APOCALYPSE NOW'S CHILD MUTILATORS HAVE A KINDRED SPIRIT IN KEN PAXTON

Many Republicans are critical of vaccines these days, but the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton, is treating childhood vaccinations as potential crimes. The New York Times reports:

Mr. Paxton has ... implicated the nation’s largest organization of pediatricians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, in [an] alleged conspiracy over the workaday task of protecting children from polio, measles, meningitis and more than a dozen other dangerous and sometimes life-threatening diseases.

“I will ensure that Big Pharma and Big Insurance don’t bribe medical providers to pressure parents to jab their kids with vaccines they feel aren’t safe or necessary,” he said when announcing the investigation in January....

As the Times notes, he's legally harassing individual pediatricians, like a doctor the paper identifies by her middle name only, as Dr. Rachel:

Until recently, she had planned to continue her practice for years to come. But this year, she has begun to reconsider amid the stress and legal costs of defending herself in a statewide investigation by Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, who has accused doctors, drug companies and insurers of conspiring to push parents into vaccinating children....

In December, Dr. Rachel received a letter from the attorney general’s Consumer Protection Division demanding her vaccine purchase records over the past 10 years. “The division believes that you are in possession, custody or control” of material, “involving potential misleading or deceptive acts regarding incentives associated with the administration of childhood vaccines,” it said, adding that such acts could be in violation of the state’s deceptive trade practices law.

The letter also requested her practice’s vaccine policy, and said that it would not be sufficient to cite the childhood vaccine schedule recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

... Dr. Rachel said she did not know why the attorney general’s office targeted her tiny practice in an inquiry that he announced as directed toward the state’s “largest medical providers,” vaccine makers and health insurers. She said that responding to the demand for her records had so far cost her nearly $15,000 in legal fees, and sent her digging for receipts for $18 vaccines given a decade ago.

... She supplied information in response to Mr. Paxton’s office’s request for every “reward, financial benefit, bonus, discount, return, rebate or other consideration” from a vaccine maker, giving details that included a $40 batch of cookies a vaccine maker’s representative brought to her office. She said her most significant discounts were small reductions vaccine makers gave her for paying a bill promptly.

Paxton, the Times tells us, is a pioneer.

So far, Mr. Paxton is the only attorney general to investigate pediatricians for vaccinating children.

How depraved has the Republican Party become when this statement has to be preceded by the phrase "So far"?

The Times is unsure why Paxton would do this.

It is unclear why he opened this investigation, though some people in Texas have speculated that he began it to court Mr. Trump’s endorsement in a competitive primary race (which he eventually received) or to appeal to vaccine-skeptical Texas voters.

“I think aligning himself with Kennedy helped him get an endorsement from President Trump, which then allowed him to win the Senate primary here in Texas,” said Dr. Heidi Russell, a pediatrician and director of the Center for Health Policy at Rice University in Houston.

This is Robert Kennedy Jr.'s pet issue, but it's not Trump's, even though he's vaccine-skeptical. I don't think this mattered to Trump one way or the other when he was deciding which candidate to endorse. It's far more likely that Paxton was in a tight primary with John Cornyn and was looking to appeal to anti-vaccine Republicans in (because this is Texas) the most punitive, heavy-handed way possible. I'm sure he also believes that the anti-vaxx crowd doesn't inevitably vote Republican, and he could add anti-vaxx independents and even Democrats to his coalition if his anti-vaccine crusade was sufficiently high-profile.

This is a sick, sociopathic way to try to win an election.

In the past, I've talked about a horrific scene in Apocalypse Now in which Marlon Brando, as Colonel Kurtz, recounts a Viet Cong response to an American vaccination drive. (This was, fortunately, a screenwriter's invention.)

I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

Ken Paxton isn't chopping children's arms off, but that's a difference of degree only. He's making childhood vaccination in Texas perilous for pediatricians because the Cause -- Republican domination of politcs forever, as well as the advancement of his own career -- is more important than protecting children from contagious and often deadly diseases.

