MAYBE THE SUPREME COURT SHOULD HAVE FEWER SEATS (AND OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT A FIGHT I DON'T TRUST DEMOCRATS TO WIN)

This past Sunday, Congressman Jim Cyburn brought the notion of Supreme Court reform into the Democratic mainstream.

“Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker asked Clyburn if he agreed with former Vice President Kamala Harris’s request for court expansion in an interview.

“Yes, I do,” the South Carolina Democrat said. “I think we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress and we ought to expand, and 13 is a pretty good number. A baker’s dozen, it would be a good number to have on the court.”

The party's leaders usually recoil in horror whenever a Democrat or progressive proposes a major shakeup like this, so Clyburn's statement represents a real change in the party establishment's thinking.

House Speaker Mike Johnson subsequently announced a plan to have the House vote on a constitutional amendment fixing the size of the Supreme Court at nine justices. This is pure theater -- a constitutional amendment needs to pass both houses of Congress by a two-thirds vote, after which it needs to be ratified by three quarters of the state legislatures. That's not going to happen.

But this is just an early effort on Republicans' part to persuade Americans that what the GOP prefers is what the Founders would have preferred and what Democrats want is evil, weird, and un-American.

If Democrats hold both houses of Congress and the White House after the 2028 election, they'll have every right to change the makeup of the Court, the size of which is not specified in the Constitution. They can do it simply by passing a law.

But if they get serious about this, there'll be a massive propaganda camapign against it. The entire right will be opposed, and portions of the "liberal" media will undoubtedly join in. (Already, MS NOW has published an opinion piece headlined "Rep. Jim Clyburn’s Supreme Court Plan Isn’t Worth Discussing.") Democrats will need to out-message Republicans on this, and I hope they're up to the task. Some of what I'm seeing from the liberal commentariat right now seems to assume a nerdish understanding of the federal judiciary that most Americans simply don't have.

13 justices for the 13 districts has got to be the throughline; the age limits, senior status and rotations can roll into that. THIRTEEN JUSTICES FOR THIRTEEN DISTRICTS. MARCH.

— bskwitter.bsky.social (@bskwitter.bsky.social) June 25, 2026 at 8:39 PM

How many Americans know there are thirteen federal courts of appeals? If you're going to go in this direction, you'll need to start by doing some education. Well-educated Democrats often forget that ordinary Americans don't have the knowledge base they have. They can't win this fight in the court of public opinion unless they recognize how much ordinary Americans know.

Democrats could counter the suggestion that we need to stick with nine justices by saying that if you really want to do this the Founders' way, we should have only six justices, the way we did at the beginning, in 1789. If Republicans are such defenders of tradition, why don't they want that?

The key point Democrats need to make -- and make over and over again until all of America understands it -- is that the number of justices on the Court has changed several times in our history.

We're in the mess we're in because Republican presidents have appointed 15 of the last 20 Supreme Court justices. That's created a Court that's far to the right of the American public. I don't know whether Democrats want to stress that point, because to a large extent it's just luck of the draw. (Jimmy Carter had no vacancies to fill during his four-year term in office, and Joe Biden had only one, but Trump -- partly because Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on Merrick Garland in 2016 -- had three in his first four-year term.) But it still suggests how out of whack this Court is, and I think it's worth bringing up.

For sheer vindictiveness, I'd like Democrats to pass a law reducing the Court to six justices, with the (Democratic) president in charge at the law's enactment being given the discretion to remove three justices of his or her choosing. (Presumably the choice would be the three appointed by a president who went on to be convicted of dozens of felonies.)

But that's not a serious proposal. I think Democrats need to settle soon on a set of reforms and settle on a campaign built on talking points that explain why this is a reasonable thing to do and not a violation of the Constitution or federal law. They mustn't let themselves get outmessaged.

EVEN IF EL-SAYED EMULATED OBAMA, HE WOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO PUT PIKER-GHAZI BEHIND HIM

Michelle Goldberg's latest column is a nuanced and well-meaning assessment of Abdul El-Sayed's Hasan Piker problem. She acknowledges that there's a double standard at work here: for instance, Trumpworld insider Laura Loomer is much more bigoted than Piker and much more powerful.

Administration officials she targeted were purged from the National Security Council, and on Friday, she claimed credit for the deportation of the British right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who’d become her enemy. Loomer is also openly bigoted in a way that outstrips the most offensive things Piker has ever said. Over the weekend, she called Angie Nixon, the Democratic Senate nominee in Florida, a “ghetto bitch” who speaks “Ebonics.”

But Goldberg sees El-Sayed's need to distance himself from Piker as an acknowledgment of political reality:

We can and should denounce double standards, but successful candidates must also navigate them. And right now, El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, is letting this one trip him up.

She think El-Sayed needs to have a Jeremiah Wright moment.

In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign faced a crisis when comments from his pastor Jeremiah Wright emerged, including a clip of Wright damning America. Obama turned what could have been a fiasco into one of the best speeches of his career, one in which he tried to explain the anger of disappointed civil rights activists to white voters and the anger of the dispossessed white working class to Black voters. It was a masterpiece of empathy, and at the time it felt that it changed the trajectory of his campaign.

I’m not sure if El-Sayed is capable of something similar, of weaving his visceral grasp of many voters’ fury and despair at Israeli ethnic cleansing with a recognition of the terror American Jews feel in the face of rising antisemitism. But if he was, it might be a turning point in this race.

I strongly suspect that it would not be a turning point in this race.

In 2008, a Republican president in his eighth year in office had completely lost the support of the American people, and it was clear that the next president was likely to be a Democrat. Obama was inspiring and telegenic, and his life story made a lot of white Americans feel good about themselves for supporting him. He was also safe, a left-centrist Democrat who didn't intend to challenge economic neoliberalism. And he had star quality. The Cinderella story of his campaign drew eyeballs to news outlets. (Another advantage he had was that the media hated his opponent in the primaries, Hillary Clinton.)

So our mainstream political culture was eager to allow him a do-over. That political culture will never feel the same way about Abdul El-Sayed. Even if he delivers an Obama race speech of his own, El-Sayed will continue to be treated as a suspect "other." He'll never be fully embraced because he challenges the status quo in a way that Obama never did.

Also, our political culture, even on the "liberal" side, appears to be more "wired for Republicans" than ever, despite the fact that we're experiencing a GOP presidency far worse than George W. Bush's. Also, El-Sayed, unlike Obama, is a Muslim, and the political culture still isn't sure whether anti-Muslim bigotry is a serious problem, even when it's accompanied by (right-wing) anti-Jewish bigotry.

In The Gurdian, Mehdi Hasan writes about this double standard. Hasan notes that a bigoted adviser to Abdul El-Sayed's opponent, Mike Rogers, has gotten a free pass from the media.

His name is Lorenzo Sewell.

And you’ve probably never heard of him.

... He has publicly and proudly described Islam as a “conquering religion” and a “death cult”. He has called El-Sayed an “Islamic jihadist” who wants to impose “Sharia law all over this land”. The United States, he insists, is “not a nation of Muslims. We are a nation of Christians.”

... But Sewell’s vile rhetoric is only part of the story. On 18 August, the pastor co-organized the “Christian Crusader March on Dearborn City Council Meeting” with the far-right anti-Muslim agitator Jake Lang. Lang was charged with assaulting police officers with a deadly weapon over his actions on 6 January 2021, before receiving a pardon from Trump. He also says he doesn’t believe the Holocaust happened “at that level” and has used the N-word and was arrested in Texas in June on a charge of making a terroristic threat.

The Dearborn “Crusader” rally co-organized by Sewell and Lang attracted neo-Nazis waving a swastika flag and wearing Nazi armbands. There were also reports of pro-KKK material being distributed during and after the event. Dearborn police made 22 arrests that day.

The response from the media: crickets.

The media analysis platform Ground News aggregated 242 separate stories mentioning Piker from across the political spectrum over the past three months – almost three stories a day.

... I searched the websites of the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN. Not one of them appears to have mentioned Sewell in its coverage in 2026. The Times covered the “Christian Crusader” rally in Dearborn, including Jake Lang’s role in it, but made no mention of Sewell – or of Sewell’s connection to Rogers.

So maybe El-Sayed should give us an Obamaesque speech. But it probably won't do his campaign much good.

TRUMP WANTS TO PROJECT FAKE GREATNESS SO HE CAN TAKE CREDIT FOR A FAKE ELECTORAL VICTORY

As Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Isaac Arnsdorf of The Washington Post note, presidents who are struggling in the polls as midterm elections approach generally recognize that some voters don't like them and adjust their campaign strategy accordingly.

... recent presidents ... when their popularity sagged, generally gave endangered members of their own party room to run away from them.

In 2006, [George W.] Bush largely confined his late campaigning to places where Republicans believed he could still help, while vulnerable GOP candidates advertised their independence from him and avoided appearances with him. Eight years later, Barack Obama watched endangered Democrats criticize his policies, skip his visits and keep him out of some of the states where they faced the toughest races.

President Joe Biden made that accommodation almost a running joke. During the 2022 midterms, as some vulnerable Democrats kept their distance from an unpopular White House, Biden frequently told candidates: “I’ll come campaign for you or against you — whichever will help the most.”

Not Donald Trump this year.

Next week, as primaries give way to a perilous general election campaign for vulnerable Republicans, Trump will headline two nights of a GOP political convention in Dallas. Over the next two months, his super PAC plans to run advertisements that feature his name and play up his political record. And although he will not appear on any ballot in the midterms, he has told voters they should behave as if he is.

His interpretation of his record is ... well, delusional. “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country in my first term,” he said, at a recent Las Vegas rally. “But this is blowing it away.”

This isn't completely insane, says Tevi Troy, a presidential historian.

“What we’ve seen over the course of the past decade is, when Trump is on the ballot, you get better turnout if you’re a Republican,” Troy said.

But when polls are showing that more voters disapprove of your job performance than approve of it in 47 out of 50 states, efforts to turn out your own base run the risk of turning out the Democratic base in larger numbers.

Beyond inspiring base turnout, there's a second explanation for what Trump is doing: he's the most egomaniacal person who's ever lived, and he's massaging that ego. But I see a third explanation.

We know that Trump sees only two possible outcomes for the midterms. They're the same two outcomes anticipated by Charles Foster Kane's New York Inquirer during Kane's run for governor in the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane:



The party of Trump might cheat its way to victory in the midterms if the Supreme Court upholds Trump's restrictions on mail voting. Trump might rig elections by seizing ballots or intimidating voters at the polls. Or he might be helped by Republican election officials who refuse to certify Democratic victories, or congressional Republicans who refuse to seat Democrats.

Or Democrats might trounce Republicans. In response to that outcome, Trump and other Republicans will assert that they were the victims of massive Democratic voter fraud (which they somehow can't prove).

One way or another, Trump anticipates a Republican victory -- or at least anticipates an outcome he'll describe as a Republican victory.

I don't know exactly how delusional Trump is. I don't know if he'll really believe that a blue-wave election is actually a Republican triumph, or if he'll merely believe that he can sell that fiction to his gullible superfans. But he expects to announce a triumph -- and he wants to be the one responsible. Even if the "victory" is a total illusion, he wants to say that he gets the credit for it, not the Republicans who are actually on the ballot.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that would occur only to a very diseased mind. But I'm convinced that that's how Trump's mind is working right now.

GRAMPA CARVILLE STILL FANTASIZES ABOUT DEMOCRATS ACHIEVING POLITICAL DOMINANCE WITHOUT MAKING ANY EFFORT WHATSOEVER

Let me take you back to February 2025, when James Carville offered some idiotic advice to Democrats on Dan Abrams's podcast and in a New York Times op-ed. Carville told Abrams:

What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing.... I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.

He continued:

“It’s going to be easy pickings here in six weeks,” [Carville] said of opportunities for Democrats. “Just lay back.”

Abrams asked, “You literally think 30 days to six weeks, the Trump administration is effectively going to collapse in terms of public support?

Carville predicted Trump would find it impossible to pass any agenda items and that House Speaker Mike Johnson would be forced to reach across the aisle to ask House Democrats for help.

“We’re in the midst of a collapse,” Carville said. “It’s over.”

As I noted at the time, thirty days after this podcast appearance, Trump was at 47.5% approval and 49.6% disapproval in Nate Silver's polling average, and was at 47.9% approval and 48.8% disapproval in the Real Clear Polling average. His numbers didn't collapse on their own. It took active resistance on the part of Democrats (starting with Senator Chris Van Hollen's defense of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's right to due process, along with resistance by No Kings demonstrators, anti-ICE protesters, and anti-Trump lawyers) in combination with Trump's mismanagement of America to drive his poll numbers down. Just kicking back and doing nothing wasn't enough.

In the meantime, Trump was highly effective, getting his One Big Beautiful Bill through Congress, and imposing other horrors on America -- DOGE cuts, preposterous tariffs, the militarization of American cities, the dismantling of scientific research funding, and finally a ruinous war -- through executive action.

Nevertheless, Grampa Carville is back with a new "just chill and Trumpism will die on its own" fantasy:

James Carville is refusing to back away from his extraordinary prediction that President Donald Trump will quit the White House next year....

The veteran Democratic strategist revisited his prediction Thursday on his Politicon podcast after listeners asked what a President JD Vance might look like if Carville’s forecast actually came true.

Carville went further than merely standing by his earlier claim, predicting Vance “will be president next April” and describing what he believes would be a severely weakened Republican administration.

“... yeah, Trump’s two years are one thing, alright, he was a year ago everybody had to pay attention to him, everybody had to return his phone call,” Carville said.

He argued Trump’s political influence was already diminishing and predicted Republicans would suffer major electoral losses in the midterms, leaving Vance without control of Congress....

“And then the whole Republican Party is going to fall apart when they lose all these seats because they’re going to know that Trump doesn’t protect him.”

Carville concluded: “So JD Vance, in my opinion, will be president next April. He will be the most constrained, ineffective, babbling president in the history of the United States.”

This isn't new. In June, Carville said of Trump, "I genuinely think that he will resign next spring." He subsequently said, “I’m telling you, this guy, by Easter of 2027, is just gonna walk away from this job.”

I hope no one believes this. I hope no Democratic leader or key strategist believes it's going to be this easy to wrest power from Republicans.

First of all, resignation is the last thing we should expect from Trump. He fears prosecution, which becomes more likely if he's out of office. Moreover, there's nothing Trump fears more than appearing weak. I'm not sure his aides and family will acknowledge that he's no longer president even if he dies in office.

Why does Carville want to believe this? I think it's because Carville, like most Boomer Democratic insiders, suffers from 1980s PTSD. He thinks the three presidential trouncings in that decade prove that America hates Democrats, and his solution is for Democrats to "play possum" all the time, minimizing their differences with Republicans in the hope that enough of them will still be elected for the party to stay in the game. Carville really doesn't like it when Democrats who want to do something make demands, as becomes clear in the full version of the first quote above from that February 2025 podcast appearance:

What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing. It doesn’t need Elizabeth Warren and somebody screaming to pacify some progressive advocacy groups in Washington, which, by the way, I wish these people were just useless. They’re actually worse than useless, that they’re detrimental. And they never, ever learn to shut up. And so then this is what I believe. I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.

(Emphasis added.)

Also see this passage from that February 2025 op-ed:

... in the first Trump Administration ... Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics. We voiced outrage on social issue after social issue. We spun ourselves up in a tizzy over an investigation into Russia. We fought Mr. Trump at every corner, on every issue imaginable and muddied up our message in an unwinnable war. We were saved only by his lousy governing and a lot of effort on our side finding good candidates to run for the House and Senate in 2018. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is retreat on the immediate battlefield — and advance in another direction.

As I wrote then:

No, the Democrats didn't just get lucky. The resistance worked! It fired voters up and flipped the House in 2018. It drove Donald Trump from office and won full congressional control in 2020. It kept Trump's poll ratings under water for the entirety of his first term. It pushed back on efforts to repeal Obamacare, separate immigrant families, and embrace the racist right at Charlottesville and elsewhere.

People like Carville believe -- or at least want to believe -- that power will drop in Democrats' laps if Democrats never draw attention to the fact that they're Democrats. Carville believes this because he thinks normal people hate Democrats, even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections.

And even if Carville's fantasy were to come true, it's absurd to argue that President J.D. Vance would be "the most constrained, ineffective ... president in the history of the United States." He'll still have the Supreme Court on his side. He'll have the veto pen. (Democrats can't possibly win enough seats to override presidential vetoes, and Republicans in Congress will never break ranks with a Republican president in significant numbers.) He'll have a massively funded anti-immigration machine still at his disposal.

And we still don't know whether we'll have fair elections in 2026 It's quite possible that the Supreme Court will end genuine democracy in America by greenlighting Trump's assault on mail voting. And even if this doesn't happen, Republicans are probably plotting to prevent the seating of enough Democratic midterm victors to maintain a Republican majority in the House, as Michael Luttig warns.

Which means Democrats can't just hang out on the porch in a rocking chair, as Grampa Carville's fantasies suggest. They'll have to fight like hell for every victory, and never stop fighting.

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ALMOST CLOSE TO GETTING IT

A New York Times story about Jon Ossoff's Senate reelection campaign suggests that Ossoff's success in the polls is baffling and paradoxical:

In Georgia, Ossoff Courts Broad Appeal With an Anti-Trump Script

Senator Jon Ossoff, the youngest sitting senator and the only Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump won in 2024, hasn’t moderated his message in his critical race.

The story's author, Robert Jimison, clearly regards Ossoff's popularity as a head-scratcher:

Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia entered this election cycle with every reason to tack to the political middle.

He is the only Senate Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump carried in 2024, making him one of the most vulnerable incumbents in his party and an obvious Republican target from the start.

But Mr. Ossoff hasn’t moderated his votes or his message to appeal to a broader swath of voters, as Democrats in competitive statewide races often do in the conservative-leaning South. Instead, he has dived into his party’s efforts to thwart the president’s agenda in Congress, and sharpened his attacks on Mr. Trump and Republicans on the campaign trail.

Are you sure you want to do this, Jon? Jimison appears to be saying.

The approach risks alienating some members of the coalition whose backing he needs to win re-election in Georgia, including independents and conservative-leaning voters.

Or ... maybe Ossoff has unearthed a secret about the Georgia electorate known only to a few. Jimison tells us that Ossoff appears to be

taking advantage of ... Mr. Trump’s sagging approval ratings — a Fox News poll in June found him with net-negative ratings in Georgia, with 56 percent holding an unfavorable view of him....

Trump's favorability in that Fox poll is 42%. So he's at -14 in the state. And among the independents Jamison says Ossoff "needs to win re-election," the Fox poll says that Trump's favorable rating is a mere 26%. Trump's unfavorable rating among Georgia independents is a whopping 70%, including 51% who say their view of Trump is "strongly unfavorable."

So I have this crazy, wacky theory, Robert. I think being opposed to Donald Trump is centrist in Georgia. I think the median Georgian hates the tariffs, the high prices, the war, the corruption, the measles, the diarrhea lettuce, and the obsession with the ballroom. In other words, I don't think Ossoff's decision to campaign as a partisan Democrat is counterintuitive. I think Democratic ideas are what's normal, and Republicans are the out-of-step weirdos.

Jimison notes that Ossoff's opponent, Mike Rogers, is campaigning as a Republican partisan, and doesn't seem to regard that as weird or counterintuitive.

Mr. Collins, the 59-year-old son of former Representative Mac Collins of Georgia, has focused heavily on the issues that animate the Republican base — illegal immigration, transgender athletes, crime and grievances surrounding the 2020 election....

Mr. Collins is working to draw a stark contrast with Mr. Ossoff on issues including law enforcement and border security in a state that remains conservative.

Donald Trump is underwater by double digits, Ossoff has a solid lead in multiple polls, Georgia's other senator is also a Democrat, and a Democrat leads the governor's race, so how can Jimison call Georgia "a state that remains conservative"? It's clearly a middle-of-the-road state. (Jimison, who's Black, may be arguing that white Georgians are conservatives and the state's large Black population is at least culturally conservative. But that doesn't add up to a conservative state.)

Our entire political culture, including most Democrats and most putatively liberal media outlets such as The New York Times, believes that Republicans are normative and Democrats are outlier freaks suitable only for decadent big cities and college towns. Meanwhile, Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections, and in order to maintain the fiction that Republicans are the normal ones, we grade GOP election performance on a curve, treating Trump's victory in 2024 as a 1932-size landslide even though he won the popular vote by a mere one and a half points, against a replacement candidate handicapped by sexism, racism, and a global impulse to toss out all incumbent parties.

And now America hates Donald Trump, and it might hate the entire GOP if Democrats attacked the party as ferociously as Republicans attack Democrats. In any case, Jon Ossoff knows that Republicanism isn't normative in 2026. Robert Jimison and the Times still seem incapable of grasping this reality.

NEW FRONTS IN REPUBLICAN GRIEVANCE POLITICS

Toluse Olorunnipa of The Atlantic reports on the GOP's latest grievance: naturalized citizens are allowed to hold office.

In recent months, an idea once confined to the fringes has gained mainstream traction across the country. Republican legislators in several states have introduced proposals that would restrict naturalized citizens and dual citizens from running for a range of elected positions, including sheriff and governor. In Congress, at least five Republicans have sponsored various proposals to bar naturalized or dual citizens from serving in roles including federal judgeships, Cabinet posts, and ambassadorships, and in Congress itself. Florida lawmakers this year enacted a law requiring candidates for several state and federal offices to disclose whether they hold another citizenship in addition to being a citizen of the United States.

Olorunippa tells us, "The movement has been fueled in part by the rise of a new class of foreign-born politicians—most prominently New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani." He doesn't mention Ilhan Omar, a naturalized citizen whom Republicans despise, or, for that matter, Abdul El-Sayed and Rashida Tlaib (both of whom were actually born in Michigan, though most Republicans don't know that). If you pay attention to the right, you know it's hard to tell where the belief that even naturalized immigrants are a menace ends and the belief that Muslims are a menace begins.

The campaign to pass these laws is in its early stages:

When Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen first floated the idea of barring naturalized citizens from serving in elected office, he cited Mamdani’s mayoral run as one impetus. “We want to make sure that no potential foreign influence or foreign meddling could impact our state’s highest elected leaders,” he told AL.com last year....

State lawmakers in Alabama introduced legislation earlier this year that would require natural-born citizenship of those seeking to run for governor, legislator, sheriff, or a handful of other elected positions. Republican legislators introduced similar bills in Kentucky and Tennessee this year. Although the proposals—which face significant constitutional questions—have not yet passed, the effort is nevertheless building momentum. When the law in Florida requiring disclosure for dual citizens takes effect next year, it will mark the first time such a proposal has become state law.

The mood on the right is punitive:

Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said that he would bar public schools in his state from hiring H-1B-visa holders. He described the first-of-its-kind proposal as a way to reduce “foreign influence” and “indoctrination in the classroom.”

Even if few of these proposals become law in the immediate future, this fear of contagion will become an effective way for the GOP to maintain party solidarity despite the current Republican president's astonishingly awful mismanagement the country. Just as Republicans relied on the Tea Party to rebrand the GOP after the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, and just as the party used crusades against transgender youth and diversity initiatives to rebrand starting around the time of Trump's 2020 defeat, a message of "Vote GOP and Muslims won't gain political power" could sustain the party until the next charismatic leader comes along.

This isn't the only post-Trump assault on citizenship we should expect. Here's Breitbart's John Nolte reporting on a research paper claiming to find a"connection between trans beliefs and violence."

A just-released study from Rutgers University, the Network Contagion Research Institute, and the Manhattan Institute has found something not at all surprising...

“These findings suggest that gender ideology is associated with LWA [left-wing authoritarianism] and willingness to justify political violence.”

"Gender ideology" is a right-wing jargon term meaning "belief that trans people are human beings deserving respect and basic civil rights."

Nolte quotes the study:

... broader research on perceived victimhood, moralization, and political violence suggests that identities organized around grievance, perceived victimization, and injustice, when paired with authoritarian or punitive dispositions, can predict support for anti-democratic or violent political action... Taken together, these literatures suggest a common mechanism: ideological content that names an oppressor class, certifies ongoing victimization, and locates remedy in coercive institutional or social action which may supply authoritarian psychology with morally justified targets.

In other words, leftism + trans = all True Patriots being at risk of being murdered in their beds by baristas with blue hair.

It's widely believed on the right that trans people are disproportionately responsible for acts of left-wing violence. This is an attempt to demonstrate this premise using science, or at least pseudoscience. Nolte argues that trans people are dangerous, but it's not really their fault:

You take a group of people who are already mentally fragile, you tell them that whoever does not affirm their delusion is committing a genocide, and then turn them loose into a world that they cannot control.

This is not only a deliberate recipe cooked up by the left and their media allies to activate violent Manchurian Candidates who will always target the people the left and media hate (anyone to the right of Joseph Stalin), but it’s an act of cruelty against transsexuals.

He thinks he's being a nice guy here, while accusing cis lefties, or maybe Democrats, or terrorism via brainwashing. Most on the right just go straight to trans people are sick and twisted, so of course they kill people.

I think it's only a matter of time before some states restrict trans people's right to hold certain jobs, as an intermediate step before depriving them of the legal right to vote, or to be trans at all. And if they never get this far, they can at least brand the GOP as the party that wants to do this. If you can tap into rage this way, why would you even need a charismatic leader?

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you on Friday.