Sunday, October 19, 2025

NOW, NOW, DEMOCRATS -- NO DENOUNCING THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION PARTY!

When Donald Trump said last month, in a now-deleted Truth Social post, that "THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD" at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 -- during Trump's first term in office -- some observers asked whether the post was evidence of dementia. So what should we say about the mental faculties of New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher, who apparently doesn't know who's president right now?


In New Jersey, the most expensive attack ad in the governor’s race so far this fall accuses the Republican nominee, Jack Ciattarelli, of wanting to be “the Trump of Trenton.”

In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for governor, has spent millions of dollars casting her Republican rival, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, as an acolyte of President Trump and supporter of his policies. “Sears speaks for Trump,” the narrator warns in one recent ad....

After a year of soul-searching and introspection by Democrats about what they should stand for after losing the White House and Senate in 2024, the party is largely coalescing behind the same message that has united it for the past decade: stopping Donald J. Trump.

From coast to coast, the tactical decision to continue centering Mr. Trump in advertising in the closing stretch of 2025 contests has left some party strategists concerned about a missed opportunity to forge a more forward-looking vision.
Look, I get it: Democrats need to articulate an agenda of their own. But this is written as if Trump is in the rear-view mirror and Democrats still won't stop talking about him. Trump -- I hope you're sitting down for this, Shane -- is the president of the United States right now. If Democrats need a "forward-looking vision," remember that Trump will also be president going forward, for the next three years (at least!).

What's more, Trump is threatening to make himself the de facto governor or mayor of any state or city that displeases him. And he's doing great harm to Virginia and New Jersey right now -- firing thousands of government workers who are Virginia residents, moving to "terminate" work on a tunnel that would connect New Jersey and New York's Penn Station. He could send troops to any location he chooses in either of those states at any time.

Goldmacher implies that the Republican candidates in these races -- Jack Ciattarelli in New Jersey and Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia -- are relentlessly focused on local issues.
“New Jersey’s a mess, and all Mikie Sherrill wants to talk about is President Trump,” Mr. Ciattarelli complained in one spot. “Come on. What does the president have to do with rising property taxes and higher electricity bills?” ...

“While Mikie Sherrill has focused her entire campaign on how much she hates Donald Trump, people here in New Jersey are focused on who can fix the state and only one candidate is talking about that,” said Chris Russell, an adviser to Mr. Ciattarelli.
Really? Ciattarelli is "focused on who can fix the state"?

Here's the YouTube page for Ciattarelli's campaign. Notice the four most recent videos:


The most recent one is a reminder that Ciattarelli was born in New Jersey and Sherrill wasn't, which segues into an attack on Sherrill for earning money on stocks during her time in Congress. The others are an effort to suggest that Sherrill is covering up involvement in a cheating scandal when she was at the U.S. Naval Academy more than thirty years ago, another attack on her stock gains, and ... a Ciattarelli video rally with Donald Trump. Where's the focus on issues?

And here's a complete transcript of a Ciattarelli ad released in the summer:
Ignore the BS. Only one candidate for governor earned President Trump’s endorsement: Jack Ciattarelli.

President Trump called Jack a winner who will fight tirelessly for New Jersey.

Jack Ciattarelli: the Trump choice for governor.



And in Virginia right now, Winsome Earle-Sears seems to be focused primarily on attacking Spanberger because she won't ask the Democratic candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, to drop out of the race following the release of inflammatory 2022 texts.


And Earle-Sears is attacking two past presidents, Joe Biden and Barack Obama:



Meanwhile, the issue she seems most focused on that could be considered local is ... trans athletes.


Oh, and also: Earle-Sears believes that you shouldn't vote for Spanberger because other Virginia Democrats equated Antifa and U.S. troops.



We're in the midst of a cold civil war. Both parties campaign on their voters' abhorrence of the other side. But I guess it's only bad when Democrats do it.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:00 AM 0 comments

Saturday, October 18, 2025

FEAR ISN'T THE REASON REPUBLICANS ARE TALKING ABOUT THE NO KINGS RALLIES

I'm heading out to the Manhattan No Kings rally soon. I'm hoping for a huge nationwide turnout and for a peaceful day with no arrests, no violence, and no property damage. I hope the policing is restrained and respectful. (I've been to a lot of demos this year in New York. The police, for the most part, have been surprisingly calm.)

But I have concerns about today, because Republicans have been talking about No Kings a lot. I've been going to demonstrations since the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter reinstated draft registration, and in all that time the administrations we were protesting never acknowledged the existence of the protests -- certainly not to the extent we've seen Republicans talk about No Kings in the past week or two.

I don't think they're doing this because they're afraid. They're doing this because, rightly or wrongly, they see today's rallies as something they can leverage in their war against democracy and pluralism.

If you want to know what the Republican Party is thinking at any given time, go to the Fox News website. Right now, here's what you'll see:


I bet you can guess (((who the billionaire is))).

The story tells us:
New York City organizers embedded in the global intifada to destroy the state of Israel moved Friday to join the controversial "No Kings" protests planned for today, despite the peace deal reached between Israel and Hamas.

"UAW Labor for Palestine" and "NYC Labor for Palestine" quietly posted a call-to-action for the "Palestine Labor Solidarity Contingent" to meet Saturday at 11 a.m. at Duarte Square at the corner of Grand Street and Canal Street in midtown Manhattan and then flow into the #NoKings protests planned to protest President Donald Trump.

They’re not alone. Around the country, anti-Israel blocs are slotting themselves into the "No Kings" protests as a "Palestine Contingent" and "Socialist Contingent," positioning their messages "front and center," as Seattle activists put it, "from Providence to Palestine."

The alignment underscores a strategic pivot in the global intifada’s next phase, experts say, carrying the anti-Israel message into any high-energy civic protest, even after Hamas agreed to a ceasefire by linking "Free Palestine" to domestic fights like ICE, police and "fascism."
This is a scaremongering appeal to American Jews and Christian Zionists, but it also harks back to the post-9/11 era. Palestinian = swarthy Muslim = evil terrorist. This is "the global intifada" aimed at killing you in your bed in Bugtussle, Arkansas, Mr. Fox Viewer.

Yet the big villain here is the right's favorite Jewish Antichrist.
Billionaire donor George Soros is reportedly funding many of the organizations leading the "No Kings" protests, like Indivisible, whose co-founders, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, received a $3 million two-year grant last year from Soros’s Open Society Foundations for "social welfare activities." Details about the "Palestine Contingent" weaving into the "No Kings" protests raises new questions about the way big Democratic donors like Soros are funneling nonprofit dollars into a professional protest industry that is fractious, divisive and partisan, potentially in violation of tax and nonprofit laws.