Ken Paxton is a moral monster, but the Republican Party as a whole is morally monstrous, so this story comes as no surprise. It will probably take a disease outbreak far more horrible than anything we've experienced in the second Trump presidency to arouse the level of outrage this anti-science zealotry deserves. Meanwhile, for this and many other reasons, Paxton's political career needs to end right now.

ALITO'S KAVANAUGH ASSASSINATION CONSPIRACY THEORY HAS NEVER MADE SENSE

In a softball interview with CBS's Jan Crawford, Samuel Alito once again flogs his favorite conspiracy theory: that the leaker of the Court's Dobbs decision knew the leak would lead to a Supreme Court assassination attempt.

"It was quite a shock," Alito said. "But within a relatively short period of time, the thought occurred to me, and I think to the others in the majority, that this would endanger us. And it made us targets for assassination."

Security, Alito said, ramped up immediately. A month later, in June of 2022, the world would know why. In the middle of the night, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family slept in their Maryland home, a would-be assassin approached their backyard with a bag containing a gun and rounds of ammunition, a knife and nail punch, duct tape, zip ties, a crowbar and other burglary tools, including special shoes to silence his footsteps.

He was intent on killing justices before the Court released its Dobbs decision. With its narrow 5-4 majority, it would only take one justice. He said on private messaging boards he aimed to kill at least three of the conservatives and, as prosecutors later put it, "single-handedly and irrevocably to alter an entire branch of the United States government."

At the last minute, the man spoke to his sister on his cell phone, and she managed to talk him out of it. He was arrested and later convicted for the attempted assassination of Kavanaugh.

"His goal was to change the decision in the case. So that was quite predictable," Alito said. "And whoever leaked it knew or had good reason to know that that would be the consequence of leaking it. And Politico knew, or should've known, that that would be the consequence of their decision to publish it."

This isn't the first time Alito has said this. He made the same argument in October 2022, a few months after the assassination attempt.

The leak to Politico ahead of the decision confirming that opinion overruling Roe v Wade "gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us," Alito said in a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

He made the argument again six months later in a Wall Street Journal interview.

“Those of us who were thought to be in the majority, thought to have approved my draft opinion, were really targets of assassination,” Alito told the Wall Street Journal in an interview....

“It was rational for people to believe they might be able to stop the decision in Dobbs by killing one of us.”

Except that the would-be assassin, then known as Nicholas Roske (and now known as Sophie Roske), didn't know it would be a 5-4 ruling. At the time of the leak, Politico reported that five right-wing justices were on board and three liberal justices were dissenting, but

How Chief Justice John Roberts will ultimately vote, and whether he will join an already written opinion or draft his own, is unclear.

It was also reported at the time that this wasn't Roske's sole motivation:

Roske told a Montgomery County Police detective "that he was upset about the leak of a recent Supreme Court draft decision regarding the right to abortion as well as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas," the court documents say.

The court papers add, "Roske indicated that he believed the Justice that he intended to kill would side with Second Amendment decisions that would loosen gun control laws."

No gun decision had been leaked at the time of Roske's assassination plot.

Please note that Alito hasn't argued that the leaker and the would-be assassin knew each other. In fact, he's implicitly arguing the opposite, because if they'd known each other, the leaker could have given the leaked decision to the would-be assassin privately -- it didn't need to be published. What Alito is arguing is that the leaker's thought process was this: I'll make this draft decision public, secure in the knowledge that someone out there will read it and think, "Okay, that's it, I'm going to start killing Supreme Court justices."

That's quite a leap of faith.

It also supposes that would-be assassins are motivated only by the perceived opportunity to change a specific government course of action and never by anger at a specific past act or series of acts. If you believe Alto's conspiracy theory, an assassination attempt was much more likely to happen happen when the Dobbs decision was pending than when it was on the books -- no one would be murderously angry at that point!

And this isn't how anything works. Powerful government officials will inevitably anger their critics. Some of those critics, inevitably, will want to react to what angers them with violence. In a society with free speech, that's not a justification for withholding important information from the public, although Alito -- whose job it is to defend the First Amendment -- may believe it is. The government (sometimes augmented by private security services) should protect public officials from violence. That's all a free society can do.

ANGELA PAXTON ISN'T A CULTIST. SHE'S A NORMAL POLITICAL PARTISAN.

Angela Paxton, a Republican state senator in Texas, is divorcing the party's morally bankrupt U.S. Senate candidate, Ken Paxton, who cheated on her. Now she's made an ad on his behalf, although the ad doesn't include his name.

#TXPol: "I'm Texas Senator Angela Paxton. People have asked my thoughts about this election and turns out, I have some ... I'm voting for the Republican ticket on November 3rd." Texas PAC is up with a new ad featuring Angela Paxton, Ken Paxton's estranged wife. https://t.co/U7yYZ6ZBXp

— AdImpact Politics (@AdImpact_Pol) October 3, 2026

She's also talking to Republican groups and telling them they mustn't empower the Democratic Party:

Appearing at a Texas Federation of Republican Women meeting, Angela Paxton warned the group that when voting, they should consider that “the party comes with the person.”

“Because we have more control over that seat and the future when we control the seat, when it’s still in the family, even if we’re mad at it,” she said. “But if we lose it to the other team, the nuances that we want to fix with maybe a certain candidate are nothing compared to what it’s going to take to get it back, right?” ...

“They’re [Democratic candidates] not like a stand-alone thing, like a menu item. We have more control when it’s our party,” Paxton continued. “We have more ability than influence, and that person is attached to our party.”

People on social media are calling this cult behavior.

Can you believe this shit? It is truly a cult. www.yahoo.com/news/politic...

[image or embed]

— Susanne democratic socialist (@momoftwo.bsky.social) September 25, 2026 at 3:18 PM

www.cnn.com/2026/09/28/p... She is completely under the influence of a cult and she doesn’t even realize it. There is no MAGA “team” that will respect the rights of women. And the abuses she endured from Pox-ton? What kind of role model is this? 🤮🤮

[image or embed]

— The Word Bird (@thewordbird.bsky.social) September 29, 2026 at 10:33 AM

What she's doing seems extreme for a normal person, but it's a version of fairly common "good wife" behavior in politics. After a male politician is caught cheating, his wife, sadly, is expected to appear by his side in a show of support. It's a humiliation for her, but it's the norm.

Presumably, these wives, or at least most of them, prefer their husbands politically. Hillary Clinton shared Bill Clinton's politics and opposed the politics of Newt Gingrich. Angela Paxton supports the Republican Party. So she's backing Republican candidates.

This isn't cult behavior. It's partisan behavior. Republicans, with some exceptions (cough Trump cough), back Republicans. They believe it's always better to vote for a Republican than for a Democrat. They attack Democrats every chance they get. They close ranks around their own candidates.

That's normal -- but if you're a Democrat, it might seem odd. Democrats pursue endorsements from Republicans and boast about their bipartisanship. They attack other Democrats, even in the midst of campaigns. They proclaim that some Democrats are too far to the left or too far to the right. They A few even endorse Republicans -- here's Maine's Jared Golden endorsing a House Republican from New York, Mike Lawler, at a time when most of America is gearing up to vote against Republicans.

And what Democrats never seem to do is attack the Republican Party categorically. In a two-party system, you'd think this would be an obvious message: Our party is good, their party is bad. James Carville wrote a book years ago called We're Right, They're Wrong, but Democrats -- Carville in particular -- never seem to say that now.

In 2026, you'd think would be a simple message: A Republican president is destroying the country and Republicans at every level of government are either helping him do it or praising him for it. A vote for Republicans is a vote for more of the same.

Angela Paxton believes in her party and is unalterably opposed to the opposition party. Democrats should be the same way.

REPUBLICANS ARE GEARING UP TO SAY THAT BAD NEWS COVERAGE OF TRUMP IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE

Donald Trump can't quite say this yet because he needs to put on a brave face and insist that Republicans will do well in the midterms, but if the November results are as bad for the GOP as most observers now expect, I expect him to argue that poor media coverage of his administration was illegal election interference. And he won't be alone.

Take a look at some of the whining he did in the Time interview that was published this week. Trump was asked,

Why should Americans believe that you respect the free press when you're restricting access to the White House to some of our colleagues?

The gist of his answer was this:

Because I do respect the free press, but I don't respect fake news.... I haven't had a good story on CNN for years. They're incapable of being—they're fake news. Same thing on MS NOW.

If I do the finest thing, if I found the cure to cancer, they would say, "Why didn't he move quicker?" They are just horrible people, and they're so bad.

... I don't think anybody should be forced to bear fake news, constantly bad stories, because I've done great things. I mean, I've done Venezuela. I've done—I can name, I can name 100 great things I've done. I never get good press. I never get fair press. Doesn’t have to be good. All it has to be is fair.

His questioners changed the subject to Iran, but Trump couldn't let go of the idea that the press is mistreating him:

Everything is obliterated. They don't have radar. They don't have any anti-aircraft capability. Nothing. I have The New York Times saying how well they're doing, and it's so crazy. Their whole military is gone. Their radar is gone. Their leaders are gone. You know, we went through two levels of leaders, and The New York Times keeps writing about how well they're doing. They have no money. They have no value of money. They have nothing going, and just fake news, fake news, and maybe they’ll be next.

"Maybe they'll be next" means that the Times might experience its own White House ban. That's hard to imagine given Trump's love-hate relationship with the paper, but it could happen.

Trump was asked about the midterms and his own polling. He lashed out:

Mr. President, your polls have never been lower.

They're fake numbers. I would beat anybody running today by 20 points. Your numbers that you have are fake. The pollsters are corrupt. They're almost as corrupt as the writers.

And at the end of what was mostly a deferential interview, he lashed out again:

You haven't asked me one fucking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative.... I would say that I should be given credit for fixing the White House because I'm also doing very well with the war. I'm doing very well with another war that we already won, Venezuela.

Put it all together -- Trump crying about bad coverage, Trump insisting that pollsters are publishing dishonestly bad polls about him (why would they do that?) -- and I think it's quite possible that he'll argue that the press engaged in illegal election interference, just by not flattering him as much as Natalie Harp does.

Ohio senator Bernie Moreno seems ready to back Trump up if he makes that argument, HuffPost reports:

... Moreno [said] voters are mad about gas costs, not at the president, and blamed the media for making people even more mad at him.

“Number one, gas prices. And number two, a media that just does not let up,” said the Ohio Republican. “I watch CNN literally every morning ... every night. Can you say something positive or neutral? I mean, it’s like a constant barrage. So people absorb that, and then when they’re angry because of gas prices, those punches land.”

Trump might be too busy hunting for illegal votes to focus on the press after the midterms. He might be too fixated on mail ballots or slow vote counts to blame the press primarily. But he will blame the press sooner or later, and so will many Republicans. They love to complain that the press doesn't give them a fair shake. (Here's the Media Research Council in summer 2020 asserting that the three major television networks had broadcast "150 TIMES More Negative News on Trump than Biden.") Trump will probably try to weaponize this idea after Election Day. It won't surprise me if he files lawsuits, or orders his Justice Department to find criminal liability. If this happens, none of it will change the outcome, but it will please what's left of the GOP base, and it will be another assault on the First Amendment.

THE POST-TRUMP GOP WILL BE AN EVEN MORE RACIST PARTY, SANEWASHED BY THE "LIBERAL" MEDIA

This morning, Matthew Gertz of Media Matters posted this at Bluesky:

Here's what Tucker Carlson is up to when he talks to his own audience, instead of interviewers from NPR or NY Times: Explaining that white people are facing extinction and the ADL is trying to cover it up. He concludes, "Noticing is hate. Noticing is violence." www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carls...

