David Sessions @davidsess Twitter profile

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

It’s amazing the degree to which the Democratic Party is just nowhere. No plan, no solidarity, no presence, nothing.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Basically nobody in liberal circles is taking seriously the consequences of the fact that the exiled cadre of the Republican Party are building a massive power base in the Democratic Party

Jim Acosta

@Acosta

4 years

As Republican convention begins, former RNC chair @MichaelSteele joins @ProjectLincoln

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Stop saying that "America doesn't have the will to get through this" when you mean "Americans made enormous sacrifices to try to get through this, and their shambolic leaders did absolutely nothing to make that sacrifice sustainable and meaningful"

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

The notion that a socialist candidate who has been through two major presidential campaigns against the wind of a hostile media and political class “hasn’t faced any scrutiny” is really the desperate whine of a DC blob about the fact that nothing they’ve tried has worked

David Frum

@davidfrum

4 years

As Sanders moves into first place in some polls, a reminder of the hazards of nominating for president a candidate with a 40 year record who has never faced tough scrutiny. Latest in @theatlantic

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

I'm not the first to say it but the mind-blowing thing about @AOC is how easily she dominates news cycles talking about radical policies, thereby exposing a generation of Democratic learned helplessness

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Had to type up the @cushbomb monologue in case old podcasts are hard to find in a few decades. I've said and thought these same things so many times the last four years, but seems like it will be a great primary source for exactly how it felt The Day Before.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

For people who still don't get the visceral antipathy to Buttigieg, it's stuff like this: blatant, slick dishonesty that suggests a level of cynicism that is not true of any of the other candidates.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

8 years

Every once in a while, it's possible to summarize an entire historical moment in six words.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

2 years

It's nothing @realchrisrufo hasn't said elsewhere in public, but I keep thinking back to this Clubhouse room in March 2021 where he and others described how they were going to use the media to manufacture a new culture war. I took notes.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

We need a lot more cold-eyed analysis of the interests involved here on both sides of this marriage rather than gauzy rhetoric about saving democracy. Never Trump Republicans & Democratic elites are friends for obvious reasons, and none of them are good for the fate of democracy

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

. @amjoyshow being explicit that the complaints about supposed Sanders harassment is really about reporters getting rude replies.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

The President of the United States has declared counting all Americans’ votes to be fraud.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

7 years

Old white race scientist gets harassed on campus: thousands of hot takes. Black scholar gets death threats: crickets

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

A few things I discovered about the "Bernie is unvetted" argument over its now going on five-year history: 1/ It is an attack response whose appearance is almost always directly linked to Sanders' success in the polls.

The Eternally Unvetted Bernie Sanders

No matter how much his record has been covered by the media and his ideas attacked, his opponents persist in claiming he has escaped scrutiny.

newrepublic.com

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

So: - Lots of jobs are pointless, except for the low-paid ones - “Paying for it” is a completely fake issue in American political debate - Most of the awful, punitive things about society are unnecessary and can be abolished overnight with no consequences

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Kinda funny to imagine a geopolitical tit-for-tat that spirals into all the genocides finally being recognized

THE TAO OF NOW

@InTheNoosphere

3 years

Erdogan threatens to recognise US genocide of Native Americans in response to Armenia ruling

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David Sessions

@davidsess

13 days

It’s anecdotal, for sure, but I personally was told multiple times by insiders in job searches things like “they’ll never hire a white man,” “we can’t give it to a white man in this climate,” “a white man who studies European history is dead on arrival,” etc.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Just stupefied at how shamelessly pro-endless war the American elite media is, regardless of the historical record or consequences. Like, I know it intellectually, but it shocks me all over again every time it's demonstrated.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

And just look at my mentions if you want a snapshot of the level of liberal denial about this

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

Here’s the full transcript of the Biden “make sure the TV’s on” answer. Mind you this breathtaking spiral was in response to a question about his dismissal of historic racism and opposition to school desegregation, which he didn’t even try to address.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Where exactly is a PhD student supposed to get $6,000 in *even one* year of their program, much less all of them?

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David Sessions

@davidsess

7 years

@Boston_DSA Tremont Street is a wall of socialist banners. #fightsupremacy #resistboston

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Read @samuelmoyn who put it better than I did

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David Sessions

@davidsess

7 years

Front of the enormous socialist march. @Boston_DSA , ISO, SA, IWW, SP. #resistboston #fightsupremacy

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Something I’ve seen very few Warren supporters wrestle with honestly is her narrow, highly class-bound base. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong with *her*, it just means you need a strategic plan to appeal to people outside it that she hasn’t seemed to have

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

It's National Coming Out day, so as good a time as any to say I came out this year, finally, in my 30s. Blowing up your adult life is excruciating to say the least, but there's no substitute for living in truth. If you're in that situation and need someone to talk to, I'm here.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

@OriginalBad Um, did you watch any of the DNC last week?