... According to a public database of the protest’s organizers, compiled by the Pearl Project, a journalism initiative, the protest’s "partners" include 265 mostly nonprofit organizations, including some anti-Israel groups, like Jewish Voice for Peace, exploiting their nonprofit benefits to wage a political war against the sitting president.
This, as you know, is a major part of the White House plan for establishing a permanent one-party state: a legal assault on liberal-leaning groups that neutralizes them prior to the 2026 midterms, and wipes them out by 2028.

In the near future, we're going to hear a lot about tax-exempt organizations that are seen as fronts for "the Democrat Party," so let's remember that many tax-exempt organizations lean pro-GOP. The Heritage Foundation is tax-exempt. So is the Federalist Society. So is Turning Point USA. Even extremist right-wing organizations such as Identity Evropa and the Oath Keepers Educational Foundation have received tax-exempt status. If their main purpose is "education" and they avoid direct involvement in electoral politics, they can be granted this status.

This is a well-established principle:
Big Mama Rag, a radical feminist nonprofit magazine, lost its tax exemption in the late 1970s. The IRS revoked its charitable status upon seeing that the magazine refused to publish views contrary to its own. When the magazine fought back, an appeals court determined that the criteria the IRS and a district court had used to deny exemption were unconstitutional because they were based on the organization’s constitutionally protected views.

This case set an important precedent: The government considers charities advancing unpopular views to be educational enough to keep their tax-exempt status.

The IRS now evaluates educational methods, not content.
But the Trump regime intends to attack the tax-exempt status of these groups, and to shame them publicly along the way.

Will it work? I don't know. I know that Republicans are hoping there'll be violence or smashed windows at today's demonstrations, which they can blame on Soros, thus bolstering their case against groups he helps finance. Will there be right-wing efforts to provoke violence today? It's possible. It's also possible that the White House doesn't feel the need to devote resources to that sort of thing, which could backfire.

Or Fox might simply assume that one of its usual montages -- the most inflammatory signs, the most pink-haired and pierced protesters, plus a few signs from organizations like the Revolutionary Communist Party -- will be enough to scare Grandma and Grampa in Bugtussle ... and Grampa in the White House.

I think the overwhelming majority of demonstrations today will fit Ed Burmila's description:


But She Guevara's more paranoid vision might be accurate in one or two places. Be a little bit wary, but be righteous and peaceful out there today. And loud.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:25 AM 0 comments

Friday, October 17, 2025

A NOUN, A VERB, AND "HEALTHCARE": A NEW POLL CONFIRMS THAT DEMOCRATIC CONSULTANT-SPEAK ISN'T WORKING

Last month, I posted results from a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that voters favor Republicans over Democrats on nearly every issue.


Democrats had solid leads over Republicans on only three issues: women's rights and the environment (which are liberal-coded) and healthcare (which consultants tell Democratic politicians to talk about incessantly, even when they're asked about other issues). In the Reuters poll, Democrats had a small lead on respect for democracy -- and trailed on crime, immigration, foreign conflicts, the economy, guns, and -- despite the fact that Donald Trump is president -- extremism and corruption.

Now we have an AP-NORC poll with similar results. It's not quite as bad for Democrats, but only because AP-NORC asked respondents about a smaller number of issues.


This is what happens when Democrats, following the advice of consultants, treat reporters' questions on every conceivable subject as opportunities to "pivot," usually to healthcare, the only issue on which Democrats are favored in this poll.

I think these "pivots" are a terrible idea, as you know if you happened to read my comment in response to Yastreblyansky's post on Monday. Yas favorably quoted a remark by Establishment congressman Ritchie Torres of New York in an NPR interview on the shutdown:
Look, my constituents want the Democratic Party to fight. Like, those of us who are Democrats have a simple choice. We can either stand by passively and allow Donald Trump to gut our democracy, to gut our health care, or we can fight. And we've chosen to fight for the health care of the American people. And the majority of Americans want to see an agreement that both reopens the government but also preserves health care - affordable health care for tens of millions of Americans.
Yas's take:
Note how he doesn't dismiss the democracy issue in favor of the kitchen table issue in there, the way you might have expected his kind of "moderate" to do, he incorporates the democracy issue into the argument, which is pretty good.
But what I see is Torres dodging the issue of democracy and pivoting to healthcare as hard as he can. In a short answer, he says "healthcare" four times. It seems to me that he can't run away from the subject of democracy fast enough.

We can disagree on this, but it should be obvious from the polls that voters aren't hearing what they want to hear from Democrats on most issues. They're not even hearing a clear, coherent message from Democrats on the economy and inflation -- issues on which Trump is wildly unpopular.

How unpopular? Nate Silver's polling average has Trump's overall job approval rating at -7.4% -- but on the economy overall, he's at -14.6%, and on inflation he's at an abysmal -27.2%. In one September poll, from Marquette University, disapproval of Trump's handling of inflation was 71%. Approval was only 29%. That's -42%. Why aren't Democrats hammering away at Trump specifically on inflation? Why aren't they calling it "Trumpflation"? Whty aren't they denouncing the inflationary tariffs every chance they get?

Every so often you'll hear a proposal for a "shadow cabinet" -- a team of Democrats who'll critique Trumpism point by point. Here's an American Prospect piece on the subject from March:
Imagine a shadow Treasury secretary explaining the tangible downsides of [Scott] Bessent’s pro-billionaire actions; a shadow interior secretary condemning Doug Burgum’s public lands giveaways; a shadow labor secretary denouncing Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s attacks on worker protections; a shadow transportation secretary underscoring how [Elon] Musk stands to benefit from the privatization of air traffic control infrastructure; a shadow health and human services secretary defending public health from RFK Jr.’s ill-informed blitz; a shadow housing and urban development secretary slamming Scott Turner’s attempts to hurt low-income tenants; a shadow Environmental Protection Agency administrator ripping Lee Zeldin’s accommodation of polluting corporations; and a shadow U.S. trade representative explaining how Trump policy is undermining a nascent manufacturing renaissance.
Okay, so what happened?

In April, Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin announced the formation of a "People's Cabinet" --
a new project from the DNC that will leverage a deep bench of qualified policy experts, national and local leaders, as well as community voices who – all working together – will cut through the lies and speak directly to the American people about the reality of the Trump administration’s reckless and dangerous agenda.
The announcement happened, a few members were named (including Robert Reich, Martin O'Malley, and former Wisconsin lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes), and then ... nothing. Or next to nothing. Google tells me that a New York state senator, James Skoufis, was named to the People's Cabinet in May. That's all I see in the first couple of pages of search results. There's a Democratic-leaning podcast called The People's Cabinet, but it isn't having much of an impact either.

What I like about the shadow cabinet idea is the belief that it's important for Democrats to talk about every issue. What I don't like is the fact that the members of the DNC's shadow cabinet aren't in office and are struggling to get airtime.

Meanwhile, reporters are already interviewing Democratic officeholders. Why can't they "cut through the lies and speak directly to the American people about the reality of the Trump administration’s reckless and dangerous agenda" -- all of it, not just what he and congressional Republicans are doing to healthcare?

If you're in the House or the Senate, you should be able to talk articulately about every issue, foreign or domestic. This is especially true if you're a party leader. Obviously, some members of Congress will have issues they're particularly qualified to address. But Democrats need to talk about everything. They need to have serious proposals on every subject. No more pivots. Otherwise, the polling on the two parties will continue to look the way it does in those Reuters/Ipsos and AP-NORC polls.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:00 AM 0 comments

Thursday, October 16, 2025

THE SUPREME COURT PLANS TO STEAL 19 HOUSE SEATS FOR THE GOP AND DEMOCRATS SHOULD GET ANGRY NOW

Last week, Politico reported on the possible outcome of a Supreme Court case focused on the only major provision of the Voting Rights Act that hasn't been gutted yet by our Republican Supreme Court:
Ahead of the court’s Oct. 15 rehearing of Louisiana v. Callais — a case that has major implications for the VRA — two voting rights groups are sounding the alarm, warning that eliminating Section 2, a provision that prohibits racial gerrymandering when it dilutes minority voting power, would let Republicans redraw up to 19 House seats to favor the party and crush minority representation in Congress.

That calculation, made in a new report from Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund ... would all but guarantee Republican control of Congress.
The case was heard last year, but a rehearing was scheduled for this year. Oral arguments took place yesterday, and it's now universally acknowledged that the six Republican justices will vote to hand those 19 seats to their party. Here's The New York Times:
The Supreme Court appeared poised on Wednesday to weaken a key provision of a landmark civil rights law by sharply limiting the ability of lawmakers to use race as a factor in drawing voting maps, which could lead to widespread redistricting efforts.

If the justices determine that lawmakers cannot consider race when drawing districts, the consequences for the country’s political balance could be sweeping. The decision could end the practice, endorsed by the court for decades, of crafting congressional districts with the purpose of helping minority voters elect the candidates of their choice.
Black districts tend to be Democratic districts. Republican states would like to eliminate those Democratic districts, and now it's clear that the Supreme Court intends to let them do that.
Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi could have all of their Democratic members ousted.
In Mississippi, more than 36% of the population is Black. Alabama is more than 25% Black. South Carolina is nearly 25% Black.

Louisiana, the state that's suing, also has a substantial Black population. Elie Mystal writes:
The state has six Congressional districts. After the 2020 Census, the state produced a map where five of those districts were majority white. But Louisiana is only 56 percent white, and 31 percent Black. Simple math should tell you that there should be at least two districts in Louisiana that are majority-minority....

Louisiana was sued by the NAACP after the 2020 census, and a court ordered the state to redraw its maps, producing two majority-minority districts.

A group of white plaintiffs in Louisiana then counter-sued the state over its new, less racist maps, arguing (wait for it) that this application of the VRA violated their constitutional rights. The white litigants were arguing that their overrepresentation in Congress is permissible and that attempts to use the VRA to stop them is the real Constitutional violation.
And the Supreme Court intends to give those white litigants what they want.

Can the Supremes be stopped? It seems unlikely, but Democrats and liberal/progressive activists should try.

Even as the Supreme Court has become more and more partisan and more and more corrupt, critics have maintained a certain level of respect for the institution. The Court's intentions are treated as not completely knowable in advance. Its rulings are greeted with, at worst, muttered disgruntlement. We don't get mad, and we certainly don't get mad in advance. It's the Supreme Court! It's sacred!

Screw that. We need to start talking about these highly partisan legislators in robes with the same lack of reverence we show other politicians we don't like. In this case specifically, we should say that we know the fix is in and we know the outcome: A Republican Supreme Court plans to steal 19 House seats for the GOP.

Mainstream Democrats should express outrage about that in advance. The rest of us should march and protest and write letters and make phone calls to the Supreme Court -- hell, if they're going to be legislators pretending to be justices, we should treat them the way we treat legislators.

The Supreme Court's six Republicans aren't Donald Trump -- he shares their radical-right agenda, but unlike Trump, they've tried to get the agenda enacted incrementally and stealthily. Trump loudly proclaims that he's putting his thumb on the scale for the GOP; the Supreme Court's Republicans act on the GOP's behalf (and the plutocracy's behalf) quietly and in a stepwise manner, hoping we potted frogs won't notice as the cooking water gradually comes to a boil.

The Court's Republicans stay under the radar because their work isn't on video and their words rarely become viral soundbites. The decisions they write, including the ones that are most devastating to our democracy, are written in a dense legalese that's about as quotable as an end user license agreement. That's why they're rarely the main characters in our news cycle, even though they've arguably done more damage to America than Trump.

So we should make them the main characters. We should talk about their plan to steal 19 seats for the GOP. We should say this until everyone who pays even a small amount of attention to politics knows about that plan and knows the number 19.

We should do this because the Supreme Court's Republicans are accustomed to flying under the radar. They expect normie Americans not to be paying attention to them. I know that publicity didn't alter the Dobbs decision after it leaked, but if there's a 1% chance that they can be persuaded not to do this, it'll be because we call them on the intended ruling before they can issue it.

Even if this doesn't work, it's good to encourage the public to have a healthy disrespect for the current Supreme Court. They shouldn't be seen as thoughtful mandarins wisely applying arcane knowledge in their quiet chambers. They should be perceived as the grubby political hacks that they are.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:41 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

THE WORST THING ABOUT HATE SPEECH IS THE HATE PART

I'm back. Thank you, Yas, for smart posting while I was away (and I hope my comment on your second post wasn't too harsh).

The biggest story in politics right now concerns a Telegram chat in which Young Republicans said vile things about Jews, Blacks, Indians, and other groups.
Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

... When Luke Mosiman, the chair of the Arizona Young Republicans, asked if the New Yorkers in the chat were watching an NBA playoff game, Giunta responded, “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.” Giunta elsewhere refers to Black people as “the watermelon people.”

