YOU DON'T REALLY HAVE TO DO A BIG ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY TO UNDERSTAND REPUBLICAN VOTERS

I agree with Philip Bump that you'll never understand why Donald Trump still retains the loyalty of nearly 40% of the country from the mainstream media's reporting.

Perhaps the hoariest trope in modern political reporting is the Diner Sitdown with a Trump Supporter. Between the ubiquity of them during President Donald Trump's first bid for his current position and the necessary superficiality of it — it is hard to take the measure of a person over the course of eating one slice of pie — such conversations became a source of derision or parody. Readers were often left with little to no insight, and the insights they were offered were often trivial and repetitive.

Bump correctly notes that most of these safaris come to no conclusion more edifying than "Trump voters like Trump." So what's the alternative? Bump recommends an academic study:

But what if you left the diner with those voters? What if you went to their homes, spent days with them? What if you tracked the media consumption and interviewed their friends and neighbors? What if it wasn't superficial? ...

In February, a team of researchers from ReD Associates, in partnership with the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, visited counties in three states — Michigan, South Carolina and Wyoming — to conduct the sort of in-depth research described above. Teams spent time with conservative Americans, getting to know them, getting to know their communities, getting to know their habits. They spoke with dozens of people in largely rural parts of the state, with the specific goal of understanding how Donald Trump supporters viewed the democratic institutions of the United States. What resulted was a thorough, if constrained, understanding of the set of beliefs and assumptions that correlates with support for the president.

The study appears to have some interesting insights, one of which is that these people are wary of democracy because they think it produces outcomes that conflict with their values. Here's an example:

They chafe at proscriptions that emanate from a federal government that is designed to service all 340 million Americans, often seeing conflicts between national and local priorities as examples of corruption....

One Wyoming resident dismissed the value of democracy through this lens: "Every single small town would be outvoted by every single city. We wouldn't be able to feed people cows. We'd all be eating seaweed."

We're told that they're not getting these ideas from the obvious sources. They don't have "a relentless dedication to watching Fox News." Instead,

The researchers found that the people with whom they spoke relied heavily on bespoke sources of information and ad hoc solutions for health problems. Diaries detailing their media diets include a range of YouTube channels, influencers and Facebook groups, few of which could be called media outlets in any real sense. They "do their own research," though that often means outsourcing their research to trusted, non-institutional voices....

This is worth knowing, but I think the message it sends is that it's really hard to find the source of these people's ideas, unless you're able to put together a team of researchers and conduct an ethnographic study like this.

I disagree. While I recognize that Fox is not the main source of news for younger right-wingers -- which is a consequence of the decline of print, television, and cable in the age of TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts -- Fox News is still part of the right-wing media ecosystem in which these "bespoke sources of information" operate. (They sources are not really "bespoke," i.e., custon-tailored for an individual. They're just more obscure than Fox.)

For as long as I've been blogging, I've been angry at the mainstream media for not paying attention to the narratives spread at Fox and elsewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem. For reporters (and Democratic politicians and consultants) who want to know why GOP voters hate Democrats as much as they do, Fox is in plain sight, just as, in the past, talk radio was in plain sight, and podcasters and video and Twitter influencers are in plain sight today. If you want to know what these people are thinking, you can still learn a lot just by looking at the top-rated right-wing oultlets in various media. Individuals voters might not get particular ideas from the top-rated outlets, but those ideas are circulating in and out of those outlets, and can be spotted in those places.

The guy who's afraid city slickers will ban meat and force him to eat seaweed? I'm not sure precisely where he got that notion, but you can easily find the idea, or variations of it, at Fox. Here a just some of the Fox headlines I found when I Googled "world economic forum ban meat foxnews.com":

* Davos speaker calls for one billion people to 'stop eating meat' for 'innovation' and the environment

* GOP rep introduces resolution condemning UN for calling on Americans to stop eating meat

* UN wants Americans to cut back on eating meat. And that's only the beginning

* UN climate summit serving gourmet burgers, BBQ as it calls for Americans to stop eating meat

It doesn't have to be Fox. It could be Twitter, or (in the past) Infowars. It could be any number of prominent podcasters. I'd even recommend Reddit communities like Forwards from Grandma, where you can find a wide range of right-wing memes, including memes reflecting the right-wing view that liberals are unalterably opposed to meat:

This one isn't even particularly obscure -- you may have seen it in a parking lot.

