindicated.


In AI news...



And for the math nerds in the audience.
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