THE MAINSTREAMING OF NICK FUENTES IS STANDARD-ISSUE GOP NICHE MARKETING

Rolling Stone reports:

From the story (free to read here):

Just a few weeks ago, the Republican Party was ripping itself apart as factions moved to either distance themselves from Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old white nationalist streamer, or to loudly announce they would never bow to the woke mob demanding they disavow the openly racist, proudly misogynist, Holocaust-denying Hitler fanboy.

The outrage cycle is apparently over now, and Fuentes has come out on top: Instead of being sidelined by the uproar that erupted after his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show in October, Fuentes is now being courted by some of conservative media’s biggest names. Last week he appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars and Steven Crowder’s podcast “Louder With Crowder.” On Monday he’s scheduled to sit down with Piers Morgan, for his YouTube show “Uncensored.” ...

There was a moment, a few weeks ago, when the GOP appeared poised to unite in a stand against him....

But a funny thing happened next: The leaders of the Republican Party shrugged the whole thing off. “You can’t tell him who to interview,” Trump finally said of Carlson in November, after weeks of silence on the subject. “If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes — I don’t know much about him — but if he wants to do it, get the word out. Let him, you know, people have to decide.”

It's odd that this appears the same day that the front page of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post looks like this:

(Story here.)

This seems ... inconsistent, but I think it's just the Republican Party doing what it normally does: marketing several different messages to niche audiences.

Back in February -- when some Republicans were praising the sex criminal/online influencer Andrew Tate while others were denouncing him -- I recalled an earlier era of GOP niche marketing:

Remember when some Republicans couldn't stop talking about their certainty that Barack Obama had a fake birth certificate and was actually born in Kenya? That was birtherism. Many Republicans, including Donald Trump, eagerly adopted it in 2011 and 2012. Other Republicans, including 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, rejected it. And then there were GOP responses that could be sorted into other categories, as Adam Serwer noted at the time:

Ironic Post-birtherism: Making humorous or ironic references to the idea that the president was not born in the United States as an attempt to signal solidarity with or otherwise placate those who genuinely believe the president was not born in the United States. Examples: Tim Pawlenty, Rep. Raul Labrador.

Pseudo-birtherism: An umbrella term that encompasses all the various modes of belief that involve embracing fictional elements of the president's background, from the belief that he is a secret Muslim to the idea that he was raised in Kenya. Includes highbrow forms of birtherism like the "Kenyan anti-colonialism" thesis and theories that his name was legally changed to "Barry Soetero," as well as the idea that Obama's "real father" was one of the handful of random black celebrities you can name off the top of your head. Examples: Newt Gingrich, Andrew C. McCarthy.

This allowed voters to pick any response to birtherism that seemed correct to them, in the belief that that response represented the real Republican Party. Conspiracy-minded voters could embrace undiluted birtherism. Romney Republicans could tell themselves that the party rejected crackpottery. And people in the middle could tell themselves that Obama might not be lying about his place of birth, but he sure acts like a left-winger from the less developed world, doesn't he? Please note that all of the responses led to support for the Republican Party.

Later, there were the various niches surrounding the 2020 election:

Trump's 2020 election lie worked the same way. Some people believed crazy theories about fake ballots made from Chinese bamboo and electronic vote rigging by means of satellites directed from the U.S. embassy in Rome (or the Vatican). Others said that the baroque conspiracy theories were a bit much, but the Deep State sure did suppress that Hunter Biden story in 2020, wouldn't you say?

It all works this way:

Extreme, irrational, dangerous ideas are allowed to flourish on the right. "Mainstream" Republicans might reject these ideas, but they show up in communications channels that abut or overlap with "mainstream" GOP communications channels. The really extreme stuff leads gullible people to the GOP, while mainstream Republicans can reassure more sophisticated voters that the party isn't really like that. It's win-win for Republicans.

That's what's happening with Fuentes -- although, as I noted in February,

Inevitably, there's extremism creep. When COVID vaccines were first approved, then-president Trump boasted about them, and every governor in America, Republican as well as Democrat, embraced them -- yes, even Ron DeSantis. But the party became increasingly anti-vaccine, the way it became increasingly birtherist and conspiratorial about the 2020 election.