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

@BrandyLJensen @offbeatorbit @AITA_reddit It is amazing how many grown-ass adults can barely contain their eagerness to tattle. It’s very unsettling when you meet them in the wild.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

Andrew Yang correctly points out that America interferes in elections and Klobuchar flings a binder at his head

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

Still amazes me that people think it’s OK to tip less than 20%

Yashar Ali 🐘

@yashar

5 years

What a stupid, stupid awful video. Wanna save money? Go out less, cut from other places. Don't screw over hard working people who deal with BS from customers all day long. Tip at least 20%.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

13 days

@BattynattyK They actually do this all the time, shockingly!

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

On the fucking contrary

Reza Zadeh

@Reza_Zadeh

3 years

It's pretty awesome how dancing makes robots less intimidating. Looking forward to seeing more nontrivial Machine Learning on these robots. Credit: Boston Dynamics.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

This might be the single most important thing to understand about the 'new' conservative nationalism. They understand capital is the problem, but rather than confront that they conflate it with the urban creative class in order to keep the basic framework of ethno-cultural war.

Will Wilkinson

@willwilkinson

5 years

@AdamSerwer @michaelbd @jbouie @matthewstoller @lionel_trolling This conflation is central to the conservative nationalist rhetorical strategy. No matter how furiously it is denied, the idea of nationhood is ethnocultural, so educated urban whites pose a problem solved by identifying kombucha yoga mat culture with globalist vulture capital.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

One of the things I think about a lot as a European historian is how little we understand just how poor and squalid most of Europe was in 1945 *before* the war destruction.

Matthew Zeitlin

@MattZeitlin

3 years

i can't stop thinking about historical Portuguese literacy rates

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

2/ It is an ideological argument presenting itself as a process argument: if voters are supporting Sanders, they must not have "gotten enough information," that is, had it sufficiently driven home that he is a socialist who wants to tax the hell out of them.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

13 days

And the absolutely unhinged response to this tweet and the original one illustrates another toxic layer on the already miserable, deplorable situation for humanities PhDs. It doesn’t matter that I’m working-class, a first generation-student, or gay. I’m just a racist white man.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

7/ Either they mystically believe in the existence, somewhere, of a smoking gun, or they think that the definition of "vetting" is "voters start agreeing with me and stop supporting Sanders." That tells you everything you need to know.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Wait so the moral of the big NYT story about Provincetown is that it has the highest vaccination rate in the country, some people got mildly sick, and nobody died?

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Jennifer Rubin’s support never fails to be an embarrassment to anyone or anything she bestows it upon

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Biden could hardly be a more perfect avatar of the end-of-history consensus: visibly empty, exhausted, not even really trying, and yet somehow retaining a fairly comfortable grip on power.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

13 days

After hearing that enough, you do start to take it seriously on some level, and it’s very easy for it to become a part of your frustration with a situation that is impossible, unfair, and degrading in so many ways

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David Sessions

@davidsess

7 years

The brocialists carrying the @Boston_DSA banner wanted me to tweet a picture of them.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

I would be happy to read more conservative publications if it didn’t always feel like their articles could have been published any time in the last 50 years with no changes

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

I have long puzzled about what is actually meant by the "Sanders doesn't care about intersectionality" discourse, when his campaign, coalition, and policies are as concrete an embodiment of it as can be imagined. It seems like the biggest thing is "he doesn't use our jargon."

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Very strange times when you wake up every day to another pillar of neoliberalism crumbling

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David Sessions

@davidsess

6 years

In case you missed the news: 4 DSA candidates won state House primaries in Pennsylvania last night, three will be unopposed in November. Two were against members of Pittsburgh’s conservative-democratic dynasty.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

4/ For the reporter version especially, it's worth asking why we hear about one candidate's record not getting attention but not others: i.e., why does no one ask why Biden hasn't been hammered about his Iraq war support and his long, energetic collusion w/ predatory finance?

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Tell us again about how there is no Democratic establishment

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

6/ But the fatal flaw of all of them is that they can't say what "vetting" would look like: more media coverage? Already happened. Hostile debate questions about general-election viability? In every single debate.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

3/ Actually, there's a few versions: the hack version, which is pure cynical strategy; the pundit version, which is the hack version combined with centrist ideology & the desire to shape narrative; & the reporter version, which naturalizes the first two as a turn in the horserace

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Lots of you know already, but I officially defended my PhD afternoon and am staying at @BostonCollege as a VAP of history for the next while. Thanks for listening to me pontificate and bitch about it these last few years!

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

@JHWeissmann @pareene No way it goes away. Because the media people who push it literally think that David Sirota’s tweets are harassment and that calling people “corporate Democrats” is a toxic slur.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

5/ The reporter version turns out to be subtly influenced by ideology as well: the danger of socialism and the impracticality and expense of Medicare for All is seen as an urgent matter, but Biden's flaws are just normal, uncontroversial Democrat things.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

People seem strangely committed to the idea that fascism is the only very bad political thing that ever happened

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

2020, the year when a reasonably educated person can get a decently paid job at a university doing almost anything besides being a professor

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David Sessions

@davidsess

7 years

Mesmerized by one of my primary sources' map of the Soviet administrative structure (1937).

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

At some point we may have to take our hats off to BHL for winning the intellectual game like no one else. Vapid writing, no contribution to thought or letters whatsoever, yet covered (and photographed!) endlessly around the world as a celebrity. It's actually really impressive.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

I feel like still not enough people know that @CHAPOTRAPHOUSE is low key one of the best places to get historically-informed analysis of American religion right now

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David Sessions

@davidsess

1 year

is there anything right-wing billionaires won’t throw money at lol

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David Sessions

@davidsess

13 days

We should keep the focus on the material forces behind the pain the job market produces, and be broadly generous in the moments that pain breaks people. Not reify them as an identity category and basically celebrate their misfortune because of it.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

13 days

Since this blew up, I’ll add: I did not consider myself “victimized” or feel sorry for myself, and the reason I didn’t get an academic job is that there basically are none. Just that believing what you are routinely told on the job market is understandable.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Texas is getting all the attention, meanwhile Massachusetts is opening restaurants to full capacity

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Gotta hand it to Hofstadter for pegging conservative grifting in the early 1950s

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

The comedy of Andrew Yang is that he's trying to be Emmanuel Macron in a country a) where upstart parties don't work and b) where there's already a massive, powerful neoliberal party whose elites believe all the same things he does.

Andrew Yang’s Vapid Third-Party Vision

The political gadfly’s latest project, the Forward Party, is designed to leverage buzzwords in the service of cementing his place in the Thought Leader Extended Universe.

newrepublic.com

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David Sessions

@davidsess

7 years

Cheers as Black Lives Matter arrives to lead to the march. #fightsupremacy #resistboston

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Hearing the worst writer in America blather about “adult supervision” and “elders” makes me think of all the awesome, tireless, incredibly radical teens and 20-somethings I’ve met on this campaign who are about to hand the likes of Thomas L. Friedman their own asses

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Conservative entertainment: all about owning the libs since 1964

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

In @DissentMag , I wrote an intro to the 1970s Marxist state theorist Nicos Poulantzas. Only scratches the surface, but if you're interested in how to think about the capitalist state and what socialism might look like in the 21st century, this is for you

Nicos Poulantzas: Philosopher of Democratic Socialism - Dissent Magazine

Poulantzas tried to envision how the left could simultaneously champion rank-and-file democracy at a distance from the state and push for radical transformation from within it.

www.dissentmagazine.org

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

I find it endlessly fascinating how church people in my hometown had an elaborate spiritualized moral topography - goes to church/doesn't, divorced/not divorced, drinks/doesn't drink, good parent/bad parent - that was one big euphemism for whether people had money or not.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

@jonathanalter Everything he says in this video was true, and Soviet cultural programs indeed put the US to shame. The USSR was not a Stalinist hellhole in the 1980s.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

I have never seen a newspaper as servile toward the police as the @BostonGlobe

Natalie Shure

@nataliesurely

4 years

. @BostonGlobe reported incident I witnessed, relying solely on police statements w/o independent verification. They lied. They even lied about number of vehicles! We’ve seen evidence of police lying across country - trusting their word as fact here is journalistic malpractice

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

America's rich local gentry is exactly what Josh Hawley means by the "vast American middle." These are the people the new right-populist types think should rule. Their war against the "PMC" is not on behalf of workers, but on behalf of their own elites.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

I was always saying this to photo editors when I published pieces on evangelicalism: "No, not that ancient/historic Catholic art, think more like a strip mall"

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

The transcript leaves out the “pho-“ syllable that came after “record player.” Was he really going to say phonograph?

