That's my variation on a short verse about taxes ("Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree!") attributed to the late Louisiana
Senator Russell Long.
It's also the FA portion of FAFO that Republican voters were only too happy to
sign up for when they nominated Trump to be their Dear Leader three times,
voted for him three times, and elected him twice.
Farm Bankruptcies Jump In 2025, More To Come In 2026
Farm bankruptcies across the nation have jumped 46% in 2025. You'll never
guess why.
A report from the American Farm Bureau Federation shows that farm
bankruptcies jumped by 46% across the nation. In Wisconsin alone, there
were only 2 bankruptcy filings each in 2023 and 2024. But in 2025, that
number leapt up to sixteen filings.
The reasons for this massive increase in bankruptcies should not be a
surprise to anyone. They include lost markets due to Trump's illegal
tariffs and ballooning costs due to Trumpflation. Everything a farm
needs to operate jumped in cost, but farmers weren't getting nearly
enough back to meet their costs.
Another factor adding to the farmers' woes was the labor issue. With
fewer migrant workers, labor costs rose, squeezing farmers even more.
In Trump's first term, his tariffs and his war on immigrants caused
Wisconsin dairy farms to close at a rate of two per day. To do the same
thing and expect different results is the definition of insanity - or in
Trump's case, dementia.
Unsurprisingly, experts are warning that 2026 is going to be more of
the same, only worse.
In keeping with our farming theme, that is what the fruit of the poison tree
looks like.
Trump Supporter Learns Hard Way ICE Doesn’t Just Target ‘Worst of the
Worst’
A New Jersey couple can’t believe “we were MAGA” after their immigration
ordeal.
A Donald Trump supporter is regretting voting for the president after
her husband was swept up in the administration’s immigration
clampdown.
Sandra Hafraoui’s husband, Abdellatif Hafraoui, spent 108 days in
custody after being detained by ICE at Newark Liberty International
Airport as the couple attempted to fly out on vacation.
Abdellatif, a Moroccan national who has lived in the U.S. for nearly 40
years, was detained despite having no criminal record. He was caught up
in the crackdown because of a missed immigration court date more than a
decade ago that he was not even aware he was scheduled to attend, NJ.com
reported.
Sandra, who voted for Trump in the last three elections, said she is
now reconsidering her MAGA allegiance and the president’s mass
deportation plans due to the treatment her husband endured.
“To think we were MAGA!” she told NJ.com. “You [Trump] said you were
going after the worst of the worst, but instead you ruined our
life.”...
And if these are the poison fruits, this is the seedbed where the poison plant
was rooted, watered, fertilized and allowed to grow big and strong.
From Investigate Midwest, November 13, 2024
Trump support grew in America’s top farming counties despite first-term
trade war
Farming-dependent counties rallied behind Trump with an average of nearly
78% support.
America’s most farming-dependent counties overwhelmingly backed
President-elect Donald Trump in [2024's] election by an average of
77.7%.
Trump has appeared on three presidential ballots, beginning in 2016. In
2020 and 2024, he increased his support nationwide, topping 50% in this
year’s popular vote.
However, Trump also increased his support this year among
farming-dependent counties by nearly two percentage points compared to
2020...
Fuck 'em.
And now, an unfairly out-of-context bit of audio for your listening pleasure:
As longtime readers are aware, the chorus of hundreds of Liberal voices which,
for decades, provided ample evidence and brutally accurate warnings that the
Eisenhower cheese was sliding off the Republican party's cracker and into the
fascist abyss was, by, turns, scornfully, mockingly, angrily and then airily
dismissed for years by Mr. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic.
Ol' Tom held those critiques to be ludicrous on their face. Or, at best,
wild over-reactions by alarmist, Liberal cranks.
Then some time passed and, ok, something has clearly come undone inside the
party of Reagan, but it is asinine to suggest that the rise of Trump has its
roots deep in the Republican party. Gotta be something mechanical and
fixable like a spun bearing or a cracked dilithium crystal, not
structural. And whatever is going on, calling it "fascist" is waaaay out
of line. At best, Trump was a black swan event. A fluke.