Extremism creep in this case means a party that becomes more and more anti-Semitic. That's probably inevitable. But the "official" party will continue to sell itself as the anti-anti-Semitic party even as it increasingly embraces anti-Semitism -- and the mixed message will reassure the normies (especially because the mainstream media will eagerly retransmit the mainstream party's reassurances). The GOP will never be portrayed in the press as a party that's gone completely to the Nazi side, just as it's still portrayed as a party that operates in the reality-based world on other topics. It won't be seen as a party of haters, cranks, and conspiratorialists, even when it obviously is precisely that.

In the future, the message the party will continue to send to voters worried about anti-Semitism is that the libs are the real Jew-haters, even if Jew-haters are beginning to dominate the GOP. And that will be the conventional wisdom.

IF TRUMP IS LOSING IT, DOES THAT EVEN MATTER?

The New Republic's Jason Linkins asks:

Linkins comes to the familiar conclusion:

The president is fully checked out because he’s old, enfeebled, and his brain is slowly turning into pasta e fagioli.

But he adds a twist: The administration is lawless and brutal because Trump is in decline.

At least I think that's what Linkins is saying. Quoting a recent Atlantic article about Trump's increasing disengagement, Linkins writes:

The vacuum Trump is leaving in the White House needs to be filled, and it’s being filled by “enablers” rather than people who might “[moderate] some of his more extreme impulses.” Or, as someone less committed to euphemism euthanasia might put it, it’s being filled by utter ghouls: a Pentagon head who’s in over his head and spiraling out as he commits war crimes, a Health and Human Services secretary who’s bringing Lysenkoism back, an FBI director crashing out because no one brought him a cool jacket to wear—and all the rest hopped up on völkisch nationalism, pulling Black people out of their cars in Minneapolis and warring with Sabrina Carpenter.

Comparing this administration to the previous one, which was led by a president whose aging process got far more attention, Linkins writes:

Those who served in Biden’s inner circle aren’t going to be remembered fondly, but no matter how enfeebled the president was, the country did not have the same problem we do now. The Biden White House wasn’t packed stem to stern with people dedicated to looting the country, terrorizing children, turning masked goons out onto the streets of American cities, or using the Department of Homeland Security’s social media presence to—as administration sources told Zeteo—“intentionally use popular music from vocally anti-Trump performing artists in order to trigger a negative response from a famous liberal and provide further amplification of neo-Confederate memes.”

Linkins seems to be suggesting that all this is happening because Trump is in decline. But is it? I'm not certain that's what he's saying because, quoting The Atlantic, he refers to these people as "enablers." If they're Trump's enablers, that means they aren't running wild because a feeble president can't stop them -- it means they're doing precisely what he wants them to do. Which is it?

I think it's the latter. I don't know the precise extent of Trump's mental and physical impairments, but I think if they could be magically cured, his White House would be doing exactly what it's doing now.

This is the administration he wanted eight years ago: a Justice Department that acts like his personal legal team, a thuggish crew of racists and anti-immigrant extremists, a team largely plucked from right-wing TV and dedicated to his aggrandizement. He might be sleeping through what they're doing, but they're doing what he wants.

And while they're alienating the rest of America, they're doing what the MAGA base wants. If Trump were to die tonight, I suspect that President Vance would keep nearly all of his policies in place -- the tariffs would probably be diminished or abandoned, and Vance might do a better job than Trump of pretending to take affordability seriously, but the ICE raids and the boat bombings and the sucking up to Vladimir Putin and the European far right would continue uninterrupted. There might be fewer pardons of white-collar criminals, but the crypto and AI industries would still be allowed to do whatever they want. Vance might not talk about windmills, but he'd put his thumb on the scale for fossil fuels. And the social media shitposting would, if anything, worsen.

The press will maintain its double standard on aging presidents for two reasons. One is obvious: The press has been browbeaten by GOP ref-workers for decades and is much more reluctant to criticize Republicans than Democrats. Mainstream journalists have operated for years on the assumption that if a Trump utterance seems bizarre or inappropriate to them, it's because they're elitist liberals who don't understand Trump's plainspoken, elemental connection to Real Americans.

