A SENATE CONFIRMATION REMINDS US THAT THE MEDIA'S MASTER NARRATIVE OF THE PARTIES IS COMPLETELY WRONG

HuffPost reports:

Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to confirm Joe Kent, a conspiracy theorist with alarming ties to white nationalists and far-right groups, to lead the National Counterterrorism Center.

Kent was confirmed, 52-44. Every Republican but one, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, voted for him.

Every Democrat present opposed him.

And if the four absent Democrats had voted no, Kent's nomination still would have been confirmed.

A former CIA paramilitary officer and twice-failed congressional candidate backed by Trump, Kent has regularly aligned himself with far-right extremists. He talked to white nationalist Nick Fuentes about helping him with his social media strategy, gave an interview to a Nazi sympathizer, downplayed the extremism of the neofascist Proud Boys and grouped the Black Lives Matter racial justice movement with “child trafficking rings and cartels,” saying they should all face “federal terrorism charges.”

Kent has also pushed dangerous conspiracies, like the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection being a “deep state” plot and the Secret Service being “in on” last year’s assassination attempt against Trump.

Also, he has called COVID mRNA vaccines "experimental gene therapy," and he wants to defund the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as repeal the 1934 National Firearms Act.

What the HuffPost story doesn't mention is that Kent came very close to winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 2022 and 2024. The Democrat who defeated him in both elections was a party gadfly who's become a media darling, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. (Gluesenkamp Perez beat Kent by less than a point in 2022 and by 3.8 points in 2024.)

The mainstream press loves Gluesenkamp Perez, The New York Times in particular. Here she is being interviewed just after the 2024 election by the paper's Annie Karni. Karni's lede:

It’s not always fun to say I told you so.

For two years, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from a rural, red district in Washington State, has been criticizing her party for being too dismissive of working-class voters.

That message appears to have helped Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, long considered perhaps the most vulnerable Democrat in the House, defy the odds in this week’s election. Even with President-elect Donald J. Trump at the top of the ticket and winning her district for the third cycle in a row, she appears on track to beat the same candidate she faced two years ago, the far-right Republican and former Green Beret Joe Kent, by a larger margin.

Here's an admiring profile of Gluesenkamp Perez that appeared a few months before the election in The New York Times Magazine just after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket (headline: "The Blue-Collar Democrat Who Wants to Fix the Party’s Other Big Problem"). And here's Ezra Klein interviewing Gluesenkamp Perez for his podcast this past May (I wrote about that interview here). The message of all of this media coverage is the same: The Democratic Party is too elitist and too woke. Democrats could emerge from the wilderness if they'd just listen to the scolding of this blue-collar bike-shop owner turned congresswoman.

The mainstream press loves to portray the Democratic Party as much too far to the left. But where are the media's deep dives on the extremist state of the GOP? At most, we're told that Donald Trump is a crackpot leading an administration of extremists, and that a handful of Republican members of Congress -- Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, the House Freedom Caucus -- are as far to the right as he is. (And even then we're told that Trump is "transactional" and has no firm ideology.) The master media narrative of the GOP is this: Most congressional Republicans quietly despair at what Trump is doing to the country and to their party. They're afraid to challenge him openly, but they really, really wish they could. Secretly, they'd love to return the GOP to what it was before Trump became its leader: a moderate, Reaganite party.

The party of Reagan wasn't moderate, of course. And the fact that Republicans in Congress invariably endorse Trump's extremism out of fear of losing their seats to more radical primary challengers tells us that most Republican voters are as far to the right as Trump.

But the media doesn't cover this as a story. The media writes endlessly about real or mythical Democratic radicalism, always arguing that it's a party-wide problem, but the same news outlets never portray the entire Republican Party as dangerously radical, even though there's far more evidence to support that narrative. And now much of America believes we have an effete, extremist Democratic Party and a normal-people party called the GOP.

THE PRESIDENT OF THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION OPENLY CALLS FOR AMERICAN APARTHEID

The president of the organization that essentially invented second-term Trumpism isn't content with what the Trump administration has done, and what it intends to do, at the federal level. If you live in a big city in a red state, it wants your state to take away your right to self-governance.

Right Wing Watch reports:

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts urged right-wing state legislators this month to “de-charter” liberal capital cities and replace them with “state municipal districts.” ...

"When we have cities like Austin, or Nashville, or other capital cities whose local government is not representative of the will of the people, de-charter them and establish them as state municipal districts in the name of common sense,” he urged.

Roberts called Austin, Texas his “adopted home town” and described it as “a once-great place that has been taken over by Marxists.”

Roberts’ justification for this brazen attack on democratic self-governance? He claimed that the biggest threat to the Trump-Vance agenda, which is essentially the Project 2025 agenda promoted by Roberts and Heritage, is “that there are government entities that illegitimately are imposing something other than the American dream on their people.”

Roberts said this in a speech to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which crafts many of the right-wing laws that Republicans pass in states where they hold power.



What Roberts is describing is apartheid. Any city run by "Marxists" -- the current right-wing name for "liberals" -- should, according to this vision, become an occupied territory, like Gaza, or like the Bantustans established in apartheid-era South Africa. (No surprise, of course -- these cities are too liberal for the right and insufficiently white.)

Roberts describes liberal city governments as "government entities that illegitimately are imposing something other than the American dream on their people," which makes Heritage's worldview clear: even though voters in these cities democratically elected these governments, and have the right to vote them out in the next election cycle if they don't like the results, the governments, Roberts says, are mistreating "their people" -- meaning people like Roberts, who are the only legitimate citizens a government should serve.

Hardcore Republicans believe that only Republicans are Americans, and have felt this way since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan's first interior secretary, James Watt, said, "I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans." When House Speaker Mike Johnson recently said that President Trump's approval rating was 90% according to CNN, he wasn't lying or exaggerating -- earlier this month, CNN's Harry Enten reported that Trump's approval rating was 90% among Republicans. To Johnson -- and Roberts and the rest of the GOP -- these are the only voters who matter.

Which is why they think it's fine if Democratic city-dwellers lose their basic democratic rights. I think it's only a matter of time before a red state tries to carry out this aspect of the Heritage agenda.

