David Michael Slater is an acclaimed author of books for children, teens, and adults. He is also the fiction editor at Judith Magazine.
Portland, OR
Joined May 2013
- Tweets5.2K
- Following1.8K
- Followers1.4K
- Likes307
David Michael Slater retweeted
For the last two years, the Trump Administration has been governed by a simple mantra: “We can just do things.” On Tuesday, voters replied, “So can we,” and wiped out the GOP. This was not a blue wave. This was not a blue tsunami. This was the breakup of a winning coalition.
Those voters, in breaking up the coalition, treated downballot races as proxies for their contempt of Washington, D.C. The race for dog catcher became nationalized because of Republican political malpractice.
In 2024, Donald Trump assembled a multiracial and multiethnic coalition of voters who bristled at the progressivism of the Democrats and the wreckage of the economy. By 2026, Trump and his White House acolytes set that coalition on fire to cater to a group of hyperonline grievance mongers who have confused Twitter with real life.
Last night, the American constitutional system worked as designed and worked so well and so thoroughly that the party that lied to itself in 2020 that it had lost only because the election was stolen is now lying to itself that it lost only because of gas prices and war. Last night’s drubbing was too complete to be theft.
It was gas prices.
And it was the war.
But it was also calling affordability a “hoax.”
And it was also the corruption.
The incompetence.
The tariffs.
The playing nice with Russia while treating our allies worse than our enemies.
The impression of cruelty.
The overly aggressive deportations.
The accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic.
The arrogance.
The ballroom.
The reflecting poll.
The golf courses.
The arch.
The Qatari 747.
The aggressive redistricting push.
The threats against enemies.
It turns out a weekend Fox and Friends host might not be a reassuring beacon of competence to Americans.
Gas prices and the war cannot explain a wipe out from top to bottom in Texas or Georgia or losing South Carolina or Ohio or a total coast to coast wipe out. Only the simpletons can believe that.
Adam Hamilton won Finney County in Kansas, which was a Trump +35 county in 2024 and he did so with Hispanic voters. He did not do that just because of war and gas prices.
And shall we talk about Mississippi?
A few weeks ago, Bo French in Texas attacked University of Texas students who were American citizens of Indian descent. A portion of the President’s base cheered him on. Even some within the Administration, on public Twitter accounts tied to the Administration, echoed him. Those voters’ parents repudiated the racism in the GOP and wiped out Republicans in Texas, not because they support the Democrats, but because the party they had supported turned on them. It was political malpractice by the GOP.
David Michael Slater retweeted
Jewish Democrats are hopeful today that with U.S. funding to Israel ending and AIPAC politically diminished and no longer funding candidates, the hatred will stop.
Here in Canada we have no AIPAC equivalent, and our funding to Israel is insignificant.
The hatred is worse.
David Michael Slater retweeted
Why is @UMich silencing this? This woman assaulted me and @teameffujoe , resisted arrest, and threatened to KILL ME.
The fact that the police let her out of custody is absolutely insane to begin with. And now the fact @UMich as let her back onto campus. and is silencing people is unfathomable. She is a DANGER to students. She is someone who has been institutionalized and is on multiple SSRIs.
If I were a parent at this school, I would IMMEDIATELY remove my child.
When I went to the ER yesterday, I was told by the physician that assaults are very common on this campus.
This is an absolute disgrace.
So @UMich is allegedly hushing yesterdays assault. The perpetrator was let go, and no students apparently feel they’re not allowed to talk about it.
The Reddit post regarding the incident has been locked.
David Michael Slater retweeted
This paper answers why confident idiots run the world.
Cornell University published a psychological paper that explains every terrible boss, every loud influencer, and every broken corporate hierarchy.
It’s called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”
they tested participants across logic, grammar, and humor to measure the gap between actual performance and self-perception.
And the results are wild.
participants scoring in the bottom 12th percentile consistently believed they were operating in the 62nd percentile.
they were not lying. they were literally incapable of recognizing their own incompetence.
the paper revealed a brutal paradox:
the exact skills required to master a domain are the exact same skills required to accurately evaluate your own competence in that domain.
if you lack the skill, you inherently lack the cognitive capacity to realize you are failing.
this creates a dangerous systemic loop.
the incompetent are blessed with absolute, blinding certainty. their brain protects them from their own ignorance, allowing them to speak first, demand authority, and never second-guess their decisions.
meanwhile, the actual experts suffer the exact inverse.
top performers in the study consistently underestimated their rank. because a task was easy for them, they falsely assumed it was easy for everyone else.
they hesitate. they obsess over nuance. they assume they have nothing unique to add.
we are biologically wired to confuse confidence with competence.
the loudest person in the room gets promoted, gets funded, and gets the microphone, not because they know what they are doing, but because they are physically incapable of seeing what they don't.
the only defense mechanism is building systems that stop rewarding absolute certainty and start demanding proof of work.