[brief driftglass aside: No Tom. It wasn't something mechanical
and fixable. It wasn't a spun ideological bearing. It was your
party's Pretty Hate Machine with a fatal leaking coolant...
...which I was writing about in detail20 fucking years ago.: end brief driftglass aside. We now return to the cartography of ol'
Tom's long, winding, through-gritted-teeth journey to where the Left has been
all along.]
Or, ok, so, Trump's not going away. The fever is not breaking. But
-- and I want to make this 100% clear -- as a child of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!), there is
no way I personally could have known what was happening with the Republican
party in faraway lands like Georgia and Mississippi. Despite the fact
that knowing what's happening with the Republican party is my job.
And anyway, ol' Tom's got nothing to feel guilty about because the Left's
hands are plenty dirty here! (From a since deleted Tom Nichols Tweet
barking at brother Charlie Pierce who had the temerity to point out that Tom
was full of shit.)
You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of
matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.
And now, at last, in February of 2026 -- decades too late -- we arrive here.
Call Them What They Are The Republican Party has become a haven
for Nazi sympathizers. By Tom Nichols
And this is the front-page teaser or "refer" for that story:
The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem How did the GOP become a
haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich?
Great question! Which we will definitely get to in a minute.
But at least as important as what ol' Tom says in this article is where the
article was published. It's in The Atlantic.
And knowing that, you may ask yourself this question: how exactly does
ol' Tom -- who has been wrong, tardy and dismissive all along -- rate a
column in The Atlantic, while the folks who have been right all along
-- folks who ol' Tom routinely derided, ridiculed and blocked from his perch
at The Atlantic -- are still legacy media pariahs?
Again, great question. And I would suggest that it's the same reason so
many other recently-former Republicans and Neocons have found a home at The Atlantic. Because in that pundit world, the fact that you
have been wrong all along matters so very much less than the fact that you
were wrong in all the right ways. Ways that flattered the average legacy
media reader or viewer. A writer of things that are declarative, but
cautious. Timid. And always, always riding that Both Sides Do It
lane right down the middle, so that however harsh your Trump critique of the
day may be, you make sure to take snide shots at the Left every step of the
way.
Which is why this guy --
You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of
matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.
Four-fifths of this thing reads like an utterly anodyne, Wikipedia-style
history of the modern Republican Party. Just another 9th grade book
report recitation of the familiar facts and milestones of the modern
Republican party with which, I'm sure, most of you are not only drearily familiar, but have been shouting from the rooftops since forever. Of course, St.
Reagan’s image is carefully guarded and burnished, but from Nixon to Gingrich
to Trump, there’s nothing here we haven’t known, discussed, dissected, blogged about,
podcasted about, and thoroughly masticated for decades.
And the striking thing is, it doesn’t sound like Tom Nichols at all.
None of the snark and bile he routinely unlimbers in the cause of belittling
and tone policing any Liberal who disagrees with him. Instead it reads
like a second cousin to Jay Rosen's
"View from Nowhere".
The only time it even begins to sound like Nichols is when he dips into a
wide-eyed, golly-how-did-this-happen voice -- as if he’s a child just
discovered that Santa Claus isn’t real. What? When did this happen? How did
this happen?
Then he ambles back over to Wikipedia, looks up the history of the Republican
Party during his entire adult life, and says, "Oh, so that’s what
happened."
However, to give Nichols his due, there is at least one sentence that had to
cost him dearly to see published in a national magazine, and here it is:
In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite
embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of
violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party,
until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.
Then Nichols asks the next obvious question:
Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency
latent in the DNA of the party?
And here was my reaction:
Now you and I both know that, in this life Tom Nichols -- Mr.
"Expertise" -- is never gonna call on a dirty, disreputable hippie to explain
[checks notes] his own political party to him. However, he did the next
best thing.
To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged
a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former
Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the
Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats,
then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me
when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven
for Nazis was inevitable.