But the other reason is that when Trump is awake, he can seem tireless. Linkins quotes a Guardian story in which a Johns Hopkins Medical School professor says that Trump "really has trouble completing a thought." But when Biden seemed to have trouble completing a thought, his voice dropped to a whisper and his words trailed off into silence. Trump just keeps talking. Here's The Washington Post on Trump's appearance yesterday at an event connected to the Kennedy Center, where performers will be honored tonight in a ceremony hosted by Sylvester Stallone:

In his 37-minute remarks, Trump mused about the Kennedy Center’s renovations, Stallone’s career, the New England Patriots, the UFC fight set to be staged at the White House next year, his recent golf outing with renowned golfer Gary Player, crime in American cities and the Biden administration’s policies, among other topics.

He just talks, and it usually makes some kind of sense, even though his pronouncements are often based on lies and misinformation (but it's misiniformation millions of Fox viewers also believe). Trump's energy might derive from multiple Diet Cokes or Adderall, or he might simply be invigorated whenever a captive audience allows him to indulge his obsessions. But the result is that he seems more vigorous than Biden did. Even his sexist and racist outbursts seem vigorous. And that's why the press corps won't put him in the same category as Biden.

In any case, this is the presidency Trump wanted when he first ran. If he doesn't finish his term, I don't think very much will change between now and January 2029.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE STORY THAT EXPLAINS GOP SUPPORT FOR RFK JR.

You've just received a box. You're told that if you press a button on the box, you'll be given a million dollars, but someone you don't know will die. Do you press the button?

We're all familiar with this question. It inspired a 1970 short story by Richard Matheson called "Button, Button," which became an episode of The Twilight Zone when the series was revived in the 1980s, and was also the basis of a 2009 film called The Box.

I think it explains why Republicans who know better have allowed Robert Kennedy Jr. to do so much damage to public health in America. I'm thinking of people like Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a doctor who, as a member of the Senate Finance Committee, cast the deciding vote in Kennedy's favor when Kennedy was under consideration as health and human services secretary. Now Cassidy claims to be upset because Kennedy's minions have voted to roll back hepatitis B vaccine recommendations for newborns.

I agree with everything you say here my former congressional colleague. And I also blame you for everything you say here. Bcuz you had the power to stop this dangerous quack. And you caved. Shame on you.

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— Joe Walsh (@walshfreedom.bsky.social) December 5, 2025 at 1:10 PM

Why did Cassidy and so many other Republicans roll over for this former Democrat whose principal goals had nothing to do with the core MAGA agenda? For that matter, why did Donald Trump seek Kennedy's endorsement during the 2024 presidential campaign and incorporate Kennedy's flaky and dangerous ideas into his own movement?

Think of Kennedy as the box. Many of the voters who flocked to Kennedy during his run for president weren't MAGA, and were demographically very different from MAGA voters. Quite a few were upscale suburbanites who'd developed an interest in alternative, quackish health ideas. Trump sided with Kennedy in order to win over Kennedy's voting bloc. The rest of the GOP went along. For them, the Kennedy voting bloc was the million dollars.

Many of them understood that empowering Kennedy would have terrible public health consequences. But congressional Republicans, including Cassidy, wagered that the people who'll suffer and die as a result of Kennedy's choices will be people they don't know. So they pressed the Kennedy button.

Many of the moral choices made by Republicans follow this formula. Republicans back unlimited access to AR-15s because being absolutist on guns brings them a bloc of committed voters; they assume that the resulting violence won't affect them or their friends and family, that the schools their children and grandchildren attend will never be shot up. Republicans win voters by being anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion, even though I'm sure many of them aren't personally absolutist on this subject; they assume they and their friends and relatives can be quietly or surreptitiously LGBTQ and can quietly or surreptitiously obtain reproductive care if they need it, and only people they don't know will suffer. The ones who understand that climate change is real think they can personally move away from its worst effects of climate change; others will suffer, but they'll be showered with campaign cash from fossil fuel billionaires. And so on.

The Republican Party includes a lot of true believers on all these issues, of course. On vaccines, Trump has been an occasional skeptic, and many Republicans are skeptical as well. But the Republicans who are just going along for the ride are doing so because they assume the button won't harm anyone they know.

And this is how some of them feel about Trump himself. They know the damage he's doing, but they assume it won't hurt them or anyone they care about. People they don't know will die or be hurt, but the votes will continue to come their way. Those votes are the million dollars, and while Trump might be the most dangerous button of all, they'll press it eagerly.