Hendrix made a similar remark in July: “Bro is at a chicken restaurant ordering his food. Would he like some watermelon and kool aid with that?”

Hendrix was a communications assistant for Kansas’ Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach until Thursday. He also said in the chat that, despite political differences, he’s drawn to Missouri’s Young Republican organization because “Missouri doesn’t like f--s.”
This isn't a problem just because the words used are indelicate or prohibited in polite society. This is a problem because of how easily these young Republicans dehumanize individuals and groups they don't like. Dehumanization enables hate -- real hate, the kind of hate that leads those in power to deprive those out of power of basic human and civic rights.

The man all these young people look up to, Donald Trump, certainly doesn't believe his enemies deserve to be treated as full citizens. We see this in Trump's handling of the shutdown:
Two weeks into the government shutdown, the Trump administration has frozen or canceled nearly $28 billion that had been reserved for more than 200 projects primarily located in Democratic-led cities, congressional districts and states, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

But this goes beyond funding. The Bulwark's Andrew Egger responds to a Truth Social post in which Trump claimed that Joe Biden (who wasn't president at the time) "PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6":
The post is the core of how Trump sees the world: Trump people and Biden people, heroes and villains, patriots and terrorists, angels and demons. All political actors are sorted into two great camps, and what matters aren’t any of the actual relevant facts about their behavior, or their motivations, or their leadership. All that matters is whether Trump perceives them as loyal allies or outside agitators. He may have been president on January 6th. But an FBI that wasn’t jumping to do his will at that given moment was a Biden FBI, in his brain.

It isn’t just the tweets—Trump now runs the whole government this way. It’s the belief that underlies freezing half-finished green energy infrastructure projects, or purging law enforcement agents because they happened to work on January 6th cases, or carrying out firings at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency because he’s still mad at Chris Krebs. These people are the demons—they’re Biden-coded—so all you can do is root them out. On the flip side, there’s the pledges he has made to police officers not to prosecute abusive behavior, his firings of a host of internal government watchdogs, his dead-lettering of the Hatch Act and of corruption laws. All these things only exist to constrain him and his allies—the good guys.
Trump told us at Charlie Kirk's memorial that he hates his opponents. He wasn't kidding.

And as a recent Economist poll notes, Republican voters -- not just young Republicans brain-poisoned by internet chat, but Republicans of all ages -- hate their opponents and want Trump to take revenge on them.


Trump doesn't deserve all (or even most) the blame for this. I blame the right-wing media, particularly Fox News, which over the last few decades has used simplistic tales of conservative purity and liberal evil to teach Republican voters -- including Trump -- that some Americans are worthy and others are subhuman.

And yet in recent years it's been liberals and progressives who've been chided for intolerance. They're more likely to end friendships based on ideology! They won't date right-wingers! Is it possible that conventional wisdom has this all wrong? Is it possible that liberals and progressives avoid right-wingers not because we're more intolerant, but because we know how much right-wingers hate us and how evil they think we are?

At Bluesky, Annette Gordon-Reed responds to the story about the Telegram chat:
You may remember the articles criticizing liberal students for their hesitancy to make friends with conservative students—alleging that they were less open-minded than their conservative counterparts.

... consider this story when we think of those previous articles.

Many students don’t want to associate with students who easily express hostility towards Black people & Jewish people. That’s completely understandable.
Are we the intolerant ones if what we're unwilling to tolerate is deep, dehumanizing hate?
Posted by Steve M. at 11:20 AM 0 comments

Monday, October 13, 2025

Beutlerian Jihad

T-Shirt by BumLung, $23 from Etsy.

 Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!

Brian Beutler, a veteran of Talking Points Memo and The New Republic, now mainly active as a Substacker, is one of the best at doing this one thing I can't stand, which he was up to again over the weekend: getting himself so worked up over Democratic politicians' failure to thwart the far right in its evil plans that he ends up assigning them all the blame, in a kind of vicious Murc's Law feedback loop—since only Democrats have agency, they are the effective actors when the right succeeds: they must be the ones responsible for the way our country is turning rapidly into a police state, they literally made it happen, through their fecklessness and timidity and lack of leadership. While Miller and Vought are diligently constructing fascism, Beutler is so busy complaining about Schumer and Jeffries that he hardly has time to talk about that.

Which isn't to say he doesn't have a point about Schumer and Jeffries, or whoever he's mad at at a given moment. What I want to say, rather, is that it isn't a good approach to doing something about it; it's a counsel of despair, frankly, which precludes the reader from trying.

This was especially evident in this particular post, where he's responding, precisely, to readers asking "What can we do?"

...the answer is unsatisfying, because it’s the same one you’ll get everywhere: Do what JB Pritzker says. Protest peacefully, record abuses on your phone, share the videos widely. Join organized marches—if you’re a U.S. citizen, the incremental risk of protesting is minimal. You’re likelier to be hit by a falling object or trampled to death at a concert than you are to be targeted for carrying a sign, or being an Indivisible volunteer or anything else. If you’re able, and if it comes to it, engage in genuine civil disobedience, though there’s more danger there: a greater risk of arrest, assault, political harassment.

But my sense is that what costs people like us sleep at night isn’t that we aren’t doing enough. It’s that we’ve lost confidence in the people who are in positions to do more. It’s become fashionable to repeat cliches like “nobody is coming to save us,” and “we’re going to have to save each other.” We surely do need stamina and self-sufficiency, but mantras like these let people in power—people who sought power, and people who have power by dint of wealth—off the hook too easily. They should know what we expect of them.

That last sentence sounds like a pretty good suggestion, except it turns out to be a suggestion to tell the politicians not what we want them to do, but who we want them to be: Imagining himself in the position of a future historian after decades of post-constitutional decay followed by a restored republic, Beutler wonders not whether the denizens of the past could have saved themselves, but how he would go about judging them, like the historian as Dante, assigning them to their various circles in Hell or Purgatory or Heaven; how he'd

assess the actions of the people who had the most power to slow or stop the authoritarian takeover. People like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and (before Jeffries) Nancy Pelosi. People like Pritzker and Gavin Newsom, but also people like Joe Biden and Merrick Garland and Gretchen Whitmer and John Fetterman and Tim Cook and Bill Gates and on and on.

Who would come out of that analysis looking good, and who would come out looking bad? Who would emerge as an unheralded prophet, and who would be remembered as the most Chamberlainesque appeaser?