For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party.
White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964
and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters
deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his
’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard
Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected
white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By
the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.
In Nichols' view, it was Reagan's personal charisma that kept the various
Republican factions -- gun nuts, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, bigots,
imbeciles, paranoid conspiracy junkies, millionaires, Conservative
evangelicals, Bill Kristol, George Will and Charles Krauthammer -- in line and
pulling in the same direction. But once Reagan died...
Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of
Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican
Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked
by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in
2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon
discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs.
Allow me to repeat that which I have already said a dozen times on this blog
and on The Professional Left podcast: it's not a "hijacking" when they
throw you the keys and beg you to drive.
And given that the base of the party threw the keys to Trump
three times in 10 years...? Sure as shit doesn't sound like a hijacking. Sounds like the
fascist Meathead Messiah had arrived and the bigots and imbeciles were and are
ecstatic about it.
But the best -- the very best -- use of the view from nowhere comes in the
form of a very familiar dodge. A dodge I hadn't heard deployed so
brazenly since Matthew Dowd was making the rounds with it.
Nichols, who has a long and well-documented history of dismissing or swatting
away criticism of Republicans from the left, suddenly transported himself up,
up, up to David Brooks' "view from nowhere" orbital punditing platform where
he can safely opine about the deplorable Both Siderism of "Conservatives..."
and "People on the right..." --
Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated
their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors
lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s
most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who
co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the
U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have
casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an
office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to
work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of
Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.
-- without having to add the damning modifier, "Conservatives like me..." and "People on the right like me..."
Moral grandstanding with a big bump of selective amnesia is a helluva drug. Because what Nichols was up to during all the years he was averting his
eyes from what his party was doing was busying himself telling liberals to calm
down. Informing Democrats what they should and shouldn’t say.
Tone-policing anyone who challenged his perspective -- a
perspective now definitively disproven.
What’s striking isn’t simply that he’s arrived at this realization. After all, the
world is full of slow learners and thumb-suckers who need to be told,
over and over again, in the immortal words of Wade Garrett, "Don't Eat The Big White Mint."
What's striking is that Nichols is my age and he is only now, grudgingly, arriving at this revelation.
What's striking is that, instead of being some waterhead propping up a wall at a dive bar, Nichols' whole deal is Expertise. Right from jump he'll let you know that, in his expert opinion, he is always the smartest guy in the room.
What's striking is that he holds a column at
The Atlantic based on his alleged expertise in this very subject. One he appears to
have been in denial about until roughly ten minutes ago.
And so to wrap this up, we circle back to these questions. Why does The Atlantic staff itself with people like
this? Why are the people who were right about the Right all along still
treated as pariahs? Why are they not only unwelcome in the circles where Tom Nichols,
David Brooks, David Frum, and the rest circulate, but are treated as if they do not exist at all?
Because The Atlantic is in the business of telling its audience what it is
prepared to hear. Its readers are ready to hear that Donald Trump is as bad as
he appears, that the people around him are terrible. But they are not prepared
to hear that the Left was right. They cannot bear the thought that the highly
paid columnists of legacy media were wrong -- and that their readers were
misled along with them -- while the so-called dirty hippies were right all
along.
In case you missed Piggy's post-SCOTUS rebuke of his tariff regime...here's
the short version.
The six justices who voted against the tariffs are fools, lapdogs, a disgrace and have betrayed
’Murrica.
The Democrats on the Court did it because Dems want to destroy ’Murrica. The
Republicans on the Court who overturned Trump’s tariff regime — including
the two muppets he himself appointed — are actually RINO stooges under the
influence of foreign powers.
But it doesn’t matter, because what the decision really said was that
I have vastly more power to tariff, embargo, and destroy other countries
than ever. I can destroy anyone. Any country. I tried to be nice before. I
was a good boy. But now? Forget it.
Biden was incompetent.
This country was dead a year and a half ago. Dead.
Now we’re the hottest country in the world. Barely legal but tits out
to *here*! And that ass!