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David Sessions

@davidsess

7 years

My @NewRepublic essay on the rise of Thought Leaders is online.

The Rise of the Thought Leader

How the superrich have funded a new class of intellectual.

newrepublic.com

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

This does nothing to unsettle my opinion that all higher ed career advice is in some sense a joke

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

What in the actual fuck

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

My elegy for Joe Biden, the man who wanted to be president his whole life but never could articulate a reason why—until he became the empty vehicle of Democratic voters’ fear.

Joe Biden’s Endless Search for a Message

A compelling personal story has long obscured the substance of his politics.

newrepublic.com

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David Sessions

@davidsess

2 years

"For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact."

The Institutionalist's Dilemma

On trusting the process after it's openly failed

theap.substack.com

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David Sessions

@davidsess

7 years

This @rickperlstein piece on his thoughtful Trump-supporting student (and the student's essay) is remarkable.

I asked my student why he voted for Trump. The answer was thoughtful, smart, and terrifying.

"The best thing they can do is try to send in a wrecking ball to disrupt the system."

www.motherjones.com

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David Sessions

@davidsess

1 year

I've long wanted to write something about my (increasingly repulsed) fascination with Rod Dreher, and @phil_christman 's piece on his "anti-fandom" seemed like a good moment.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

There's nothing those flag-covered Trump trucks resemble so much as ISIS vehicles

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Still inclined to think that the shock and trauma of 2016 will keep a lot of people - including myself - from reading the fairly strong signs that Trump will lose in a landslide in 2020 almost no matter what.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

It’s never going to stop is it

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

For the thousandth time, the thing about "woke capitalism" is that evil companies don't plaster themselves in rainbows to force people to support LGBT rights, they do it because most people already support LGBT rights

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

The video is a thousand times worse

shoe

@shoe0nhead

5 years

WHAT #DemDebate

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

Bernie message aside, once again I can hardly believe what I am seeing anytime I’m exposed to cable news

luke

@lukeoneil47

5 years

Amazing hype video Bernie going 16-0

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David Sessions

@davidsess

6 years

. @thecatreviewer : Amsterdam hotel cat. High points for colors, chillness, petting availability, minus a few points for lack of reaction to anything and rough fur. Still 9/10.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

@cushbomb Link for people asking to copy the text:

Matt Christman - The Opening of the Door

In my darker moments I reflect on the fact that caring about politics is a mental illness, kind of—what it is is essentially a mad and desperate search for a sense of control. It’s to feel like you...

docs.google.com

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

The centrists have been absolutely losing it over the lone NYT poll.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

I worked on Kingston, this town in the conservative-leaning SE of NH, for two days last weekend. We knocked a lot of the doors on three consecutive days. Bernie won it by 11 votes.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

I promised myself on April 25, 2019 that never in my life, under any circumstances, would I vote for Joe Biden. I meant it, and it’s abundantly clear he himself would tell me not to vote for him. Best of luck in November.

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

This explains a lot

Daniel Boguslaw

@DRBoguslaw

4 years

JFC these debate tickets started at $1750. That would explain why people are booing when ever @MikeBloomberg gets attacked. The class demographic of the audience here seems like it may skew towards billionaires...:

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David Sessions

@davidsess

6 years

This isn’t a pattern at all (cf her blow-up at Al-Jazeera in 2014)

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

It's amazing how much of our political discourse is based on opinion polling, which is the flimsiest type of survey research, which is in turn the flimsiest type of social science

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David Sessions

@davidsess

5 years

François Mitterrand upon becoming leader of French socialism in 1971, 10 years before his presidential victory: "I would like this party to take power. Already, the sin of electoralism! I'm off to a bad start."

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David Sessions

@davidsess

4 years

Colorado exit polls: big support for Medicare for All and complete overhaul of the economic system

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David Sessions

@davidsess

7 years

Massive socialist contingent waiting on police ruling on pocket sticks. #FightSupremacy #ResistBoston

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

I tried to explain to a relative that you get a PhD, then you get a great job for a couple of years, and then after all that experience you get a terrible job for poverty wages or no job, and they absolutely could not understand it

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David Sessions

@davidsess

3 years

Always on the lookout for nutshell definitions of American politics, and maybe it’s: nothing in our own country is possible, but we can do absolutely anything in any other country

🔪🔪🔪bЯyan🔪🔪🔪

@murderxbryan

3 years

Uhhh ok

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