I mean, why not imagine a history where the disaster is forestalled, and speculate on how it was done? Where the German Communists reject Stalin's orders, you know, and form an electoral alliance with the Socialists? Or whatever it takes in a particular case? Instead of whining about how octogenarian Nancy Pelosi seems to have taken a dim view of progress in recent years, let's remember how she counted the votes on behalf of legislation that will endure when she was a sprig in her 70s.

More broadly, it seems to me that dismissing "Nobody is coming to save us" as a fashionable cliché is showing a crucial misunderstanding of representative democracy and how it works. The point of saying it is that you can't expect your legislators, in particular, the people who come to power through the inevitable compromise and trimming of the electoral process to be paragons of imagination and bravery, because that's mostly not what gets you elected. They need to be encouraged to save us; they need to be shown what they have to do and assured that they can get away with it.  Our responsibility as citizens has to extend beyond election day to helping them to figure out what to do next, and not, by the way, by yelling at them for the disappointment they've brought us; but by showing a little faith in their willingness to help and their native intelligence.

Which might not have worked with Joe Manchin, you know, because of the intelligence thing, but might with the normally disappointing Ritchie Torres, who's come out as a real combatant in the ongoing shutdown in the last couple of weeks:

Look, my constituents want the Democratic Party to fight. Like, those of us who are Democrats have a simple choice. We can either stand by passively and allow Donald Trump to gut our democracy, to gut our health care, or we can fight. And we've chosen to fight for the health care of the American people. And the majority of Americans want to see an agreement that both reopens the government but also preserves health care - affordable health care for tens of millions of Americans.

Just for example. Note how he doesn't dismiss the democracy issue in favor of the kitchen table issue in there, the way you might have expected his kind of "moderate" to do, he incorporates the democracy issue into the argument, which is pretty good. Where Beutler complains about politicians who want to

[i]gnore everyone demanding more fight in the here and now—they’re liable to push you into a “trap” that will “increase the salience” of crime and immigration. Talk about health care instead.

Torres has found the stuff to use fighting words as he's talking about health care, and that's an improvement. Maybe somebody talked to him. 

You know what else people are talking to their congressmembers about is immigration, as videos of ICE abuses circulate, and a lot of simple old rural white folk are starting to get upset with the mistreatment of people they like from personal experience. That's an issue more directly keyed to the questions of constitutionalism, because of the flagrant disregard of human and constitutional rights. It will take Congress a lot longer to get around to it, probably, given the current Republican majorities, but we can start preparing them now.

The main thing is, fixating on Real Leaders too often lands us with the ones who aren't interested in doing what we want them to do; democracy promotes the Profiles in Discourage, so to speak. And that's a good thing, in a sense. If nobody's coming to save us, that's democracy: it's our job to make them.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names. 

Posted by Yastreblyansky at 5:18 PM 0 comments

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Moving Mountains


Mountain moving, via.


I'd been struggling for a couple of days with the need to write a post commemorating the second anniversary of the Gaza war on October 7 when the news came that the negotiators in Sharm el Sheikh, including the Israeli and Palestinian delegations who had arrived on Monday, had brought the war to an end, sort of, or were about to do so, or that the beginning of its ending had been at any rate announced, on Donald Trump's social media platform under his account:

"Well, I'm blessed!" said the president. 

Not by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, though, which pointedly announced that they had already made their final decision (as it turned out this morning for the Venezuelan democracy advocate María Corina Machado) on Monday, that is days before Israel and Hamas assented to the 20-point Trump peace plan—Norwegian politicians are warning that Trump might express his rage in tariffs. The White House has issued its official complaint:

"President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives. He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will," White House spokesman Steven Cheung said in a post on X. "The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace."

I have to say I very much welcome the plan as far as I understand it, in spite of its seemingly being the old mountain-mover's accomplishment. It obviously can't make up for the suffering of the last two years, of those Israelis especially living in the desert kibbutzim near the Gaza border who endured the October 7 attack and of all the Gazans who bore the constant bombing and deprivation thereafter, victims on both sides of unspeakable collective punishments—it's so much better if that stops than if it doesn't. And there seems to be a great deal of hope that it really is stopping, for some kind of long term, though the initial declaration that the war was over has been giving way to more cautious reference to a ceasefire.

Read more »
Posted by Yastreblyansky at 12:48 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 08, 2025

GONE AGAIN

I'm traveling again -- I'll be gone for a week, but I believe Yastreblyansky and maybe Tom Hilton will be posting here in my absence. Stop by, and I'll see you next Wednesday.
Posted by Steve M. at 5:12 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 07, 2025

DID VIVEK RAMASWAMY JUST END HIS POLITICAL CAREER?

What the hell is Vivek Ramaswamy thinking?
Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Tuesday plans to call on the GOP to embrace a less overtly belligerent and oppositional posture, Axios has learned.

...Ramaswamy will be the featured speaker at a Montana State University event being held by Turning Point USA, the organization [Charlie] Kirk co-founded.

According to his prepared remarks, Ramaswamy will say the conservative moment is at a "fork in the road" and urge them to abandon its fixation on "owning the libs" in favor of a less overtly confrontational posture.

"We can still stand for truth, while viewing those who believe in falsehoods not as our enemies who must be vanquished, but instead as our fellow citizens who have lost their way and must be shown the light," Ramaswamy will say.

"Not to berate them, embarrass them, and banish them -- but to pray for them, to talk to them, and to persuade them," he will add.
In Ramaswamy's view, conservatives have a monopoly on truth and the rest of us "have lost their way and must be shown the light." Gosh, thanks, Vivek. I really feel seen and respected.

But sure, it would be good if the right abandoned its total war on Democrats, liberalism, and progressivism. It would be good if Republicans concluded that they need to coexist with the rest of us with and accept that we'll wield political power sometimes.

But they won't. As A.R. Moxon recently wrote, quoting Ezra Klein, "'we are going to have to live here with each other' is the exact premise that Republicans do not agree with any of us about." From Co-President Russell Vought on down, they want to purge all liberal and progressive influence from every institution in American life. They want their authority to supersede that of Democrats in cities and states that are currently blue. (As I've told you a few times, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, wants Republican governors to "de-charter" Democratic-run cities and take them over, a plan that President Trump seems to be instituting at a national level.)

And, of course, rank-and-file right-wingers simply despise us. They hate everything about us. Their main form of entertainment is watching Fox News, which portrays us as dangerous freaks on a 24/7 basis.

I think I know why Ramaswamy is doing this. He's running for governor next year and he's certain to win the Republican nomination because he has Donald Trump's endorsement -- but he knows that Democrats sometimes overperform in midterms when there's a Republican president. A fairly popuar Democrat, Sherrod Brown, is likely to be on the ballot as the party's Senate candidate, and at least one poll has shown him trailing, but within the margin of error. Ramaswamy might believe that he'll need a few swing voters to win the gubernatorial election.

Ramaswamy might also believe that Trumpism will be unpopular even in his red state by next year, or that "MAGA" will fade if the president really is in poor health and dies in the next year or so. (I believe that "MAGA" is just a subset of the longstanding hate-Democrats cult and will easily survive Trump's demise. And even if Trump becomes increasingly unpopular, the right-wing noise machine will simply create new Two Minutes' Hates that don't rely on Trump. Recall that the right's jihads against Critical Race Theory, DEI, and trans people largely began just after the 2020 election, when many people thought Trump was a spent force and the GOP appeared to need a rebranding.)

It's conceivable that Ramaswamy merely wants us to think he's taking the high road, while he has no intention of distancing himself from the GOP's war on Democrats and liberals. He'll seem like a high-minded post-Trump conservative, and he'll be the subject of glowing feature stories in The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic without ever challenging his party's nasty messaging.

Or he'll drop this peacemaker act when he realizes no one in his party wants it. (He'll need to if he wants to win a Republican presidential primary in 2028 or beyond.)

But if Ramaswamy is sincere about this, he's cooked. Recently, when I did that podcast with DougJ, he reminded me of a post I wrote in 2011 in which I wrote about Jon Huntsman, who was looking to challenge Barack Obama in 2012, as a politcal version of M.C. Hammer trying to hold on to his audience at a time when his family-friendly rap style was rapidly losing market share to gangsta rap. In the post, I quoted a New York Times story in which Huntsman was interviewed by Matt Bai:
Didn't he at some point have to get in tune with the emotions of his party's electorate? "I had one person who came up to me at an event in Florida," he replied, "and said, 'If you get into this, are you going to take it to the president, take him down and all this, eviscerate him?' And I said, 'Ma'am, you’ve just described a losing strategy for the next Republican.' You're either able to take a message to the heart and soul of the American people that they can connect with, or you're done.

"I think what's going to drive this election, really, are two things -- authenticity and the economy," Huntsman told me. "I think people have become so disillusioned by the professional nature of politics -- the organizations around politicians, the way that politicians approach problem-solving, the way in which they go about their daily business. There has been very little in the way of authenticity in politics in recent years."
Huntsman ran in 2012 and withdrew after getting less than one percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses and losing the New Hampshire primary by more than 20 points.

The fever hadn't broken then. It won't break any time soon.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:13 AM 0 comments

Monday, October 06, 2025

DID AN ACT OF POLITICAL TERRORISM PUT AN 81-YEAR-OLD DEMOCRAT IN THE HOSPITAL?

This happened over the weekend:
An inferno ripped through the waterfront home of a South Carolina judge and her ex-senator husband on Saturday, leaving three people hospitalized, according to authorities and reports.

Circuit Court Judge Diana Goodstein’s Edisto Beach home went up in flames around midday, sending plumes of black smoke into the air and forcing her husband, former state Sen. Arnold Goodstein (D-Charleston), to jump from the first floor to escape the blaze, the Post and Courier reported....

Sources close to Goodstein’s family confirmed Arnold was airlifted after breaking multiple bones in his hips, legs and feet after escaping from the four-bedroom, four-bathroom home, FitsNews reported.
It won't be easy for Arnold Goodstein to make a full recovery from those injuries -- he's 81 years old.


FITSNews says, "Agents of the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) are investigating" the fire, adding,
... multiple sources close to Goodstein told FITSNews the judge had been receiving death threats in the weeks leading up to the fire.

“She’s had multiple death threats over the years,” a judge close to Goodstein told FITSNews.
This might not be arson, although "S.C. chief justice John Kittredge referenced an 'explosion' on the property in an email update to judges," according to FITSNews.

If this was a targeted attack, we don't know the attacker's motive. Many people develop grievances against judges over the course of their careers.

However, there's this:
Last month, [Judge] Goodstein had temporarily blocked the state’s election commission from releasing its voter files to the Department of Justice, a decision that was openly criticized by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and later reversed by the state Supreme Court. The DOJ had sought the information, including names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and social security numbers, of over three million registered voters as part of President Donald Trump’s March executive order restricting non-citizens from registering to vote. (Non-citizens are already not allowed to vote in federal and state elections.)
Here was Dhillon's tweet:


And, of course, Co-President of the United States Stephen Miller has
repeatedly attacked judges that rule against President Donald Trump, telling supporters they are being oppressed by "judicial tyranny," and even accused a federal judge Trump himself appointed of waging "legal insurrection" when she blocked the administration from sending the National Guard to occupy Portland, Oregon.
Did Congressman Daniel Goldman overreach? Or did he hit a nerve?


In any case, an 81-year-old man is in the hospital. We used to assume that top government officials would express sympathy under circumstances like this, and would want to lower the temperature regardless of the victims' party affiliation. We don't hold Trump to that standard.

Even if this isn't directly linked to the Trump administration's words and deeds, I have to wonder whether Trump is partly responsible for the recent uptick in high-profile attacks, even when the attackers' motives are apolitical, vague, or the product of mental illness -- and even when the attackers are critics of Trump and the right.

Those of us who lives in cities sometimes encounter people who are mentally ill, agitated, and threatening. We've learned to keep calm around these people. It can help reduce their agitation and limits our own risk.

I believe that Donald Trump's total-war presidency is the opposite of this. I think it's leading to agitation among those in the general population who are struggling to resist violent impulses. I also think it's sending a message that conflict and violence are good.

I think even apolitical people who are committing high-profile and very public crimes are responding to the intense agitation in the air. I also think that people with political grievances -- across the political spectrum -- are hearing the leaders of our country say on a daily basis that violence is preferable to peace. Under these circumstances, I'm not surprised that grandiose forms of violence seem to be on the rise, even as ordinary crime is declining.

Violence is in the air. Trump's violent pronouncements and actions are persuading other people to imitate those in authority. And so here we are.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:18 AM 0 comments

Sunday, October 05, 2025

ONE-OFF MOMENTS OF GRACE WON'T SAVE US

David French's work at The New York Times has surprised me: not only has been a harsh critic of Trumpism, he's also sharply critical of evangelical Christianity in America because so many churches value Donald Trump and the Republican Party more than they value the teachings of Jesus. Reading his columns also reminds me of my time as a Catholic, and then a vaguely Christian adolescent -- I didn't turn atheist until I was seventeen, and members of my family continued to be believers.

So I was willing to give French's latest column, "The Grace That Gives Us Hope," the benefit of the doubt -- the religious beliefs of most Americans are closer to French's than they are to mine, so I was hoping he had actually spotted a path away from Trumpism that ordinary Americans mightbe inclined to follow. But he hasn't.

French writes about the response of some Mormons to a recent attack on a Latter-Day Saints church in Michigan that killed four people.
A member of the L.D.S. Church, Dave Butler, started an online fund-raising campaign ... for the family of the shooter. He was killed at the scene and had left behind a wife and young child.

As Sonia Rao, my newsroom colleague reported, the money rolled in. It took only two hours to raise $7,000. By the 12-hour mark, the total reached $100,000. By Friday, more than $300,000 had been raised, much of it donated by Latter-day Saints.

... In true imitation of Christ, who — according to Christian theology — died for us while we were still sinners, Latter-day Saints did not wait to pour out their love. They just gave it, unconditionally, to a family they did not know.
I can be a stony-hearted bastard, but this does move me. But does it reflect an impulse that could save America? French thinks so.
America has witnessed two remarkable acts of forgiveness in the last month. Erika Kirk forgave the man who killed her husband. Latter-day Saints loved the family of the man who massacred their brothers and sisters. A nation that produces such acts of such love is a nation that still has life. It’s a nation that still has hope.

On Tuesday, Kelsey Piper, a staff writer at The Argument, responded to the Latter-day Saints church’s act of love with a beautiful and true statement. “If America is going to make it,” Piper wrote, “it will be because people choose forgiving things they should never have had to forgive over hurting people they have every right to be angry with.”
I wish I agreed, but I don't.

One problem with these acts is that they're perceived as extraordinary. The Christians who praise them see them as over and above -- which means that the Christians who approve of them don't need to question their own behavior. My interpretation of Christian forgiveness is that every Christian should be as forgiving as Erika Kirk says she is. But most American Christians don't expect that. They think her statement of forgiveness was admirable but not morally necessary. That's why they had no cognitive dissonance when Donald Trump took the stage shortly after Kirk and said he hates his enemies. Admirers of Kirk and Trump came away from that event still admiring both of them, because they don't think Christianity requires forgiveness of enemies.

Traditional morality might help us overcoming Trumpism, but the aspect of traditional morality that would be the most useful is moral condemnation, not forgiveness.

We might be saved if right-leaning Christians had a single moral standard, one that would compel them to condemn brutality, heartlessness, corruption, and contempt for the law by people on their own side. Many of them don't approve of Trump's methods even if they approve of his stated goals -- but they would need to recognize that, for instance, the brutality of the ICE crackdown, the terrorizing of children and the elderly, the incarcerations without due process, is all wrong according to their moral code, which they need to apply even if it means their side loses. They need to stop forgiving "their" politicans for deeds they would find unforgivable in "our" politicians.

Needless to say, I don't expect this will ever happen.

Look, I get it. I remember doing moral backflips in reaction to Bill Clinton's exploitative sex life. It seemed necessary to defend him because bad people -- Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Rupert Murdoch, the Kochs and Scaifes -- wanted him destroyed. I'm not proud of that moment. I wish we'd jettisoned Clinton the way we later jettisoned the likes of Anthony Weiner and Andrew Cuomo.

Right-leaning American Christians need to apply their professed moral code to their politicians. And also -- because they mostly regard themselves as great patriots -- they need to apply their secular moral code as well. They should demand respect for the law because that's what the Founding Fathers they claim to revere would have wanted. They should defend free speech for everyone, not just for themselves. They should condemn the self-dealing that has increased the Trump family's wealth by billions.

They won't, of course -- but that's the moral awakening that could save us.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:12 AM 0 comments

Saturday, October 04, 2025

IF THE PARTIES WERE REVERSED, THESE MURDERED TEENAGERS WOULD BE POLITICAL MARTYRS NOW

The New York Times reports on the murder of two teenage girls in New Jersey, and the arrest of a teenage boy who was stalking one of them:
The two 17-year-old girls were riding their e-bikes down a quiet street in a small town on Monday, in the slanting light of a summery fall evening. The girls, Maria Niotis and Isabella Salas, close friends, were with Maria’s family, and they were going to get ice cream.

From down the block, a car came shooting up the street, said Maria’s uncle Emmanuel Niotis. “Next thing you know, there were bodies flying up in the air,” he said.

One twisted bicycle was embedded in the crushed front end of the Jeep S.U.V. The driver fled briefly, prosecutors said. Both girls were pronounced dead at the hospital.

And as word of the driver’s name seeped out, for the girls’ families and friends in Cranford, N.J., heartbreak turned to fury.

The driver, they said, was Vincent Battiloro, also 17, who had been fixated on Maria for months, at least. Maria’s mother told a friend she had called the police multiple times because he had parked outside the family’s house and would not leave. Two friends of Maria’s said he had harassed her. Online, where Vincent has tens of thousands of followers as a video game streamer, he had taunted Maria and her mother a week before the crash, ordering pizzas to their house as a prank.
The Times reports that the young man continued streaming even after his arrest, and even offered his "sincerest condolences to those girls, lost in that tragic accident." Townspeople wondered why he was free after his arrest. (His father and uncle are cops.)

But here's some information that's not in the Times story:

The alleged murderer had also been stalking one of the girls even before Kirk's assassination, but he said that he sent the pizza as vengeance over a Charlie Kirk comment.

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein.bsky.social) October 3, 2025 at 9:49 PM

A report from a New Jersey radio station confirms this:
The video where he addresses the stalking and Charlie Kirk was just one of several that remain online....

In a clip from the same video, which has been posted on X, he accuses Maria of making fun of conservative speaker Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated by a gunman on Sept. 10.

"Hey, whenever Maria sees the pizza guy come, better think of Charlie Kirk for making fun of his f**king death. Stupid ass clown. Just remember that," the teen says. "She made fun of Charlie Kirk's death on TikTok on a repost. Maybe her mother should monitor her social media activity."


This is really a story about stalking and other toxic male activities. The suspect has been accused of circulating nudes of teenage girls without their consent, probably fakes. The Times quotes a text exchange in which he admits to creating fake nudes.
“I did it to one girl,” Vincent wrote. “I’ll do it to another.” He added: “Keep running your mouth and I’ll create your girls nudes” right now.
But imagine if a teenage boy who didn't like Charlie Kirk had killed a teenage girl who did. It wouldn't matter what other reasons there might have been for the murder -- this would have become another example of "the violent left" killing people on the right. The victim's name would be nationally famous. Every other person in America who'd criticized Kirk would be accused of being an accessory to murder. State after state would consider some form or another of "Maria's Law," which would allow prosecutors to treat critics of right-wingers as murder conspirators.

