Politics

Twitter announced last month it would start flagging content the company and moderators decided was manipulated to deceive their users. The fear at the time was that this would of course be applied as Twitter deemed fit — decisions would be based solely on the personal opinions of the moderator or moderators. That fear now seems real. Twitter flagged a video clip of presidential candidate Joe Biden stumbling over his words at a recent campaign rally. Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media manager tweeted out a clip of the speech, which Twitter flagged as ‘manipulated media’. The trouble is, under the definition of what manipulation is and how that applies to video, the clip Twitter flagged was not manipulated. Instead Twitter is simply flagging context.

The results of Super Tuesday show that while Joe Biden can’t be described as coherent, the Biden campaign has found a coherent message. It is not a message bristling with policy detail. It is not a message that swears fealty to intersectional dogma. Certainly, it is not a message that has much appeal to anybody under the age of 30. Instead, what Biden offers is a strange vision of a nation restored to a pre-Trump summer of the early 2010s. ‘We have to correct,’ Biden says in his speeches. The correction is not aimed at what those on the left perceive to be enormous structures of injustice and inequality. Biden rarely talks about systems.

Elizabeth Warren did not die in a tragic accident yesterday. But judging by the reactions of America’s journalists and academics, you would be forgiven for thinking she had. Instead, she suspended her presidential campaign after a string of self-inflicted, humiliating failures. Yet huge swathes of the overeducated US intelligentsia responded the news as though their entire worldview had been shattered. I don’t see much of a difference in the reactions of Warren’s elite opinion-maker supporters to her campaign suspension and the way Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash was processed by NBA fans: raw trauma and disbelief, with some anger and desperation mixed in.

Being president just wasn’t in Elizabeth Warren’s DNA. The New York Times’s favorite candidate has nevertheless stopped persisting. After finishing third in her home state of Massachusetts on Super Tuesday, all the smoke signals were there, and the media could no longer circle the wagons around her. The question was never about if Warren was going to fold her tent and go home, it was simply a case of when. Warren was supposedly considering taking her candidacy all the way to the convention, but that would have been quite the gamble for both her and her party.

The aftershocks of a stunning Super Tuesday continue to ripple through the conscience of America. Suddenly, a great number of Americans find themselves wondering where they can turn to find the best hope to restore American dignity and normalcy. I’m referring, of course, to Libertarian presidential candidate and fugitive John McAfee, who sadly announced he was suspending his campaign in a Twitter video Wednesday from parts unknown. The country has been robbed of the potential for McAfee, surrounded by a plethora of gorgeous Belarusian strippers and strapped up with an AK-47, to be sworn in to the presidency with an acid-dipped joint dropping from his lips. McAfee instead declared his candidacy for vice president alongside Libertarian candidate Vermin Supreme.

Arlington, Virginia A special type of Democratic voter lives in the suburbs of DC that conservatives heavily caricature whose existence I couldn't confirm until now. Overwhelmingly white, young, progressive, desperately out of touch, and they love Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Warren fans are hard to come by nowadays, but I was lucky enough to find one of her last pockets of support at an Arlington Democrats and Arlington Young Democrats election night party. Nearly a hundred of the club's members gathered at William Jeffrey's Tavern, a bar with plenty of craft beers on tap and a projector screen set up to display live Super Tuesday results. Local news crews swarmed the small section of the bar reserved for the group.

Perhaps the intense wave of establishment Democratic party consolidation around Joe Biden over the past 48 hours isn’t a concerted conspiracy — no smoke-filled rooms, no corrupt deals, no villainous blackmail schemes. But the Democratic party establishment (which we’re often told does not exist) is clearly making every effort to give the appearance of something conspiratorial going on.Take yesterday, for instance. Pete Buttigieg meets for breakfast with 95-year-old Jimmy Carter (?), ensures the visit is well-publicized, then heads home to South Bend and pulls the rug out from under his campaign. Wait, what? Is this the same Pete Buttigieg whose aides just a few days earlier released an elaborate memo detailing his surefire path to a formidable delegate acquisition?