ONLY REPUBLICANS ARE ALLOWED TO BE WRONG

There was a shooting in midtown Manhattan yesterday. The gunman, Shane Tamura of Las Vegas, was apparently of Black and East Asian descent. Your right-wing relatives are furious about this:

CNN received ridicule and criticism on Monday after its reporting that the suspect in a deadly New York shooting was “possibly white” was quickly disproven.

Reporting on the shooting on her show Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN host Erin Burnett asked, “Was his face visible? I mean, do they have any idea at this point who he is?”

CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller replied, “They do not know who he is. They know he is a male, possibly white....”

“possibly white” ?
You sure about that @JohnMillerCNN ??

pic.twitter.com/6R0AGVmpdE

— #sanathan (@AA2ANJ) July 29, 2025

I don't know exactly what right-wingers imagine when they think about a CNN reporter, but John Miller doesn't match their stereotypes. He has alternated jobs in the media with long stints in law enforcement, working for police commissioner William Bratton in both New York and Los Angeles; his first job with the NYPD was under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He also went to work for the FBI during George W. Bush's presidency. I wouldn't bet the rent money that he's a registered Democrat.

He said this, as did CNN's Erin Burnett, and they're being slammed for it. Meanwhile, Republican propagandists were spreading this erroneous report:

BREAKING: Active shooter described as a “middle eastern man” opened fire at police in Manhattan

Please stop and say a prayer for our brave officers 🙏🏻 pic.twitter.com/9AnGjOscwb

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 28, 2025

BREAKING:

The suspect who just shot (and possibly killed) an NYPD officer in NYC is being described by witnesses as a Middle Eastern man with an AR-15 rifle. @ZohranKMamdani and the trend of nominating/electing Muslims to run for office in the US is empowering Middle Eastern…

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) July 29, 2025

Loomer's tweet went on to say:

@ZohranKMamdani and the trend of nominating/electing Muslims to run for office in the US is empowering Middle Eastern people and people who support the Free Palestine movement to kill cops.

It will get worse when Mamdani is Mayor of NYC.

It’s time for the Trump admin to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.

There's not even a "possibly" in either of these tweets, which were absolutely wrong. The incorrect identification of the shooter apparently came from the cops, according to the New York Post: "Early police reports also suggested the suspect might be of Middle Eastern descent." The cops weren't sure, but Laura Loomer and Chaya Raichik ran with this as if it was established fact.

As it turns out, if there was a Muslim involved in this incident, it was the police officer who died at the scene. His name was Islam.:

Didarul Islam, a 36-year-old New York Police Department officer, was among four people killed Monday when a gunman stormed the lobby of a sprawling office tower in Midtown Manhattan and opened fire.

A Bangladeshi immigrant hailed as a hero by city officials, Islam leaves behind two young sons and his wife, who is pregnant with their third child.

Islam had been off duty but in uniform working security in the building when he was shot and killed by Shane Devon Tamura, 27, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.

The right-wing propaganda machine wants CNN to be attacked for its errors, while Loomer, Raichik, and all their allies are free to say all the ignorant, misinformed, bigoted things they please.

And then there's Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who went on Sean Hannity's show last night to politicize the shooting (it's never "too soon" to politicize a shooting if you're a Republican):

“On Capitol Hill, probably beginning in the morning, there’ll be the inevitable call by some of my colleagues for more gun control laws. We’ve got hundreds of gun control laws, maybe thousands,” Kennedy said on Sean Hannity’s show. “We don’t need more gun control, we need more idiot control.”

... The Louisiana senator also floated bringing back stop-and-frisk, a policy with a controversial history of targeting communities of color in New York City.

“The other thing that, frankly, New York’s going to have to face, is the issue of whether we should bring back more aggressive stop and frisk, which is a perfectly legal law enforcement tactic,” he said.

Let's go back to that photo of the shooter:

You want to frisk someone who's open-carrying an assault weapon? How does that even make sense?

Tamura reportedly drove cross-country in order to commit this crime. It's not clear that he ever left his vehicle with the gun on his person until he was about to start shooting. When was he supposed to be stopped and frisked, and on what grounds? Because he was a Black man behind the wheel of a car? (That's probably the answer most Republicans would give.)

Also, despite a documented history of mental illness, Tamura had a concealed-carry permit from the state of Nevada. It actually wasn't legal for Tamura to carry that gun in New York -- but Senator Kennedy apparently believes it should have been. Here's a press release from earlier this year:

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) today joined Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and colleagues in introducing the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. The bill would allow individuals with concealed carry privileges in their home states to exercise those rights in any other state that allows concealed carry, so long as one exercises those rights within the limits of each respective state’s laws.

New York State has a concealed carry law, though it's fairly restrictive. I'm not sure whether the bill Kennedy endorsed would have required New York State to waive the licensing and permitting restrictions for out-of-state gun owners -- but eventually, I assume, the entire country will have Red America's most accommodating gun laws, whether we like them or not, and Senator Kennedy will be pleased.

TRUMP'S SUPPORTERS DON'T THINK THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY HAS REALLY STARTED YET

I'm reading the latest New York Times focus group -- this one is with Hispanic Trump voters -- and seven out of twelve participants aren't happy:

Mostly it's the economy. Esteban ("22, Texas, Republican, corrections") says:

My biggest concern is the cost of just basic needs. In the time that I’ve started working, going to school, I’ve seen the prices of everything jump up. I voted for Donald Trump initially because he promised to help the working class, but from what I’ve been seeing, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to seeing any benefit from the policies.

Jose ("45, Ind., Republican, transportation") says:

Everything is very uncertain right now. The tariffs, they might work. I’m not saying they won’t. But if you look at the cost of everything right now, basic things, can you guys imagine what it’s going to be like in 10 years? National debt, what is it going to be like in 10 years? What are we actually doing for our kids to give them a better future?

Adriana ("53, N.Y., Republican, customer service") says:

It’s not going good. Prices are going up. Nobody’s paychecks are really going up. Things that once seemed pretty affordable now seem almost unattainable. A decent vacation costs a great deal. But I believe, in time, it will balance itself out. Right now, we’re just on a little shaky ground financially.

