YOU SAY "TEA PARTY MOMENT" AS IF THAT'S A BAD THING

In The New York Times, Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck have a dark warning for Democrats:

Is the Democratic Party Facing Its Own Tea Party Moment?

A movement of young, progressive outsiders has stormed Democratic politics this year, sparking a wave of contentious primary contests across the country and fueling a fraught debate over whether these new, left-wing candidates are remaking the party in their image.

But as primary season winds to a close, the results reveal not only the strength but also the potential limitations of this insurgent movement.

In Minnesota last week, Peggy Flanagan, the lieutenant governor, won a Senate primary by a double-digit margin, pressing a fiercely progressive message to defeat a more moderate opponent. Just a week earlier, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a left-leaning Democrat, won a Senate primary in Michigan despite being vastly outspent. And Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, came close to winning a primary for governor in Wisconsin, falling short by less than one percentage point.

As I told you on Wednesday, the mainstream political world expected Hong to win her primary, which would have confirmed the preferred narrative of mainstream journalists: that radical barbarian outsiders are taking over the Democratic Party, and hurting the party as a result. When Hong lost, Flanagan -- who's not an outsider (she's been the state's lieutenant governor for nearly eight years and was in the state legislature for four years before that) -- was simply swapped in. A few paragraphs later, Lerer and Glueck write:

The next major tests for the left will come this fall in a smattering of battleground House districts, and as Dr. El-Sayed and Troy Jackson, a progressive former state senator in Maine, fight to win seats that Democrats need to capture control of the Senate.

Jackson is also not an outsider -- he served in the Maine House of Representatives for six years and in the Senate for fourteen years; he was the Senate president for six of those years. A party committee chose him to replace Graham Platner (an actual outsider) on the ballot. But the narrative is more important than the facts.

According to the narrative, progressive Democrats want to build a Tea Party of the left, but this will probably cause the party to lose winnable races, which means the movement is doomed. Lerer and Glueck write:

As left-wing candidates have notched victories in primary after primary, many progressives hope they will be able to move the Democratic Party further to the left — mirroring, in some ways, how the rise of the Tea Party movement nearly two decades ago pushed the Republican Party much further to the right. But the results raise questions about whether these candidates can piece together a broad enough coalition of Democrats, independents and moderates to win general elections in swing states that could determine whether Democrats are able to regain power in Congress and, eventually, the White House.

But Tea Party Republicans lost their share of winnable races, too. Here's a Politico story from October 2010:

Tea-party-backed outsider candidates became the superstars of the midterm elections, drawing national attention after big Republican Senate primary wins — and leading tea partiers to pour millions into those campaigns, seeking credibility. But on Nov. 2, the tea party itself could get a mixed return on those investments.

With about a week to go until Election Day, several candidates stamped with the tea party seal of approval are either locked in statistical ties with their Democratic opponents or sinking in the polls....

Examples included several Senate candidates -- Sharron Angle in Nevada, Ken Buck in Colorado, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Joe Miller in Alaska, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware.

Angle, Buck, and O'Donnell lost to Democrats. Miller lost to incumbent Lisa Murkowski, who won as a write-in canddiate after losing her party's primary. (This was before the days of ranked-choice elections in Alaska.) Rand Paul won, of course. Democrats held the Senate and maintained their hold in 2012.

But you can't call the Tea Party a failure because some of its candidates lost races the party could have won. On balance, the Tea Party made the GOP a lot stronger than it was after the 2008 Democratic blowout. Here were the numbers at the end of Barack Obama's final term in office:

... the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower....

President Obama entered the White House with his party touting a 60 seat majority in the Senate and 257 seat majority in the House. Democrats now hold a 48 seat minority in the Senate and 194 seat minority in the House — a net loss of 12 and 64 seats respectively....

The midterm elections delivered significant blows to Congressional Democrats. In 2010, Democrats lost 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House, costing them the chamber. In 2014, Democrats lost another 13 seats in the House and a staggering 9 seats in the Senate; this time losing them the Senate and completing a Republican takeover of Congress.

So it's okay -- or at least it can be okay -- if an insurgent movement produces a few candidates who prove to be unelectable, as long as the infusion of energy makes the party more competitive overall.

(It helps not to attack your own candidates. Mainstream Republicans did a lot less of that establishment Democrats are doing now.)

Elsewhere in the Times, data guy Nate Cohn asks:

Could El-Sayed Cost Democrats Michigan?

Cohn begins his analysis with a factual error:

When the midterm election campaign began, Michigan seemed like a state that Democrats could take for granted in their pursuit of the Senate. Yes, it’s a presidential battleground state, but that makes it the kind of state that Democrats would ordinarily win easily in what seems like a strongly Democratic midterm cycle.

No, Michigan never "seemed like a state that Democrats could take for granted." It's a state Donald Trump had won twice. In 2020, the only year Trump lost the state, the incumbent Democratic senator, Gary Peters, won reelection by less than two points. The state's other Democratic senator, Elissa Slotkin, won the state by less than half a point in 2024.

And as of the end of January, two of the three top Democratic candidates for the Senate seat -- El-Sayed and Mallory McMorrow -- were trailing Republican Mike Rogers in the Real Clear Polling averages. Only Haley Stevens was leading Rogers, and that was by a margin of just 1.3 points.

Cohn continues:

It’s not a state Democrats can take for granted anymore. There are clear signs that the newly minted Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, could underperform a typical Democratic candidate’s vote share by enough to endanger the party’s chances.

According to Cohn, "ordinary" progressive Democrats like Senators Tammy Baldwin and Cory Booker "do only about a point worse than other Democrats," but candidates "of the activist progressive left" do noticeably worse. How does he define the latter group?

They might ally themselves with the democratic socialists, define themselves in terms of their support for activist causes like Gaza or the climate, run against the Democratic Party, engage in righteous fights with Republicans, post clap-backs on social media, or champion activist slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the Police.”

This is how far we've fallen: In a year of massive heat waves and wildfires, "climate" is deemed one of the "activist causes" that can get a candidate branded as a radical. Also radical: being a candidate who "engage[s] in righteous fights with Republicans." Fighting your opponent makes you an extremist outlier in the Democratic Party -- as does posting "clap-backs on social media." (Apparently, it's extremist to be better at online messaging than Chuck Schumer.)

I suspect that past support for defunding the police can be a drag on a candidate's popular support. Criticism of Israel? Maybe that too, if only because it worries some Jewish Democrats and leads other voters to believe you're one of those crazy radicals.

But I also have to wonder how Abdul El-Sayed would be doing in the polls if he were running the identical campaign under the name Al E. Sanders. Michigan might be no more ready for a Muslim senator than America was for a Catholic president when Al Smith got trounced in 1928. The national Republican Party is certainly running against Islam nationwide. But neither of these Times pieces mentions El-Sayed's religion as a reason why he might be underperforming other Democrats trying to win Senate races in purple states. The narrative -- radicalism bad! -- can't be challenged.

GIULIANI: YOU WHINY KIDS NEED TO BE SMACKED AROUND BY SOMEONE WITH STRONG VALUES, LIKE MY THUG FATHER

Yesterday, Media Matters posted this clip from the Wednesday edition of Rudy Giuliani's podcast:

Rudy Giuliani: Young people struggling economically are “privileged little shits” who need “somebody like my father to kick the shit out of them”



TED GOODMAN (PRODUCER): Look, some folks in this country of the younger generations are feeling the squeeze a little bit economically.

RUDY GIULIANI (HOST): Well who cares if they’re squeezing? Their grandparents felt the Depression and were pro-American.

GOODMAN: Yep, right.

GIULIANI: They don’t have anything like the Depression. They’re a bunch of privileged little shits.

GOODMAN: You’re right.

GIULIANI: What they really need is somebody like my father to kick the shit out of them.

Recalling the Great Depression, one Bluesky poster responded:

I think I heard something about some sort of deal that put people to work on, like, public works or something. I don't know. Maybe I dreamed it.

In the clip, Giuliani goes on to speculate about the parents of disgruntled young people: "A lot of the parents of these kids, they’re a bunch of ex-hippies, they were smoking their marijuana and these assholes are smoking even stronger marijuana."

He doesn't go into detail about his own father. I think I know why.

ABC News reported this in 2000:

... a new book now claims that Giuliani’s father served time for armed robbery and had ties to organized crime.

The book, Rudy: An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani, by Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett, contains a string of claims about Gotham’s controversial mayor and his family.

According to Barrett, Harold Giuliani served a one-and-a-half year term in Sing Sing prison after robbing a milkman at gunpoint in 1934, a decade before his son, the mayor-to-be, was born.

Rudy also alleges that Harold Giuliani served as the “muscle” for a loan-sharking outfit....

More, from The Washington Post:

It seems that the mayor's dad, Harold Giuliani, was a 5-foot-11, big-knuckled man who wore Coke-bottle glasses and made a living as "muscle." Which, in Brooklyn at that time, meant working as a debt collector for a loan-sharking operation. He swung a mean baseball bat and was a most skilled craftsman.

According to the book, Harold Giuliani "shoved people against walls, broke legs, smashed kneecaps, crunched noses. He gave nearby Kings County Hospital a lot of business. 'People in the neighborhood were terrified of him,' said a frequent customer at Vincents," the Giuliani bar.

Giuliani's father enjoyed signing his love letters to his future wife "Your Savage."

The New Yorker added:

During his mayoralty, Giuliani often invoked his father. He liked to say that he had adapted his principles for running the city from the formula his father used for running the family: it is better to be respected than loved. When, in April, the Mayor was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the same disease that killed Harold Giuliani, in 1981, he said, “I miss my father every day of my life. And he’s a very, very important reason for why I am standing here as the mayor of New York City”

It is unclear whether the Mayor himself was aware of his father’s robbery conviction. He was not born until ten years after the crime, but he grew up among many people who must have known about it, including his mother, née Helen D’Avanzo, who had been dating Harold for several years at the time of the robbery....

Harold Giuliani tried to go legit.

He took a job as a groundskeeper at a Long Island high school but lost it because of absenteeism and drifted back to his post at the bar. His travails included ulcers, heart trouble, and some sort of nervous breakdown. All in all, he comes across in Barrett’s account as an irascible and pathetic figure, who, one presumes, would have been at least as hard for a son to respect as to love.

For instance:

Rather than risk having to serve in the Second World War, Harold Giuliani appears to have tipped off the local draft board to his own arrest record.

This is Rudy Giuliani's main role model. This is the kind of father he thinks today's young people needed.

IS TRUMP NOSTALGIC FOR EVERYTHING ABOUT HIS YOUTH, EVEN THE CRIME?

The federal government will spends billions of tax dollars on President Trump's orders so the U.S. Navy can live in the past:

President Trump has directed the Navy to tear out a complex system for launching jet fighters from its aircraft carriers and instead go back to using steam catapults, a move Navy officials have fought for years and will likely cost billions of dollars.

U.S. officials say Trump signed a national security memorandum Thursday directing the change, which would involve removing the electromagnetic catapult system used by the ships in the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers.

One of fascism's most effective tactics is making the populace nostalgic for a lost nation that never really existed, or at least wasn't the utopia it's portrayed as. Trump is good at invoking this kind of nostalgia, but in moments like this it becomes clear that he doesn't just express yearnings for real or imagined aspects of the past that matter to (some) Americans -- bygone race and gender relations, economics, and so on. Trump seems to express nostalgia for everything from the past, even things most Americans don't care about (or would actually prefer to be modern).

The story of the catapults goes like this:

Nearly a decade ago, he claims he spoke to a sailor who had positive things to say about steam catapults, and soon after, he told Time magazine that he directed the Navy to re-embrace “goddamn steam.”

From the transcript of that 2017 interview:

You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”

It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said–and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be–”Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.

Trump is very stupid, so he liked the idea that the current catapults are needlessly complex: I'm not a moron. I'm smart! This technology is too damn complex! But the newer technology is actually better, in many ways:

Replacing the electromagnetic catapults with steam will be a complex endeavor that will likely cost billions of dollars, according to Bryan Clark, a naval expert with the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank....

“Electric is more reliable,” Clark said. “If I can turn these components to be electric instead of steam, it eliminates all the steam related mechanical parts.”

The maintenance on the electrical systems is cheaper, he added. There are 500 fewer sailors on the Ford, in part because fewer technicians are needed to work on the ship’s existing steam equipment.

Do even the Trump followers who take the phrase "Make America great again" very literally want our military to go backwards technologically? I doubt it. But Trump is compulsively nostalgic.

All his favorite songs are decades old. He keeps trying to memify the notion that America is now "the hottest country," a phrase that sounds like sloganeering from the Mad Men era.

And I believe he's even nolstalgic for some problematic things about the past, or at least for the self-righteous backlash to those problems. I think when Trump talks about cities today, he's not talking about any currently existing cities -- he's talking about the cities of his youth, and he's describing them the way critics described them then.

You may have seen this clip earlier this month:

Trump: "Look at the blue cities. What do they have in common? They're all dirty. They're filthy dirty. Their streets are dirty. Their streets smell. Their storefronts are broken. Their trees are all gross. Everything about the place is dirty. It's really all of them."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 3, 2026 at 2:28 PM

Trump had been asked about the war in Iran. He wandered off the subject and said:

I said it the other day that maybe doesn't sound that important, but when a country goes bad, like, look at the blue cities. What do they have in common, aside from massive crime? Much more crime. The Republicans have very little crime. But what do the blue cities have in mind? And also, you can say this with nations, when they go bad. The blue cities have something in common -- crime, high crime, vicious, violent crime -- but what do they have in common? They're all dirty. They're filthy dirty. Their streets are dirty. Their streets smell. Their storefronts are broken. Their trees are all gross. Everything about the place is dirty. And I don't want to mention any specific city. It's really all of them. But you go into these cities that are blue, they're crime-ridden and they're filthy, dirty. They're like Washington, D.C., was a year and a half ago, with graffiti all over the place, with crime all over the place, with people afraid to be here.

(I added the end of that final sentence from this transcript.)

How would Trump know this? As far as I know, Trump hasn't walked a block in any American city this century. He's a guy who goes from the building lobby to the limo to the building lobby. His windows are always tinted. He's not describing anything he's seen with his own eyes. He's describing cities the way they were portrayed on the news in 1973 and 1982, and the way they were portrayed in twentieth-century movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish.

And look at the way he described the city of Washington a year ago, when he announced the deployment of National Guard troops there:

In declaring a “crime emergency” in Washington, Trump wrongly claimed at an Aug. 11 press conference, “Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever. They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years.”

... The city’s murder rate did increase in 2023 to the highest rate in 20 years, but it wasn’t the highest ever.

Nope:

And murders have decreased since.

Statistics released by the Metropolitan Police Department on the same day as Trump’s remarks showed the number of homicides had decreased by 32% from 2023 to 2024 and by 12% so far from 2024 to 2025. In addition, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia reported in January that violent crime overall for 2024 was down 35% from the previous year and was “the lowest it has been in over 30 years.”

As the one-year anniversary of Trump's deployment approached earlier this month, Trump said of D.C., “This was the crime capital, frankly, of the world.”

That was D.C.'s reputation decades ago. Crime has dropped since then. But Trump doesn't know that. He's tapping into memories of the D.C. he saw on TV back in the late twentieth century.

A year ago, he said, "We're getting rid of the slums, too" -- evoking a bygone era when one of the goals of "urban renewal" was "slum clearance."

Trump has a first-hand familiarity with the places he's lived in and the places he's played golf -- the White House, Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, Trump Tower. Everything else he knows mostly from television -- old television. He lives in the past.

THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE FUCK-YOU MONEY NEVER TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro recently dropped the felony case against David Hearn, the ex-Olympian falsely accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool in Washington. President Trump threw a fit in response to Pirro's decision, and now Pirro is trying to save her job. Maybe this will work:

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has convened a special grand jury in Washington, D.C., amid a clash with President Donald Trump....

A special grand jury is a rare legal body that can release a potentially critical report about the subject of an investigation if there is a “preponderance of evidence” of wrongdoing, regardless of whether there is enough evidence to bring the person to trial....

It is not yet known what the special grand jury will be investigating....

The legal body generally runs for 18 months but can finish its work sooner or be extended in six-month increments by a judge, as long as it does not exceed 36 months.

My question is: Why bother? Why not just leave with some dignity? Pirro isn't super-rich, but she's comfortable. She has a net worth of $11.6 million, according to her federal financial disclosure forms. And while she probably won't get her old Fox job back if she's on the outs with Trump, there might be a place for her in the world of podcasting. Ask Megyn Kelly.

Or why not retire? Pirro is 75 years old.

But the world is run by people who aren't merely ambitious -- they can't seem to turn off their ambition. They succeed at a level 99% of us will never attain and they still can't stop. And because you have to please people more powerful than yourself even when you're near the top, and because most of those people are colossal assholes, that means the people near the top still need to abase themselves, out of their compulsive desire to remain near the top.

Which leads to what I call the Fuck-You Money Paradox. Ordinary people, when they imagine being rich, think wealth would give them the clout to say "Fuck you" to anyone who wanted them to do something they didn't want to do. But, paradoxically, the people who are ambitious enough to attain elite status manage to do it because they're addicted to pursuing and attaining elite status -- and because they're addicted, they'll never do anything to put that status at risk. So people at or near the top are precisely the ones who'll never say "Fuck you" to anyone who might put even a tiny amount of their money or status at risk. In other words, the people who obtain "Fuck you" money or status would never use it as "Fuck you" money or status.

Which is why the people who've put up the most resistance to Trump are ordinary citizens like the people of Minneapolis, while elites -- the people who run the top law firms, universities, and corporations -- continue to prostrate themselves before Trump.

You know, like Jeff Bezos, who continues to lick Trump's boots:

Amazon Prime can’t get enough of Melania Trump.

Months after Amazon MGM Studios released the documentary film Melania, her senior adviser Marc Beckman announced Tuesday that the first lady will be the subject of a new Amazon Prime docuseries slated to be released on the platform later this year.

The original movie

earned just over $16 million globally, making it a financial loss for the studio after its hefty cost — $40 million for the documentary, with the marketing alone costing an estimated $35 million — sparked speculation that Amazon had made the investment to get close to Donald Trump.

I understand that Amazon has a lot of government contracts on the line, and this is clearly keeping Bezos in Trump's favor. But is there no point at which you say to yourself, I'm the third-richest man in the world, I'm worth a quarter of a trillion dollars, and I'd like to retain a bit of my dignity?

Ordinary people with ICE firearms pointed at their faces are displying backbone:

This is absolutely WILD. Here's the dashboard video posted by @fritschner.bsky.social. Fast forward to about 1 minute. An ICE officer jumps out of a van and pulls a gun on this woman immediately before lying and claiming she "almost ran us over." *profanity warning if watching in public.

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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) August 11, 2026 at 5:29 PM

Bezos? Pirro? No backbone. They're too addicted to their money and status. They'll never have enough, even when they have all they'll ever need. It's people who are at genuine risk who have the courage to say "Fuck you."

THE TIMES WON'T ABANDON ITS PREFERRED NARRATIVE ABOUT DEMOCRATS JUST BECAUSE THE FACTS CONTRADICT IT

Francesca Hong was expected to win the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin yesterday. That anticipated victory, along with last week's win by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary and other recent triumphs by left-leaning Democrats, was giving mainstream journalists a story they liked: The Democratic Party is being taken over by radicals who are very, very scary.

You'd imagine that Hong's loss to David Crowley, a moderate, would force the media to write a different story. But The New York Times simply swapped in a different Democrat for Hong and kept peddling the agreed-upon narrative:

David Crowley, the moderate Milwaukee County executive, won an upset victory for the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin early Wednesday, prevailing over Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who had led in opinion polls but faced questions about whether she could win the swing state in the general election....

But another Midwest progressive, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan of neighboring Minnesota, won the high-profile Democratic Senate primary there....

In Wisconsin, Mr. Crowley, who had the endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers, scored a surprising win over Ms. Hong, a chef and state lawmaker who energized left-wing voters. But her candidacy worried moderate Democrats: Ms. Hong had come under fire for writing on social media in 2020 that Thanksgiving should be canceled, though she recently walked back the statement. She also supported abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and increasing taxes on people who make more than $750,000 per year.

Ms. Flanagan’s nomination in Minnesota, however, was a victory for the party’s left wing heading into the midterms.

See what the Times did there? It conflated Hong's attack on Thanksgiving -- which I'm sure would have been offputting to at least some swing voters in the general election, even though it's not a real issue voters are concerned about -- with ICE abolition and taxing the rich, which are mainstream ideas.

Hong's $750,000 floor for tax increases isn't extreme -- as a Pew survey noted last year,

About six-in-ten (58%) say tax rates on household income over $400,000 should be raised, including 23% who say these tax rates should be raised a lot. Much smaller shares say taxes on higher-income households should be lowered (19%) or kept the same (21%).

As for ICE, here's a YouGov survey from March:

Support for abolishing ICE has hit a new high in this week's Economist / YouGov poll. Half (50%) of Americans now somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE. Only 39% oppose abolishing the agency.

Flanagan also supports abolishing ICE -- understandably, given what ICE has done in her state. I don't think this is perceived as a radical, beyond-the-pale idea by most Minnesota voters.

Hong previously supported police abolition:

“I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” Hong said in a 2020 social media post after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A year later, while serving in the State Assembly, Hong again posted about Blake, writing: “Police exist to uphold white supremacy. Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”

Flanagan never did, even when the city of Minneapolis put it to a referendum vote in 2021. (The measure failed.) And even though Flanagan is Native American, she doesn't want Thanksgiving canceled:



Swing Democrats in Wisconsin seemed to be focusing on electability: Hong has been trailing Republican Tom Tiffany in general-election polls, though not by much, while Crowley has a slight lead over Tiffany. (I should note that it's hard to take the polls seriously when they predicted a double-digit primary win for Hong.) In Minnesota, by contrast, Flanagan seems quite electable: a recent survey by her moderate opponent, Angie Craig, showed either of them winning a general-election matchup by 7.

Flanagan is both progressive and mainstream. She's the lieutenant governor. She's not like Hong (or Zohran Mamdani) -- a DSA-affiliated state legislator who entered the race with little name recognition outside her district. But you can expect the Times and the rest of the mainstream media to add her name to the list of outsiders trying to overthrow the party mainstream, simply because she ran against a Schumer- and AIPAC-backed moderate. It's too tempting a narrative to give up.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO ALL THE FREAKS IN THE GOP, THE PARTY OF NORMAL PEOPLE!

Today's Michelle Goldberg column is about a proud Republican asshole named Brandon Herrera, who's running for a House seat with the support of prayerful invertebrate Mike Johnson:

Because this is a family newspaper, I cannot quote the piquant term that Brandon Herrera, a Republican House candidate in Texas, used to refer to children in a 2023 video. I can only report that he called them “trophies” for getting a man to ejaculate. Nor, alas, am I allowed to repeat the obscenities that Herrera, a gun influencer, used to explain why the opinions of mothers are without value. I can only say that he argued, essentially, that getting pregnant requires no special skill.

This is not a family blog, so I'll provide that Herrera quote, though you may want to take a shower afterward:

GOP candidate Brandon Herrera on moms advocating politically:

“Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions.

The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn’t make you any less wrong about the dumb shit they you say.” pic.twitter.com/NmnnXT5jnp

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) July 17, 2026

Jesus, apparently, doesn't have a problem with this.

Joint House Republican leadership endorsement statement with @SteveScaliseGOP, @tomemmer, and @LisaForCongress:

Brandon Herrera has our joint ENDORSEMENT because he is an America First grassroots leader who will help us to continue securing the border, lowering costs, defending… pic.twitter.com/tcawmC1A4c

— Mike Johnson (@MikeJohnson) March 19, 2026

Goldberg continues:

I can, however, tell you about the Nazi and eugenics stuff. In a 2022 video, Herrera and a buddy in sunglasses and a balaclava tested a Nazi-era submachine gun, then goose-stepped to a Nazi marching song. Herrera called the weapon “the original ghetto blaster.” In a 2024 podcast, after calling for abolishing Social Security, he joked that we should also “abolish old people,” laughing along as his co-hosts riffed about killing them off as in the cult horror film “Midsommar.”

Herrera was the less offensive of the two major candidates in his primary.

Herrera became the Republican nominee in his South Texas district in March after the sitting congressman, Tony Gonzales, withdrew due to a sexual harassment scandal.

Gonzales reportedly had an affair with a married staffer who then committed suicide by setting herself on fire. But remember, the Republican Party is the party of traditional moral values.

I give Michelle Goldberg a lot of credit. She regularly writes about sick freaks in the Republican Party. Two years ago, she wrote about Royce White, the Alex Jones-loving misogynist (“Women have become too mouthy”) who ran unsuccessfully for Amy Klobuchar's Senate seat. (Goldberg was on to him long before his current campaign, which has been accompanied by a cheap stunt -- White is claiming he's a woman so he can participate in the WNBA draft -- and a judge has issued a fifty-year no-contact order preventing him from interacting with his ex-wife and one of his children, whom he's said to have abused). Goldberg has written about Micah Beckwith, the Christian nationalist book-banner who's now Indiana's lietenant governor, and Victor Marx, the self-styled exorcist who, if we're to believe him, killed someone when he was seven years years old.

But even the most engaged resistlib Trump haters have probably never heard of these people, or, as Goldberg says in the current column, this guy:

I regularly speak to people who follow politics closely but haven’t heard of Cory Mills, a Republican representative running for re-election in Florida. One ex-girlfriend of Mills won a restraining order against him after saying he threatened her with revenge porn. Another, whom he was seeing at the same time, told the police he’d assaulted her, though she later recanted. (He denies both charges.) Mills is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of both sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations. Yet it barely made a stir when Trump endorsed him in the Republican primary, which takes place next week; polls show him ahead in the four-way contest.

She notes that the alleged abuse by Ohio congressman Max Miller "finally breached what we might call the bad-even-for-Republicans line," but he's the exception, not the rule.

I'm glad Goldberg regularly draws attention to these GOP lowlifes. But I don't fully agree with her on the reason they generally get so little attention:

That Herrera has flown somewhat under the radar is a testament to a fundamental asymmetry between the parties, as well as in our discourse about them. Thanks to Trump, misogyny and extremism among Republicans has become what journalists sometimes call a dog-bites-man story, something so ordinary and predictable that it breaks through only when it reaches an absurdly high threshold.

Is it really just Trump? He lowered the bar, but outside of leftist/liberal spaces, the master narrative surrounding the GOP defines it as the party of Real Americans, regular folks with traditional values and ideas, while the Democratic Party is said to be full of weirdos with bizarre ideas and lifestyles. The latter characterization has persisted even though the party's most prominent figures, at least until recently, have been moderate dullards -- Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries.

Republicans can generate a national panic about "communist" Democrats because for years they've been characterizing even the most moderate Democrats as socialists and commies. Right now, they're just taking advantage of a well-established narrative. Outside of left/liberal spaces, there hasn't been a master "Republicans are extreme, nasty weirdos" narrative -- Tim Walz tried to get one going in the 2024 presidential campaign, but he was asked to stop calling Republicans "weird" and, sadly, he complied.

I blame the mainstream media for not writing a thousand trend pieces about Republican pathology. And Democrats are still unwilling to condemn the Republican Party categorically, even when there's so much to work with (and even when it's obvious that categorically condemning the Democrats has been a highly effective strategy in much of Middle America, sustaining the GOP's political dominance even though the party has nothing to offer ordinary Americans on real issues).

Democrats' message should be: This is who Republicans are. They abuse with impunity. Their ideas are extreme. They're the party that's out of touch with normal American values. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that narrative to take hold.

TUCKER CARLSON'S NEW PARTY LOOKS LIKE A COLLECTION OF ANTI-SEMITIC D-LISTERS

People are taking Tucker Carlson's talk about a new political party very, very seriously. MS NOW's Zeeshan Aleem writes:

Right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson announced in June that he was leaving the Republican Party because he was incensed at President Donald Trump for launching a war against Iran. Surprisingly, what began as a theatrical (and possibly temporary) exit from the GOP has led to a more adversarial and organized opposition. The former Fox News personality appears to be trying to help launch — or encourage the launch of — a right-wing third party. If it comes to fruition, that could be a terrible thorn in the side of Republicans.

This is published under the headline

How Tucker Carlson is creating a lane for a third party to take on the GOP

Signs that the right-wing pundit and his allies want to launch an antiwar third party are mounting.

In addition to portraying the possible new party as "antiwar," the story tells us this:

In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review published in July, Carlson said he was “going to help build a third party” as part of his “good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country.” In his explanation he leaned into the same isolationism he cited when he said he was leaving the GOP.

“Your life expectancy has gone down, and the promise of your children’s lives is likely gone. No one seems to care,” he said to CJR. “It’s not even a factor. ‘What about Hamas?’ I officially don’t care about Hamas. The US government should have, as its first priority, the welfare of its own people.”

The Hamas line hints at what's really going on here. This isn't about isolationism in the abstract, or an "America First" focus on domestic needs. It's about Israel. The principals appear to be not only Israel skeptics but anti-Semites.

Here's a list of the people Carlson has assembled in pursuit of a new party:

Carlson recently hosted some allies on his Maine compound: former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene; former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent; and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who made an issue of the Trump administration’s mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and, in May, lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger.

Greene you know about, or you certainly know about her past speculations on a California wildfire:

... Greene is a proponent of the Camp Fire laser beam conspiracy theory. She wrote a November 17, 2018, Facebook post -- which is no longer available online -- in which she said that ... “oddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires.” She also speculated that a vice chairman at “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm” was somehow involved, and suggested the fire was caused by a beam from “space solar generators.”

Greene also "shared a video in 2018 repeating the antisemitic claim that 'Zionist supremacists' are conspiring to flood Europe with migrants in order to replace the white populations there."

When Kent resigned as head of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of Donald Trump's Iran war, he blamed not just this war but George W. Bush's Iraq War on Israel -- as if dumbass Republican presidents and their subordinates didn't make these catastrophic foreign policy miscalculations all on their own. Kent wrote, "it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby," telling Trump,

This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that you should strike now, there was a clear path to victory. That was a lie and the same tactic that the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of men and women.

(I know that Benjamin Netanyahu lobbied Trump in order to get him to start the war, but he's lobbied previous presidents, and Trump was the only one stupid enough to take the idea seriously. Bibi was pushing on an open door.)

Massie is a longtime opponent of U.S. military aid to Israel, which would seem like a principled stand if other actions of his didn't suggest a strain of anti-Semitism. His was the only no vote on a 2022 House resolution condemning anti-Semitism -- a resolution on which Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib voted yes. He's said that he's the only Republican in Congress who doesn't have an "AIPAC babysitter."

"When they come to DC, you have to go to lunch with them, and they've got your cell number and you have conversations with them," he said....

When he lost his primary earlier this year, he told the crowd at his concession speech that he'd had trouble contacting his AIPAC-backed opponent to congratulate him: "I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv."

And Carlson, of course, has interviewed not only Nick Fuentes but Darryl Cooper, who used Carlson's podcast to argue that "the United States was on the ‘wrong side’ in the Second World War, and falsely [claim] that millions of Jews in concentration camps 'ended up dead' only because the Nazis did not have the resources to care for them," as Congressman Jamie Raskin noted.

I don't know what Carlson's plan is, but I wonder if there's really a place for a paleoconservative third party, especially one spearheaded by four losers -- three Republicans who've been driven out of D.C. politics and a podcast host who lost his major-media gig a few years ago. It's obvious that a right-leaning third party could dilute the right-wing vote and help Democrats, just as left-leaning third parties helped Republicans in the 2000 and 2016 presidential races. I assume Carlson knows that, and I wonder if he's hoping to shake down the GOP by threatening a divisive presidential campaign (though he says he won't personally run) and agreeing to back off in return for money.

Or maybe he sincerely thinks the GOP will coalesce around a pro-Israel candidate (Marco Rubio?) in 2028, and he wants to provide an alternative. (I think the party will coalesce around J.D. Vance, who's anti-Semitism-curious, and who used to employ Carlson's son Buckley as a deputy press secretary before Buckley resigned to join the private sector. Last year, Vance defended Buckley Carlson against accusations of anti-Semitism, calling the accusers "scumbags.")

My guess: Carlson's party will be vaporware -- it won't run candidates, and it may never exist in any form. But he got people's attention for a news cycle or two.

DEMOCRATS ABASE THEMSELVES TRYING TO APPEAL TO THE CENTER. REPUBLICANS ABASE THEMSELVES TRYING TO APPEAL TO THE EXTREMES.

The Atlantic's Tom Nichols, an ex-Republican and Trump critic who likes to lecture Democrats, has some advice for Abdul El-Sayed:

Start by kicking Piker to the curb - hard

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— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) August 8, 2026 at 2:51 PM

I'd expect a centrist like Nichols to recommend that El-Sayed cut ties with Hasan Piker, who's said some things that are offputting to voters El-Sayed needs. But "kicking Piker to the curb - hard" implies more than just a separation. It seems as if Nichols wants El-Sayed to abase himself and make a great show of renouncing Piker. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but even if I am, we know that it's conventional wisdom that Democrats need to move to the center, or center-right, or even right, in order to win elections outside deep-blue regions, and the usual advice is that Democrats should put flashing neon lights around their renunciations of liberalism or progressivism, just to make sure every voter is aware of the act of submission.

Yet Republicans running in purple states and districts never seem to do this. Ken Paxton, for instance, isn't tacking to the center in order to win a tough race in Texas.

In fact, the only kind of renunciation Republicans ever seem to engage in is renunciation of past moderation. Lindsey Graham and J.D. Vance renounced their previous (justified) attacks on Donald Trump and won elections in red states. And now that's happening even in the swing state of Michigan:

In the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election, as President Trump refused to accept defeat and pumped out false claims about voter fraud, Mike Rogers was a clear and consistent voice of reproach.

Mr. Rogers, a former Republican representative from Michigan, denounced Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the election as “cause for both concern and alarm.” He ripped the president’s pressure on Georgia’s top election official “as more gangster than presidential.” As for Mr. Trump’s role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Rogers declared, “You’re damn right you had responsibility for this.”

But as he aims to return to Washington, in a Senate race considered key to control of that chamber, Mr. Rogers has become an election skeptic. Minutes after the president’s recent speech filled with outlandish accusations about voting fraud — including a debunked claim about Michigan ballots — Mr. Rogers weighed in, suggesting that further scrutiny of the election was warranted.

“I am thankful for President Trump’s commitment to transparency,” Mr. Rogers said on his social media accounts. “The news coming out of the White House tonight is deeply troubling — especially that of a voter fraud scheme right here in Michigan.”

Mr. Rogers has also suggested that voting irregularities sunk his Senate bid two years ago — based on an unproven claim about late-arriving Detroit ballots....

Democrats who follow conventional wisdom tug their forelocks and say their party is "weak and woke," or uses too much "faculty lounge" language. They reject the aspects of their party that are (rightly or wrongly) seen as out of touch with the mainstream.

Republicans are doing the opposite right now. They're attacking Anthony Fauci. They're embracing election denialism. They're scaremongering about communism and sharia law.

And there's this:

Former NBA player Royce White told OutKick/Fox News Digital that he apparently plans to declare for the 2027 WNBA Draft, as he now claims to be transgender.

There are now two former NBA players to announce such a decision, after Enes Kanter Freedom made his announcement earlier on Friday.

"I'm transgender. I'm a woman. I identify as sometimes identifying as a woman for purpose of basketball, professional basketball, so I'll be declaring for the WNBA draft in 2027 as well," White said.

To some extent, this is White -- Alex Jones fan, misogynist, and anti-Semite -- trying to win a Republican Senate primary in Minnesota in which he's struggling in the polls. But the fact that he has an accomplice -- along with the fact that the right-wing media is reacting with across-the-board squeals of delight -- tells me that this is a troll intended to motivate GOP base voters nationwide, at a time when they appear much less enthusiastic to vote than Democrats.

Republican voters love "I identify as..." trolling, so much so that there's an entire subreddit based on the idea that this is the right's "one joke" (reddit.com/r/onejoke/). If they were mainstream Democrats, they'd want to abandon this sort of thing less than a hundred days before the election. But they're mainstream Republicans, so they're leaning into obnoxiousness and partisan division.

THIS IS HOW THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WILL SURVIVE WHEN TRUMP IS GONE

A month ago, I wrote a post titled "The Next Trump Might Just Be a Collection of Grievances." I was making a point that I've made here several times: that the Republican Party will no longer have a charismatic leader when Donald Trump is gone, but it might not need one -- it will probably just reorganize itself around grievances, the way it did during the Barack Obama/Tea Party era, when Republicans made big gains in congressional and state elections, even though the party (and the Tea Party movement) had no charismatic figurehead. Anger was the organizing principle, not personality.

I think we're beginning to see a post-Trump Republican Party take shape, even though Trump is still in office. In the midterm elections, Republicans know they can't run on their record, and they certainly know they can't run on Donald Trump's record. So they're running on hate, particularly hatred for Muslims. This has been happening in the battleground state of Texas for months -- last September, Governor Greg Abbott

signed into law House Bill 4211, which took aim at sharia compounds—fantastical concoctions. This was in response to a ferocious conservative campaign against EPIC City, [a] proposed master-planned community near Dallas.... Created by the East Plano Islamic Center, a prominent Collin County mosque, and rebranded late last year as the Meadow, the residential development would reportedly include more than a thousand homes, a faith-based K–12 school, a community college, and a place of worship. The issue exploded in early 2025, after [online right-wing commentator Amy] Mek labeled the development a “402-acre sharia city.”

All this year, Texas GOP candidates have denounced any manifestation of Islam in Texas as part of a scheme to impose sharia law on the rest of us. Now this Islamophobia is going national, largely in response to Abdul El-Sayed's victory in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary. Below, I've cued up some of the responses to El-Sayed's win from prominent figures in the national GOP. Please note that Trump is among them, but it's other Republicans -- the likes of J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, and Tommy Tuberville -- who are leading the charge.

TRUMP: Abdul El-Sayed, can you believe this? He doesn't love Israel. He doesn't love Jewish people. He hates 'em.

TUBERVILLE: Hey, we might build a 30-foot wall around our state, because I know what's coming. I can see it coming, I can hear it coming, I can -- you know, you can just smell it.

CRUZ: They want to cancel Thanksgiving. They want to cancel Christmas. El-Sayed is also an Islamist, as is Mandami [sic]. And look, you see the green-red convergence where the communists and the Islamists, they want sharia law.

VANCE: The modern Democratic coalition, which is self-hating white liberals united to people who just came to the country for the first time and don't actually have the sense of appreciation for it that they should.

Cruz and Vance wrap a couple of grievances up in a neat package: the fear of communism and Islamicism, allegedly embodied in El-Sayed, who's neither a communist nor an Islamist. (At this moment, every Republican rank-and-file voter appears to believe that all Muslims are Islamists and all Islamists are communists.) And, of course, it's Francesca Hong, the DSA-affiliated candidate for governor of Wisconsin who's likely to win the Democratic primary on Tuesday, who formerly expressed skepticism about Thanksgiving, not El-Sayed. But Republicans want to keep those distinctions muddy.

Maybe this is just a stopgap plan for motivating base voters this year, when many of them have soured on Trump. Maybe it won't be the party's message after November. But Trump will still be a terrible president for two years after the midterms. I think the party will be running against Muslims and commies (and Anthony Fauci and trans people and a long list of others) two years from now.

This might fail. El-Sayed might win comfortably. And in all likelihood, only a tiny audience will pay attention to the Daily Wire's latest foray into moviemaking, which is tapping into the same bigotry and rage:

When radical Islamic terrorists hijack a liberal college's pro-Palestine encampment to enforce barbaric Sharia law on students and execute infidels in a makeshift caliphate, a ragtag band of red-blooded students, a security guard tired of 'Uncle Tom' smears, and a Delta Force vet must arm up to save their clueless peers and keep America from surrendering to the enemy on its own soil. Coming exclusively to The Daily Wire, September 16.

But all this will keep the base loyal as Trump declines. In some surveys, Trump's approval is in the low 30s, but I fear that anti-Muslim bigotry might poll higher -- as might anti-trans bigotry. The GOP knows how many voters live in small towns and rural communities, monocultures where difference is always perceived as dangerous. If Trump's numbers sink into the 20s, Republicans will just define Republicanism as a collection of bigotries and never look back.

OFF FOR A FEW DAYS

I'm going to be traveling again -- I'll be back at the end of the week (probably Saturday). See you then.

WHY ISN'T DAVID HEARN THE MAIN CHARACTER IN THE REFLECTING POOL STORY?

At some point in our post-Columbine era of mass shootings, advocates began accusing the news media of paying too much attention to perpetrators and not enough to victims. Some argued that the press shouldn't name the perpetrators of mass shootings at all. The press hasn't gone that far, but most well-meaning news outlets try to report on the victims and the lives they've lost.

No one was shot in the Trump administration's war on imaginary Reflecting Pool vandalism, but I'd like to see a little more attention paid to David Hearn, whose life was upended because he put his hand in the pool's water.

This is the story:

donald trump can just sit in mar-a-lago and make up a lie on someone and then have the entire weight of the federal government come down on that person.

That should scare you.

— Covie (@covie_93) August 1, 2026

But this is how the story is being presented:

This is a story about the President and several of his hand-picked appointees all committing crimes and blatantly lying to the public while stealing public funds and abusing the criminal justice system, but the NYTimes describes the situation like they're recapping a soap opera.

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— Max Kennerly (@maxkennerly.bsky.social) August 2, 2026 at 8:24 AM

The story cited here, by Glenn Thrush of the Times, isn't just about Trump's feelings -- it's about the feelings of the three people Thrush regards as the main characters. The innocent man who was indicted isn't one of them.

Jeanine Pirro faced the cameras on July 2 with characteristic self-assurance to announce the indictment of the 67-year-old ex-Olympian David Hearn for trashing “sacred” government property, President Trump’s highly prized but shoddily renovated Reflecting Pool.

There's something off about the final clause in that sentence. I understand what Thrush is trying to say -- that Trump seems to prize the Reflecting Pool but did a shoddy job of renovating it -- but the pool isn't "President Trump’s highly prized ... Reflecting Pool." It isn't Trump's pool at all. It's our pool.

“This is not only a priority for the president, but for myself,” said Ms. Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, disclosing felony vandalism charges against Mr. Hearn for touching the lining of the pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

But Hearn wasn't charged with a felony "for touching the lining of the pool" -- the U.S. attorney's office said at the time of his indictment that on June 19 "Hearn allegedly ripped a piece of the recently installed blue pool sealant on the bottom of the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial."

