1/ It is very hard to steel man because it requires us to ignore everything we know about American politics. It is basically "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, while not woke, are woke sympathizers. Thus, radicals will take over our government from the inside and institute terrible https://twitter.com/austinm419/status/1323048847736774657

2/ policies. Borderline communist policies, in Lindsay's estimation. And this is a bigger threat than anything Trump has done so people shouldn't vote for Biden.

This is so astonishingly ignorant, and reflects such a lack of expertise or curiosity about how America works, that

3/ it isn't *really* worth responding to. But one last time: As I've said, repeatedly, governing America is not governing Portland. If Biden wins, he will have won because of millions of normie voters and will govern as a center-left moderate, with some meat thrown to the left

4/on genuinely important issues like climate and criminal justice (both of which are issues where, depending on how you ask the question, the majority of Americans appear to be in favor of real action anyway).

I have trouble spending a lot of time carefully constructing

5/counterarguments because "Dems = [neo-]Marxists" is the stalest claim in the book, and because "Kamala Harris will give rise to Communism, or something like it" is such a crazy line, and is coming mostly from people who had no interest in American politics until the woke wars,

6/ that it feels silly to take much time to respond. It is not a coincidence that this happens to be the decades-long GOP playbook: A lot of the people parsing every Biden/Harris utterance in search of excuses to vote for Trump are not genuine liberals.

As a

7/ general rule, when someone pops onto the scene and is suddenly very interested in American politics -- but only because of one formative event or culture-war interest -- you should be skeptical of their analysis until they can prove a deep understanding of it. Part of what is

8/ happening is that people who are *otherwise* very smart are overestimating their expertise in a new area. I see all sorts of warning lights that major IDW figures don't grok the basics of American politics.

Okay! Done with this.

9/ PS -- When I talk about JB doing this or that policy-wise, the idea that the Democratic Party will be able to do *anything*, legislative policy-wise, is itself a major assumption. Could be total paralysis! Huge uphill battle for even the most incremental policy change! All the

10/ more reason to be skeptical of the idea that a Biden presidency will lead to any sort of sweeping anything, especially when the possibility of backlash is factored in. Obamacare, a centrist healthcare policy, led to THE PRESIDENT BEING BURNED IN EFFIGY. Total shitstorm,

11/ awful midterm for Dems. It helps to have some historical awareness when trying to figure out what to fear. "Radical SJWs taking over the federal government" ranks about as high as "Flying leopards with laser eyes."