David Turnbull

We talk a lot about a crisis of public trust in America today. But when we do we’re usually talking about Red America or what we might call Disaffected America — people lack trust in the press, in elections, in scientific or expert authority and big institutions. But there’s this other crisis of trust in institutions and people, rapidly catching up... See more

Reporters and columnists have ingested the taboo on criticising voters and now sound more and more like a party communication department.

This twists the morality of the situation until it goes into reverse. The voter behaviour must be blameless so the party they voted for must therefore be blameless too. Cruelty is validated by voters which means i... See more

Amy Burgans, the clerk-treasurer in Douglas County, Nevada, herself had doubts about the outcome of the 2020 election when she started in her role that December. (The previous clerk-treasurer had resigned—the pandemic and contentious election cycle, Burgans told me, had been “a lot.”) Burgans said that she had heard in the news, on social media, an... See more

As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently noted, the effect of this disinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subset of people stay anchored in their alternate reality.

Political Scientists Reassure Americans That Stripping Minorities Of Citizenship Usually Where Descent Into Fascism Peters Out

The question of why all post-Covid electorates are grumpy and miserable is more interesting and hasn’t been the subject of as much work as it deserves.

Given the global trend, it’s really Republicans who should be hand-wringing and asking why it’s even close, and the answer is obviously that Trump is a scumbag.