[image or embed]

— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) October 2, 2026 at 8:32 AM

Gertz is right. Carlson talks like this all the time, but he was respectfully interviewed by Lulu Garcia-Navarro in The New York Times this past spring and by Steve Inskeep on NPR last week. My one quibble with Gertz's post is that Carlson didn't really conceal his bigotry in those interviews -- in the Times interview, as I noted at the time, he argued, essentially, that Benjamin Netantyahu brainwashed Trump into starting the war with Iran and manipulated him into going through with it, thus implying that Trump is effectively blameless because an evil Jew made him do it. He says similar things in the NPR interview. Of course, he swears that none of this is anti-Semitism.

Inskeep and Garcia-Navarro don't care very much. They let him say these things and then politely proceeded to other subjects. They did this because Carlson is an insider. He regularly talked to Trump! He's an influential voice on the right who could be a 2028 kingmaker, yet he knows how to have a polite chat with liberal-coded journalists.

So the Times and NPR sanewashed him.

One poster who responds to Gertz calls this "a kind of fascist glow up service." Another one says that "liberal" outlets publish this sort of thing out of a delusional sense of what's good for their audiences: "All for 'fairness' & to get readers like me out of the 'liberal bubble.'"

But Carlson isn't the only influential bigot on the right who gets far more respectable coverage from the "liberal" press than he deserves. There's also Chris Rufo. Christopher Mathias of Talking Points Memo reports:

To the degree that a “respectable” or “moderate” right exists today in America, Christopher Rufo is considered part of it. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the tony midtown think tank that holds black-tie galas; he recently enjoyed a polite sit-down interview with Ezra Klein on Klein’s massively popular New York Times podcast....

This past weekend Rufo introduced an alarming new term that feels like an escalation, even for him: the “Indian Question” — that is, what to do about the very existence of Indian people, citizens and noncitizens alike, in America? Rufo’s new phrase formed the title of the latest episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” the BlazeTV podcast he co-hosts with Jonathan Keeperman, a lesser known and less “respectable” proprietor of white nationalist talking points....

Rufo and Keeperman discussed the tweet in which this year's Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, Bo French, recoiled in horror at the sight of University of Texas football fans who were of South Asian descent. Mathias writes:

Keeperman and Rufo’s “Indian Question” episode amounts to an hour-long defense of French’s post....

“Successful assimilation is precisely that you wouldn’t notice it, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about,” [Keeperman] said. “The mere fact of us being able to notice that, no, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game, is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.” ...

Rufo nods along with all of Keeperman’s arguments. When Keeperman expresses disgust for the phrase “diversity is our strength,” often used by liberals, Rufo excitedly agrees, saying it “sounds like a slogan from [George Orwell’s novel] ‘1984.’”

This makes me furious. Like me, Rufo is of Italian descent. I have immigrant grandparents from Sicily on my father's side and immigrant great-grandparents from the southern mainlaind on my mother's side. Rufo's father immigrated from Italy to America, and Rufo has said that he and his children have Italian citizenship and speak Italian at home. (I don't speak any Italian.)

Rufo and I are perceived as white in America now, but my ancestors, at least, weren't always accorded that privilege. Many people thought we didn't look the same and act the same as "real" Americans. This also true of Keeperman's ancestors -- he's Jewish.

But our skin is light enough and our facial features are European enough that we're all now regarded as white. We can assimilate and "you wouldn't notice it." You wouldn't notice that we're descended from foreigners who were darker-skinned and regarded with suspicion.

The South Asians who are being attacked by Rufo and Keeperman don't have that option. They can't disappear into whiteness, at least as it's currently conceived -- not the way Rufo, Keeperman, and I can.

So even though these kids were doing the most American thing imaginable -- excitedly watching a college football game (something I never did when I was an undergraduate) -- Rufo and Keeperman are holding them to an impossible assimilation standard. But Rufo and Keeperman don't want them to succeed, Mathias writes:

The pair’s “solution” to the “Indian question” is the forced deportation of Indian immigrants who aren’t assimilated, and a complete ban on all immigration. “That means cutting off the spigot right now, getting rid of anybody who’s only here temporarily, and encouraging — through remigration efforts — to compel people who don’t wanna go through that process of assimilation to go back to where they come from and let this thing cool off for a matter of perhaps decades,” Keeperman says....

For Indian-American citizens or other Desi people otherwise allowed to stay in America, Keeperman advocates them being “subjected” to an “assimilation hazing process” that will include instances of “vulgar, defamatory racism” until they have sufficiently left parts of their Indian “identity behind.”

Rufo is embracing this argument not just because he's a vile bigot, but because he has a keen eye for which culture-war attacks will keep the rubes angry and willing to vote Republican. As Mathias notes, he was the guy who urged the right to go after DEI, critical race theory, and "gender ideology." He's telling us that this is next.

And yet "liberal" journalists will continue to give him extremely respectful coverage. Why? Because he has connections to the Republican establishment, and because they believe that bursting our "liberal bubble" is more important than calling bigots what they are.

HOW TO SURVIVE THE CULTURE WARS

In a post at Zeteo and a series of posts at Bluesky, Asawin Suebsaeng tells us that the GOP's anti-Hasan Piker strategy isn't working. Suebsaeng tells us at Bluesky:

... one of Trump’s top pollsters is on the record throwing cold water on the GOP-wide 2026 anti- Hasan piker electoral strategy which is still going strong at the NRSC [National Republican Senatorial Committee], etc.

... this is a pollster who trump has leaned on for good news when others predict doom.

Anyway, it’s not just public polling showing the anti Piker strategy ... is a fucking dud.

Per our sources familiar with the data, different GOP orgs have private internal polls that scream at them about a) how basically no one knows who hasan piker is and those who do were largely voting Republican anyway and b) there is scant, if any, evidence that the sustained strategy has moved the needle in Republicans favor....

The intra party face palming over the gop and trump admin Hasan Piker obsession, where they seem to earnestly believe this was a “gift” to them in their campaigns this cycle, is merely one hilarious,, miserably online symptom of how deeply screwed the GOP and President trump likely are on Election Day.

This follows a report that even the centrist Democratic group Third Way now believes that Democrats shouldn't adopt right-wing framing when talking about trans issues:

For Third Way, the terms of engagement have changed, Lanae Erickson, the group’s senior vice president for social policy, education and politics acknowledged in a wide-ranging interview....

“On this issue, the dynamic has really shifted,” she said. Republicans and the right have grown far more extreme, while advocates for trans people have moved to a “more pragmatic place.”

“The MAGA folks took from the 2024 election that this was a great issue for them, that it was one that united their base and made Democrats uncomfortable,” Erickson said. “And that was all true at that moment, but now they’re going way beyond any concerns the public had.”

A number of Democratic candidates have echoed right-wing anti-trans messaging:

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, an Ohio Democrat whose past record was generally supportive of LGBTQ people, referred to “transgender ideology” and keeping “boys out of girl’s sports” in an ad. The state’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Amy Acton, said in a statement that she opposed “boys playing in girls’ sports” and then her campaign set off several negative news cycles with its adversarial stance to queer people who were taken aback by her calling trans girls “boys.”

Acton has a small but growing lead in the polls -- but in Michigan, the Democrats' Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, is also leading, even though he's refused to attack trans people (and responded to a question from Fox's Jesse Watters about the essentially nonexistent practice of castrating trans girls in childhood by asking if Watters was circumcised).

I don't want Democrats to throw trans people under the bus, but the polling success of both Acton and El-Sayed suggests that this issue doesn't really matter to voters this year one way or another, as long as Democrats are keeping the focus on issues voters care about.

That's Lanae Erickson's recommendation:

Addressing trans issues directly while refocusing attention to Republicans’ policy failures – including a war with no clear goal, economic distress and rampant corruption – is the tactic widely promoted among strategists advising the Democrats....

“One person who’s done this extremely well is Jon Ossoff,” Erickson said of the senator from Georgia. “You talk about the corruption, about all the things that are wrong in our government and what is making people’s lives hard.

“And then he adds, ‘and it’s not transgender kids.’ And I think that has helped to really inoculate him against some of these attacks.”

That's what's working for Democrats. It's certainly working for El-Sayed, whose message centers economic concerns and Medicare for All. He hasn't abandoned trans people, but he has put distance between himself and Hasan Piker, regularly chiding interviewers for being excessively interested in "a Twitch streamer from California."

Abdul El-Sayed: "Weijia, with all due respect, this is the third time you've asked about a Twitch streamer ... their whole game is to make us fight culture wars so that we don't pay attention to the fact the president has made $2.2 billion ... "

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 13, 2026 at 10:53 AM

Kamala Harris didn't have a strong, compelling economic message in 2024, so culture-war attacks hurt her -- the "Kamala is for they/them" message probably wasn't what defeated her, but her inability to distinguish herself from President Biden on the economy left her vulnerable. Democrats are talking this year about the issues voters care about. That makes them much less vulnerable to the culture war -- even when they stand up to culture-war attacks. That's how you beat Republican culture warriors.

WHY WAS ERIC SCHMITT BEING GROOMED FOR STARDOM IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Former special prosecutor Jack Smith was interrogated at a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing yesterday. If you know what happened, you know this ended as a massive embarrassment for Republicans -- and for one in particular -- but if you don't, here's a brief summary:

Trump and his allies have argued for years that Smith weaponized his powers as a politically motivated cudgel, and on Tuesday, [Missouri senator Eric] Schmitt and his aides were going to prove it. They were well prepared for the showdown. They didn’t just have a smoking gun — they had a chart printed on poster board....

But as it turns out, the Schmitt team’s whole setup was based on a dumb mistake. They apparently thought they’d found proof Smith was in Atlanta the day after a pair of local prosecutors announced an affair, revealing some kind of anti-Trump collusion between them.

This local prosecutors Smith was accused of meeting were Fani Willis, the Fulton Country DA, and a hired prosecutor with whom she was having an affair, Nathan Wade. Willis had acknowledged the affair a day before Smith's alleged trip to Atlanta.

The proof was a series of text messages about a basketball game Smith attended on February 3, 2024, which they believed was an Atlanta Hawks game. But Smith had actually attended an Iowa Hawkeyes game in Maryland that night. The whole sequence — Schmitt’s accusation followed by the humiliating correction — plays out painfully over a little more than seven minutes.

This is worth watching unedited. Senator Schmitt bullies a bewildered Smith, declares that he's caught him in a perjury trap, and calls him a "dirtbag." Then the next questioner, Democrat Amy Klobuchar, correctly IDs the team Smith watched as the college women's team whose star was Caitlin Clark.

A phenomenal moment in the Senate.

Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., claims he has evidence Jack Smith went to a HAWKS game in Atlanta.

Smith denies it.

Schmitt declares he has busted Jack Smith for perjury.

Smith, vexed, says he went to HAWKEYES game in Maryland.

Watch the whole thing: pic.twitter.com/J07o5Uwfxi

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 29, 2026

And we know Smith attended that Iowa Hawkeyes game because he was seen on camera there.

This is priceless. Check out how local news is reporting on Sen Eric Schmidt’s clown-show grilling of Jack Smith. They found Jack Smith at the game… “Top corner, section 109, row 1. In fact, that seat doesn’t even exist in Atlanta.”

[image or embed]

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) September 29, 2026 at 9:25 PM

Senator Schmitt faceplanted in what was supposed to be a career-making moment. We know that was the plan because shortly before the hearing got underway, we were fed this "scoop" by one of Axios's top reporters, Jim VandeHei:

Sen. Eric Schmitt is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028

First-term Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) — who was a tough-on-crime state attorney general, and now is vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee — has grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect to become a potential 2028 running mate.

We hear the VP views Schmitt, 51, as trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator.

