Yascha MounkVerified account

I barely ever watch Fox News but did so a lot in the days after the 2020 elections. It was a bizarre experience. During the day, Chris Wallace would report the facts honestly and skillfully. Then the talk show hosts would come on and ignore what Wallace had just laid out.

Chris Wallace was a real voice of integrity at Fox News. His coverage of the 2020 election was excellent; it's not surprising it drew the ire of Trumpists. His departure from the network is bad if not entirely surprising news. I wonder what Fox's coverage of 2024 will look like.https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1470047884615815179 …

((Finally, all of this could be scuppered by the arrival of yet another variant that is more lethal. But such a variant would have to stay very dangerous in people who are vaxxed and/or have previously been infected. There's some decent reason to hope that this won't happen.))

(Obviously, I don't mean that Covid will completely go away; sadly, it seems likely that this group of viruses will stay with us in some form. But if Omicron does turns out to be relatively mild and extremely infectious, it'll speed the arrival of a new post-pandemic normality.)

Omicron increasingly looks like it *could* turn out to be the beginning of the end of the pandemic.

DeepL is astonishingly good.

(Deleted a Tweet that incorrectly characterizes today's Supreme Court decision. SCOTUS did not strike down the law but rather allowed the plaintiffs to challenge it in a lower court. My bad.)

Democracy really is in danger in the United States. But the extent to which a very powerful media machine now sets out to portray every single event in catastrophizing terms, even when it has a perfectly reasonable explanation, makes it very hard to focus on what's actually bad.

A real democracy agenda would have drawbacks. Even if attempted, it might fail. But the least Biden can do is be honest. If he has decided that what's required to make a difference in the fight between democracy and autocracy isn't worth the cost, he should come out and say so.

3) Democratic Spirit Biden hoped that a defeat of Trump could revive America as a model for the world. But Trump kept control of Republicans and sowed doubt about the 2020 election. Right now, America simply is in no condition to inspire a revival of global faith in democracy.

These problems are amply evident at this week's summit. From Modi to Bolsonaro, the Who’s Who of international populism will be welcome at the Summit for Democracy. And since the hosts aren't proposing real action, the guests are also unlikely to make meaningful commitments.

2) Democratic Backsliding Unlike Trump, Biden opposes authoritarian populists from India's Modi to Brazil's Bolsonaro. But so far, the administration has no real strategy for how to get them to stop assaulting the rule of law, much less bring them back into the democratic fold.

In the article, I evaluate to what extent the Biden administration has helped protect democracy around the world on three fronts: 1) Attempts to contain the growing power of outright dictators 2) Attempts to stop democratic backsliding 3) Attempts to renew the democratic spirit

Alternative Explanation: If you suffer from early symptoms of Alzheimer's, you are 69% less likely to get laid.https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1467960308887175176 …