ONE WEIRD TRICK DEMOCRATS COULD USE TO MAKE TRUMP'S NARCISSISM HUMILIATING

There are more important stories right now, but I want to focus on this one:

National parks change prioritizes Trump birthday over days honoring Black people

The Donald Trump administration has changed which holidays qualify for free entrance to national parks, removing two holidays celebrating Black people and adding the president’s birthday....

Now, visitors to the 116 parks that charge entrance fees will no longer get in for free on MLK Day or on Juneteenth.... They will, however, on Trump’s June 14 birthday, which was added to the list this year....

Other free entrance days in 2026 include Presidents Day (Washington’s Birthday), Memorial Day, Independence Day weekend, the 110th birthday of the National Park Service, Constitution Day, Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday and Veterans Day.

This is obviously a story about Trump's deep and lifelong anti-Black racism -- but it's also a story about his boundless egomania. He sometimes appears to be the most narcissistic person who's ever lived.

This story appeared shortly after your tax dollars were used to position letters in place changing the United States Institute of Peace to the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace.

there you have it

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— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) December 3, 2025 at 10:52 PM

Yesterday, the building hosted a signing ceremony for an agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which Trump sold as a peace settlement, even though the fighting is still going on. Trump slept through part of the signing. On Tuesday, Trump also slept through parts of a meeting in which Cabinet secretaries took turns praising him.

Today Trump will receive the so-called FIFA Peace Prize, an award invented by international soccer's governing body in order to curry favor with Trump, who remains butthurt because he's never received a Nobel Peace Prize.

And that's just one week of Trumpian narcissism.

Regular readers of this blog know the approach to Trump I recommend for Democrats: attack him on every serious issue ... and attack him on trivial issues (yes, even "distractions" like threatening Greenland or renaming the Gulf of Mexico) if what he's doing is very unpopular. I think Trump's narcissism falls in the latter category. I believe Democrats should try to start a conversation about Trump's egomania whenever the opportunity seems to arise, asking how much time and money are spent flattering the president, who seems to believe that we live in the United States of Trump.

Of course, the same Democrats and Democratic consultants who say that the party shouldn't use big words like "oligarchy" would probably say the same thing if party members began talking about Trump's "narcissism" or "egomania." I think those are perfectly ordinary words that nearly everyone understands -- but if multi-syllable words are deemed a problem, never fear: Democrats could talk about this using two simple one-syllable words.

Self-love.

Imagine Gavin Newsom posting a fake Trump press release announcing the creation of a new Cabinet-level Department of Self-Love, with President Trump naming himself as America's first Secretary of Self-Love. Or imagine Jasmine Crockett or AOC mocking Trump's self-love on television.

I think Democrats should mention the examples of self-love that I listed above, as well as others (like the Trump banners hanging from federal buildings). They should demand hearings on the consequences of Trump's self-love, with an air of seriousness -- they should never break character and reveal that they get the joke. Ideally, they'd say all this in dead earnest, or with barely suppressed laughter.

It's hard to imagine Democrats doing this -- but wouldn't it be hilarious if the words "Trump" abnd "self-love" became inextricably linked in Americans' minds?

Maybe this is juvenile -- but hey, it's 2025. Whatever works.

IF BARI WEISS SINCERELY BELIEVES THAT PRO-GOP EXTREMISTS ARE MAINSTREAM, SHE'S ANOTHER OUT-OF-TOUCH COASTAL ELITIST

A couple of weeks ago, Bari Weiss explained her "vision" for CBS News:

Bari Weiss says she wants to use her new perch at CBS News to “redraw the lines of what falls in the 40 yards of acceptable debate” in American political and cultural life. She says the aim is to sideline voices like Hasan Piker, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and elevate… pic.twitter.com/hfbM4gOwcN

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) November 25, 2025

The New Republic's Alex Shephard wrote:

For Weiss, the decline of the American media is best exemplified by the rise of Nick Fuentes (a Nazi), Andrew Tate (a virulent misogynist), and Hasan Piker (a leftist streamer who pushes universal health care while playing video games). For what it’s worth, she is sitting next to Ben Shapiro while she says all of this....