Every president but me was stupid for not using tariffs to make us all rich.
I’m very good at reading!
Brett Kavanaugh is a good lil’ stooge who’s gonna get two scoops. His
dissent is genius, and you have to be a radical left lunatic to disagree.
I won. In a landslide. There was so much cheating, but I still won.
Yadda yadda yadda. All the usual demented rambling claptrap intermixed with
the usual lies from a degenerate old criminal whose brain is turning to
prune dip before our eyes. I’m sure I missed some of the finer points, since
after a few minutes of this maniac slurring and stumbling us onto the ash
heap of history, it all sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher — if that
teacher were George Wallace, drunk and brain-damaged.
And if this makes your blood boil, don’t forget to thank your Republican
neighbors, co-workers, and fellow churchgoers for putting this depraved,
bigoted monster back in the Oval Office.
Like a some Conservative version of the Casimir Effect*, I believe I can
prove, to a scientific certainty, that when two old-school neocon Never
Trumpers are put in close proximity to one another, eventually at least two of
the most odious and deeply held core tenets of their ideological faith will
always manifest themselves out of the air.
First element to emerge will be sanctimonious Both Siderism. An
above-it-all certainty that because Both Sides are pretty terrible they are
now "politically homeless".
The second element to emerge will be condescension. The airy dismissal
of any prior criticism from the Left of their now-former party, which, in
actual fact, will turn out to be just blatant Straw Man bullshit. We
know this because such derision never involves interviewing any actual
Liberals or citing anything that anyone on the Left has ever actually written.
Instead, the entire constellation of thoughtful, detailed and brutally
accurate analysis of the long, ugly trajectory of the Republican party --
decades of labor by hundreds of smart, savvy lefties -- is sneered at and
waved off as, "Well, you know how those people are."
And thanks to whoever it was that had the bright idea of putting old-school
Neocon Never Trumper Mona Charen and old-school Neocon Never Trumper
David Frum together on Frum's podcast, we now had a perfect opportunity to
either confirm or disprove my hypothesis by experiment and observation!
Let's see what happened.
First test: Emergent Both Siderism:
Frum:
What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to
allow in these voices, to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and
Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That’s where we live. (Laughs.)
And it is opening the door to the kind of—there’s a lot of left-wing
anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little
more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews.
There is quite a bit of that. Sure, the right is awful, but they only
scare Frum "a little more" than the left.
Also Frum:
On the other hand, assuming there is an election and J. D. Vance is the
Republican nominee, he will be running against a nominee from a party that
just vetoed the most plausible-looking running mate for Kamala Harris
because he was Jewish and because he wouldn’t renounce his support for
Israel and wouldn’t hedge his condemnation of anti-Semitic outbursts on
American college campuses, and where important voices in that party are
saying that the test, their most important test for their support in 2028 is
Holocaust inversion...
Charen: As you say, J. D. Vance is very close to Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens
is a huge influencer, and all of that. On the left, it is, for now, the
precinct of the hard-left progressives. It’s untested as to whether that
will become the dominant strain in the Democratic Party. We’ll see. That
would be very, very worrisome.
So, Both Siderism? Check.
On to the second test: The Straw Man.
Frum: ...I think there’s something important that we [Never Trump Republicans]
bring, and that is a sense of that this is a group that has a unique sense
of the uniqueness of what is happening now. And I’m sure you’ve seen often
in the comments you get from readers or viewers or listeners, they’ll say
something [like], Aha, we warned you that the moment Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson,
Trump was the inevitable outcome—
Charen: Absolutely. All the time.
Really? You've heard Liberals blaming Ike for Trump?
"All the time"?
Because I am one of a whole army of Liberals who've spent decades warning you
fuckers of the dangerous trajectory your party was on and I have never heard
anyone say this. Not a single serious historian. Not a single
political theorist. Not a single potty-mouth blogger. There is no record
whatsoever of anyone arguing that the moment Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated
Adlai Stevenson in 1952, the eventual rise of Donald Trump became
“inevitable.”