I'm not saying that Democrats should behave like Republicans and reduce every murderer with a political point of view to nothing more than that point of view. The motives of many high-profile murderers aren't simple. Some have forms of mental illness that leave them susceptible to violence. Others are motivated by a mix of ideas, frequently including misogyny. (The 101.5 story notes that the New Jersey murder suspect was known to make reference to Andrew Tate.) And some have a set of political ideas that range across the left-right spectrum, often in ways that don't make much sense.

But at a time when Republicans are arguing that politcal violence is overwhelmingly (or even exclusively) left-wing and that all leftists and liberals are complicit, Democrats should be shouting about the murders that prove Republicans wrong, like the Trump supporter who attacked a Mormon church in Michigan, or the PTSD-afflicted veteran who shot up a restaurant in North Carolina, and who believed that "LGBTQ White Supremacists" wanted to kill him because he was heterosexual and survived an attack in Iraq that he blamed on them. Democrats need to say that it's wrong to blame one side for violence when violent people's ideas can be left, right, center, apolitical, or utterly incoherent.

And they should ask whether Republican elected officials condone the behavior of this young man -- including the harassment directed at Maria Niotis for daring to criticize Charlie Kirk. It certainly seems as if Republicans think it should be legal to stalk a teenage girl if she has what an opinion about Charlie Kirk that Republicans consider incorrect. So what do you say, Republicans?
Posted by Steve M. at 10:49 AM 0 comments

Friday, October 03, 2025

THE FEDERALIST TELLS EZRA KLEIN WHERE HE CAN STICK HIS OLIVE BRANCH

In recent weeks, Ezra Klein has said nice things about Charlie Kirk and has championed the idea that the Democratic Party should run candidates with right-wing positions on issues like abortion and trans rights. These are the thanks he gets from one of the most prominent Republican opinion outlets, The Federalist:


Yes, that's Klein talking to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The piece, by Federalist senior editor John Daniel Davidson, isn't primarily about Klein's work. It's mostly about the cancellation of a Federalist Society event at NYU Law School and an alleged assault on a right-wing reporter in Portland that the reporter said was ignored by the police. All of this, Davidson tells us, is evidence of a conspiracy to silence and brutalize right-wingers that apparently involves literally every leftist and liberal.

Ezra Klein too? Yes, Ezra Klein too. Davidson writes:
A clip from a recent Ezra Klein podcast with Ta-Nehisi Coates has gone viral in part for laying bare the seething intolerance and intellectual hubris of the left.

At one point in their exchange, Klein notes that a majority of Americans disagree with transgenderism. They don’t think men should compete in women’s sports or use women’s bathrooms, and they don’t think anyone should be compelled to use preferred pronouns or affirm that men can become women. Klein says that he and Coates both know that those people are “fundamentally and morally wrong,” but asks what can be done about them, given that they are a majority in America. Klein knows that this majority will never be convinced to adopt his and Coates’ views, and he recognizes, to his credit, that this presents a dilemma: these people must be negotiated with or suppressed by force.
Neither Klein nor Coates ever entertains the notion that anti-trans bigots should be "suppressed by force," of course -- that's a grotesque lie. But go on, John:
Coates, who says Kirk was a “hatemonger” unworthy of mourning, has no real answer. He is not concerned about the dilemma Klein is trying to get him to recognize.
Coates, in fact, is "concerned about the dilemma Klein is trying to get him to recognize." He just doesn't want to focus on what Klein cares most about, which is increasing the number of elected Democrats in Washington.
On the question of transgenderism, Coates believes the conservative view is dehumanizing. “If you think it is OK to dehumanize people,” he says, “then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.” That’s the line he draws.

And that’s where the left is now. Conversation, in their view, is probably not possible with the opposing side. Kirk thought it was, and he dedicated his life to it. Perhaps he was wrong. We’ll see. But for now, it’s not too much to say that Kirk’s assassin and Coates are on the same side of this question. They share the same view on civil discourse. They are not really interested in talking.
Wow, that escalated fast. Ta-Nehisi Coates is on the same side as a political assassin? Because he believes in the full humanity of trans people and regards that belief as non-negotiable?

Let's take a look at this allegedly inflammatory, illiberal call for jackbooted thuggery. It's ... um, shockingly mild-mannered, in both the words and the tone.


Here's a transcript, with Klein in bold:
... a majority of the country, believes things about trans people, about what policy should be toward trans people, about what language is acceptable to trans people, that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong.

And what politically — not in a column or something, but politically — should our relationship with those people be? Do we win them over? Do we compromise with them?

This feels like a very salient question. The Republican Party is going to make sure this is a relentlessly salient question.

Right. I agree with that.

Where does that approach leave us? Where do we go on that?

I think that’s a great question. I think a couple of things.

Again, my tradition is the only thing I have a reference point for, so I’m sorry to keep going back to this. But when I look at the times that we have lost, if I think specifically about the Black tradition, for instance, it’s hard for me to say that politically they did something wrong. You know what I mean? Reconstruction falls. What was the thing that should have been done?
That's it. That, according to Davidson, is Klein and Coates summoning the thugs. It's Coates arguing that Reconstruction was correct because Black people unquestionably should have remained legally equal and able to wield democratic power in the South, and offering that as an analogy to the full civil and human rights trans people unquestionably deserve now.

It's no surprise that Davidson equates Coates with a murderer -- that's how right-wingers prefer to talk about Black people who aren't Republicans. But Klein -- who clearly wants Democrats to run anti-trans candidates if that's what it takes to save other parts of the Democratic agenda -- isn't spared. Davidson concludes:
Coates and Klein and other prominent liberals can formally disavow violence all they want, but it has become impossible to deny that they belong to a political project that has no theory of mind for the right and is unable to grasp why conservatives believe the things they believe. They have arrived at epistemic closure, which is going to involve all of us. Here at the end of the line, erstwhile liberals once so proud of their open-mindedness to rational inquiry are taking refuge in the only thing they have left: the brute application of force.
And there you have it. If liberals or leftists have principles they won't compromise -- or even if they themselves are willing to compomise but have a polite dialogue with someone who'd rather not -- that's "the brute application of force."

Sorry, Ezra -- you can't appease these bastards. They'll still hate you and want you politically silenced, all while lying to their allies that you're the real authoritarian.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:43 AM 0 comments
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