From self-described free speech advocates like Elon Musk to more conscientious execs like Reid Hoffman, the tech industry’s silence is deafening — Back in January, I wrote a piece here about the first anniversary of the January 6th attack focusing on the conspicuous silence of a wide range of tech leaders and VCs, people who pride themselves on how innovative they are, how they’re making the world a better place, yadda yadda…

What NY’s Democratic Redistricting SNAFU Has Revealed For All To See — According to the New York Times, just two weeks ago, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) told his fellow House Democrats in a private meeting that if the new congressional maps that the New York state legislature had just approved under redistricting were thrown out by the state’s highest court, it…

And how politicians from Abraham Lincoln to Katie Porter manage(d) to be different — Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) said something important this week. “Too often, Congress recognizes issues too late,” she told Sarah Ferris of Politico after giving an emotional speech to her fellow Democratic House members about how inflation was affecting her family. Porter is a single mother of three who commutes back…

Until the Left invests in local orgs that matter in people’s daily lives and scaling that up, it’s likely to keep losing to the Right — Amid the deluge of reporting and commentary on the leak of the Supreme Court’s pending ruling overturning the right to abortion, one number grabbed my attention. The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), which started in 1968 as a group of Catholic bishops opposed to state abortion laws, now says…

The rightwing billionaire’s SuperPAC has been using this site to give J.D. Vance millions in campaign help. — On Tuesday night, just after the polls closed in Ohio, Alex Isenstadt of Politico published a story with a fascinating headline: “A mole hunt, a secret website and Peter Thiel’s big risk: How J.D. Vance won his primary.” Vance, the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy, was once a Trump critic…

The Fox Network star is a ratings crack-head, pandering to minute-by-minute data on his audience’s basest fears. — In April 2017, Tucker Carlson’s star at Fox News rose to the top slot, the covered 8:00pm prime time hour that had just been vacated by Bill O’Reilly. He had one challenge: how to build a loyal audience while distinguishing himself from fellow host Sean Hannity, then the network’s biggest…

As the midterms approach and voters sour on the party in power, here’s an alternative path worth trying. — A month ago in this space, I offered some arguments for optimism about the upcoming mid-term elections for the majority of Americans who don’t want to see Trump Republicans return to power. Voter turnout has jumped dramatically since 2016, and the voters who surged in to vote in 2018 and…

The world’s richest man could use Twitter to radically disrupt politics — Ten years ago, Google did something unprecedented for a giant tech company. It blacked out the landing page for search and replaced it with a call to action, urging people to email their elected representatives in Congress to stop legislation that Google feared would break the internet. It was part…

No, and Jonathan Haidt’s big new Atlantic essay about social media’s damaging effects couldn’t be more wrong about what ails us — Jonathan Haidt, the New York University social psychologist and author of the bestselling book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, has been on a tear for a while about the negative effects of online social media. Three years ago in The Atlantic, he and…