David Michael Slater retweeted
In my media appearances and social media posts, I have been extremely outspoken in arguing that the mainstream Democratic Party must stand aggressively against the anti-American bigotry of the DSA and the far left. The response from my liberal friends has been largely positive, reinforcing my belief that a large but all too quiet majority of liberal Democrats share these concerns.
I believe many are keeping quiet because they see the Trump administration as a greater threat to America and consider defeating it an overriding moral obligation. I understand their reasoning, but I strongly disagree with the conclusion. Having a clear moral voice about what we stand for and what we oppose is an essential strategic asset for the Democratic Party, now and in the future. Selective outrage undermines our credibility and strengthens the extremists we decline to confront.
I believe this hierarchy of priorities helps explain Obama’s otherwise inexplicable support for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, as well as the relative silence of Schumer and Jeffries in the face of far left madness. They are trying to defeat what they see as the greater immediate threat, even if that means avoiding a direct confrontation with anti-Americanism and Islamist apologism within the Democratic coalition.
The Democrats face an electorate in which too many young progressives have been drawn toward extremist views. That shift did not happen in a vacuum. Failures to teach civics and critical thinking, the lack of meaningful governance of social media, and the manipulation of information systems by hostile foreign actors and other bad-faith forces, the rise of oppressor/oppressed ideologies, and many other factors have created an environment in which extremism has spread and gained legitimacy.
A significant faction of the Democratic electorate has become anti-American, anti-capitalist, and sympathetic to Islamist radicalism. A significant faction of the Republican electorate has become hostile to democracy and willing to excuse the Trump administration’s rampant corruption and lawlessness. Those of us who love our country must confront both, including when doing so means challenging people in our own party, including when we need to take short term political risks in the name of longer-term political gains and our principles.
I firmly believe the sensible center can reassert itself, but that will require conviction, courage, and organization from people willing to defend our democratic values consistently. It will not happen on its own.
Fighting for our civilizations, our societies, and our democracies must be the common work of everyone.
David Michael Slater retweeted
The complaint reveals the depth of the rot.
A NYT newsroom employee reported anti-Israel bias at least 15 times to HR and internal standards channels.
HR responded: “If you don’t like our values here, maybe you should go find a place whose values align with yours.”
Breaking: New York Times shareholders just SUED the company over its Israel coverage.
The suit cites a Jewish former NYT employee who says she repeatedly blew the whistle on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias inside the newsroom, raising concerns at least 15 times through managers, HR, and the standards desk.
The Times ignored her complaints.
Now shareholders are asking a judge to force the paper to turn over internal records it has refused to produce for months.
David Michael Slater retweeted
The antisemite does not experience himself as a bully. He experiences himself as courageous. A truth teller. A freedom fighter exposing hidden power.
That is part of antisemitism’s peculiar pleasure. It offers revelation, belonging, moral certainty, and the thrill of cruelty recast as virtue.
At the same time, Jewish outrage is not incidental to the experience. The shock, anger, fear, and anguish it provokes are part of the reward.
From medieval religious spectacles to Nazi rallies, college quads, and online mobs, antisemitism has repeatedly offered its adherents something far more psychologically rewarding than mere hatred. The antisemite is often having a really good time.
David Michael Slater retweeted
My full address at the Oxford Union on the debate motion: “This house believes Israel never truly wanted peace with Palestine.”
🇮🇱
David Michael Slater retweeted
Brad Lander called Gaza a genocide, pledged to end all military aid to Israel, and endorsed Mamdani.
That still wasn't enough for the antizionists.
David Michael Slater retweeted
Four days ago, Amnesty International published a report documenting extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrests, and other abuses by Hamas militias against Palestinians in Gaza.
Has anyone seen prominent pro-Palestine voices in the West speak about it?
If not, why? Why is accountability for Hamas’s crimes against Palestinians met with silence from the same people who claim to champion Palestinian human rights?
Or do Palestinian lives matter to them only when Israel is killing them?
David Michael Slater retweeted
I don’t understand why celebrities and cultural figures are backing murderers …
Thanks for the details @samanthaettus
More than 20 Marvel stars are calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences for murder. He is now being cast as a Palestinian Nelson Mandela, with more than 200 prominent cultural figures joining the campaign. Before turning a convicted murderer into a symbol of liberation, perhaps they should learn the names and stories of his victims.