That's unlikely to happen now -- Schmitt didn't just get his facts spectacularly wrong, he got his facts wrong on the subject of sports, something millions of Americans care about and understand in detail. Normal Americans care about sports. Top reporters and pundits in the still male-dominated world of politcal journalism care about sports. This is an embarrassment Schmitt will take to his grave. It won't be forgotten.

But there's something wrong with our political culture when a mainstream news outlet can describe an extremist like Schmitt as a potential rising star who might join a presidential ticket. While Democrats are routinely warned that it's risky for their party to run candidates in statewide and national races who are merely progressive, Axios is touting Schmitt even though he's clearly a white nationalist.

Last year, Schmitt hired a white supremacist staffer who'd lost a job with Ron DeSantis for being too much of a Nazi:

... Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt hired former DeSantis speechwriter Nate Hochman as a policy adviser in February [2025].

... Hochman was unceremoniously fired by Governor DeSantis’ presidential campaign in July 2023 because he’d created and shared a “fancam” of the candidate that heavily featured the Black Sun or Sonnenrad. First designed to adorn the floor of Heinrich Himmler’s castle Wewelsburg, the symbol has been readily adopted by neoNazi groups in recent decades. And Hochman decided it should be in bright red, spinning in front of his boss’ face as the triumphant finale to a propaganda video.

Also:

... the never-Trump conservative outlet the Dispatch revealed details of a Twitter Spaces recording of a 2022 conversation between Hochman and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

In that exchange, Hochman complimented Fuentes, saying, “You’ve gotten a lot of kids based” and calling him “probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men”.

Between the time DeSantis fired him and the time Schmitt hired him, Hochman wrote racist and sexist columns for right-wing and publications.

... Hochman cited Jonathan “L0m3z” Keeperman, who says women in the workplace are the cause of societal decline and proudly publishes antisemitic ravings, in order to second Keeperman’s argument that men have to retake the world from women....

... he called Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day “part and parcel of the mythology of the New America, which vies to destroy and replace the myths, heroes, and traditions of the old republic,” ... and bemoaned the modern day lack of appreciation for the antebellum South and the good name of Robert E. Lee.

After Schmitt hired Hochman, the senator delivered a "blood and soil" speech at the National Conservatism Conference that may have been written, or at least influenced, by Hochman:

In the speech Schmitt criticized legal immigration, and said that America was not a "universal proposition" open to anyone. He said, "Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness ... We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims who poured out onto the ocean's shores ... America belongs to us, and only us."

In the speech, Schmitt also

identified America with colonial violence, including “the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian warband attacks from beyond the stockade walls”, [who] he said would be “astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a proposition” rather than “a homeland for themselves and their descendants”.

And:

As for those who would raise questions about America’s glorious past—including those Americans who joined protests after George Floyd’s murder in 2020—Schmitt said, “America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.” Who is the “we” in that declaration? The descendants of the European Christians who claimed the West.

The fight at hand, Schmitt contended, “is about whether our children will still have a country to call their own....”

That last sentence sounds a lot like the neo-Nazi Fourteen Words.

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

But our political culture has normalized this. It has decided that a slighly milder version of this kind of talk doesn't disqualify J.D. Vance from being vice president or perhaps president. So if it doesn't disqualify Vance, why should it disqualify Schmitt? And why should Schmitt's belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 election -- something he's asserted since he was Missouri's attorney general -- disqualify him when nearly every Republican officeholder in America asserts the same thing without consequence?

In 2020, Schmitt was among 17 Republican attorneys general who joined Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in suing Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to invalidate their electoral votes in the 2020 United States presidential election. The suit claimed the four states' presidential vote tallies were unconstitutional; no evidence supported these claims and the arguments had already been rejected in other state and federal courts.... On December 11, 2020, the Supreme Court rejected the suit in an unsigned opinion.

It appears that no one short of a self-declared Nazi is too far right to be perceived as a potential vice president or president. It appears that being an early adopter of Donald Trump's biggest Big Lie isn't disqualifying. That's how our politics works.