What reporters and other interested parties need to know is that the right-wing media diet, from all sources, is chock-full of paranoid, alarmist ragebait, and that the alarmist talking points are fairly easy to discover if you put a little effort into looking for them. Even just a daily glance at Fox's red-meat headlines will tell you more about the mindset of right-wing voters than a series of questions about grocery prices in an Ohio diner.

DEMOCRATS SHOULD HAVE MESSAGING THAT'S STRONG ENOUGH TO WITHSTAND SOME QUESTIONABLE CANDIDATES

Progressives aligned with Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America won three primaries in New York City on Tuesday, and James Carville is flipping out about one candidate in particular.

Democratic strategist James Carville called for a “schism” in the Democratic Party, stating that he wants nothing to do with the likes of three candidates who won their Democratic primaries in New York....

On Wednesday’s Politicon podcast, Carville ... noted that [Darializa] Avila Chevalier, who was born to Dominican immigrants, once said white people should not be in interracial marriages.

“Lady, I ain’t in the same party as you,” Carville said. “I’m sorry. I’m just not. And I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism. I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent. And there’s just some sh*t I can’t be in the same tent with.”

Carville then insisted that despite winning their Democratic primaries, “these people are not Democrats.” ...

“But I’m done,” he continued. “I’m not in that f*cking political party. I am totally comfortable in a political party that spends time questioning the policies of the government of Israel. In fact, I’m enthusiastic about that. I don’t want to be in a political party that denies the right of the state of Israel to exist. That’s just not– I just can’t do that.”

Avila Chevalier did disparage some interracial relationship -- she

slammed men of color for engaging in interracial relationships in a Feb. 2019 post on Twitter, now X.

“Black men [handshake emoji] Arab men fetishizing ugly colonizer women,” the post stated.

And on Israel:

In August 2020, Avila Chevalier reposted a tweet responding to a social media prompt that asked, “Israel suddenly disappears, your third emoji is your reaction.” The reposted tweet replied, “Trick question – Israel doesn’t exist!”

She's called for abolition of the police, prisons, and the U.S. border, in now-deleted tweets.

I'm to Carville's left, but I understand why he's not pleased. Still, he's helping Republicans when he denounces Avila Chevalier. He's worried that Republicans will try to make her the face of the party, but right now he's doing that for them.

Maybe her views haven't moderated at all and she'll continue to come off as a crackpot. So what? The Democratic Party should be strong enough to withstand that. Other Democratic candidates' messages should be strong enough that they're defined by what they say, not by what she says.

Republicans always manage to avoid being defined as the party of their congressional crackpots, whether it's Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or George Santos. Bizarrely, congressional Republicans seem to be only partly defined by the Crackpot in Chief, Donald Trump -- their polling isn't great, but it's much better than his.

How do Republicans who aren't Trump avoid being defined by the party's crackpots? In a few ways: (1) by putting out a lot of messaging on other subjects, (2) by demonizing Democrats much more than Democrats demonize them, and (3) by not constantly drawing attention to party members they find embarrassing, which is exactly what Democrats are doing now.

This was true even in the pre-Trump era. Remember 2010? Republicans ran quite a few candidates who seemed beyond the pale, candidates such as Christine "I'm not a witch" O'Donnell, and Carl Paladino, who had a long history of posting and forwarding racist emails. Republicans distanced themselves from some of these candidates, but then they went right back on message, criticizing Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress, and they shellacked the Democrats in the midterms.

