i don’t think enough attention has been paid to the heroism of Senator Van Hollen. 1/ www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcn...

He put himself in real danger. Bukele could have locked him up on some pretext, and it’s not at all clear the US executive would have done anything about it other than smile. US courts would legit have no jurisdiction. There would just be outraged liberals. 2/

It remains unclear how Van Hollen succeeded at getting a meeting with Abrega Garcia after first having been refused. I don’t know how he pulled that rabbit from a hat, but I tip my hat and give him credit for it. 3/

Van Hollen: “If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else in America.” Amen. /fin #Solidarity

the point is US state media wouldn’t be “Dem messaging”. it’d constitute a diverse slate of high quality noncommercial media—think Voice of America, BBC, CBC, etc. i hesitate to say NPR because it has such particular pathologies, pathologies that derive from the fact it is mostly *donor* financed 1/

to break down the problem a bit, there are (at least) two approaches to our present media catastrophe: 1. fight fire with fire, our propaganda to counter theirs; or 2. reshape the media to be environment to be tendentious and propagandistic. 2/

obviously both are likely necessary, but in the longer term i think only the second project can save us. 3/

(i think “democrats make you richer”, while it has the virtue by certain measures at least of being true, is messaging that has been tried quite a lot and proven easily countered by negativity-biased messaging that calls attention to people’s hardships and blames enemies.) /fin

i don’t love the state level in the US, it’s true. (i think there should be maybe 500 or 5000 states rather than 50.) but i do love the idea of a diverse publicly funded media ecosystem. i don’t hate state governments per se, just want them structured to be more meaningfully democratic. 1/

i don’t think virtue can compete with vice in ecosystems dominated by bot swarms. fascism offers compelling accounts that can fit on a bumper sticker and in a tweet. truer stories won’t fit their. i think we want to reduce the scope and importance of bot swarm media, not compete in manipulation. 2/

the late, great-even-if-i-often-disagreed @kdrum.bsky.social has made the case that fox news alone accounts for basically everything. 3/

like yeah, the specific disfigurations of soul that inflict eg JD Vance come from “too online” edgelording, but the main reason all that matters is because organs like Fox and Newsmax amplify it to less informed, less political audiences. 4/

i’m not sure i’m persuaded that’s right, but it’s worth taking seriously, and reminding ourselves that most people try to avoid rather than immerse themselves in online political content. 5/

whether its the absence of more better quality media or the presence of putinbots all over social media that’s the bigger problem is hard to tease out. but we should do our best to encourage the former and make the world less hospitable to the latter, i think. 6/

i don’t think we can compete on bots, but well funded, social-democratically inclined media can absolutely create great material that can flow onto tiktok, great podcasts that develop parasocial followings, etc. /fin