“Those people don’t actually represent our values, and they don’t think that they represent the values or the worldview of the vast majority of Americans,” Weiss says, growing more passionate. “This is an opportunity to speak for the 75 percent, for the people on the center-left and the center-right that still believe in equality of opportunity, that still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in: liberty and freedom and individual responsibility and, on a basic level, the right to know what is exactly going on in the world. Not the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be, but what’s actually going on in the world.”

... The example of a “center-left” and “center-right” discussion she cites? That’s right, it’s a Free Press–sponsored debate over gun control between former NRA head Dana Loesch and nightmare Thanksgiving guest Alan Dershowitz.

You probably assume that Weiss is cynically attempting to redefine Fox News conservatism as centrism -- but I wonder if she actually believes her own nonsense. She's distancing herself from Carlson, Tate, and Fuentes. She may sincerely think of Dershowitz as the kind of Democrat who says, "My party left me!" She might actually believe that conservatism minus Nazis, proud homophobes, and rape apologists is centrism.

In other words, she might actually believe that she's appealing to the middle with this upcoming event:

Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, is scheduled to moderate a network town hall event with Erika Kirk, the widow of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk....

The event will air on 13 December at 8pm and will focus on “grief, faith, politics, and more”, according to internal marketing materials.

Maybe she's just doing what she appears to be doing: trying to make CBS News the first well-financed competitor to Fox, all while hoping she'll get the chance to do the same at CNN if Larry and David Ellison buy its parent company and hand control of the news channel to her.

But Weiss is a coastal elitist, and many coastal elitists -- Ezra Klein, for instance -- fell for the notion that Charlie Kirk was a widely beloved, massively popular figure before his death. Many mainstream media figures responded to Donald Trump's 2016 victory (despite his popular-vote loss) by concluding that the entire country is MAGA apart from a few small, out-of-touch liberal enclaves. The GOP's midterm losses in 2018, Trump's own loss in 2020, and Democrats' decent showing in the 2022 midterms didn't disabuse these left-centrist elitists of their belief in a fully MAGA America, and Trump's victory in 2024 (by one and a half points) persuaded them that the country had undergone a permanent realignment -- a belief they're only now beginning to shake, as Democrats win (or overperform in) election after election.

Weiss -- who attended Columbia University, lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and is married to a woman -- might still believe that everyone in America who lives more than fifty miles from an ocean is a Trump-loving, Kirk-deifying zealot. But Kirk was never the massively popular, universally beloved figure right-wing propagandists and gullible centrists tell us he was. Here's some polling YouGov did just after his death:

Barely half the country was familiar with Kirk when he died. And as subsequent YouGov polling has made clear, he was far from universally loved:

YouGov says, "Popularity is the % of people who have a positive opinion on a topic." For Kirk, that number is 25%. And he's more disliked than liked.

If Weiss is trying to manufacture consent, I get it, and she's a menace. But I think she might believe her own BS, which means she's in an elitist media bubble and she's a menace.

THE ANTI-TRUMP BACKLASH IS BIG, BUT IT COULD BE A LOT BIGGER

I thought the hype might be real. I thought frustration with the status quo might give Democrat Aftyn Benn a win, or at least a photo finish, in yesterday's special congressional election in Tennessee's 7th district, where Donald Trump won by 22 points last year.

It didn't happen. The Republican candidate, Matt Van Epps, won by 9. That's very good news for Democrats -- a 13-point swing since 2024 is huge -- but it isn't better news than Democrats got on Election Day and in other special elections this year. In The New York Times, Nate Cohn tells us that the numbers suggest a typical power swing in 2026 and 2028, not a massive realignment:

... the winning party in the last five presidential elections has gone on to lose each of the next five midterms — and four of the next five presidential elections.

... the backlash against Mr. Trump and simmering dissatisfaction has yielded a familiar political landscape:

* Mr. Trump’s approval rating is at 41 percent; on average, the prior five presidential winners were at 42 percent at this point in their terms.

* The Democrats lead by about five points in the early generic midterm polls; on average, the party out of power led by four points at this stage after the last five elections.

* The Democrats ran about eight points better in the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia than those states’ lean with respect to the country in the last election; on average, the party out of power ran seven points ahead in New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races without incumbents.