Make your case for yourself and your party. Attack the GOP incessantly. And for crissakes, stop drawing attention to people you think are embarrassing the party.

WHY DOES JAIME HARRISON HATE HIS OWN PARTY'S VOTERS?

A former chair of the Democratic National Committee has some thoughts about yesterday's primaries in New York:

I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination. Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.

— Jaime Harrison (@jaimeharrison.bsky.social) June 23, 2026 at 7:58 PM

Harrison is peeved because three candidates aligned with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America won their primaries yesterday, defeating two incumbents and the candidate endorsed by a retiring congresswoman.

U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was defeated by Mamdani's most polarizing pick, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who once helped organize pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, a two-term incumbent, was beaten by the Mamdani-backed former city Comptroller Brad Lander, who has often aligned himself with the democratic socialist movement. And another Mamdani ally, democratic socialist state Assembly Member Claire Valdez, defeated the handpicked successor of retiring U.S. Rep. Nydia Velazquez.

I can't really fault Harrison for feeling some bitterness about the victory by Avila Chevalier, whose Twitter history includes tweets in 2020 calling President Biden a "war criminal" and a "rapist." But Valdez is a Democratic state legislator, while Lander is a normie New York City politician, a middle-aged progressive who worked at housing nonprofits (that's normie here) and then served as a Democratic city councillor and comptroller for fifteen years.

These candidates inspired voters at a time when Democrats often fail to do that. Harrison could have embraced them, or said nothing. He could have recognized that Democrats need to motivate a wide range of voters, from the center to the left, if they ever want power again. But as I said yesterday, there are just too many Democrats who think DSA is a greater threat than the Heritage Foundation.

I'm not sure why Harrison is so grumpy. Outside of a few left-friendly enclaves of New York City, corporatist and pro-Israel Democrats did just fine yesterday, regrettably:

Maryland Democrat Adrian Boafo, for example, benefited from more than $5 million in super PAC spending connected to the crypto organization Fairshake....

Boafo, the preferred successor of retiring former majority leader Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, was also boosted by another $5 million from an AIPAC-aligned super PAC.

Independent expenditures from crypto money in Maryland also boosted Rep. April McClain Delaney (D) as she fended off a comeback bid by former congressman David Trone....

In a Utah district that Democrats are poised to flip because of court-ordered redistricting, AI-related groups spent $400,000 trying to elevate former congressman Ben McAdams from a field of more liberal challengers. McAdams, who was also a former Salt Lake City mayor, won.

And the race in my district, New York's 12th, became a tech billionaire proxy battle between Micah Lasher (who won) and Alex Bores.

Major industry players spent millions targeting Bores, who finished in second place, in part because of his work spearheading one of the country’s landmark laws establishing guardrails for AI....

In all, a whopping $27 million was spent just by groups both supporting and attacking Bores. Think Big, a super PAC in the Leading the Future network, which is backed in part by leaders at OpenAI and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, spent $8 million against Bores.... Pro-Bores super PACs — many of which were backed by people in the industry who favor AI regulations, like crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and those with ties to Anthropic — dropped more than $19 million to boost him.

This is the party Jaime Harrison is comfortable with. It's still better than the GOP -- neoliberalism is preferable to neofascism -- but it's dispiriting to the base, and polls suggest that it's not very inspiring to middle-of-the-road voters. The Democratic Party should be as popular as Donald Trump is unpopular, but it isn't.

Are Republicans rejecting their more extreme primary winners? The entire party has rallied around Ken Paxton in Texas. And in an upstate New York district that borders Canada -- the district currently represented by Elise Stefanik -- we'll see what happens with this jamoke:

Anthony Constantino, the sticker magnate who erected a 12-foot-high “VOTE FOR TRUMP” sign atop his company’s headquarters, won the Republican nomination for an open House seat in New York’s North Country, according to The Associated Press.

His victory is a major blow to the state’s Republican Party, which had taken the unusual step of endorsing his opponent, Robert Smullen, a state assemblyman and former Marine.

Trump endorsed Constantino, in defiance of the state party. And right-wingers might not come together in this race:

In his short time in the public eye, Mr. Constantino has made enemies of many local Republicans and other party leaders. He is embroiled in a lawsuit with Gerard Kassar, the leader of the state Conservative Party, who Mr. Constantino says threatened to kill him.

The Conservative Party has provided its backing and ballot line to Mr. Smullen, potentially splitting the Republican vote come November.

Mr. Smullen has attacked Mr. Constantino, calling him unfit to hold office, and vowed to continue his campaign through the general election.

Constantino is an ex-boxer who's made rap videos, including this one, in which he calls Zohran Mamdani -- whose name he can't pronounce -- a terrorist.

Terrorists aren't flying planes into buildings anymore. They're coming at us different, trying to install fake politicians who aren't even from our country in our government to hurt our citizens. One is named Zohran Mandami [sic]. First off, fuck you, bitch....

Actually, Constantino seems like an ideal match for Stefanik, whose pinned tweet on X is this:

Because he is. https://t.co/bAL6ZURrLE

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) October 17, 2025

Stefanik remained neutral in the primary, but she's endorsed him now, as has the chair of the state GOP. (Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, and Jim Jordan had already endorsed him in the primary,k in addition to Trump.)

But will Smullen stay in the race and split the right-wing vote? I bet he won't.

Asm. Smullen already secured the Conservative line on the ballot in November, leading to a potential for a split ticket in November. Though, to secure the seat in Congress for the Republican party in the midterms, sources say Smullen could be pressured to back off in the coming weeks.

There are divisive fights on the right, but they generally end when primary season is over. It's usually Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and all of us against the stranger. For "the stranger," substitute "the evil Democrats." (Constantino calls Mamdani "a demon" in that rap song.) In the end, they prioritize winning power for their party, no matter which wing of the party comes out on top in a particular race. Too many establishment Democrats don't.

DO DEMOCRATIC CONSULTANTS EVEN WANT DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES TO WIN?

Last night I clicked on an MS NOW story about the Texas Senate race:

James Talarico has a new ad — with millions behind it

Texas Democrat James Talarico is jumping headlong into his Senate bid against Republican Ken Paxton with a multi-million dollar ad buy, MS NOW has learned.

The Senate candidate, who is hoping to become the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas since 1994, is launching what his team is labeling his first “major” ad of the general election....

Not just a new ad, but "his first 'major' ad of the general election," "with millions behind it"? Wow! Talarico's team must have worked really hard on the ad, right? With this kind of investment, and with the campaign proudly displaying the spot to the national media, the results really ought to be special!

They aren't. The ad is terrible. It's generic Chuck Schumer/Hakeem Jeffries-style mush.

In the 30-second spot, shared first with MS NOW, Talarico talks straight to camera while exiting a Red & White food store, a brown paper bag of groceries in hand. The campaign notes that the truck on screen is his own.

“Too many Texans feel like they’re drowning. The cost of groceries, gas, health care,” he says, pledging — if elected to the Senate — that he will “keep fighting to lower your costs.”

We're told, "The spot notably doesn’t directly mention Talarico’s general election rival — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton." Talarico does say, "I'll take on corruption," which we're supposed to understand as an extremely subtle jab at Paxton, but why not mention his name? Instead, Talarico brags about how bipartisan he is: "In the state house, I brought both parties together to make life more affordable."

Are the consultants who created this ad and decided to spend millions on it releasing it to show Democrats nationwide how hard they're fighting to win this seat? Or did they create and promote this ad to reassure billionaire Democratic donors that Talarico isn't one of those Democrats -- the ones who want to tax the rich and stir up (justifiable) populist anger?

Talarico has campaigned at times like an economic populist. If you go to his campaign site, the first video you see is one he posted in September, in which he says the following:

The biggest divide in our country is not left versus right. It's top versus bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other so that we're not looking up at them. The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power. So, their social media algorithms and their cable news networks tear us apart. They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so that we don't notice that they're defunding our schools, gutting our healthcare, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It is the oldest strategy in the world. Divide and conquer. But we will not be conquered.

The consultants might say that this was a good message for a Democratic primary, but the affordability mush in the new ad is a better message for a general election in a Republican-dominated state. That's nonsense. Every voter now thinks there's a powerful "they" in charge of everything. Solidly Republican voters believe the powerful "they" are sinister Democratic elitists, but everyone else in the electorate is up for grabs. They know someone is thriving while they're drowning. Talarico has a chance here to speak to that anger, but the consultants don't want him to.

I've begun to believe that the Democratic consultant class thinks the greatest danger facing America is not corpo-authoritarian Republican extremism, but rather the possibility that left-populists might win real power in a Democratic White House or Congress. They fear the Democratic Socialists of America more than they fear the Heritage Foundation. They want Democratic candidates to suppress populist anger, because the rich donors whose interests they serve are afraid of where that anger might lead.

Or maybe they just have an outdated view of what swing voters want: nothing unsettling, nothing bold, just empty talk about affordability. And while they insist that they're trying to solve the problem of the Democratic Party's broad unpopularity in America, it seems clear that they're a main reason for that unpopularity. So they might be leading the party into a period of sustained powerlessness, squandering the opportunity to persuade voters that Democrats are the party of real change, at a time when the leader of the other party is the most widely despised politician of the century.

THE HOTTEST NEWS IS MURDOCHLAND IS ABOUT TWO PEOPLE WHO AREN'T EVEN IN OFFICE ANYMORE

Republicans obviously want the 2026 midterms to be about anything other than Donald Trump's presidency, so it's no surprise that at 9:00 Monday moring, the lead story at Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and the lead story at Murdoch's New York Post were about two guys who aren't even working in the government anymore.

At Fox:

And at the Post:

The Fox story focuses on Lindy Li, a former Democratic fundraiser who's been flipped by the GOP and is now a professional Democrat-hater. Her upcoming book, Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse, will be published (by Murdoch's book-publishing company, HarperCollins) on September 15, just around the time early voting starts in the midterms. That's how the Republican media machine wants to motivate voters -- not just by saying Democrats are evil, but by saying Democrats were evil two years ago.

Or according to the New York Post, six years ago -- that's the point of the lead item there. Anthony Fauci, who is Democratic-coded in the eyes of Republicans even though he served presidents of both parties, is (according to the Post's Miranda Devine and outgoing director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard) linked to a lab leak that brought us COVID (even though we still don't really know where the COVID virus originated, and even though Republicans have long insisted that COVID is no worse than the flu). This is meant to motivate Republican voters who never feared COVID in the first place, and who are sure that it can be easily cured with ivermectin in any case. And it will motivate them.

The average D.C. Democrat will denounce Trump and his or her election opponent, but not Republicans as a whole, and certainly not a wide range of Republicans. Republicans, by contrast, incessantly denounce Democrats (and figures presumed to be Democrats), not just for what they're doing now but for what they did many years ago. Republicans stir up grievances, then sustain those grievances forever.

And this works. The GOP is a party with a hugely unpopular president, but it might survive the midterms with minimal damage.

The Dems midterm warning sign is pretty clear:

There are high quality polls (Ipsos, MU Law, & NBC), which show Dems shy of their generic ballot benchmark in past wave years.

Their Dems avg. lead is just 3 pts... & Dems need a 3-4 pt win to take the House given redistricting. pic.twitter.com/qPy5CsxFZS

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) June 15, 2026

Some Democrats are doing a decent job of directing voters' rage, but Republicans have a huge head start -- and a massive back catalog of grievances.

OF COURSE TRUMP SUPPORTERS GENUINELY BELIEVE HIS LIES ABOUT THE REFLECTING POOL

President Trump is making preposterous claims about what's happening to the Reflecting Pool in D.C. He's ordering people to be detained for imaginary crimes.

President Trump said on Saturday that “multiple individuals” had been arrested for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and that problems with a more than $14 million renovation project had become so severe that the pool would likely have to be at least partly drained for “necessary repairs.”

... Among those accused of vandalism was David Carter Hearn, 67, a cyclist and three-time Olympian as a canoeist who says he stopped at the site on Friday just to have a look, then reached down to touch a strip of peeling blue paint mixed with the algae.

The U.S. Park Police arrested Mr. Hearn shortly after, accusing him of destroying government property, a crime that can carry up to a 10-year prison sentence. Mr. Hearn denies the charge.

... The administration has not released the names of others accused of vandalizing the pool, a crime that Mr. Trump said on Saturday could lead to “years in jail.” In a later post, he said without evidence that vandals had “poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”

Trump's critics, most of whom are rational, intelligent people, appear to assume that his base knows he's lying about the vandalism.

I never get used to how much cultists will degrade themselves by pretending to believe this lunatic’s nonsense.

[image or embed]

— Great Popehat My Honor (@kenwhite.bsky.social) June 21, 2026 at 5:11 AM

Another Bluesky commenter writes:

Didn't we establish that the obviousness of the lie is part of the power play? It's clear bullshit but they can punish people with it, and that's what his voters love, that it doesn't *matter* it's a lie.

But they don't think his lies about the Reflecting Pool are lies. They believe him.

Here are some of the top comments in response to a Fox News story about the Reflecting Pool:

Ruining a $14.8 million dollar job. How is that a misdemeanor? They should all be convicted felons with full restitution orders.

****

You know, I never cared for Biden, Obama or Clinton's policies, but I sure the hecks wouldn't vandalize my own country.

****

If I just finished a 52-mile bike ride, reaching into a reflecting pool to touch peeling sealant to see what it felt like wouldn't be the first thing on my mind! He's an idiot!

****

Juvenile delinquents vandalize. Those are actual adults behaving like juvenile delinquents.

****

It is beyond belief. An American would vandalize a national monument because he hates the president who renovated the pool. Have democrats completely gone crazy?

****

Vandalizing a national monument is a serious felony folks! The perps need to have the maximum sentence available! This is getting out of hand! Nasty people!

****

It takes a really awful person to vandalize a monument that the government is attempting to restore to its former glory

****

Those 'Love Not Hate' folks sure are hateful.

In response to a New York Post story, there's this:

Why would he think that he could just start messing around with a monument in DC, and nothing would happen?
Make this vandal pay for the repairs. Shameless this is a national monument, not a Trump monument; doing this on our 250th anniversary is a double disgrace for these criminal vandals.

****

These vandals defacing government property by ripping out the liner need to pay for the replacement repairs of the liner. This was a multimillion $ restoration project! Even if you don't like the current president, you can't just vandalize the white house property ! This guy is an older man. His last Olympic competition was over 26 years ago. Make him and the other vandals pay!!!!

****

I'm an avid bike rider and I never once stopped riding my bike and reached into a fountain to pull out a floating piece of plastic. I'm weird like that.

****

What did I do ! What did I do! The common phase used by criminals.

****

The white version of "I dint do nuffin"

The comments in response to Breitbart's story are more of the same:

President Trump is working to Make America Great Again! Democrats only try to destroy America.

****

Democrats only doing what Democrats do.

****

It's so incredibly stupid, it's gotta be Democrats. They prefer the unhealthy large germ factory.

****

Lock them up with no trial and keep them in the DC jail for as long as possible. Then throw the book at them like they did to Grandma and Grandpa for trespassing. Only this is vandalism.

****

Let them meet in jail the people they've been rooting for and see how that goes.

****

For someone to be filled with so much hatred toward Trump that they would act like children destroying hard work and beautiful things our taxes paid for is beyond comprehension. And to think, every bit of the hatred learned by them was deceitfully installed in their weak little minds by their handlers who are only using them until they get what they want: the destruction of our country.

****

Democrats seek to: MAKE AMERICA A S**THOLE FOREVER

And at Gateway Pundit:

The progressive Democrats are insane. They are literally mentally ill.

Wearing shirts that say TEAM ALGAE and knifing the pool liner are not the actions of a mentally balanced individual. We are seeing mass hysteria becoming mass insanity.

****

End times, expect it to get way, way, worse.

****

Demonic

****

Demonic manifestations will become almost normal. Just in the last 10 years we've seen this type of demonic activity increase 100 fold. Expect it to increase a 1000+ fold in the coming years.

****

Beheadings (of whites) has gotten way too common in this country.

****

Team Algae should be declared a terrorist organization and the charges upgraded to reflect that.. I’m not kidding either

****

What the F is wrong with these lunatics? They are enemy combatants of the United States and should be treated as such.

****

They were indoctrinated in our schools to hate our country. That is what happens when you let people who openly hate your country run the education system for multiple generations. Add to that, these same people controlled most of the mass-media.

****

The enemy within.

****

This is some serious TDS. Although, kids today are taught to hate America from their first day in school.

Seems to me root cause is not the crime you see. All these Dim really just trying to get their guts pushed in and if they go to jail they will get all the LOVE they want... They are Dims so they lust to have anything jammed in their bungholios...

I should probably stop there.

America has a two-party system. Members of the Democratic Party regularly say that they think America needs a strong Republican Party. They praise bipartisanship and "working across the aisle." They get their news from outlets like The New York Times that are often harshly critical of their own party.

Members of the Republican Party get their news from Fox, which depicts Democrats as uniformly evil -- Republican-hating, America-despising, crime-loving, chaos-admiring psychopaths. Of course these people believe that evil Democrats (with "Trump derangement syndrome") deliberately vandalized the Reflecting Pool. Of course they don't believe this was a botched restoration -- they don't believe Trump is capable of doing a bad job.

They're nearly 40% of the country -- and they vote. Yet our political culture never argues that they're the problem. Our political culture believes that, as Toby Buckle puts it, "the right must be understood, but never blamed." And that's why America is in this mess.

THERE'S NOTHING INHERENTLY WORKING-CLASS ABOUT WANTING TO FIGHT THE VILLAINS

The New Republic's Greg Sargent recently wrote about some research conducted for the Democratic group American Bridge that tried to determine the kinds of party messages that might appeal to white working-class voters who've lost faith in Donald Trump. I know that Democrats always try to win over disaffected Republicans, and it rarely works -- but it's true that the voters in the study aren't happy and blame both Trump and the GOP for what's wrong these days. They might listen to Democrats, for once:

... among the targeted constituencies ... a certain type of economic messaging resonates. It blames insurance companies and other conglomerates for high medical and prescription drug costs and hits big corporations for price gouging and tax avoidance. It blames Trump and Republicans for allowing these things to happen. And finally, that messaging vows that Democrats will crack down on them.

Similarly, regions hit hard by Trump’s tariffs and Iran-war-related costs are very responsive to arguments about those things. Among targeted voters in Iowa’s 1st and 2nd districts, for instance, one message that resonates hits Republicans for backing Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran, arguing that they’ve hiked grocery and energy costs and hurt farmers who export goods. In short, what appears to work is a populist economics that centers villains, hits Trump and Republicans for enabling them, and pledges action.

John Stoehr thinks a message focused on villains appeals to something special in the white working-class brain.

... that word gets at something important about the white working class. These voters ... have been primed to gobble up messaging that names the bad guy. Only instead of "insurance companies and other conglomerates," the villains have been "criminal illegal aliens" or some other other. The white working class is persuaded by messaging that clearly identifies the criminal, the crime and the punishment, to wit: The brown guy is stealing from you, so crack down on him.

