Writer, producer, director - thirtysomething, Last Samurai, My So-Called Life, Dangerous Beauty. Let's build a future for our children - and their children.
Los Angeles
Joined June 2009
- Tweets33.3K
- Following991
- Followers4.3K
- Likes6.5K
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
This is absolutely brutal and perfect. Read this short piece—and, most importantly, click on the hyperlinks.
From me @NRO, with a frightening warning to voters:
A List of Things Democrats Might Do If They Retake Power
nationalreview.com/corner/a-…
Disgusting. Yes, Republicans do it too. That's a reason NOT to do it. If Peltola loses, the DSCC will have no one but themselves to blame.
nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/po…
"A Top House Democrat Says His Party Is United on the Economy"
Sadly, Democrats are united on the usual milquetoast patchwork of policy changes instead of the aggressive redirection of the economy the vast majority of Americans want.
Ironically, only the socialists are speaking to the level of emergency Americans actually feel, and centrist Dems risk losing control of the party if they don't wake up. "Affordability" isn't good enough when millions are giving up on the very idea of the American dream. "Prosperity," "upward mobility," "knowing your kids will do better than you did" are the words Dems need to commit to, which can only be done by taking power from the billionaire class and restoring it to the American people. Even our "leaders" no longer remember how astonishing the American economic engine was when it created the world's greatest middle class.
washingtonsun.com/campaigns/…
"We operate with a mandate that our businesses should not only be profitable, but also benefit their communities."
These simple, humane, yet radical words are at the center of the fight that's coming across America. We need to seize power away from the private equity firms, the tech lords, the billionaires, the giant monopolies who all corrupted our government in order to buy that power -- and reinstate the rules that created the greatest middle class in history. Two generations ago the profit-at-all-costs ethic of neoliberalism started its perversion of our economy, and millions now live under the terrible damage it has done.
Many think the answer is socialism, but by definition socialism cannot create prosperity and never has; only capitalism can do that.
But not the corrupted form of capitalism we have today. Ask your parents and your grandparents what life was like when there was no private equity, when stock buybacks were illegal, when unions were strong, when the rich were taxed at the level necessary to pay down the deficit, when the FTC made sure no company could get big enough to destroy a market, when you went to the local family pharmacy instead of waiting in line at CVS, when companies cared about customer service, when news was meant to inform instead of making money by enraging. When the common good - the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - was embraced by American business.
It was all real in post-WWII America, and can be real again.
nytimes.com/2026/10/28/opini…
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
Exactly what we need in the absence of a functioning U.S. Department of Justice. An organization of ex-prosecutors and investigators who help can put cases together for current and future prosecutors who will restore accountability for corrupt federal officials and those who benefit from that corruption.
We are facing a crisis of impunity. That's why we built The Rule of Law Project — to investigate unlawful conduct by federal officials, and work with state and local prosecutors to hold them to account.
Watch former DOJ prosecutor Mark Blumberg and human rights leader Brad Adams launch this critical accountability initiative on MSNOW with Nicolle Wallace.
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
Sadly this is completely unsurprising. Meta has executed a “merchants of doubt” campaign against the reputation of people calling out the toxicity of their products for a long time.
@JonHaidt is a true hero who has done more than almost anyone else to affect global norms and policy to protect children’s developing minds from social media and screens with #TheAnxiousGeneration
Meta had an internal PR plan to try and discredit Jon Haidt because he was a critic of social media.
Meta was going to recruit academics, like Andrew Gelman, to write take down pieces. They were trying to turn academics against one another through a "whisper strategy".
This is a very serious problem for open academic debate. If academics who share negative evidence about a platform are targeted by campaigns to smear our credibility, we are in deep, deep trouble.
This creates a very serious conflict of interest for anyone who is paid to do this.
law360.com/articles/2542517/…
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
“I’ll tell you what, David,” one of my sources said. “You’re so concerned about antisemitism? Why don’t you look on X, at the bile that comes out of that platform, that he tweets and retweets—that’s who you want as an investor in your company?”
puck.news/hollywood/2026/10/…
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
I’ve had this weight on me for a while and felt the need to share it once and for all.
Years ago, the CEO and co-founder of Semafor, a media publication, approached me. He presumably wanted me to consider investing, because he spent a significant amount of time boasting about all of his supplemental sources of revenue.
I was stunned when he bragged about getting an enormous amount of money from the government of Qatar. The pretense was that he was receiving these funds to “train journalists.” I don’t recall the precise amounts, but recall that he acknowledged that the cost to conduct this “training” was a tiny fraction of what he was getting paid - directionally it was something like getting paid $2mm to conduct a “media training” boot camp that would cost Semafor $50,000 to execute. I pointed out that it sounded like he was being bribed - that nobody with proper intentions would offer to pay something that was 20-100X off market - and no entity pretending to be a journalism outfit should accept stuff like that, as it would compromise him.
He insisted that wouldn’t happen. But over the course of many years, I’ve observed how Semafor continues to receive government sponsorships and perform all sorts of “trainings” and “conferences” in partnership with Qatar, while providing very complementary coverage to the government of Qatar. This is downright unethical - and particularly unbecoming of an outfit pretending to be “training journalists”! The problem doesn’t end with Semafor.
