I don't think that's totally fair. In 2020, Vox put out an article making the argument for each of the candidates, Matt wrote the Bernie article.

Even before the tattoo, I figured Matt was going to support Platner because he looks like a dudebro and because of Mills' defense of trans people.

The single largest group in the party coalition is made up of older moderate voters, at 28% of Dem voters/16% of all voters. Progressives are the smallest group among either party's coalition, at 12% of Dem voters/6% of all voters.

www.pewresearch.org/politics/202...

It's actually the other way around, but that would get in the way of the narrative.

www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/12...

Anyway, if you're familiar with the dynamic, it is impossible not to notice the way it is playing out on the national stage, with Republicans the daddy party and Democrats the mommy party. Daddy's raging, destroying, lashing out, & most political analysis amounts to ...

If you've ever seen the comments on any article of his that mentions trans people, you'd know a warning like that was 100% needed.

I'm no Yglesias fan, but isn't that overstating his importance? From what I remember, many Biden Admin staffers were subscribed to his Substack, giving his writing some amount of influence in the staffer class, and somehow this has blown up into "Yglesias was a Biden Admin consultant".

He's been doing this re:trans people for years while defending hacks like Singal. Not surprised to see his interest in Hanania has led him here.

I don't think it's made up, they're just pretending like there's not a BIG difference between that gesture when its palm up vs palm down. Hand-on-heart, extend arm, palm up? That's extending your love out to a crowd. But palm down? That's a Nazi salute.

I think the Watsonian answer is that it's supposed to be a way of distinguishing between the kind of intelligent Ozian people-birds and dumb bird-birds.

The Doylist answer is that, yes, it's there for syllables.

He acknowledges that being a hack gets him more attention, goes more viral, brings in more money, while substantive policy reporting gets him nothing. With those incentives, of course he went down the road he did.

He's capable of self-reflection (see below), but his livelihood depends on not listening to it. Audience Capture has fully set in.

thespectator.com/topic/substa...

In more than one of my normie liberal podcasts people were speculating that it would go down like this, a tit-for-tat agreement that they smother the ethics report in exchange for him withdrawing his nomination, otherwise Trump would humiliate them in the Senate by forcing them to vote for a pedo.