Maga messaging also taps into the fundamental nature of the white working-class voters, which is that, above and beyond all else, they are hierarchical. The belief that society has a top-down structure is fixed. That's why they can apply the word "entitled" to people at the bottom of the social order – undeserving "welfare queens" – as well as people at the top – the undeserving rich. Neither has earned their place. One wants everything given to them. The other has already had everything given to them. Both are "entitled."

Stoehr continues:

For a decade, the GOP has oriented white working-class voters so they look downward only. The trick for the Democrats is reversing that orientation, so the criminal, the crime and the punishment are just as clear looking upward, to wit: The rich are stealing from you, so crack down on them.

I understand what Stoehr is getting at, but I think a lot of this is wrong, and a little bit patronizing.

First of all, if being "hierarchical" means believing "that society has a top-down structure," who's more hierarchical than educated progressives? We believe that the rich have way too much money and politcal power. Our anti-Trump movement is called No Kings. Many of us quote the aphorism "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism."

Beyond that, if white working-class voters really believed that society's "top-down structure is fixed," they wouldn't want the rich taxed at a higher level, as even some Republicans do now. They wouldn't oppose the construction of data centers by wealthy tech firms, as some Republicans (though far more independents and Democrats) do now.

Do you know who's really hierarchical, in Stoehr's sense? Voters who still admire Trump despite all the maladministration they've seen. These are the people who think Trump's billionaire status and gold-plated life are signs that God wants him to be rich and powerful. Even now, they wallow in AI images in which he bestrides the world like a Colossus. No Democrat is getting their votes, ever.

Stoehr writes:

Progressives who do not come from the white working class may not be aware that working-class white Americans are essentially illiberal, in the sense that they will resist liberal attempts to flatten the top-down structure of society. In that resistance, however, lies an opportunity. It is because they are illiberal that they are not only open to a message of retribution, but attracted by it. They already know who's screwing them. What they don't know is who's going to make it right. The Democratic candidate's job is to tell them.

I'm a progressive who comes from the white working class. If you "resist liberal attempts to flatten the top-down structure of society," does that mean you're "illiberal"? Or does it mean you worry that the would-be flatteners will just become a new set of elites screwing you? (That's certainly what Fox News has told them -- for several decades, not just the decade of Trump.)

And again, if they're "open to a message of retribution," doesn't that mean they are receptive to at least some flattening?

I think what's going on is a lot simpler. A certain percentage of white working-class Americans now believe they're being shafted by a Republican president and his party, and they want action. There's nothing uniquely working-class about wanting action -- suburban Democratic women want action, too. Here's a scene from a gathering of Democrats in the Cleveland suburbs, as reported by The Atlantic's Elaine Godfrey. The chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, Kathleen Clyde, is struggling to win over voters (mostly women) who should be receptive to her message:

“What are we going to do differently?” one woman asked, pointing out that the Democrats’ brand is terrible. Eventually, the microphone was abandoned, and another woman asked: “Why don’t the Democrats have a good message?” A third woman chimed in, a little frantically: “What can we do?!”

Clyde’s eyes were wide. She hadn’t expected friendly fire. “We do have a good message!” she sputtered. “Affordability!” But the women smelled weakness, and now, several of them were shouting at once. “How are you going to do that?” one demanded. “It has to be more specific!”

The weak tea Democrats seem to be offering is We're laser-focused on affordability! with no specifics. The liberal women in that Ohio gathering will sigh wearily and vote for that message, even though they find it lacking. But even very disaffected ex-Trump voters in the white working class probably won't.

How did Mikie Sherill score a double-digit win in the New Jersey gubernatorial race last year? In part, by promising to freeze utility bills.

How did Zohran Mamdani win the mayor's race in New York City last year? In part, by promising to freeze rents.

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Don't think of white working-class voters as dumb palookas who want combat because that's what appeals to their primitive brains. Think of them as normal people who feel as roughed up by the powers that be as we do, and want to hear what specifically Democrats will do to intervene in the beatdown, just the way we do.