This creates some cognitive dissonance. When she's asked for "one word that describes how you feel about how things are going in the country these days," Angela ("58, Calif., Republican, business owner") says, "Great." Later she says that Trump is "on a roll." But eventually she says:

Inflation is rising higher than what salaries can keep up with. You go to the grocery store, it’s crazy. I’m in California, so gas prices — crazy. I think we’re hurting. I think the economy is really bad.

How does she reconcile these two beliefs? Here's how:

I said things were going great because I believe the tariffs put in a more equitable trade with these countries who have for so many years have taken advantage of the U.S.A.

For Trump, the beauty of the tariffs is that he can just keep saying that they haven't paid off yet. Jeanette ("42, Fla., Republican, administrator") thinks they will:

We’re one of the largest consumer bases in the world. We’re going to get what he wants eventually. If these businesses do come back, we’re going to have high prices for a little bit, but it’ll eventually come down because he’s going to give them credits to have them coming back to the United States. If mortgage rates come down, that’ll help. Economies are bad all over the world right now. We’re still doing better than other countries.

In other areaa, Adrianna says:

Technology is advancing. It will be better. Right now, we’re just in the midst of figuring it out and trying to get through one problem at a time.

And overall, Joe ("69, Colo., Republican, retired") says:

We have a good president. If Congress will just get behind him and back him up, I think there’s a lot of good he could do for us.

To many of us, it seems as if every week under Trump is a decade, but to these voters, the Trump presidency has barely begun. They think it's way too soon to judge him.

Trump has persuaded his voters that he has big ideas that we can't really judge him on for years. I'd call this a con, but I think he actually believes in tariffs and expects them to deliver a glorious payoff. He also seems to be wrapping himself in the mantle of AI and crypto. And he implies that the true payoff from all those ICE arrests hasn't happened yet.

Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan also sold themselves as leaders with big ideas that needed time to pay off. Joe Biden could have sold himself this way, but he wasn't a charismatic leader, and he simply wasn't capable of holding forth at great length about how his policies would pay off in the long term.

Trump's ideas are terrible, of course, but most people don't know that. Many believe that the terribleness they're seeing now will change when Trumpism fully takes effect. They don't realize that the terribleness is Trumpism.

When asked if they could ever imagine voting for a Democrat again, eleven of the focus group participants say no. Some of them could change their minds about that, of course, as America gets worse. But the changeover might require a Democrat who seems to have a big vision.

Assuming we ever have fair elections again, I don't think a successful Democrat needs to have one big idea -- I think the Democrat needs to have many big ideas. Trump has ideas about everything imaginable. They're awful ideas, but he sure sounds confident describing them. He's persuaded millions of Americans that he's a visionary and an ideas guy, and that's buying him time. A successful Democrat, if we can find one, will probably need to sound visionary, too.

THIS IS LITERALLY "CONTINUED ON NEXT BILLBOARD"

This ad campaign is good, I guess, but it could be a lot better:

The road to four struggling rural hospitals now hosts a political message: “If this hospital closes, blame Trump.”

In a series of black-and-yellow billboards erected near the facilities, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) seeks to tell voters in deep red states “who is responsible for gutting rural healthcare”.

“UNDER TRUMP’S WATCH, STILWELL GENERAL HOSPITAL IS CLOSING ITS DOORS,” one sign screams. The billboards are outside hospitals in Silex, Missouri; Columbus, Indiana; Stilwell, Oklahoma; and Missoula, Montana.

This story is from The Guardian. It's illustrated with a photo of one of the other billboards, which is in Columbus, Indiana:

A press release from the Democratic Party shows the billboard that's in Missoula, Montana:

I'm glad the party is going on offense -- but why attack Trump and only Trump? He won't be on any ballots in 2026 (or, we hope, 2028). I assume that all these billboards are in districts represented in the House by Republicans. Why not put those representatives' names on the billboards? Why not blame them for the cuts?

Does the party see this as just a preliminary ad campaign, with a plan to cite specific Republican members of Congress by name later? If so, it reminds me of the famous Al Franken aphorism I quoted recently: “Our bumper stickers always end with ‘continued on next bumper sticker.’” If this is simply the first set of billboards and Democrats intend to link specific GOP members of Congress to healthcare cutbacks in the future, that's literally "continued on next billboard."

And that's not because the message is complicated. The message is simple: Trump and [Congressperson X] voted to close your local hospital. So why not say that on these billboards?

There's another possibility here: that these billboards aren't intended to sway public opinion as much as they're meant to show up in news stories (like the Guardian story and the local news story cited in the party press release) so that Democratic donors nationwide will give more money to the party. Is that what's happening here?

Democrats should be identifying Republicans who are vulnerable in 2026 and attacking them by name, now. And maybe they should be attacking the Republican Party specifically -- I know that Democrats love to talk about working across the aisle and never want to say a discouraging word about the GOP as a whole, but maybe it's time to rethink that. Maybe it's time for the Democratic establishment to stop bad-mouthing the Democratic Party, as so many of them regularly do, and start bad-mouthing the Republican Party instead. The current strategy isn't working. It's leading to numbers like this:

New WSJ poll: The Democratic Party is 30 points under water with registered voters, considerably worse than the GOP (-11). www.wsj.com/politics/ele...

[image or embed]

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) July 26, 2025 at 12:00 PM

To be fair, Democrats are 3 points ahead of Republicans on the generic House ballot, according to the same Wall Street Journal poll (see question 10 here). But that number could be a lot better. As CNN's Harry Enten notes, Democrats were doing much better sixteen months before previous midterm cycles in which they made big gains:

Reality check: Dems are way behind their 2006 & 2018 pace on the generic ballot at this point in the cycle.

Ahead by only 2 pt vs. 7 pt in 2006/2018 cycles.

Seat-by-seat analysis actually reveals more GOP pickup opportunities than Dems! Very much unlike 2006 & 2018 at this pt. pic.twitter.com/CRgXukTjz6

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) July 16, 2025

Attack the GOP by name. Attack individual Republicans by name. And keep attacking them.

TRUMP HAS REGAINED CONTROL OF THE EPSTEIN STORY

A few days ago, we were talking about Jeffrey Epstein -- what he did, what his associates did, and what we might learn about all this from files in the Justice Department's possession.

The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have now jujitsued the story in their favor. We won't see the files any time soon, if ever, and now we're waiting for Ghislaine Maxwell to publicly recite a script she's working out with the president's lawyer.

That script will exonerate Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kennedy Jr., and anyone else Trump wants exonerated. It will accuse people Trump doesn't like. The president himself read from a rough draft of the script yesterday:

Trump: You should focus on Clinton. You should focus on the president of Harvard, the former president of Harvard. You should focus on some of the hedge fund guys. I will give you a list. These guys lived with Jeffrey Epstein. I sure as hell didn’t

[image or embed]

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) July 25, 2025 at 10:04 AM

Maxwell's testimony will be a combination of the truth and lies, but the accusations will be so explosive -- and plausible, since many people on "our side" did consort with Epstein -- that they'll be the news. They'll be fresh news. Demands for the release of the files will seem so last month.

Trump’s plan to offer Ghislaine Maxwell clemency in return for telling ridiculous lies is brazen, shameful, and highly illegal. But let’s face it, it’s probably going to work.

— NY Times Pitchbot (@nytpitchbot.bsky.social) July 24, 2025 at 9:55 PM

When I say "people on 'our side,'" I mean, yes, Clinton and Summers. You may not consider them allies, but Republican officeholders and GOP propagandists in the media will portray even Summers and the hedge fund guys as radical-left Democrats. It absolutely could work.

Right now, Democrats need to be more pointed and specific than they have been about what the White House is doing. They need to spell it out: The deal Maxwell is cutting with our lying, criminal president will require her to (a) exonerate Trump and his friends and (b) accuse Trump's enemies. She might tell the truth about some of Trump's enemies, but if Trump is guilty of crimes, or if other allies of Trump are guilty of crimes, she will dishonestly proclaim their innocence or leave their crimes out of her narrative, because that's the deal this sex criminal is cutting in order to get a reduced sentence or a pardon.

Senator Richard Blumenthal gets partway there in this clip, but not close enough:

SENATOR RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: ... You know, I really hoped that this issue would be bipartisan, because I think that the American public, regardless of whether they identify as Republicans and Democrats, really believe that full disclosure of these files is absolutely necessary to dispel the doubts about the credibility of the Department of Justice in the Epstein matter.

Most Americans don't care about the credibility of the Department of Justice. They care about powerful people getting away with brutal sex crimes.

I really believe it's in the interest of the president for there to be full disclosure.

You do not, under any circumstances, need to give Trump the benefit of the doubt this way.

That's the reason, on the House side, there has been bipartisan support for full disclosure of the Epstein files.

Yeah, except for that Republican shutting-down-the-House thing.

I really hoped there would be here, too. Senator Cornyn is right that Jeffrey Epstein is dead, but right now, ongoing, in real time, right before our eyes, are events and actions that smack of a cover-up. There ought to be no secret meetings, no secret deals, especially with Trump's personal lawyer, who is now doing his bidding at the Department of Justice, namely Todd Blanche, who reportedly is on his way, as we speak, to Florida, or whatever prison is currently confining Ghislaine Maxwell, possibly to offer her a deal in return for exculpatory information about his former client, the president of the United States. All of it just really stinks.

This is good, but it's an inadequate prediction of what Trump wants from Maxwell: not just exoneration, but redirection of the rage against Democratic-coded elites.

No ordinary person can send their Department of Justice henchman to some kind of cover-up talking to a convicted felon in a federal prison, and unfortunately, the appearance here is that President Trump, once again, is misusing his power corruptly to benefit himself. Most people can't do any of it. It is unfair, and it undermines the credibility of our entire criminal justice process. The American people deserve full disclosure of this file. I hope we can have bipartisan agreement.

Again, this is fine, but most normie Americans can't relate to being a person named in a criminal investigation. Stick to the main subject: Trump is scripting a sex criminal's testimony so he can protect himself and punish his enemies. Maxwell might tell part of the truth, but she'll only tell the part Trump wants her to tell, and she'll cover up the crimes Trump doesn't want us to know about.

Another busy day -- see you tomorrow.

CONSPIRACIES: REPUBLICANS LIKE 'EM BIG AND STUPID

If you want to understand Republican voters, you can read a half-dozen New York Times focus groups ... or you can watch this podcast clip featuring former 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan and stuntman turned conspiratorial religious-right documentarian Mike Smith:

I will never get over the fact that this woman was once a respected 60 mins correspondent!

[image or embed]

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) July 24, 2025 at 6:39 AM

LARA LOGAN: Is it true that to get to a certain level in Hollywood, these famous people have to sacrifice their firstborn child? Is that a crazy thing to say?

MIKE SMITH: ... I believe that there is a club, and I do believe that there are certain people that to attain certain stature or certain level of influence or power, fame, whatever, you're required to either sacrifice a blood sacrifice, whether it be a mom or a relative or whatever, or transition one of your kids, because it's all worshipping their god, their false god.

... That is, that is Baphomet, that is satanic.

This isn't the only batshit-crazy clip from the podcast. Hang on for a few seconds in the clip below as Smith struggles to make it seem as if sex at Hollywood parties is extraordinarily decadent -- and then Logan kicks the conversation into another gear altogether. I won't spoil the surprise:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Lara Logan (@lara_j_logan)

This is just normal discourse on the right these days. A generation ago, some of the conspiracies on the right were fairly primitive -- the Clintons killed Vincent Foster! Michael Dukakis's wife once burned an American flag! The conspiracies gradually became more and more baroque (the Clinton death list, for instance) until, eventually, Michelle Obama was a man, Barack Obama was controlling Joe Biden's presidency remotely, and, of course, every rich "globalist" in the world was an ally of America's Democratic Party and was part of a global conspiracy to sexually exploit children and extract a chemical called adrenochrome from their bodies.

When Fox News largely controlled the right-wing infosphere, there was a limit to how mainstream a truly batshit conspiracy theory could become. But in the era of social media and podcasts, conspiracy-mongers just keep upping the ante.

And now the audience expects every explanation of the world from trusted media figures to have two characteristics: (1) It must be elaborate, baroque, and massive, and (2) its villains must be exclusively people the right-wing base regards as enemies.

The Lara Logan-Mike Smith allegations fit the bill nicely. (To the right, everyone in Hollywood is evil, apart from a handful of brave conservatives.) The problem with the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it's not likely to satisfy right-wingers the same way. So while it's nice that some Republicans in Congress are as eager as Democrats to wrest Epstein documents from President Trump's Justice Department, GOP voters (and politicians) won't like what they see if we finally get the documents and Trump or any of their other heroes are implicated, or if prominent Democrats aren't implicated, or if it becomes clear that Epstein's circle of friends consisted of rich people who committed statutory rape with impunity but didn't control the world using pedophilia as a weapon.

This is a long way of saying that if we ever see the Epstein documents, Republicans will declare them fake as soon as they don't confirm the right's global pedophilia narrative. If Trump is implicated, or prominent Democrats aren't, they'll say the documents are fakes created by Obama, or by whoever controlled Joe Biden's autopen. There seems to be a bipartisan movement now to get at the truth, but it won't be bipartisan for long. Republicans need their craziest theories to be affirmed, and if that doesn't happen, they'll turn against the whole process.

And, of course, that's why the Trump Justice Department is trying to coerce testimony from Ghislaine Maxwell. The Trumpers want her to endorse the right's narrative, and when and if she does, we'll be told she's telling the truth and the documents are the real liars. And everyone on the right will say that's true.

FOR TRUMP, PEDOPHILIA IS A CRIME OF OPPORTUNITY MORE THAN A CRIME OF PASSION

Even if you set aside the testimony of women who say that Donald Trump sexually assaulted them when they were teenagers, it's clear from other publicly available information that he likes young girls. He clearly spent a lot of time with Jeffrey Epstein -- we have many photos and video clips of the two of them together. He posed for creepy photos with his daughter Ivanka long before she became an adult, while calling her "hot" when she was just sixteen. Four Miss Teen USA contestants have said that he would walk into the contestants' dressing room when he owned the pageant, and Trump has admitted doing this at one pageant he owned, without specifying which one. And there's this:

NEWS: In a resurfaced interview from nearly a decade ago, rapper Uncle Luke of 2 Live Crew says he fled a Trump party in Palm Beach in the early 1990s after seeing what appeared to be underage girls at a sex- and drug-fueled event

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— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) July 22, 2025 at 6:15 PM

There's also Trump's association in the early 1990s with the Elite Look of the Year contest, which provided opportunities for adult men to consort with and prey sexually upon teenage contestants.

But pedophilia doesn't seem to be Trump's main source of sexual gratification. When you look through his sexual history, most of the women involved seem to be adults. When he cheated on his first wife with the woman who'd be his second, Marla Maples, she was 26. He had an affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal starting when she was 25. His sexual encounter with pornstar Stormy Daniels took place when she was 27.

Michael Wolff claims to have hours of recorded interviews with Jeffrey Epstein, and he's played these recordings for Hugh Dougherty of The Daily Beast. The recording claim that in the time Trump and Epstein were friends, Trump's main kink was adultery:

On the tape Epstein can be heard saying, “He’s a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and uses it to do bad things to them.”

On one occasion, Epstein alleged, Trump took a woman to what he called “the Egyptian Room” in an Atlantic City casino. Epstein alleged, “He came out afterward and said, ‘It was great, it was great. The only thing I really like to do is f--- the wives of my best friends. That is just the best.’”

Feels like not enough of y’all have heard this clip where Epstein talks about how Trump would get guys talking about cheating on their wives while he had their wives listening on speakerphone… so he could sleep with their wives. Full: trib.al/qDsJmjv

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) July 22, 2025 at 8:41 PM

And remember that the Access Hollywood tape focuses in part on Trump's interest in a married woman:

Unknown: "She used to be great, she's still very beautiful."

Trump: "I moved on her actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and fuck her, she was married."

Unknown: "That's huge news there."

Trump: "No, no, Nancy. No this was [inaudible] and I moved on her very heavily in fact I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said I'll show you where they have some nice furniture. I moved on her like a bitch. I couldn't get there and she was married. Then all-of-a-sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. She's totally changed her look."

And then there's E. Jean Carroll, who was in her early fifties and divorced when Trump sexually assaulted her.

I don't think Trump is a pedophile in the sense that the desire for underage girls is an obsession for him. I think he prefers twentysomething women who are perceived as "hot." I also think he really likes adulterous sex. And it's clear that he gets off on sexual assault.

I'm sure we'll find that he forced himself on underage girls, but it doesn't seem to be his favorite thing to do, which almost makes it more reprehensible. To him it's just one of many decadent, transgressive power trips he has available to him, and it's not even his favorite one. And yet he undoubtedly did it anyway.

SORRY, I CAN'T LET THIS GO: WHY DO DEMOCRATS WANT TO MASTER EXACTLY THE WRONG KIND OF MESSAGING?

I don't mean to belabor this, but I was reading Politico Playbook again this morning (a bad habit, I know) and I realized something about Democratic messaging: It's not just that the party's leaders are bad at communicating with the public -- it's that they're trying to master exactly the wrong forms of communication.

Playbook reports today:

Can Democrats stay focused on a message that moves voters?

There is a certain allure animating Democrats’ Epstein trolling, even as it forces them to momentarily set aside their better-bet polling issues — like, say, focusing on Medicaid or the cost of living.

Of course, they can make a larger argument rolling the Epstein issue into what they characterize as Trump’s “billionaire protection racket” — and are doing just that.

How Dems are spinning it: “Republicans are literally shutting down the House floor and getting ready to go on vacation early just to weasel out of releasing the Epstein files,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement last night.... “While the American people elected leaders to fight for law and order and do their damn jobs, Republicans are bending the knee to Donald Trump and protecting an infamous sex trafficker.”

Apart from the painfulness of Ken Martin's attempt to sound tough, notice what he's trying to do here: he's trying to shoehorn multiple messages into a couple of sentences (law and order, plus congressional Republicans' subservience to Trump on Epstein).

Another party spoksman weighs in:

Added DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton, in a statement to Playbook: “The midterms are shaping up to be a referendum on who is going to lower costs and help improve the lives of everyday Americans, not the wealthy and well-connected.”

Do you remember what Al Franken used to say about the complexity of Democratic messages? “Our bumper stickers always end with ‘continued on next bumper sticker.’” It's as if Martin, Franken's fellow Minnesotan, has taken that criticism to heart and said, "I can get it all on one bumper sticker if we squeeze a lot of words onto the sticker by using really compressed type." Shelton is saying, "I can be even more concise by alluding to Epstein in a way that makes you unsure whether I'm alluding to Epstein or not. And I'm getting us back to the only issue Democrats believe that voters care about: the economy."

This Playbook passage begins, "Can Democrats stay focused on a message that moves voters?" The reference to "a message" is clearly a reflection of how Democrats see the task before them. But that isn't how messaging works in 2025 -- in fact, it's the exact opposite of how messaging works in 2025.

Democrats think they need to boil everything down to one concise message focused on one narrow set of issues. But Donald Trump throws everything at the wall -- arresting Barack Obama, challenging the Washington Commanders to change their name back to Redskins -- and while Democrats and independents aren't responding well in this Epstein moment, it's keeping Republicans faithful to him and pushing new subjects into the news cycle. That's because he and his people understand contemporary attention spans better than Democrats do.

The main messaging medium in contemporary politics isn't the bumper sticker or the concise thirty-second TV ad. It's the podcast or the video social media site -- TikTok, Instagram. I'm 66 years old. To me, the most zeitgeisty podcasts seem endless. They go on for hours and hours. But they matter politically much more than TV or cable. Who's the one Democrat who actually went viral yesterday? Hunter Biden.

He tossed out so many different messages on so many different subjects:

Hunter Biden goes on a profanity laced rant about illegals being deported:

"People are really upset about illegal immigration? Fuck you. How do you think your hotel room gets cleaned? How do you think you have food on your fucking table? Who do you think washes your dishes?" pic.twitter.com/OETugq51H7

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 21, 2025

He did this on a podcast that was three hours long. This is how you communicate in the modern era. You don't try to boil your message down to one concise bumper sticker or one multi-subject aphorism that's a sentence or two in length. You just put yourself out there and have strong opinions about a lot of things, and wait for the gods of virality to sort through the best nuggets. This is also how TikTok works: people watch a thousand little videos and some of them break through, on a range of subjects. But they don't want one central message. They want a lot of little messages.

This is how Trump operates. He thinks he has something brilliant to say on many different subjects and he throws it all at you whenever it suits him. Right now, I'll acknowledge that he's desperately trying to change the subject -- but he's succeeding with his base, at least, because he came to this moment already knowing how to leap from subject to subject in a way that usually seems confident even if, to informed people, he sounds like an idiot.

Most Democrats don't know how to leap from subject to subject confidently, and the party as a whole certainly doesn't, and doesn't want to. So when Trump tries to change the subject, Democratic leaders scream "Distraction!" and ignore what he's saying or doing -- which leaves him as the only person talking about whatever subject he's discussing now.

Democrats should attack everything Trump says, and they should do some leaping from subject to subject themselves, trying to make news any way they can. When they don't do this, they seem to be conceding Trump's point every time they fail to challenge him. And when they try to squeeze the bizarreness of the world into one little bumper sticker the way Ken Martin does, they sound phony and boring. They should just hold forth. Hunter Biden understands that.

THE DEMOCRATIC MESSAGE MACHINE IS AS SLOW AND CREAKY AS EVER

This morning, Politico Playbook tells us about President Trump's efforts to message his way past the Jeffrey Epstein story:

Last night, the president posted on Truth Social more than two dozen times.

He posted phony mugshots of former President Barack Obama and an AI-generated video of the former president being arrested in the Oval Office before donning an orange jumpsuit in prison.

He posted about the Washington Commanders, demanding they change their name back to the Redskins and suggesting that he could blow up the RFK Stadium deal if they don’t....

He posted a three-minute, captionless video with clips of a bikini-clad woman picking up and tossing a snake; a man somersaulting around a dowel down a stairway; a red Lamborghini careening beneath a truck, Clark Griswold style; a man jumping a fence and coming face to face with a speeding train; a woman break dancing; an optical illusion of a conference room; a billiards trick; a man hacking away at some rock formation; a dirtbiker stunting on a trail; a jet ski....

That last one seems to be Trump's social media team mocking every Democrat who declares, huffily, that all non-monetary subjects are "distractions" from what's really important to American voters. See, for instance, Nancy Pelosi four days ago:

Nancy Pelosi characterizes the Epstein scandal and seeming coverup as "a distraction" from kitchen table issues

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 17, 2025 at 11:42 AM

It's as if Trump's media people are saying, "Distraction? I got your distraction right here."

When this Pelosi clip appeared, a number of people from outside the Democratic establishment made an obvious point:

The public is pissed about Epstein in no small part because he was a rich guy who got away with heinous crimes because he deliberately cultivated rich friends. That's an inequality story. The only way it could be closer to "kitchen table issues" is if the files were tucked in a goddamn pocketbook!

[image or embed]

— James Downie (@jamescdownie.bsky.social) July 17, 2025 at 12:30 PM

And today Playbook reports:

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) tells Playbook he’s now advising Democrats to “hammer the issue” ahead of the midterms by tying it to a broader critique of the administration: “Whose side are you on? Are you voting to protect rich and powerful men, or are you standing with America’s children and the people?”

I'm glad Khanna is saying this, but here are the Democrats in a nutshell: The administration announced that it wouldn't be releasing Epstein documents on July 7. It took one Democrat two weeks to link Trump's handling of the Epstein case to his administration's overall pro-elitist bias, and that Democrat still didn't make the connection to "kitchen table issues" explicit, and he's only now urging fellow Democrats to adopt this message. Why not two weeks ago? Why wasn't this the immediate response of dozens of Democrats? Why are they so slow and creaky?

Also note Trump's top "distraction":

Trump just posted an AI generated video of Obama being arrested in the oval office.

[image or embed]

— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) July 20, 2025 at 9:29 PM

It will probably take Democrats two or three weeks to respond to this, but could they consider responding maybe, y'know, now? Barack Obama is popular. Gallup says he's the most popular living president, with a 59%-36% approval rating. YouGov says that 61% of Americans have a positive opinion of him, and only 24% have a negative opinion.

Democrats, right now, could rally around a very popular Democrat. As I told you on Saturday, Trump is trying to target Obama based on the false idea that there was no Russian interference in the 2016 election. Americans distrust Vladimir Putin. Why not defend a popular Democrat and attack an unpopular foreign dictator? Trump might be over his mancrush on Putin, but it's been a joke for years -- even at kitchen tables! -- so why not attack him on this now?

Democrats won't. They'll freeze, like deer in headlights, as usual. Maybe in a few weeks they'll send another trial balloon to Politico Playbook about maybe, possibly, responding a certain way in the future. By that time, Obama might be sitting in a prison cell.

TRUMP IS SCUM, BUT SOME OF THE EVIDENCE OF HIS SCUMMINESS IS FAKE

Yesterday I san an unsettling pair of pictures in a couple of Reddit threads, one of which bore the headline "Trump kissing a teenage model in the 90s":

The first photo is real. It appears in this 2020 Guardian story and shows Trump -- in 1991, the year he turned 45 -- talking to a contestant in Elite Model Management's Look of the Year contest. The contestant looks very young -- it's not clear how young, but she was probably a teenager.

While Elite’s official brochure stated that contestants were aged between 14 and 24, all of those the Guardian has spoken to, competing in both years [1991 and 1992], were aged between 14 and 19.

The contest was the subject of a televised documentary.

In 1991 and 1992, the Elite contest was filmed for a 60-minute glossy television special, featuring interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, and later screened on Fox....

The 1992 Fox documentary reported that the average age was 15....

But the second photo of Trump and this contestant in the Guardian story was this:

A fact check from Lead Stories confirms that the kiss photo is fake. Yet we know that Trump has kissed at least one beauty pageant contestant on the lips -- Temple Taggart McDowell, Miss Utah 1997 -- because she told NBC News about it.



The Guardian story depicts some very sketchy behavior on Trump's part, and shows Trump consorting with men who are alleged to have committed sex crimes.

On 1 September 1991, a large private yacht cruised towards the Statue of Liberty.... Downstairs, a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights. It could have been a high school prom, were it not for the crowd of older men surrounding them.

As the evening wore on, some of the men – many old enough to be the girls’ fathers, or even grandfathers – joined them on the dancefloor, pressing themselves against the girls. One balding man in a suit wrapped his arms around two young models, leering into a film camera that was documenting the evening: “Can you get some beautiful women around me, please?”

The party aboard the Spirit of New York was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition....

In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. He was also one of its 10 judges.

In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again.

... the Guardian has spoken to several dozen former Look of the Year contestants, as well as industry insiders, and obtained 12 hours of previously unseen, behind-the-scenes footage. The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models. Some of these allegations amount to sexual harassment, abuse or exploitation of teenage girls; others are more accurately described as rape.

But the kiss photo is fake, and it's not the only dubious item about Trump I found at Reddit yesterday. Another Redditor posted a thread with the headline

Reminder that Trump literally ran a 'high class' escort service, promising an experience 'exactly like a date with any girlfriend or loving wife'.

There's a link to an archived web page with this promotional copy:

Trump International offers elite, discreet and well bred travel companions to accompany you on your business trip, vacation or tour to any major city worldwide. (Five star only) Most of the travel companions are experienced, confident travelers, and they are all able to accommodate the trip with a calm, cheerful attitude....

Our ultimate aim is to ensure both you and the model have a wonderful, beautiful experience together. To help select the most appropriate model to join you, we'll consult with you about your preferences, and ensure your perfect woman is available....

These are first class companions in every way, carefully selected for you. And we don't just say ‘carefully selected’ lightly; Our applicants are taken through a rigorous selection and interview process to ensure they possess the minimum quality requirements we expect, based on our clients’ expectations.

But as Philip Bump reported in The Washington Post in 2016, the company promting itself as Trump Escorts had no connection to Trump -- the domain name had been registered to an Australian company called Bestcom International since 2007, the mailing address appeared to match a Trump property but was incorrect, and by the time of Bump's investigation, the escort agency had changed its name to Mystique Companions.

If there'd actually been a Trump escort agency, we'd know about it. I no longer believe that it would have been enough to prevent him from winning the presidency, but we'd at least know some details about it. Its activities would have been reported.

Donald Trump is a degenerate, but I don't believe that fake evidence of his degeneracy will help bring him to justice. There's a chance that it will discredit legitimate evidence. Never doubt that Trump is a horrible person, but approach stories about his past with some skepticism.

MAGA HAS ALREADY MOVED ON FROM EPSTEIN

I think Justin Baragona is right:

More than a week after Donald Trump’s base looked like it might be fracturing over the Justice Department’s “no client list” Jeffrey Epstein memo, MAGA world got its “perfect offramp” in the ongoing saga thanks to the Wall Street Journal’s latest bombshell.

... the WSJ’s story ... offered MAGA pundits and influencers the chance to join Trump in lambasting their shared enemy – the mainstream press.

The Journal story says that Trump sketched an image of a naked woman for an Epstein birthday greeting, and toasted Epstein with an imagined dialogue between Epstein and himself. Trump says he doesn't draw sketches, even though several of his sketches have been made public over the years. Trump is on stronger ground when he says that the message doesn't match his writing style, which we all now know from thousands of social media messages, as well as Trump-era government documents, which seem partially written by Trump himself. The prose of the Epstein greeting doesn't seem Trumpian, but please note that Trump had published four books by the time of the 2003 greeting, none of which he wrote himself, and he would publish three more in 2004, the year The Apprentice first aired. So he was used to working with ghostwriters.

Nevertheless, as Baragona notes, the semi-plausible claim that the greeting is fake seems to be uniting MAGA influencers around Trump:

With the president going off about how he was “going to sue his a** off” over the “FAKE letter,” whatever schism that had formed in the MAGA universe over the administration’s handling of the Epstein files quickly melted away as prominent conservative personalities jumped onboard the media hate train....

“This is the dumbest attempted hit piece I’ve ever read,” fumed Megyn Kelly, who just days earlier had blasted Fox News hosts and MAGA influencers for trying to move on from the Epstein controversy....

Former “first buddy” Elon Musk, who has said the administration’s conclusion that Epstein died by suicide and didn’t maintain a “client list” was the “final straw” for him, also came to the president’s defense over the WSJ's “hit piece.” ...

Podcaster and serial plagiarist Benny Johnson, who has been at the forefront of pushing the administration to release more Epstein documents amid the MAGA meltdown, unleashed a series of posts raging about the WSJ while peddling conspiracies about the paper’s reporting.

So Epstein and his circle are no longer the enemy. The media is the enemy.

What's MAGA's new focus? It might be this, the subject of the two top stories at Gateway Pundit right now:

A story that featured prominently at Breitbart this morning explains:

Republican lawmakers delivered a thunderous response following Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s explosive declassification of documents proving the Obama administration deliberately manufactured intelligence to create the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative, with revelations that expose what one Republican described as a disinformation campaign against the American people that “makes Watergate look like amateur hour.”

The declassified documents reveal that a December 8, 2016 Presidential Daily Brief stated that Russian actors “did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure,” but Obama administration officials suppressed this assessment and ordered intelligence agencies to create a new narrative that “directly contradicted” their original findings. The bombshell revelations prompted an immediate and furious response from Republican leaders on Friday....

DISMANTLING THE DEEP STATE!

New evidence from @DNIGabbard confirms what we’ve long known: The Russia hoax was a political hit job manufactured by Obama officials and weaponized by intel agencies to take down President Trump.

Accountability is long overdue! https://t.co/9NWoeds0nD

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) July 18, 2025

If you go to the link in the excerpt above, there's not much real news:

“We assess that Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure,” a declassified December 8, 2016 Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) that was set to be published the next day stated.

... intelligence officials said election monitoring combined with the fact that neither vote-counting nor -casting infrastructures were harmed made it “highly unlikely” that any results were altered.

But the Trump-Russia scandal was about efforts to influence voters, not create fake votes or vote counts.

Nevertheless, Gateway Pundit reports that Steve Bannon ranted yesterday on his podcast about incarcerating large numbers of Obama-era officials:

This is how duplicitous they are. This is how guilty they are. Ben Rhodes, Obama, all of them are going to rot in a freaking prison. This is why we got to get on top of this. This is the deep state. This is the coup against Trump. You can see it all right there.

This is all MAGA wants. Trump's voters think they care about child abise, but what they really care about is putting all their political enemies in jail. If they now believe, naively, that this is a more likely route to that end, they're perfectly willing to forget about the Epstein story. Besides, how can the Epstein story give them the satisfaction they want when liberals are expressing disgust at what he and his friends did? MAGA can't side with us -- ever!

This might not be the off-ramp MAGA needs, but MAGA is largely done with Epstein.

ATTACKING ISRAEL: IT'S OKAY IF YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN

You might not have noticed this because of all the attention being paid to the Jeffrey Epstein story, but Donald Trump's ambassador has been sharply critical of Israel recently, in ways that would have led to screaming headlines and loud denunciations if similar messages had been sent by a Democratic administration.

First, there was this story on Tuesday:

The United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, on Tuesday called on the Israeli authorities to “aggressively investigate” the death of a 20-year-old Palestinian-American citizen in a clash on Friday with Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, calling his killing a “murder” and a “criminal and terrorist act.”

Mr. Huckabee, who has been vocal about his support for settlement in the occupied West Bank — which is widely viewed as illegal in the international community — used uncharacteristically strong language in his statement condemning the death of Sayfollah Musallet, a young Floridian who had been visiting his family in the area.

“There must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act,” Mr. Huckabee said.

Responsibility for this killing doesn't really seem to be in doubt -- an NPR story on it was unambiguously headlined "Israeli Settlers Beat U.S. Citizen to Death in West Bank," and even Hakeem Jeffries condemned the killing. But now there's this from Huckabee:

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has threatened to publicly declare that Israel no longer welcomes Christian groups to Israel over what he said was Jerusalem’s failure to approve tourist visas for evangelical missions.

The threat was issued in a letter that Huckabee sent on Wednesday to Interior Minister Moshe Arbel, which was leaked to Hebrew media on Thursday....

Given Huckabee’s longstanding support for Israel and close ties with the current government in particular, the rhetoric in his letter represented a shockingly quick deterioration.

The letter is quite harsh:

“It would be very unfortunate that our embassy would have to publicly announce throughout the United States that the State of Israel is no longer welcoming Christian organizations and their representatives and is instead engaging in harassment and negative treatment toward organizations with long-standing relationships and positive involvement toward Zionism and friendship to the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” the US envoy wrote....

“If the government of Israel continues to cause the expense and bureaucratic harassment for the granting of routine visas that for decades have been routine, I will have no other choice than to instruct our consular section to review options for reciprocal treatment of Israeli citizens seeking visas to the United States,” Huckabee warned.

More:

"We would be further obligated to warn Christians in America that their generous contributions to organizations to promote goodwill in Israel are being met with hostility and that tourists should reconsider travel until this situation is resolved with clarity."

But Zohnran Mamdani is still evil, apparently.

Or perhaps the Overton window has moved a millimeter to the left. A couple of days ago, Axios reported that two purple-state Democrats have now criticized Israel (one of them very timidly):

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a moderate Democrat from a swing state, this week slammed the Israeli government for the lack of humanitarian aid in Gaza and violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Slotkin wrote on X:

Another violent week in the Middle East: in Gaza, this weekend brought the death of another 60 Palestinians who were simply seeking food and water for their families. Israel has the responsibility to allow humanitarian aid in — just as the US had the responsibility to allow aid into places like Fallujah. And if President Trump’s hand-picked aid organization can’t get food and medicine to people in Gaza a safe way, Israel has the responsibility to find one that can.

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian-American U.S. citizen to death. This totals 5 Americans killed in the West Bank since October 7, 2023 and more than a dozen Palestinians killed by lawless settler violence. It’s hard to understand this lack of accountability by the Netanyahu government as anything other than tacit approval by the state — something that should be treated as abhorrent by all decent people.

This violence has to end. As I saw from my own experience in places like Iraq, democratic governments have responsibilities even when under threat. If President Trump and his team truly want a lasting ceasefire (not to mention a Nobel Peace Prize), they need to extract basic humanitarian and law and order standards now.

That's fairly strong, but this is weak tea:

"There are times when, to me, it doesn't look like [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] is prioritizing the hostage situation," Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told Axios. "Certainly, there's times when it looks like Hamas does not want a deal."

But maybe it's a start. Nevertheless, I'm sure we'll continue to hear that Zohran Mamdani is a dangerous Jew-hating terrorist who must be stopped by any means necessary.