THEY HATE ME, J.D. VANCE BOASTED

Here's The Washington Post's lead story right now:

As JD Vance prepares to make a decision about his 2028 plans, the vice president is facing a barrage of online attacks from within his party, criticism his allies say appears to be part of a coordinated attempt to poison the well for him politically.

His detractors have adopted the “Never Vance” slogan and flooded social media, especially over the past week, with attacks including claims that Vance is “unfit” to be vice president due to his efforts to negotiate a peace deal with Iran. They have asserted, without evidence, that Vance is making policy decisions not supported by President Donald Trump. They have likened him to former president Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

The sustained public hostility from Vance’s own side of the aisle is unlike that faced by other vice presidents in decades, both in intensity and in the early timing — two years before the party will choose its next presidential nominee.

This seems bad for Vance -- until you take a closer look at the story. It doesn't quote anyone who's part of this well-poisoning campaign. The only people quoted are "a close ally of the vice president," "two other people with knowledge of Vance’s strategy," and "other advisers," all anonymous, along with "Steve Cortes, a conservative commentator supportive of Vance," and, to provide historical perspective, "Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to [Vice President Mike] Pence in the White House."

This story came from Vance World. He wants it understood that some Republicans hate him. He thinks it will help him win the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.

Why does Vance think this is happening?

Vance’s political team remains dismissive of the social media onslaught and its impact on Republican voters, believing that many of the attacks are not organic....

Vance’s allies are keenly aware of and monitoring the online attacks, but his team says the criticism sends a signal to the conservative base that establishment Republicans and opponents they label as neoconservatives hate Vance. That, they say, could ultimately strengthen his standing in a GOP primary.

Vance's team seems to be concerned that not enough Israel skeptics in the GOP noticed this in his recent Joe Rogan interview:

During the show, Vance described himself as a “reasonable moderate” in the debate over the U.S.-Israel relationship. He also cited a recent Time report about an online pro-Israel influence operation run by a former Trump campaign official, through which Vance said he was being attacked “in dishonest ways” by paid influencers.

“You know, my response to that is, ‘Well, go to hell,’” Vance told Rogan. “I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first, and that’s the way that I’ve tried to do this job.”

The operation described in the Time story isn't just "pro-Israel" -- it's financed by the Israeli government. The story tells us:

Last September, the global ad agency Havas hired [2020 Trump campaign manager Brad] Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by TIME. Under the agreement, Parscale’s operation would produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80% aimed at Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts. In a Services Agreement draft included in the filing, Parscale also pledged to amplify the campaign across social media and through “integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels,” referring to the Christian conservative broadcasting and publishing company where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Parscale vowed the effort would produce at least 50 million digital impressions per month, as well as influence how AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini characterized Israel and the war. For all this, Israel agreed to pay Clock Tower X $1.5 million per month.

The campaign doesn't appear to be working:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had hired Parscale to improve the nation’s standing among conservatives, only to watch support continue to erode on the American right and across the broader U.S. electorate. "We are pissed at Brad Parscale," says [an] Israeli official familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. "He was supposed to make things better. We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse."

But it's out there. The Post story reports:

A Washington Post analysis of conservative influencers’ posts on X found that criticism of Vance spiked immediately after his appearance on Rogan’s podcast.

Vance clearly wants anti-Netantyahu (and anti-Semitic) GOP voters to know about this. He wants them to know who hates him.

Vance is trying to walk a fine line on Israel and anti-Semitism. He'd like to retain the support of at least some voters who are uncomfortable with anti-Semitism while also dog-whistling to anti-Semites. Here's a passage about Charlie Kirk from Vance's recent memoir:

He called me in the summer of 2025 to talk about two things he was seeing among young conservatives that really worried him. The first was that they were very angry about Israeli influence in American politics. The second was that some were going from legitimate disagreement with the Israeli government to anti-Semitism.

“Young people think we allow Israel too much influence over our foreign policy, and they’re concerned about it. But for some, that concern is turning to anger, and even Jew hatred.”