Every reasonable person knew at the time that this was a lie, and Pirro is admitting that now. But Hearn was repeatedly slandered by the president and other Republicans.

We could've made this montage of liars an hour long but you get the point

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— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) July 31, 2026 at 7:02 PM

Fox News told us:

Records show former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who was charged in the weekend vandalism of the Reflecting Pool, has ties to a major left-wing fundraising network as protesters descended on the National Mall and racked up multiple criminal charges.

Hearn, 67, donated to Democratic fundraising apparatus ActBlue 10 times while also contributing to Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns five times, an administration official told Fox News Digital.

Fox also tried to portray Hearn as a repeat offender because in 1996, when the Potomac River flooded, the former Olympic canoeist was arrested for venturing into the floodwaters in his whitewater canoe. (The charges were dismissed.)

But Hearn is all but invisible after the first couple of paragraphs of the Times story, which is all about Trump, Pirro, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum:

Ms. Pirro’s office dramatically reversed course on Friday, not only withdrawing the charge against Mr. Hearn but blasting the Interior Department for the rushed and “botched” renovation....

Ms. Pirro’s 20-page filing did not refer to, much less rebuke, Mr. Trump for claiming the damage was caused by left-wing vandals rather than his administration’s missteps. But it raised innate doubts about his assertion that criminals had slashed the pool’s lining with a “knife or blade.”

That Ms. Pirro ... was aiming much of her criticism not at Mr. Trump, but his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, who oversaw the issuance of a no-bid contract to renovate the pool, did not appear to matter much.

On Saturday morning, Mr. Trump dashed off a post on Truth Social that made clear he was unhappy with Ms. Pirro, a friend and ally since the 1980s....

“I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM,” he wrote, adding, “There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!”

In the second Trump term, the media has been able to focus on some ordinary citizens brutalized by ICE, but only in a sustained way when the victims, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were murdered and were white. Earlier, Senator Chris Van Hollen forced the media to pay attention to Kilmar Abrego Garcia when he was sent to rot in a Salvadoran torture prison.

But it's hard to get the media to care when there a story doesn't include Beltway boldface names. The press is paying very little attention to Texas defendants who were sentenced to decades in prison in connection with a shooting that wounded a cop at an anti-ICE demonstration in Texas. Not only was the shooter sentenced to 100 years in prison, but others who attended the demonstration yet had no connection to the shooting received sentences of 50 years, and one defendant who wasn't even present for the shooting was sentenced to 30 years. The East Coast press doesn't care.

Even if these aren't the most sympathetic defendants, the extreme sentences are appalling. But no top official is holding news conferences about this case in D.C., and Trump hasn't made the story a Truth Social fixation. So the defendants aren't of interest to the national media. They should be, just as every victim of Trumpian authoritarianism should be.

THE PARTY OF TRADITIONAL VALUES HAS NO VALUES EXCEPT WINNING

This poll was mostly overlooked a couple of days ago:

The POLITICO Poll finds President Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters are the most loyal of any group of voters — with majorities saying they would stick by GOP candidates confronted with an array of scandals, from a DUI conviction or accepting lobbyist gifts to more serious accusations including domestic violence, sexual assault and antisemitic social media posts.

Two-thirds of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say they would continue supporting a GOP candidate accused of sexual assault — 13 percentage points higher than the share of Trump 2024 voters writ large, which include those who do not identify as MAGA. By comparison, 40 percent of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 would continue backing a Democratic candidate accused of sexual assault.

This is framed as evidence that MAGA voters are especially amoral, but note that 53% of Trump voters overall -- a majority -- would continue supporting a Republican candidate accused of sexual assault. (It's disturbing that even 40% of Harris voters would continue to support a Democrat accused of sexual assault, but at least 40% isn't a majority.)

Seventy-two percent of MAGA Trump voters say they would stick with a GOP candidate accused of domestic violence, more than 10 ercentage points higher than the overall share of Trump 2024 voters who would back a GOP candidate (61 percent). Thirty-nine percent of Harris voters say they’d stick with a Democrat accused of domestic violence.

Again, it's not just MAGA. A majority -- in this case, a solid majority -- of Republicans overall would continue supporting a Republican candidate accused of domestic violence. Approximately four in ten Democrats -- not a majority -- would support a Democrat who was similarly accused.

Here are the MAGA numbers for other scandals:

Some of this might reflect Republicans' belief that any accusation of scandal against a Republican they like is a lie, however well documented. And some Republicans might not believe that domestic violence, say, or wearing blackface is a bad thing.

I think the discrepancies here come down to two differences between conservatives and the rest of us. First, conservatives generally decide who is a good person -- someone who agrees with them politically -- and conclude that whatever is done by a person they like must be moral. That's why they've shrugged off Donald Trump's sexual improprieties for years. That's why MAGA Republicans, at least, continue to believe Trump isn't corrupt. They like Trump, therefore he's a moral man.

Democrats try to give people they like the benefit of the doubt, but only up to a point. In just the past few months, we've cut Graham Platner and Eric Swalwell loose. Over the years, here in New York State alone, we dumped Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, and Andrew Cuomo. (Cuomo almost made a comeback, but not quite.)

The second difference between Republicans and Democrats is that more Republicans than Democrats see politics as an existential battle between their party and the opposition. To some extent, this is because Rupert Murdoch figured out how to tabloidize politics, turning every story into a drama about good (them) vs. evil (us). Fewer Democrats see politics that way.

Beyond that, Republicans relentlessly promote (and defend) their own while attacking Democrats. Democrats attack one another even when there's no scandal involved (see: DSA vs. the establishment), regularly berate themselves (calling their own party "weak and woke"), and brag about bipartisanship while wishing for "a strong Republican Party." Republicans never admit error and close ranks around party members who are under attack nearly every time. (They also close ranks around candidates whom they don't consider ideologically ideal.)

I don't really want Democratic voters to defend immoral candidates, but I wish we had a higher level of party loyalty -- or maybe Republicans should have a much lower level.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as HuffPost reported in July 2020:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRAVELING AGAIN

See you tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notably, it's only Republicans who like Vance:

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

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

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

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

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