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davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social
Historian. Book: TAKING AMERICA BACK: THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT AND THE FAR RIGHT // Yale Press // April 2024
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As the academy collapses, I'm thinking this morning about the time a very prominent and successful academic told me that my work was uninteresting and unimportant. And it took me a long time to realize that, at the end of the day, their opinion does not matter at all.

submitted 11 hours ago • 11 comments

Correct me if I'm wrong, but because the Joint Chiefs are not actually in the chain of command if Trump wanted to use the military to -- for instance -- violently suppress protestors he'd issue such an order to Hegseth who would then issue it to USNORTHCOM, no?

submitted 13 hours ago • 2 comments

It's funny to me that the handwringing about the "woke right" by reactionary centrists is really just a less politically effective way of calling these guys weird.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

It’s remarkable how little salience abortion has as a political issue in 2025, considering three years ago in the aftermath of DOBBS Democrats were convinced they were on the cusp of becoming a permanent majority party on the strength of women voters.

submitted 1 day ago • 7 comments

Look, the reason the public hates higher education is not because of DEI, Palestine student activism, or liberal humanities professors—those are all interelite conflicts. The reason the public hates higher education is that it’s expensive and doesn’t pay off like it used to.

submitted 1 day ago • 5 comments

Well, I guess we're gonna see just how powerful the FBI really is, huh.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

One of the reasons I hate academic writing is that you're trained to spend an excruciating amount of time qualifying every statement and trying to engage with every other thing written about the subject that you can easily lose track of what you wanted to say in the first place.

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

I’m genuinely enjoying everybody’s historical analogues. Third Reich? Vichy? SDF? Let’s hear it. Nobody loves the rhyme of crisis more than me. But I’m still not convinced the model isn’t just America’s good ole Jacksonian era apartheid-based spoils system.

submitted 2 days ago • 33 comments

My basic assumption is that the Trump administration is guided by a form of right-wing accelerationism, which sees the prospect of mass unrest like we saw in 2020 as desirable precisely because it can be violently crushed in ways that many on the right could only fantasize then.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Westbrook Pegler, for example, a columnist for the Birchers and a kind of right-wing populist in his time, was one of the first to get wind of CIA money going to European unions, and he complained that the US was funding socialism etc. This was in the 1950s, long before the Ramparts flap of 1967

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Fine article but if I had been asked I would have added that the right-wing critique of these kinds of programs has always existed on the fringes; and the fringes are in control now www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/u...

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

My wife insisted I model for her in the snow.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Some of us could be had for pennies on the dollar *before* it was cool.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

LMFAO

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

Sure seems like an actual opposition party worth its salt would start thinking about the kind of obstruction that would get its leadership jailed, then!

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

Well, I just opened up my DMs on here. Please, *please* don't make me regret it!

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Centrists didn't like the discursive norms of the "woke left" and had conniptions over it. Now that the far-right is in power and toppling the rule of law that centrists claim to hold so dear, the best they've got is calling it "woke right." This is what happens when you don't do material analysis!

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

There's a couple of basic problems with the "woke right has gone too far and will pay a political price for it!" analyses from centrists.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

There are few people I have more contempt for than liberals who just decided to start caring about Gaza in the past three weeks.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment