THE WAR ON FAUCI, BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE KOCH NETWORK

If you watched Anthony Fauci's appearance before a Senate committee this week and are wondering why Republican base voters still despise him years after his retirement, and years after COVID peaked, let me remind you that the war on mainstream COVID science was funded by right-wing billionaires, particularly the Koch network -- the same people who finance and weaponize all the other propaganda that makes your Fox-watching grandparents crazy. When these folks implant an idea in GOP voters' brains, it stays implanted.

In 2021, the Center for Media and Democracy reported on the Koch network's involvement in COVID propaganda:

The war on public health measures began on March 20, 2020, when Americans For Prosperity (AFP), the right-wing nonprofit founded by Charles and David Koch, issued a press release calling on states to remain open.

“We can achieve public health without depriving the people most in need of the products and services provided by businesses across the country,” it read.

A month later, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a business lobbying group partially funded by Koch Industries, published a letter calling on President Donald Trump to enable states to reopen. That letter was signed by over 200 state legislators and “stakeholders,” including leaders from Koch-funded groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the James Madison Institute....

Participants for a number of anti-lockdown rallies were recruited by FreedomWorks, a dark money group tied to Charles Koch instrumental in organizing Tea Party protests in 2009. Several of the 2020 rallies were also promoted by the Convention of States Action, a group founded by an organization with ties to the Koch network and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer that wants to rewrite the U.S. Constitution....

On October 4, 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration was released to the world. Authored by Stanford University professor Jay Bhattacharya, former Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford University professor Sunetra Gupta, the declaration recommended governments allow younger, healthier people to become infected with Covid-19 while reserving “focused protection” for the vulnerable, in order to reach herd immunity. Suggestions included having nursing homes limit staff rotations and businesses rely on workers with “acquired immunity.”

Bhattacharya is now the director of the National Institutes of Health and the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

... the auspicious-sounding American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) ... which hosted and filmed the [Great Barrington] conference ... is a Koch-tied libertarian think tank. From 2018 to 2020, the Charles Koch Foundation donated more than $100,000 to the institute. And before that, the Koch Foundation donated nearly $1.5 million to the Emergent Order Foundation, formerly Emergent Order LLC, a PR firm that engaged in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marketing consulting for AIER.

AIER has also received $54,000 from the Atlas Network, an anti-regulation group formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that has received more than a half million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and the connected Charles Koch Institute.

And as HuffPost reported in July 2020:

A seemingly obscure Capitol Hill press conference by a fringe group of self-proclaimed medical experts quickly became on Monday the most widely seen propaganda video about the coronavirus after Breitbart News livestreamed it on Facebook. The post racked up tens of millions of views across social media in a matter of hours....

The video featured a string of right-wing talking points that criticized lockdown measures, demonized public health officials, called for schools to reopen and urged Americans not to wear face masks. The speakers, who were all portrayed as doctors, often declared hydroxychloroquine a “cure” for COVID-19....

But in fact, a conservative dark-money group was behind the press event that created this viral propaganda moment. The group featured in the video, “America’s Frontline Doctors,” sprang from nowhere only days ago and appears connected to groups involved in the Save Our Country Coalition, which was a driving force behind the “reopen” protests in April that lobbied for America’s rapid reopening, even as death tolls spike in hot spots across the country....

Monday’s livestreamed event featuring the America’s Frontline Doctors group was organized by Tea Party Patriots, a wealthy Republican donor-backed nonprofit that, in partnership with FreedomWorks and other right-wing dark money groups, launched the Save Our Country Coalition in April to push for America’s rapid reopening. Jenny Beth Martin, TPP’s co-founder, spoke at the conference alongside the self-proclaimed frontline doctors, urging people to call their elected officials to demand access to hydroxychloroquine....

The coalition’s groups have largely been funded by prominent billionaires, including oil and gas mogul Charles Koch ― who has donated to SOC group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) ― and Richard Uihlein, a major donor to Tea Party Patriots.

Many people think the country, or at least the Republican Party, began to go crazy in the summer of 2015, when Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. Many people think Republican lunacy all stems from him.