Of course what Frum and Charen are desperate to do here is avoid talking about
things like Goldwater and the seismic ideological shift he represented in
1964 as the GOP began devolving through various stages, towards Trump-era
populism.
They don't want to talk about Nixon's Southern Strategy. Or the Powell
Memo. Or the red carpet the party rolled out for southern white
conservative Evangelical segregationists like Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson.
They'd like you to forget Paul Weyrich too, and Lee Atwater, and Karl
Rove.
They'd really appreciate it if you'd also forget about Newt Gingrich.
And Tom DeLay.
They're also praying that no one mentions the profound, malignant influence of
the Right's most popular bigot, Rush Limbaugh, or his hundreds of imitators,
or the fact that George H. W. Bush was so thirsty for Limbaugh's support that
he invited him to the White House for a Lincoln Bedroom sleepover and carried
in Limbaugh's baggage personally.
In fact, they'd be eternally grateful if you'd agree to forget the rise of the
entire Conservative media ecosystem -- talk radio, cable news, online
platforms, church pulpits, direct mailing lists -- emerging from the 1980s
onward.
Instead, Frum rolls out one of the stupidest Straw Men I've ever heard of, and
he and Charen deal with their barely sublimated guilt and shame by taking
turns punching it.
Frum: No, he’s not the inevitable outcome of Dwight Eisenhower and
Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and George W. He’s
different. And we’re here to tell you that as people who liked all those
people. He’s different. And because we liked all those people, we can tell
you how and why he’s different in a way that the typical commenter who’s
blaming Dwight Eisenhower for being the start of Donald Trump can’t tell
you.
Charen: Well, yeah, the people who are kind of—and I’ll say this—I
think they’re kind of smug, and they say, This was always
conservatism, and this is just the full flowering of all the things that
conservatism always was. I say that is absolutely not the case...
So, Straw Man? Check.
Cowards? Check.
Experiment complete.
Theory confirmed by observation.
Submitted for peer review this day, February 20, 2026, by your pal driftglass.
*The Casimir effect is a weird little consequence of quantum physics that
says even “empty” space isn’t really empty. Imagine putting two perfectly
smooth metal plates extremely close together in a vacuum. You’d think
nothing would happen — but tiny quantum fluctuations are constantly
flickering in and out of existence everywhere. Between the plates, only
certain fluctuations can fit, while outside them, more kinds can pop up.
That imbalance creates a tiny pressure pushing the plates together. So the
Casimir effect is basically proof that empty space has a kind of restless
energy, and if you confine it just right, it can produce a measurable
force.
...what advice Team Legacy Media and Team Never Trump will always insist
Democrats must follow if they don't want to lose everything.
So, no surprise that, over at The Bulwark, Mark Leibovich's "advice" to
Democrats was centered entirely around picking fights with other Democrats.
From Leibovich's Atlantic article, which is why Tim Miller invited him
over for a bitch sesh:
The squabble underscored how the Democrats can’t help but keep playing to
a stubborn stereotype—a soft and pampered bunch, unwilling to make the
gritty sacrifices (such as getting dressed) necessary to prevail in their
“existential” campaign to save democracy.
“The Democrats treat their fucking people like kindergartners,” Sarah
Longwell, a former Republican consultant who quit the party over Donald
Trump, told me. Longwell can get exasperated by her new allies on the
left. When I mentioned the DNC’s in-person-work kerfuffle, it set her
off.
“Republicans are over here being straight-up mercenaries,” Longwell said.
“Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life balance.”
She apologized for yelling into the phone. Democrats “are not built for
when the fascists come,” she concluded...
Martin himself has a knack for reinforcing these caricatures. Just as I
was starting this project, he presided over the DNC’s summer meeting in
Minneapolis to begin the urgent work of rebuilding the Democratic
coalition and making the party palatable to American voters again. Soon
after calling the assembly of more than 400 party officials to order,
Martin relinquished his mic to a representative of the Saginaw Ojibwe
Nation for the DNC’s “land acknowledgment” ritual. Switching between
English and her tribal language, the Indigenous woman affirmed that
Minneapolis had been stolen from its native Dakota Oyate Tribe (“the
original stewards of the lands and waters”).
