"On the 4th of July, the New York Times opinion section chose to publish an op-ed from a Michigan resident making his case to not vote in the 2024 election. One democracy expert slammed the national paper of record for its decision to run the essay."
@wdlindsy I’m not able to find a source for the claim that Matthew Walther, the writer of this op-ed, DID vote in 2016/20 beyond screenshots of tweets/threads and showbiz411.com, and personally I’m not willing to go through a request for Michigan’s public records to get that info.
@WhiteCatTamer Thank you for the list.Since I follow the radical Catholic right — as in, I monitor it as a theologian — I've long known about Walther and where he stands. I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of those screenshots. Has Walther denied their accuracy? And didn't NYT yank the op-ed piece from its initial setting and fiddle with the headline after these screenshots were released?
@WhiteCatTamer I seem to be missing your point or not understanding it. The screenshot to which I thought you were referring was the one attached below, which I posted in a thread about Walther a day or so back. It's from Gary Legum. It now seems ypu're talking about screenshots you yourself took, and I'm confused.
@npaulreads You're right. And that's clearly the reason people like Walther want to make statements like this, and why NYT wants to high-profile those statements.
"This is just very sad and frankly just what the Autocracy Doctor ordered. Not voting is a vote to let others decide your fate, and we know that many elections are decided by relatively few votes. The goal of many autocracies is 'demobilization': people detaching from politics so they don't resist."
"If 2016 and 2020 are proper indicators, it's likely the 2024 election will be decided by just tens of thousands of votes across five or six battleground states — including Walther's home state of Michigan."