Some of it does. But quite a bit of it should be blamed on the Kochs and others who began professionalizing culture-war politics long before Trump stepped onto that escalator. Crackpots like Robert Kennedy Jr. fanned the COVID-denialist flames, but he found a receptive audience for his quackery only because right-wing billionaires had made GOP voters as crazy on the subject of public health as they were on the subject of Barack Obama's presidency. Trump just followed their lead.

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you tomorrow.

DO J.D. VANCE'S BIGGEST ADMIRERS EVEN CARE IF HE'S "INAUTHENTIC"?

Oh, dear -- we're talking about "authenticity" again. In The New York Times, Thomas Edsall writes:

Whenever Vice President JD Vance takes the microphone, he has to decide which combination of his multiple identities to select for the specific audience before him, a choice he sometimes seems to find bewildering.

The range of Vance’s mix-and-match choices includes hillbilly, intellectual, Trump successor, raging MAGA loyalist and high-tech investor, not to mention veteran threatening other countries and veteran no-long-wars guy....

Vance’s problem is his failure to find comfort in any combination of identities so that he comes across as inauthentic, cross-pressured, forced — even counterfeit.

As regular readers of this blog know, I don't believe in political "authenticity" -- or, to be more precise, I don't believe that the word is used in politics in a way that has anything to do with realness or fakeness. When we say a politician is "authentic," we mean the politician (usually a man) is personable. Donald Trump is the biggest liar on the planet, but we call him "authentic." We usually use the word "inauthentic" in politics in reference to politicians like Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. They're not phony at all. They're just awkward. For the most part, they are who they seem to be -- they say what they mean, they just don't say it personably.

Vance has that problem, but I agree that he's also truly inauthentic, in the sense that he'll change his opinions to suit the prevailing trends. But I think there's an aspect of his personality that's utterly genuine, even though one of Edsall's sources -- Harvard's Randall Enos -- disagrees:

Part of Trump’s appeal is that, despite his ideological incoherence, you believe his commitment to the politics of resentment is genuine because he is personally motivated by resentment: feeling that he was disrespected by the establishment is his casus belli. In the end, that seems to be the only consistent feature of his governing style.

Vance lacks this characteristic; rather, he appears to have adopted resentment politics because it serves him politically.

Really? If there's any Vance characteristic that seems utterly genuine, it's resentment. He just seems like a deeply resentful guy. The object of his resentments may change, but the anger remains. (“Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion,” he wrote in Hillbilly Elegy.)

Republican voters leap from resentment to resentment -- whatever and whoever the right-wing propaganda machine tells them to hate, they'll hate. So I'm not sure they care about the specifics of Vance's resentments, as long as the resentments don't directly contradict their own. (They'll forgive Vance for formerly being a Trump critic just the way they'll forgive Trump for inviting the Clintons to his third wedding.)

Notably, it's only Republicans who like Vance:

Civiqs amassed 53,032 voter comments on Vance’s favorability/unfavorability ratings over the past two years and found that an overwhelming majority of Vance’s support is concentrated among Republicans, 86 percent favorable, 7 percent unfavorable, while independents were 33 percent favorable, 59 percent unfavorable, and Democrats 3 percent favorable, 95 percent unfavorable.

Karrin Vasby Anderson, a professor of communication studies at Colorado State University, has a theory about the one specific group Vance appeals to most:

There is, according to Anderson, only one constituency firmly in Vance’s corner: “It’s men who spend time in the so-called manosphere, which is where Vance cultivated his political support. He knows how to talk with that demographic on their own terms, so they are more likely to identify with him.”

That's plausible. Why would men in the manosphere care about authenticity? Much of the propaganda of the manosphere is about the importance of turning yourself into a fake, artificial, "maxxed" version of yourself. Change your name, like Myron Gaines (born Amrou Fudl). Get buff. Change your facial features -- with a hammer if necessary, like Clavicular. Andrew Tate went from atheist to Christian to Muslim over a period of four years. People in the manosphere believe they need to be phony versions of themselves in order to make money and get sex. (Let's face it, these are their only goals.)

So if Vance is inauthentic, they don't care, as long as he's resentmentmaxxed.

WHAT IS THE GOP'S 2026 MIDTERM MESSAGE? "FAUCI SUCKED SIX YEARS AGO!"

A couple of months ago, Ezra Klein said this:

My pet theory right now is that President Trump is not trying to win the midterm elections.

... if he wanted to win the midterms, he’d be moving to the center. He’d be focusing on the things that Americans are angry about, disappointed in him about. He’d be supporting the strongest Republicans in contested races and doing everything he could to bolster Republicans in vulnerable states and districts.

He’s not doing even a little bit of that.

Many people agree with Klein. They see a president who's focused on construction projects and the SAVE America Act rather than affordability and assume he's not thinking about motivating voters.

It's widely assumed that House and Senate Republicans are different. They passed a bipartisan housing bill! They're at least trying to seem like a party that wants to help people!

But they're not all that different from the president. You really need to understand that this is their idea of an election pitch:

Former White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci will appear before the Senate this week for a hearing. Leading up to his appearance, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released thousands of pages of Fauci’s diary entries from 2020 to 2022.

Right now, normal people care about gas prices, grocery and housing costs, produce that causes explosive diarrhea, and other concerns related to the world we live in right now. But this story, about a government official who retired nearly four years ago, is a right-wing media obsession now. Here's just a sample of the headlines:

* Amanda Macias, Fox News: Fauci's Newly Released Covid Diaries Reveal Bizarre Fixation on Fame as Pandemic Deaths Mounted

* Bob Hoge, RedState: Fauci's Diary Reveals Astonishing Level of Sycophantic Groveling by the Legacy Media

* Alana Mastrangelo, Breitbart: Actress Patricia Heaton on Fauci Diaries: Lying COVID Tyrant Was ‘Exulting in His Fame’ While We Were Locked Down

* Ben Shapiro, The Daily Wire: The Hero Complex That Held America Hostage: For Anthony Fauci, it was Anthony Fauci and his ego, everywhere, all of the time.

* Hans Mahncke, The Federalist: 10 Questions for Congress to Ask Fauci About His Covid Corruption and Coverup

And on and on.

Why this now? Why these hearings now? No one's going to get Fauci to change his mind about the origin of the virus -- he still believes it emerged naturally, not from a lab, as do many other experts. He won't denounce the government's efforts to minimize death and suffering during the worst of the COVID pandemic, when -- it should be noted -- he was working for Donald Trump, not a Democrat. (Fauci was serving as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a job to which he'd been appointed during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.) The facts of his career don't matter -- to the GOP base, Fauci in 2020 represents Democrats in 2026.

Will these revelations and hearings really inspire voters in the Republican Party's grievance-collector base to turn out in November? Hard to know, but Republicans need something, as The Washington Post noted a couple of days ago:

Republican pollsters and political groups are raising the alarm that their party faces a listless and demotivated base ahead of November’s midterm elections....

The lack of enthusiasm is reaching deep into Republicans’ loyal base, spreading to the party’s most consistent voters — who have shown up to vote in all of the past four primaries and general elections, according to an analysis done by Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative super PAC affiliated with billionaire Charles Koch....

About 1 in 5 reliable Republican base voters are at risk this November, according to Nathan Nascimento, executive director at AFP Action.

Apart from that housing bill, Republicans have nothing positive to offer their own voters. So they're giving them hate. We'll see if it works.

I DO NOT THINK THAT WORD "INCUMBENCY" MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS

This is a peculiar story from Axios's Andrew Solender:

Democrats hit the anti-incumbency trap

Democrats are learning a hard lesson Republicans know all too well: The party out of power doesn't just ride the anti-incumbency wave — it can also get swept up in it.

Why it matters: The populist energy surging through the left after President Trump's return to the White House is roiling Democratic primaries and fueling establishment fears about the party's general election chances.

Just ask Senate Republicans how that went for them in 2010, 2012 and 2022.

In 2010, Senate Republicans gained 6 seats (and House Republicans gained 63 seats), so even though they failed to win the Delaware Senate race with Christine ("I'm not a witch") O'Donnell and perhaps blew a couple of other potential wins, they had no real reason to complain. The "anti-incumbency wave" in 2012 ended with the re-election of the incumbent president, so maybe there was no anti-incumbency wave at all. And 2022 ended with Republicans gaining 9 seats in the House and Democrats gaining 1 seat in the Senate, so, again, maybe it wasn't really a strongly anti-incumbent year.

What are Solender's examples of anti-incumbency pressure on Democrats?

Former state Rep. Amish Shah — whose grassroots, door-to-door campaigning tactics the DCCC does not believe are effective — prevailed over the party favorite, ex-TV journalist Marlene Galán-Woods.

The DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] ran a $500,000 joint ad buy with Galán-Woods and outside Democratic groups spent millions more to support her, but to no avail.

Shah's win came after progressives Randy Villegas of California and Matt Dunlap of Maine defeated DCCC-backed rivals in primaries last month.

But none of the losing candidates in these primaries were incumbents.

While Villegas and Shah are running to flip GOP-held seats, Dunlap is simply trying to hold retiring Rep. Jared Golden's (D-Maine) district.

"Incumbent" is a word that has a meaning. It means you're the current officeholder. The establishment-endorsed candidates in these races weren't the current officeholders.

It's as if to Solender -- and maybe to the establishment Democrats who served as spin doctors for his story -- "incumbent" means preferred establishment candidate. Just being in the clique -- being the Democratic establishment's favorite -- is like being the incumbent.

Solender continues:

Add that to Democrats' big mess in Maine, where populist left-wing darling Graham Platner dropped out earlier this month amid allegations of sexual assault, which he denied.

Platner, a self-described oyster farmer, had won the Democratic nomination after muscling out Maine Gov. Janet Mills, the preferred choice of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

Instead state party activists have turned to Troy Jackson, a progressive logger and state Senate majority leader who is already facing scrutiny over alleged angry outbursts during his time in the legislature.

Jackson is leading in the first poll of the race and is a 67% favorite according to Polymarket, but this is a "big mess" for Democrats, according to Solender. And hey, it might be -- Collins consistently trailed in the polls the last time she ran, then won handily. But the polling this time might be right -- the betting markets think so. In any case, Janet Mills may be the incumbent governor, but she's not the incumbent senator. Yet it's as if she was owed the nomination because she was the establishment's preferred candidate.

You can probably guess which race this is leading up to:

One of Democrats' biggest headache this cycle is Michigan, which has primaries on Aug. 4.

Centrist Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and progressive Abdul El-Sayed are pummeling each other to be the Democratic candidate in what is sure to be a highly competitive U.S. Senate race.

Establishment Democrats are petrified about an El-Sayed win....

Again, what does this have to do with incumbency? Neither Stevens nor El-Sayed is the incumbent. (That would be Gary Peters, a Democrat, who's retiring.) But it's as if being the establishment favorite is effectively incumbency, to Solender and his spinners.

As I said yesterday, I'm worried about this race, mostly because of the intra-party pummeling Solender mentions. But polling suggests that both candidates are equally viable -- they each lead Republican Mike Rogers by 0.5% according to the Real Clear Polling average -- and Polymarket thinks Democrats are 70% favorites.

Still, none of this has anything to do with incumbency, unless you think of the establishment Democratic Party -- powerless and stuck in the minority -- as an incumbent party that deserves to retain its status forever, powerless or otherwise.

WHY IS HALEY STEVENS USING HILLARY CLINTON'S 2008 PLAYBOOK?

Here's how Haley Stevens is running against Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate primary:

"Cool kids on the Internet. They're doing the cool kid chatter. Some of 'em might be the coastal elites, making fun of how I talk. But let's be real. They're making fun of Michigan. They're thinking they're better than us. Their jokes, their criticism, only make me fight harder." -- Haley Stevens

[image or embed]

— Howard Mortman (@howardmortman.bsky.social) July 25, 2026 at 1:14 PM

Remind you of anything?

After this campaign moment in 2007, Politico's Roger Simon wrote:

When I saw a video of Hillary Clinton downing a shot of Crown Royal whiskey in Bronko’s Restaurant and Lounge in Crown Point, Ind., on Saturday night, I was delighted to see that she has finally learned what campaigning for president is all about.