There's only one data point that seems unusual:

* Democrats have run 17 points better in special congressional elections than those districts’ lean in the last election; on average, the party out of power ran six points ahead over the last two decades. This lopsided Democratic advantage at least partly reflects the party’s edge in low-turnout elections, but that will still help the party fare well in the relatively low-turnout midterms.

What this suggests is that Democrats should do well in the next election cycle or two. Republicans and the gatekeepers of conventional wisdom agree on this: Politico's headline is "GOP Frets ‘Dangerous’ Result in Tennessee." A few quotes from that story:

“Tonight is a sign that 2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle,” said one House Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Republicans can survive if we play team and the Trump administration officials play smart. Neither is certain.” ...

“I’m glad we won. But the GOP should not ignore the Virginia, New Jersey and Tennessee elections,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who is retiring from his swingy Omaha-based district, said. “We must reach swing voters. America wants some normalcy.” ...

“It was too close,” said one House GOP leadership aide, who was also granted anonymity to candidly discuss the race.

But the numbers aren't pointing to a transformative change in American politics -- a wipeout that consigns the GOP, or at least the Donald Trump/Stephen Miller/Russell Vought/Mike Johnson GOP, to the dustbin of history, and opens the door for truth and reconciliation commissions, Nuremberg-style trials, and significant progressive change. None of that seems likely right now. What seems likely is a fairly ordinary party swing.

A recap of tonight's special election in TN-07 (plus a WAY-TOO-EARLY model of the 2026 midterms). A swing of 13 points would put Dems over 250 seats in the U.S. House. A more reasonable scenario—say, D+6—still gives them the House, and maybe the Senate. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/what-the-s...

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— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) December 2, 2025 at 10:56 PM

We know that Republicans pursue transformative agendas even after close wins -- see 2000, 2016, and 2024. Democrats don't. Maybe that will change if Democrats manage a trifecta in 2028 -- but that's a tall order because Republican dominance in small rural states gives the GOP a Senate advantage.

But will Republicans continue to sink? Jamelle Bouie seems to think so.

a thing to ask yourself re: the GOP's electoral position is what could happen over the next year that could *improve* its position? and what could trump do, plausibly, that might *boost* his numbers with the public?

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 2, 2025 at 9:44 PM

if you struggle to answer either then you have a good sense of how fucked the republicans are right now

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) December 2, 2025 at 9:44 PM

The one thing President Trump could do is accept defeat when, as seems likely, the Supreme Court's Republicans do the bidding of their corporate masters and rule that Trump can't impose tariffs using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. As I've noted a few times, Trump will be able to reinstate most of the tariffs under the terms of other laws that aren't at issue in this Supreme Court case. If he takes the loss and gives up on the tariffs, he'll improve his party's chances in future elections. But I assume he has so much emotional investment in tariffs that he'll reinstate them and wait to be sued again.

Trump and congressional Republicans really might make life in America so awful that Republican electoral losses in the future will be far worse than projected. The loss of Obamacare subsidies for 2026, which seems all but inevitable now, could be a transformative event, as could an AI crash in the financial markets. But for now, I think we're looking at normal politics, not an upheaval.

(And although Trump doesn't seem to be trying to prevent free and fair elections yet -- probably because his ego won't let him admit that his party is hurting -- that could change if the 2026 numbers look really bad for the GOP.)

*****

One last point I want to make: I see that there's some debate over whether the progressive Aftyn Behn was the right candidate for her district.

Despite @aftynbehn.bsky.social generating real excitement with an authentic progressive anti-corruption message and getting closer than anyone in #TN7, *experts* are already dropping predictable “a centrist would’ve done better” takes - as though that hasn’t been tried here many times.

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) December 3, 2025 at 8:02 AM

I don't believe that the 13-point swing happened exclusively because Behn ran a progressive campaign that excited voters. I think the major reason it happened is that there's more interest in voting for Democrats of all stripes than there was in 2024. Progressive campaigns inspire some voters -- Zohran Mamdani's campaign was extraordinary, and Behn's campaign clearly created some excitement -- but they also inspire backlash. (Mamdani didn't win by double digits. Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill did.)

If you wanted to build the ideal Democratic candidate in a lab, I suspect you'd want to create someone who sounds like a transformative progressive (to motivate progressive voters) but also projects a belief in normie-ness and incrementalism. What you'd create, in other words, is Barack Obama in 2008. It's no surprise that he won the largest victory of any presidential candidate in this century.