Charlie saw that heated foreign policy disagreements, filtered through the internet, could bleed into ethnic hatred. And while Charlie loved Israel, he agreed with a lot of his young fans that the Israeli government was not always aligned with the interests of the United States. He knew the situation was delicate and complicated, and he worked directly with young activists on how to prevent their views on this political issue from feeding bigotry.

Ironically, Vance's pal Kirk once advised Netanyahu to conduct a social media influence operation much like the one Parscale is running, as the Time story notes:

In a private letter to Netanyahu in May 2025, which TIME reviewed, Kirk warned that anti-Israel sentiment online had reached "record levels" and urged an aggressive communications campaign: mobilize influencers, send former hostages on speaking tours, flood social media with stories that humanized Israeli society. "I know you've got a 7 front war and my kvetching pales in comparison. But I'm trying to convey to you that Israel is losing support even in conservative circles," Kirk wrote. "This should be a 5 alarm fire." Netanyahu never responded to the letter, though he spoke to Kirk on the phone last year, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

Kirk later made some remarks that were critical of Israel. Right-wing influencers -- Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly -- believe Kirk was pressured to tamp down his criticism of Israel (and Owens has blamed Israel for Kirk's murder). But Vance seems to think Kirk had positioned himself correctly, and he seems to want to occupy the same spot. He wants to seem appalled by anti-Semitism while appearing to be anti-Semitism-curious (and anti-Israel-curious). Hence this Post story.

THIS MIGHT BE HOW TRUMP INTENDS TO STEAL THE MIDTERMS, WITH MIKE JOHNSON'S BACKING

A couple of polls released this week suggest that Democrats are in a strong position to take back the House in November. A Fox poll gives Democrats a 7-point lead on the generic congressional ballot and a record-high level of support:

If the election were today, 53% of voters would back the Democratic candidate in their House district and 46% the Republican.... Notably, 53% is the highest percentage either party has received on the generic House ballot in Fox News polling since 1996.

An Emerson College poll gives Democrats an even bigger lead:

A new Emerson College Polling survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%.

But because of gerrymandering, there aren't a lot of swing districts for Democrats to win, so even a blue tsunami is likely to leave them with a single-digit or low-double-digit majority.

And that could be before the challenges begin.

David French has pinpointed one way the Republican Party might try to steal the House after the midterms:

Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says that “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” In plain English this means that the House and Senate make their own decisions regarding who belongs in each chamber of Congress, and those decisions are not reviewable by any other branch of government, including the courts....

The actual process for contesting an election to the House is governed by the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969.... The actual grounds for overturning an election are left to the discretion of the House....

The law gives a losing candidate, which it calls the “contestant,” 30 days after the certification of the election by state election officials to file a challenge with the House. The challenge is then referred to the Committee on House Administration, which investigates the contestant’s claims.

The contestant is supposed to bear the burden of proving that the election result should be reversed. But the matter is ultimately decided by a simple majority of the House, and the House can refuse to seat any member while the contestant’s challenge is pending....

This means that even if Democrats win a House majority after all the votes are counted this fall, one or more defeated Republican candidates could try to persuade the lame-duck Republican majority not to permit their Democratic opponents to take office while the challenge is pending.

Would every Republican unite to deny a half-dozen or dozen Democrats their seats? Maybe disaffected Republicans like Thomas Massie wouldn't, but I'm not sure.

French tries to imagine the possible excuses for the challenges:

And as the 2020 election conspiracies illustrate, the challenges could be based on virtually anything. A contestant could use the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE Act to claim that illegal immigrants voted for his opponent in large numbers. Or he could claim that a state’s refusal to turn over voter rolls to the Trump administration meant that the election was corrupt. Or he could go right back to the 2020 playbook and cast doubt on mail-in ballots.

All of these sound plausible. For mail-in ballots, I'd expect Republicans to focus in particular on ballots counted after Election Day in California, where one or more Democrats might win after trailing on Election Night, simply because Democrats like to vote by mail more than Republicans do.

Republicans could also categorically proclaim that no socialist should be seated in Congress. Donald Trump and Mike Johnson has been talking about socialism quite a bit lately. Early this month, Johnson said:

We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we're going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we're going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism. That is the question on the ballot this fall....

There has been a small number of times in the history of America where the actual experiment in self-governance was on the ballot. The idea that we would preserve a constitutional republic, one nation under God, a government of, by, and for the people. All that is in question right now. For the first time, really in my lifetime, this is a real question. The American people have to decide in November, in a midterm election for Congress and Senate. It’s not something that we would've projected. I hoped and prayed it would never come to this, but here we are. The barbarians are in the gate.

The three Zohran Mamdani endorsees who won congressional primaries this year will all have Republican challengers in November. All three endorsees are likely to win in November, probably by two-to-one margins -- but all of their Republican opponents could challenge their elections on "OMG communism!!!" grounds. There could be challenges to democratic socialist candidates elsewhere in the country (Melat Kiros in Colorado), and even to long-established House members who are democratic socialists (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib).

I suspect that whatever the Trump administration does to try to steal the midterms up to Election Day will be the tip of the iceberg. The worst will come after the elections. It might not work, but it will at least discredit the new Congress in many voters' eyes -- although no Democratic victory will ever again be seen as legitimate by the majority of Republican voters, which is no way to run a democracy.

"JUST SAY ANYTHING" IS STILL SORT OF WORKING FOR TRUMP

Citing his own Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll for July, G. Elliott Morris declares triumphantly that the public now recognizes President Trump's mental failings:

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll in July 2024 found 44% of Americans thought Trump had the mental sharpness to serve effectively as president, against just 14% for Biden — a 30-point gap.

Today, Trump is 80 and has increasing bouts of trouble in public (he sleeps a lot during press conferences and frequently slurs his speech), and voters are taking note. Overall, 46% of Americans rate his sharpness as president as “poor” — within a few points of the 50% who retroactively said that about Joe Biden.

But do they? Do voters really rate Trump's mental sharpness today almost as poorly as Biden's during his presidency?

The "poor" numbers are comparable -- 46% for Trump now, 50% for Biden in retrospect -- but 38% of respondents still rate Trump's mental sharness as excellent or good, as opposed to 24% who say the same thing about Biden when he was president. If we treat this as a binary, with the top two ratings as positive and the bottom two as negative, Trump is at 38%-59% now and Biden as president is at an abysmal 24%-73%. If we treat "fair" as a neutral rating and eliminate it, Trump is at 38%-46% now (which isn't a horrible spread) and Biden as president is at 24%-50% (which is).

A couple of things are happening here. This is a result of GOP hero worship -- Democrats never regarded Biden as a demigod -- but it's also because Trump just talks and talks. He gets to the end of nearly every sentence, and the sentences make sense to the poorly informed because most voters are poorly informed. The sentences often rely on simplistic formulas (Democrats are communists; we're fighting a war because Iran must never get a nuclear weapon), and that's fine because most voters' understanding of the issues is as shallow and simplistic as Trump's.

Biden really did understand the issues at a deep level for most of his life. I think he still understood them in depth at the end of his term, and maybe part of his struggle to communicate was difficulty summoning up the words to convey the complex things he knew. He had a lifelong stutter, and I think speaking became harder and harder for him as he aged, but I'm not sure his thinking about the problems he needed to deal with in his job had really diminished. Biden struggled to craft sentences to convey complex concepts, but Trump just yammers, expressing simple-minded ideas that don't take much brain power.

I believe that Biden in 2024 not only had a sharper mind than Trump in 2026, he also had a sharper mind than Trump in 2017 (or 2000 or 1986). But Biden's tongue was too weak to convey what he knew. Trump knows fuck-all, so that's not a problem for him.

SICKENED BY FORTUNATE SONS

Our cryptospora crisis might be worse because of DOGE, CNN reports.

As head of the federal lab responsible for identifying parasitic outbreaks throughout the nation, Dr. Joel Barratt watched with alarm as Trump administration cuts and hiring freezes last year slowly depleted his staff.

By the time his 11-person team was reduced to three in September, Barratt said he had enough and resigned. But before leaving, he said, he sent emails to higher-ups at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the risks of losing staff and how it could hurt the response to future outbreaks.

And now, those warnings have become reality, with the employees working to rein in a growing cyclospora outbreak in the Midwest, forced to do more with less.

The Bulwark's Andrew Egger adds:

Meanwhile, some Democrats have zeroed in on another, separate cyclosporiasis-surveillance program that was DOGE’d out last year. Last week, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking why he had terminated surveillance of the cyclospora parasite in the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. “Your foolish and self-indulgent demolition of critical public health programs,” Ossoff wrote, “puts Americans at risk.”

Some critics describe Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy as eugenicists, men who are using the government to try to rid the world of ethnic and racial groups they regard as lesser. I think that applies to Musk, who hates Black people, particularly African Blacks. He knew what his assault on USAID would do to health programs in sub-Saharan Africa and he got the outcome he wanted.

I'm not sure this applies to the Kennedy/MAHA crackpots. A New Yorker article from late May by Dr. Dhruv Khullar begins this way:

Last November, Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health and an acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ... wrote a short piece with the N.I.H.’s principal deputy director for the conservative publication City Journal. The piece argues that the country should largely stop trying to surveil for new pathogens, assess the risk they pose to humans, or develop vaccines and drugs to manage them. These activities, the authors suggest, mostly serve to keep scientists happy and funded. Instead, the public should be encouraged to become “metabolically healthy” by, for example, “eating nutritious food” and “getting up and walking more.” Bhattacharya has railed against the politicization of science, but the piece concludes that the best way to prepare for deadly pandemics is by “making America healthy again.”

I don't imagine that Jay Bhattacharya and Robert Kennedy agree on an ethnic group or groups that constitute the master race. What I think they do agree on is the classic right-wing idea that if you're vulnerable, well, tough luck, because they aren't. You don't deserve public health programs.

Like many corporate bosses and cult leaders, they think you should do what they do -- they like it (Kennedy loves his supplements) and nothing terrible has happened to them. And when something bad does goes wrong -- Kennedy's youthful heroin addiction, for instance -- they have rich parents or other resources. Doesn't everybody?

Khullar writes that Bhattacharya believes

the public should be encouraged to become “metabolically healthy” by, for example, “eating nutritious food” and “getting up and walking more.”

He wrote this piece in May, when the deadly pathogen making headlines was hantavirus, not cryptospora. Khullar added:

Notably, the first known hantavirus death in the U.S., in 1993, was of a nineteen-year-old marathon runner. Metabolic health only gets you so far.

But men with power whose lives are going well think everyone should be as lucky as they are, and if you're not, well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The government should be both laissez-faire and paternalistic: we won't help you, but we'll tell you what you ought to do, and if life doesn't work out for you, it must be because you aren't doing what we assume works for us.

What's really working for them is wealth, privilege, a recognition that saying what rich people want to hear about government assistance (that it's bad if it goes to the non-privileged) will position you well in life -- and luck. Condemning everyone who can't manage to get situated this way to whatever fate throws their way is a non-racial form of eugenics.

THE GOP IS THE "LITTLE ALBERT" PARTY

I've been meaning to write about a couple of clips I watched last week as unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires spread from the Upper Midwest to New York City.

Fox host Brian Kilmeade dismissed the advice of the network’s own senior medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegle, by saying there is “not a chance” he will wear a KN95 mask.

[image or embed]

— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) July 17, 2026 at 10:53 AM

And there was this:

MAGA cultist Eric Metaxas was outraged by seeing an air quality alert triggered by the Canadian wildfires that suggested people limit outdoor activity: "How dare they say that. Who has the right to tell me or you or anyone anything? It's a free country. I can do whatever I want."

[image or embed]

— Right Wing Watch (@rightwingwatch.bsky.social) July 16, 2026 at 1:03 PM

(Yes, that's Eric Metaxas, the Yale-educated biographer of Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who went full MAGA and punched a protester who cursed at him as he was leaving the Trump White House in August 2020.)

We know the right's complaints about the public health measures taken in the first couple of years of the COVID pandemic. They didn't like being ordered not to gather in public. They didn't like being told they needed to wear masks. They didn't like being compelled to get vaccinated. They said that the virus is less harmful than the vaccines. They said that the virus is a deadly pathogen devised to engineer a massive reduction in the world's population. (Those last two can't both be true.) They said that the virus was engineered specifically to defeat Donald Trump. (I don't think it occurs to them that it was a problem all over the world.) They said that the Deep State suppressed the truth about alternate treatments they like. They said that the entire pandemic was engineered to put everyone under the control of the global elite.

None of this was relevant to these clips.

It's been said that right-wingers didn't want to wear masks or get vaccinated at the height of COVID because they don't really believe in taking action for the common good. But Dr. Marc Siegel isn't suggesting that Brian Kilmeade might want to wear a mask in unhealthy air so Kilmeade can avoid spreading a pathogen to others -- he's saying Kilmeade might want to do that to protect his own lungs. The same goes for the suggestion that Metaxas (and everyone else) might want to limit outdoor activities in bad air -- it's for your benefit, dude.

And despite what Metaxas seems to believe (or cynically wants his intended audience to believe), no one is forcing anyone else to take precautions in this bad air. This isn't like a vaccine mandate or a store's mask policy in 2020 and 2021. Why would anyone in authority make these measures compulsory? Bad air isn't spread person to person.

But to right-wingers, this feels like the COVID era. So it's easy to make them angry.

I'm reminded of John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner's fsmous "Little Albert" experiment, the results of which were published in 1920. "Little Albert" was an infant exposed (as Wikipedia puts it) to

a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, masks (with and without hair), cotton, wool, burning newspapers, and other stimuli. Albert showed no fear of any of these items during the baseline tests.

Then Albert, at eleven months, was playing calmly with a white rat when he was exposed to a loud noise every time he touched the rat. The noise was upsetting to Albert, and subsequently he became distressed when he saw the rat, even without the noise. And not only that:

In further experiments, Little Albert seemed to generalize his response to the white rat. He became distressed at the sight of several other furry objects, such as a rabbit, a furry dog, a fur coat, and even a Santa Claus mask with white cotton balls in the beard. However, this stimulus generalization did not extend to everything with hair.

Right-wingers were so conditioned to hate everything to do with public health during the COVID era that they're distressed at the thought of nearly everything resembling those public health measures.

But not everything. Wikipedia says that Little Albert's distress "did not extend to everything with hair." Right-wingers' distress doesn't extend to masks when they're worn in a right-wing way. If you're an ICE goon or a member of the Patriot Front, right-wingers think your masks are awesome -- they'll never call those masks "face diapers" or suggest that they cause carbon dioxide poisoning.

We know that a major goal of right-wing propagandists is to keep Republican voters in a constant state of rage about things that aren't happening. See, for example, the governor of Arkansas:

In our state, you cannot replace Arkansas law with Sharia law. We will not allow it. Period.

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) July 17, 2026

(Muslims make up less than one percent of the state's population, and there's no effort underway to impose Islamic religious law on the state's population -- but hey, I guess you can't be too careful!)

When the conditioning really works, all the Little Alberts believe they're under threat even when there's no sign of what they fear. In 2024, they were spreading "do not comply" messages in response to an mpox (monkeypox) outbreak even though public health officials assured the public that no lockdowns or similar measures would be necessary. A few months ago, during a hantavirus outbreak, there was a similar response, even though no public health official ever threatened to impose restrictions on the general public. GOP propagandists keep the party's voters angry and frightened -- and it keeps those voters voting Republican.

TRAVEL DAY YESTERDAY

I wasn't able to post yesterday. Hope to post something today.

THE "AMERICA FIRST" ADMINISTRATION JUST GAVE U.S. TAX DOLLARS TO THESE POSH RIGHT-WING BRITISH TWITS

There might not be any federal dollars left for the rural hospital near you, but the U.S. government has $12 million available for these posh prats:

Donald Trump’s state department intends to allocate $12m to organisations in the UK founded by the prominent Conservatives Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young, the Guardian can reveal.

The intended grants, revealed in US government documents, are part of a package of support for European groups viewed favourably by the Trump administration....

The documents reviewed by the Guardian set out details of the grants for the first time. They include $7m for 878, a “leading British and American think tank” devoted to “the rediscovery of our ancient culture” and “ending mass immigration”....

The group appears to have been incorporated in the UK in March this year. 878’s website went live in early July, and says that its registration as a US nonprofit is “pending”. It takes its name from the year King Alfred the Great of the Saxons defeated the “Great Heathen Army”, led by a Danish warlord.

(Everyone in the global conservative movement really is a twelve-year-old boy.)

The state department has also set aside $5m for Free Speech Union International, citing its work “promoting free speech and countering digital overregulation across the UK, Europe, and Australia”.

The group is an offshoot of the Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by the Conservative life peer Toby Young, and acts as an umbrella organisation for international sibling groups with similar goals.

One of the co-founders of 878 is Jacob Rees-Mogg (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, son of William Rees-Mogg, Baron Rees-Mogg, who was an editor of The Times of London and later a vice chairman of the BBC's board of governors). The younger Rees-Mogg has been a Leader of the House of Commons and a cabinet minister under Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. He's also worked in finance, and his net worth was estimated at perhaps as much as £150 million in 2018. He doesn't need our money.

Toby Young is a prominent writer and editor who failed to become a journalistic superstar in America (back when there were such things) and parlayed this relative failure into a memoir called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which was a success in Britain. He was later a guest judge on Top Chef, an experience that inspired some of his most infantile and offensive tweets, which came to light in 2018 when he briefly served on a British government education board.

Young called these tweets "politically incorrect," a term he seems to use as an all-purpose cultural get-out-of-jail-free card. Other "incorrect" opinions include his views on working-class students at Oxford:

It was as if all the meritocratic fantasies of every 1960s educationalist had come true and all Harold Wilson’s children had been let in at the gate ... Small, vaguely deformed undergraduates would scuttle across the quad as if carrying mobile homes on their backs. Replete with acne and anoraks, they would peer up through thick pebble-glasses, pausing only to blow their noses.

And on inclusivity:

Inclusive. It’s one of those ghastly, politically correct words that have survived the demise of New Labour. Schools have got to be ‘inclusive’ these days. That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library (though no Mark Twain) and a Special Educational Needs Department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Münchausen syndrome by proxy. If [then education secretary, Michael] Gove is serious about wanting to bring back O-levels, the government will have to repeal the Equalities Act because any exam that isn’t ‘accessible’ to a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six will be judged to be ‘elitist’ and therefore forbidden by Harman’s Law.

And the former Top Chef judge believes schoolteachers have it easy:

Teachers complain a lot about how tough their job is. But, you know, the day begins in most schools at nine o’clock, ends at 3.30pm. They have six weeks’ holiday during the summer, two weeks’ holiday at Easter and at Christmas. Yes, they don’t just work when they’re at school, but even so, compared to a lot of other jobs, it’s not that tough.

Young (also a baron) has also been a spreader of COVID misinformation.

The mission statement of Rees-Mogg's 878 Institute is about what you'd expect from a grantee favored by the Trump/Vance/Miller/Rubio administration:

Our name – from the pivotal year of 878 AD – conveys the urgency of our own era. Britain and its closest allies are facing peril. But through the rediscovery of our ancient culture, making the right choices, and finding the will to face down our philosophical and military adversaries, our civilisation will survive and thrive.

Now more than ever, it is incumbent on us all to rediscover and nurture the roots of our shared English-speaking civilisation in order to defend it.

At 878, we are renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission. Future leaders in Britain and America will need to appreciate the deepest roots of our political life and our freedoms. Working with scholars in Israel and other closely allied nations, we are rejuvenating knowledge of the origins of our constitutional tradition. We build friendships with our closest civilisational allies to restore both the fabric of our countries and the resolve of our future leadership.

Young and Rees-Mogg are climate change denialists.

The two men are members of the Conservative Party, not one of the British parties further to the right. But these grants, along with other actions of the Trump administration -- see, for instance, Secretary of State Rubio's global anti-Antifa summit -- make clear that the Republican Party is not "America First" but rather "Global White People First," with "white people" defined as right-wing white Americans, Brits, Israelis, South Africans, and anyone else who might conceivably get a far-right party into power (AfD in Germany, National Rally in France, and so on), or is part of a fascist party in exile (Viktor Orban's Fidesz).

The American press needs to be more forthright about what the GOP is becoming. It's not a personality cult that will collapse when Trump is out of the picture. The leaders waiting in the wings may be uncharismatic, but they're young, tireless, and well funded, and they'll be able to tap into Fox News and the rest of the GOP's well-established propaganda apparatus as they try to go global with this movement. The Republican Party isn't going anywhere.

I UNDERESTIMATED TRUMP'S NARCISSISM

Yesterday I predicted, among other things, that President Trump would use last night's prime-time speech to link alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election to democratic socialist candidates running for office this year. I thought there was a logic to the prediction: Trump calls the democratic socialists "communists" and the ruling party of China is still referred to as the Communist Party.

But I underestimated Trump's narcissism. When he thinks about the 2020 election, it's all about him. He's barely thinking about what Democrats believe (although he did refer to them as "the radical left" in last night's speech). He doesn't think about the ideology of China, or even Venezuela, a country he accused of election fraud within its own borders in 2020, although he didn't explicitly say that the same techniques were also used to rig elections in America.

Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela, and that's exactly what happened, conspiring to digitally rig their own country's elections in 2020. And that's what they did. This reporting included precise details about methods to regime develop, to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went.

This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past.

Last night, Trump didn't seem at all interested in the Democrats he presumably hopes to defeat in November. He didn't question the results of the 2020 Georgia Senate elections, as some observers had predicted, even though one of the winners, Jon Ossoff, appears to be the favorite to win his reelection bid this year and is harshly attacking Trump on the campaign trail. The message of Trump's speech was much simpler:

* Election fraud is rampant, and every conceivable form of fraud is used.

* The rigging of the 2020 election is glaringly obvious.

* The SAVE America Act would make everything better.

That's it.

All of it makes me wonder whether I was wrong in yesterday's post to criticize Ezra Klein's suggestion that Trump isn't trying to win the midterms. In May, Klein told us:

I’m not saying [Trump] wants Democrats to win, but I don’t think he’d mind it if they did. A Democratic-controlled Congress gives him an enemy to fight. I think he gets a little lost without an enemy. It frees him from the tedious work of trying to pass legislation. It puts him back in the place he’s most comfortable, which is not wielding power; it’s claiming persecution.

That seems half-right. Trump doesn't usually fight for legislation even when his party has total control of Congress -- he'd much rather rule by executive order, or by Stephen Miller or Russell Vought telling every Cabinet-level department how to be brutal in his name.

Klein is right, obviously, about how much Trump enjoys claiming persecution, but what I saw in last night's speech wasn't Trump getting ready to claim Democrats are persecuting him. Instead, he seemed to be saying that the electoral system persecuted him in 2020, and will persecute Republicans in 2026, unless he gets his precious SAVE America Act.

So I'll sat the obvious thing: Trump is trying to discredit the upcoming elections, which he expects his party to lose. His message is that the 2026 election will be rigged and the 2020 election was rigged. He's saying that likely Democratic victories are proof he was cheated six years ago, because there'll be pro-Democratic cheating this year, in the absence of the SAVE America Act.

A spring 2026 survey from Reuters/Ipsos found that 63% of Republicans agree with Trump that the 2020 election was rigged. Trump's message makes perfect sense to the overwhelming majority of voters who belong to America's dominant political party. None of these people will ever believe a Democratic victory is legitimate.