Last week, Barack Obama went to a private fundraiser in San Francisco and made some semi-coherent remarks about how people in small towns “get bitter” and “cling” to “guns or religion.”

Clinton blasted Obama for being “elitist and out of touch.”

“I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Sen. Obama made about people in small-town America,” Clinton said.

Clinton began campaigning this way when Obama was close to clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, and it didn't change the outcome. Stevens is campaigning this way in a race that could go either way.

Stevens is the candidate of Chuck Schumer, James Clyburn, and other aging establishmentarians. I know what they're thinking: that moderate candidates like Stevens are more broadly appealing than progressives like El-Sayed, that progressive candidates alienate moderates but moderate candidates don't alienate progressives.

Progressive voters might rally around moderate candidates in states where there aren't a lot of alternatives -- progressives will probably vote for Roy Cooper in North Carolina or Mary Peltola in Alaska. But in part that's because those moderates aren't showing active disrespect for a progressives. In Michigan, a moderate candidate should recognize that attacking a progressive candidate and his supporters means attacking part of the base you'll need to win the general election, as well as poisoning moderates' minds against a progressive who might be the general election candidate.

That's the nature of bitter primaries, which is why it's a bad idea to maximize the bitterness. Clinton's attacks on Obama (as, in effect, the candidate of the "cool kids") didn't cost him in 2008, but he was an extraordinary political talent running against a reviled Republican Party after years of a despised war, followed by a financial collapse. When the ideological pressure went the other way, in 2016, it's quite likely that that the Bernie Sanders campaign helped alienate enough progressive voters to cost Clinton the election.

Hillary Clinton wasn't an Obama-level campaigner. Neither is Stevens -- as the clip above makes clear. I hope 2026 is as difficult a year for the GOP as 2008 was. But if Republican Mike Rogers is competitive in Michigan, Stevens is making it easier for him to win.

TRUMP IS THE WORST PRESIDENT WE'VE EVER HAD, BUT NOT THE WORST PRESIDENT WE'LL EVER HAVE

I've been busy with other matters and haven't had a chance to watch President Trump's White House Correspondents' Dinner speech or read the full transcript, but I'm struck by this in Shawn McCreesh's New York Times write-up:

One particularly awkward moment played out when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed a group of reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for their “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein files.”

Mr. Blitzer reminded the crowd that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against the Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”

As the reporters took their awards, Mr. Trump threw his hands in the air theatrically, as if to say, Oh well, what can you do.

Trump is an authoritarian thug who's perfectly comfortable ruining other people's lives in order to get what he wants, but he's not the worst imaginable authoritarian, for one reason in particular: It's all a game for him.

He wants to win all the time, but sometimes he loses, and sometimes he shrugs and accepts that. He reworked his tariffs to be in compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling. At long last, he cut a check to E. Jean Carroll (though he's now trying to claw the money back).

If pressure from his adminstration destroys CBS News or (perhaps sometime next year) CNN, terrific. If not, we'll, that's how the game goes (though he won't stop fighting). He'll show up at next year's dinner and make nice with everyone he tried to bring to ruin.

All his life, Trump has fought dirty, but often he didn't win -- the courts, the political system, or, most often, the marketplace defeated him. His businesses went bankrupt. Many lenders wouldn't lend to him. Oh well, what can you do.

He's dangerous now because a Supreme Court full of partisan hacks and a party-over-country congressional GOP have given him near-unlimited power, but he spent most of his life not having this level of power. He's used to that. He's destroyed a lot of guardrails, but he's left some standing. He hasn't disbanded the lower courts that have ruled against him. He hasn't put Khadeeja Safdar in the gulag.

We'll have a Republican president someday who won't be so restrained.

President Vance or President Bovino or President Carlson will take the power granted by the Supreme Court and congressional Republicans and treat it as merely a baseline. A future GOP fascist president won't see authoritarianism as just a power game in which you respect your opponents and assume they're fighting dirty just like you. A future fascist will fight for all the power, with nothing but contempt for anyone standing in the way.

Unless we fascism-proof the country starting in 2029 (or 2027), or fight like hell when an even worse Republican president is in office.