I'm sorry this is the case. I'd like to believe that more progressive candidates can win huge victories. I just don't see it. I think America needs transformative change, and I think unashamed progressives can win elections outside super-liberal enclaves -- New York City isn't as left-wing as you think -- but I think the excitement advantage is at least partly offset by normie voters' fear of radicalism. I wish it were as easy to elect a left-wing radical in America as it is to elect a right-wing radical, but that's not the country we live in.

WHAT I'D BE SAYING ABOUT THE BOAT STRIKES IF I WERE A TRUMP CRITIC IN CONGRESS

I know we're all focused on the legality of the September 2 "double tap" strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean. But because I think many Americans don't care what harm comes to brown people who appear to be smuggling drugs that are killing Americans in large numbers, I wonder if the most effective line of attack on this undeclared war is to question its legality.

I keep thinking about a paragraph that appeared in a Washington Post story yesterday:

Still, the Defense Department has privately acknowledged to lawmakers that nearly all of the strikes have targeted suspected shipments of cocaine — rather than fentanyl, the leading cause of U.S. overdose deaths. Moreover, most of the narcotics moved through the Caribbean are headed toward Europe and Western Africa rather than the United States.

Yes, we should talk about legality -- America shouldn't be run by proud war criminals. But let's also start asking: Are we putting American servicemembers in harm's way to prevent shipments of drugs to other countries? I thought the policy of this administration was "America First." And given the fact that fentanyl is the drug that's doing the most harm to America, do we have any evidence whatsoever that we're targeting shippers of fentanyl?

The paragraph quoted above links to an earlier Washington Post story that raises serious questions about the purpose of these boat attacks. (I'm continuing to treat reporting from the Post as reliable because the news side of the paper is still clearly a serious journalistic enterprise. It hasn't followed the opinion section into right-wing hackery.) First, it's not clear that their real purpose of the attacks is to stop the flow of drugs:

The military strikes ... [have] brought U.S. forces into striking distance of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro....

“When I saw [an internal document on the strikes],” a senior U.S. national security official said, “I immediately thought, ‘This isn’t about terrorists. This is about Venezuela and regime change.’ But there was no information about what it was really about.”

We're clearly headed for a war with Venezuela -- another war for oil. Many Americans, especially young men, voted for Trump last year in the belief that he'd be less likely than Kamala Harris to embroil us in a forever war. Across the political spectrum, ordinary Americans want to avoid another war for oil. Why not talk more about that?

And if these are strikes aimed at the drug trade, it's not the drug trade that does the most harm to America.

... records and interviews with 20 people familiar with the route or the strikes, including current and former U.S. and international officials, contradict the administration’s claims. The [targeted] passage, they said, is not ordinarily used to traffic synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, present in 69 percent of drug overdose deaths last year. Nor are the drugs typically headed for the United States.

Trinidad and Tobago, a Caribbean nation more than 1,000 miles south and 1,200 miles east of Miami, is both a destination market for marijuana and a transshipment point for South American cocaine bound for West Africa and Europe, according to U.S. officials, Trinidadian police and independent analysts. The fentanyl seized in the U.S., in contrast, is typically manufactured in Mexico using precursors from China and smuggled in through the land border, most often by U.S. citizens....

Most of the South American cocaine bound for North America flows through the Pacific, but some does depart Venezuela through the Caribbean, according to U.S. officials and analysts who track drug routes. Much of it courses overland through the western states of Zulia and Falcón before shipping northward to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic. Some travels by air, departing clandestine airstrips in Maracaibo or Apure state for Central America and onward to Mexico and the United States.

It’s less common, investigators say, to ship U.S.-bound cocaine from the northeastern state of Sucre across the narrow Bocas del Dragón channel to Trinidad — the route the administration has targeted. Trinidad is used far more frequently as a gateway to Europe....

One recently retired senior Trinidadian police official, asked whether Sucre traffickers were bringing drugs intended for the United States, chuckled.

“Why would they use Trinidad and Tobago to transport drugs to the United States, when you have Colombia and Mexico and all of these other places that are closer?”

So are we really launching these strikes in order to stop opioids from coming into America? And if not, what are we really doing and why are we doing it?