GOP House Speaker battle looked like this

Republicans don’t know how to govern effectively, but they do know how to grab the media spotlight. This was demonstrated during the recent Republican battle for U.S. House Speaker. After narrowly winning the House majority in the 2022 midterm elections, the GOP’s first task in the new year was to elect a Speaker. They failed miserably at this job, requiring a historic 15 votes before finally electing Kevin McCarthy.

But what seemed to get everyone’s attention were the 20 or so Republican House representatives-elect, many of whom are members of the so-called “Freedom Caucus,” who battled against McCarthy’s speakership, and at least one who fought on McCarthy’s side. The members who seemed to be on camera or in front of microphones all the time especially included Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. Others on hand to a slightly lesser extent were familiar names such as Lauren Boebert and Jim (“Gym”) Jordan, so nicknamed because of his alleged involvement in a sexual abuse scandal involving wrestlers at Ohio State University. We’re not going to mention these names again in this post. Such representatives are known more for being superficial blowhards who say outrageous things rather than for the often dull but crucial work of legislating.

In short order, the GOP House Speaker election became about Republican media stars rather than about policy and substance. Such camera-hogging tactics worked, as McCarthy reportedly had to make numerous concessions to these members in order to secure their votes. What we call the GOP Civil War, also known as Republicans in Disarray, was on full, ugly display. But we already saw how a media celebrity made it into the White House six years ago, and the disastrous results that followed. The last thing we should do is feed that shallow, destructive process again by focusing our full attention on those Republican media hustlers.

The fast-growing Mastodon platform

A month ago, we pondered “What should Democratic Twitter users do now that Elon Musk has taken over?” The three main choices seemed to be: Cut and Run, Stay and Fight, and Wait and See. We chose Wait and See. Well, we have waited and we have seen. What we’ve seen is that, in those few weeks, Musk has wrecked Twitter. Most troublesome is that Musk let banned Nazis and other extremists, including Donald Trump, back on the site. Some of these extremists reportedly have been banned for the past 10 years or so. At the same time, Musk got rid of thousands of Twitter content moderators who monitor hate speech, and is reportedly purging left-leaning accounts. Moreover, Musk himself posts one right wing, intolerant screed after another on his platform, even attacking alarmed advertisers who have paused their support of the site. The result is that, counter to Musk’s promises about a free exchange of ideas, Twitter is becoming another bubble of right wing hate and misinformation, similar to Parler and “Truth” Social. Therefore, Messaging Matters is checking out of Twitter.

So where did we end up? After setting up placeholder accounts at Tribel, Counter and Mastodon, we have joined millions of others on Mastodon. Our page can be found @MessagingMatters@mstdn.social. Thus far, the experience has been completely positive. Mastodon has surpassed eight million users, and is growing at the rate of 1.5 million new users per month. It is free of ads, and, better still, free of Nazis and other hate speech purveyors. The users have been polite, and even juvenile name-calling (of the type Musk keeps engaging in on Twitter) is noticeably absent.

Where Twitter may be headed

Sometimes it takes a history professor to put things in perspective. In a mind-blowing Twitter thread last weekend, Professor Walter D. Greason of Macalester College in St. Paul, MN did just that. Specifically, Greason described the conservatives’ efforts to destroy liberal/progressive advances that have been boosted by the internet and social media, which he calls “convergence.” Gleason names Elon Musk‘s takeover of Twitter as the latest attempt to stop such progress, i.e., Republican “counter-convergence.” After the jump is Greason’s fascinating Twitter thread. If you have Twitter, you can click on “read the full conversation on Twitter” at the bottom of his first tweet. If not, we have included key tweets from the thread:

Ukraine support rally

While reading this article from the World Bank regarding emerging markets, this sentence caused a major pause:

The invasion of the Ukraine has triggered an initial appreciation of the U.S. dollar against EM currencies ….

“The Ukraine”? Haven’t we read and heard repeatedly that we shouldn’t use “the” because that feeds into the Soviet-era position that Ukraine is Russia’s territory, not its own nation? Hopefully the inclusion of “the” in the article was an oversight, and indeed there is a mention of “the war in Ukraine” earlier in the article. But often, articles from large organizations pass through more than one writer or editor, so it’s not clear that everyone at the World Bank is on the same page.

This is something to keep an eye on, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine involves not just military weapons, but weapons of words and propaganda as well.

Photo by Robert T Bell, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/DCaHhz