The government of Qatar has been buying off media, education and other groups, with reports of how it deployed billions of dollars in the US higher education system. All of us who care about ethics should demand an investigation into these practices. Regardless of whether legal authorities choose to look into this, we as the people and the consumers should admonish such egregious behavior and ensure we avoid “media” publications that are so compromised.
Countless journalists risk their lives every day to expose abuses in power. Semafor does a disservice to the profession by undermining trust.
@buildersmideast @BuildersMvt
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
I analyzed hundreds of tweets from this past weekend and found evidence of two unique disinformation campaigns amplifying Elon Musk’s accusations against Ukraine. One of these campaigns can be traced back to a Russian social media account and one of Putin’s top allies.
my latest. (Link 👇)
Anyone who uncritically takes the word of Taylor Lorenz over Jonathan Haidt has a serious problem with unseriousness.
Internet-culture reporter and influencer @TaylorLorenz falsely asserts that @JonHaidt, who is a social psychologist at @NYU's Stern School of Business, is "not an academic."
She insists Haidt is "a political actor making millions pushing a political agenda. He discredited himself by relentlessly lying abt an entire academic field that overwhelmingly refutes his false claims." Pointing to findings that Facebook's parent company has sought to undermine Haidt, Lorenz said, "It's good @Meta is putting resources into getting the truth out."
This raises the question of whether Haidt is indeed merely motivated by politics, or whether he sincerely believes that the evidence shows that smartphone use among minors yields a net harm to their well-being. He had repeatedly suggested that the latter is the case, and wrote a best-selling book to that effect.
Taylor Lorenz, for what it's worth, not long ago posted a free ad for the Bark Phone, which is parental-control software for smartphones for kids. In the ad, she enthusiastically touted smartphones as good for kids, because, she said, they provide an avenue for self expression. She did not provide any reference to peer-reviewed research to back that claim.
There is a distinction, mind you, between claiming that phones are harmful but lacking the research to support that claim or to support it convincingly, and supporting with solid research the claim that they are either not harmful or even, as Lorenz has claimed, beneficial.
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
CBS deleted this post and reposted it admitting that their original one was misleading. And the misleading post from CBS was intentionally misleading, not an innocent mistake. CBS continues to lose credibility.
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
Through their massive vote in yesterday’s election, the Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel have made it clear that they want to participate fully, as equals, in shaping this country’s future. Not taking this historic opportunity to work with them would be cowardly, racist, and self-defeating.
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
The Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Florida says that one of her campaign's IG pages was suddenly taken down tonight during an event. If this isn't election interference, I don't know what is.
Hey @Meta 👋We are currently hosting a get-out-the-vote rally in Osceola County, home to a large Puerto Rican community, and our #LatinosConAngie @instagram page was suddenly taken down while we were actively posting content from the event.
This page is a critical communication tool for reaching Latino voters and mobilizing our community. With just seven days until Election Day, every minute matters.
We are calling on Meta to immediately restore the page and provide an explanation for its removal. Voters deserve access to critical election information, especially in these final days. @andymstone
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
Zuckerberg already admitted it wrongly suspended the No Kings Instagram account during the peak of a massive voter-mobilization effort.
Now, seven days before the midterms, Zuckerberg has suspended the account Angie Nixon’s Senate campaign uses to organize Latino voters.
At what point do repeated “mistakes” that suppress organizing by Democrats become an election-integrity crisis?
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
Mao is responsible for the deaths of 10s of millions of his countrymen during peacetime. His policies killed so many people, you can see the dip in global life expectancy during the worst period of his tenure. He was a brutal, sociopathic dictator, a man who, after his wife gave birth during the Long March, discarded the infant with some peasants they passed by. Much of the increase in steel production during the most Lyskenoist of his policies came from forcing peasant to melt down all the metal they owned. People didn’t have cookware or farming tools. Famine blanketed the nation. The worst thing about Mao was that he was a cretin with terrible ideas and the power to implement them via authoritarian means.
Under “dictator” Mao, life expectancy in China increased by 30 years, literacy rates went from 20% to 70%, steel output grew from 1 million to 23 million tons, 47 million hectares of land was taken from landlords and given to peasants, and China was unified under a strong central state and got nuclear weapons.
Despite his failures, it does not take a rocket scientist to understand why Mao is revered in China.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Mao's Great Leap Forward and related policies caused an estimated 30-45 million famine deaths in 1959-1961 alone, with total excess deaths under his rule often estimated at 40 million or higher.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chi…
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC43…
chinafile.com/library/nyrb-c…
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
You really don't need to like El-Sayed to find this disgusting and un-American
If we're asking El-Sayed to repudiate the Cenk ad, we should be asking Mike Rogers to repudiate this
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
Whoever this "strategist" is shouldn't be listened to. Ossoff is actually famous for excellence in constituent service, which is definitionally "retail politics." Also you don't get that kind of embrace in the Black community in Georgia if you're a "robot." Ossoff's ties are deep
“He’s a robot,” says one top Democratic strategist who has interacted with Ossoff. “He can do the speeches. But he can’t do the retail politics at all.” vanityfair.com/story/jon-oss…
Marshall Herskovitz retweeted
⬇️⬇️⬇️ This.
Ukraine vs russia is the only black and white good vs evil war since WW2.
It is the litmus test of good and bad people.
those who are pro-russian or "neutral" are on the side of evil and in all your future actions you should know that those are the people who will step over your corpse to gain an advantage.
Keep the pro-Ukrainians close, they will have your back.