David Michael Slater retweeted
Have we considered the possibility that perhaps @MarkRuffalo isn't actually antisemitic, but that it's just a total coincidence that he happens to have obsessive, antagonistic views about the Jewish State and Jewish businesspersons in Hollywood, and inadvertently uses antisemitic tropes every time he opines on those topics, sometimes wearing a jacket pin of bloody hands stemming from the lynching and dismembering of two people who just happen to be Jewish, while amplifying false narratives about the Jewish State that stem from foreign influence ops that he never calls out because he is too busy highlighting the alleged influence of the world's only Jewish State at the exclusion of talking about any other States with far more aggressive, corrupt influence on Western Media through mergers, acquisitions and general media investments, which are often obscured from the general public and come at complete odds with Western values and oft leveraged to poison and divide the West through storytelling, but he never talks about those powerful family-owned entities because coincidence they aren't Jewish?
Like maybe it's really just completely happenstance and we're all just being too sensitive and overreacting because Jews have been having a hard time for a few thousand years and Mark is really one of the good guys and we're all wrong?
David Michael Slater retweeted
Posted this yesterday.
Lots of feedback on X, Substack, and elsewhere.
Insults, antisemitic slurs, and “everybody knows” denials: abundant.
But not one person—not a single one—contested the article on the merits or met the falsifiable standard I set out at the end:
”Show me an order or a plan to destroy Palestinians as such. Show me a pattern of conduct from which destruction is the only reasonable inference — one that survives contact with the alternative explanation, which is a brutal war against an enemy embedded in a civilian population. Show me killing rates and methods consistent with extermination rather than with that war. Show me a competent tribunal that has weighed adversarial evidence, with a defense in the room, and returned that verdict.
Bring me those and I will write the correction myself, under my own name.”
Silence on the substance is the tell.
That is why the word genocide should not be used to describe what has happened in Gaza since October 7.
For those who have not read my article 👇
justthefacts.media/p/genocid…
It's live on Just the Facts: Genocide for Dummies.
A plain-language primer on what the word actually requires under international law, what the recognized cases look like, and why the evidence from Gaza falls short of that standard.
I did not write it as an advocate. I have no brief to defend and no side to win. I wrote it as a primer — the kind of thing you should read before you enter this argument, so that when you do, you know what the word requires and what a competent court would apply.
At the end, I lay out the evidence that would change my mind. Not a rhetorical gesture. A falsifiable standard, in writing, under my name:
Show me an order or a plan to destroy Palestinians as such. Show me a pattern of conduct from which destruction is the only reasonable inference — one that survives contact with the alternative explanation, a brutal war against an enemy embedded in a civilian population. Show me a competent tribunal that has weighed adversarial evidence, with a defense in the room, and returned that verdict.
Bring me those and I will write the correction myself.
Paywall free link in the first reply. Read it before you call Gaza a genocide.
David Michael Slater retweeted
What’s likely? That all your totally normal liberal Jewish friends suddenly “love genocide” or that Israel’s Islamist neighbors bent on its annihilation used propaganda to paint Jews as uniquely evil, literally the exact playbook every Jew-hating society has used for millennia?
David Michael Slater retweeted
Why won’t fellow Democrats condemn these abhorrent views from DSA?
How is embracing Hamas a “big tent” issue for Democrats?
David Michael Slater retweeted
The party has to reckon with one of its most loyal voting blocks being pushed aside and ignored .. and being attacked from within the party…
Heading to 2028 Jewish voters can’t and shouldn’t be ignored by the party & other democratic voters
David Michael Slater retweeted
Many of us have been calling out the starvation libel and famine hoax for years. Now it has further and utterly unravelled on the basis of the UN’s own data.
When will the UN representatives and bodies finally be held to account for propagating these falsehoods that put Jews around the world at risk and undermine the credibility of these international institutions?
David Michael Slater retweeted
UNICEF just confirmed children in Gaza are better fed than the rest of the Middle East.
The “Gaza Famine” was always a hoax.
David Michael Slater retweeted
WARNING - a blueprint for replicating radical activism in schools nationwide centered around Jew hate is coming to a district near you!
The latest movement Palestinians have infested with their delusional anti-Jewish bias? Socialism.
A major socialist conference in Chicago is training activists to target K–12 schools.
Socialism 2026 features Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, DSA, Hasan Piker (Mr. America deserved 9/11), and sessions such as "Weaponizing Antisemitism."
This is not education.
It is organized ideological infiltration.
