dio (diachrony)
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diachrony.bsky.social
dio (diachrony)
@diachrony.bsky.social
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Cat lover, Balloon Juice lurker
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Reposted by dio (diachrony)
prime157.bsky.social
I've been saying since before MAGA, that the Republican party will do one of two things in my lifetime:

1) achieve a fascist state or

2) disappear for trying to achieve a fascist state

I think we're at that precipice.

And "America first" as Nazi adjacent isn't new. Dr. Seuss saw it:
Dr Seuss satirized "America First." Dr Seuss satirized "America first" linking it to the Nazis
December 12, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
davekarpf.bsky.social
“What was he saying? Oh yes, he was talking about (…) the theater in Washington named for the Politician's family that was now a battleground for cultural and political warfare.”

Christ. Just write “The Kennedy Center,” Olivia.

This is exhausting.
Lie. Surely it had landed someplace in my mind. Must be there still, recoverable, if only I could locate it. What was he saying? Oh yes, he was talking about the Broadway production, or the off-Broadway production. Or no, about the theater in Washington named for the Politician's family that was now a battleground for cultural and political warfare. But by now he seemed to be talking mostly about union health insurance, and the press, and the FBI, and for reasons even less clear, communism. All my haura heine waking hourg mu time was concerned mostly
December 10, 2025 at 6:03 AM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
davekarpf.bsky.social
Pages 206-212: she reprints in full the statement of facts from the trial against the Paul Pelosi attacker.

This sets up four paragraphs where Trump and conservative influencers invent conspiracy theories about the attack.

Followed by this non sequitur passage. Sure. Okay.
In Beachwood Canyon, Canadian flags fly outside the mid-century homes underneath the Hollywood sign. A friend in the neighborhood told me they went up after Election Day. At first I did not understand and then I understood and I still did not understand. 213
December 10, 2025 at 4:55 AM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
davekarpf.bsky.social
And in the very next passage she admits to feeding him oppo research.

…But, y’know, in a *good* way?

Regardless, none of this is anyone’s business and it is all the fault of nefarious forces aligned against her, and even if RFK has done terrible and predictable things, how dare you pin it on her.
December 9, 2025 at 11:16 PM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
davekarpf.bsky.social
I do not believe Olivia Nuzzi realizes how bad this passage make Olivia Nuzzi look.

The story of her affair has broken. RFK Jr asks her to lie about it so he can assume a role in Trump’s government.

Olivia thinks the single greatest injustice would be for any harm to befall his political career.
Shots rang out. The story of the relationship had broken, the bullet metaphorical. My phone rang again. "I need you to take a bullet for me," the Politician said. "Please." My mind flashed to where I had been, across town overlooking the Hudson, when he had first vowed to take a bullet for me. "T feel very protective of you," he had said then. Now he said, "If it's just sex, I can survive it." If it was anything more, he could not. The deal he made with the president wrought personal complication; already, his wife had told him she would not be seen with him until after the election. Now she was in Milan reading the news, hysterical, he said. It was fragile, the alliance with the president. Nothing was certain. Olivia Nuzzi Any new problems could upend the whole thing. The Politician had been through divorces before. He knew how fast they could get ugly, how little could be controlled. The election was less than two months away. If the president won, decisions about the new government would follow soon after, and if what had been promised was deliv-ered, congressional hearings would follow after that. Personal drama might spell political peril. He needed to avoid that. He would need my cooperation. My feelings about such a request aside, I did not think it fair that he would be harmed in what increasingly appeared to be a mad plot to harm me devised by the man I did not marry. I did not want the Politician to be harmed, too. At that moment my feelings were aside. I am good in a crisis. I had trained my entire life in a battlefield of crisis, the peace broker of my childhood home. The settings that enabled me to survive there switched on, and as the twister whirred faster around me, I slowed down, impervious to its force.
December 9, 2025 at 10:15 PM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
davekarpf.bsky.social
I think I could teach an hourlong seminar on how much I hate this paragraph.

(Paraphrasing) “I love driving. So American, right? I once had a panic attack in a hotel room. I saw a Trump casino. I resolved to get it together, to become a citizen of my country, and that’s why I love driving.”
It worked for a while to drive away from the problem. I like to drive through the country. Ten years earlier, on assignment in Las Vegas with a presidential candidate, I looked out the window of my suite at the Wynn to the Sierra Nevadas and realized that I could not breathe. I was late already for an event at the Peppermill, and I was not ordinarily given to panic, but I could not breathe. I could always see the water. I had never before been landlocked. On the floor of the suite I looked up through the window where across the strip a big golden tower sprouted from the dry earth. There was a name scrawled across the top floors: TRUMP. Curled in a ball beneath this expression of the president, I resolved to get it together, to become a citizen of my country, which is when I began driving everywhere.
December 9, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
davekarpf.bsky.social
If Nuzzi is a post-truth antivaxxer, she should say so.

If she isn’t, she should say so.

But you don’t get to work hard to elevate RFK Jr and then just gloss over what he has done.

Certainly not in your memoir that is purportedly about what you learned from the whole ideal.
December 9, 2025 at 2:04 AM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
davekarpf.bsky.social
The whole “aw shucks we’re so polarized and post-truth, who can tell what to believe now” schtick also hits different when the guy you torched your career for is the antivaxxer who burned down the NIH.

“There exists no agreed-upon neutral arbiter of facts.” …Gee, Olivia, who might we blame?
Olivia Nuzzi shoulders now sounded alike. It became impossible to say who believed what, whose beliefs were real, whether such a thing as realness could be verified and whether it even mattered. Verified by whom? There existed no agreed-upon neutral arbiter of facts. Value could not be quantified. Standards could not be determined, formed as they are through consensus about that which we value. Who was we? Did such a thing as a collective ethic, an American public with a shared understanding of value, have any basis in our present reality? Did we share at all? Less and less, the verdict came down.
December 9, 2025 at 2:01 AM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
davekarpf.bsky.social
Look, let's be blunt about it: what literally every reader of this book wants to know is "hey, so... you blew up your entire life for THIS GUY. What, uhm, what's the deal with that? HIM???"

We're 100 pages in and Nuzzi is extremely not talking about it at all.

bsky.app/profile/razz...
razzball.bsky.social Razzball @razzball.bsky.social · 6d
In line for the TSA behind this guy
December 9, 2025 at 12:19 AM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
davekarpf.bsky.social
I’m over 30 pages in, and the tone of the book has the feel of Chapter 2. We’re done with the introduction, the telling-everyone-what-she-plans-to-tell-them.

I’d describe the thesis of chapter 2 as “isn’t it interesting being me.”

And, speaking as a reader, no. Not really.
trying, halfheartedly, to write. Once, I was writing, and she was talking loudly about, of all things, a grilled cheese sandwich with lobster, which, first of all, is not really a grilled cheese sandwich. It is a lobster sandwich, technically, I think. And this went on, her talking about this; the matter of this sandwich, for half an hour. A lot of time for me to contemplate the integrity of the sandwich, to conclude for certain that in either formulation, I would not order one myself.
December 8, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by dio (diachrony)
maxberger.bsky.social
The fascist right doesn’t believe that American Jews belong in America. They want us to live in our own ethno-state—not here.

People like Zohran believe America is a multiracial democracy in which everyone should belong.

It’s insane the latter is treated as antisemitism.
November 23, 2025 at 5:49 PM