The interlude took only a minute or two but received outsize attention—and
ridicule—as an example of how Democrats remain overly concerned with
performative pandering to various small identity groups. “It is difficult
to imagine more than a handful of people looking out over the current
hellscape of U.S. policy and thinking to themselves: You know what we need
to be sure to address today? The Dakota War of 1862,” Andrew Egger wrote
in The Bulwark.
So let's take a look at how minor HR dispute and two minutes of harmless
comments at a summer DNC meeting in 2025 got turned into a five-alarm, OMG DEMOCRATS ARE THE WORST!
fire in 2026 at The Bulwark.
To start with, I found it interesting that Leibovich didn't feel the need to
include the next couple of sentences of Egger's Bulwark column which are as
follows (emphasis added):
Right-wing media gleefully ping-ponged the clip around social media:
Wake up, babe, they’re still doing land acknowledgments!
Democrats may believe, sincerely, that there is no harm (and, indeed,
some good) in these displays. But many more people instinctively recoil
against this sort of thing...
Two things. One for later and one for now. The later thing is,
who exactly are the "many more people" who "instinctively recoil against this sort of thing"
and how in the world do these "many more people" know the first god
damn thing about the 2025 DNC summer meeting?
Could these "many more people" tell me anything at all about the
other 99.9% of that meeting? Do they have strong opinions about the
Rules and Bylaws Committee evaluating the early voting state lineup for the
2028 presidential election?
Or the Resolutions Committee debate over proposals regarding the
Israel-Hamas war, including potential calls for a ceasefire and changes to
military aid?
How about the "Organizing Summer" Initiative to build volunteer networks,
register voters, and engage in non-political spaces to prepare for 2025/2026
elections? Any thoughts on those?
Let's put a pin in that for a minute, and get on to the second thing.
In the portion of the column that Leibovich left out, Egger explains how
this tiny moment became a "story" at all. The right-wing media was
doing what the right-wing media always does: latching on to
some incredibly trivial moment that would have otherwise passed unnoticed,..
or taking some remark wildly out of context ... or just making shit up and
using their gargantuan fascist echo chamber to hype the shit out of it.
Fox News headline, August 25, 2025:
DNC opens summer meeting with land acknowledgement ...
The second Fox News headline, August 25, 2025:
Lindy Sowmick, a Minnesota Democrat and self-described 'Indigenous
queer woman,' recited the acknowledgement Monday...
The National Desk, August 26, 2025:
DNC faces ridicule over land acknowledgment
Ridicule? Really? From whom, I wonder? Is it from...the fascists?!
The Colorado Springs Gazette:
Byron York blasts DNC land acknowledgement...
Really? York at the Colorado Springs Gazette? Oh how the mighty
fops of yesteryear have fallen.
Megyn Kelly on Facebook:
The Democratic party learned NOTHING as they start summer meeting with
"land acknowledgement..."
Megyn Kelly on YouTube:
The Democratic party learned NOTHING as they start summer meeting with
"land acknowledgement...
Megyn Kelly on YouTube Shorts:
Megyn Kelly reacts to the ridiculously long "land acknowledgement" at
DNC summer meeting.
The Blaze:
The Democrats have gone insane
So at this point this is just another
"OMG! Obama wore a tan suit!"/ "OMG! Obama likes fancy
mustard!"/"OMG! That crazy communist Kenyan Obama thinks inflating
your tires correctly will solve all our energy problems!" bit of catnip for the bigots and imbeciles who think Fox News is "news" and
who jerk off to Megyn Kelly's hate-porn.
For the fascists to boost bullshit like this out of the Fox News terrarium and
into the wider world they're gonna need help.
They need their manufactured indignation at least appear to be
"bipartisan".
The need some cranky, octogenarian Democrat who is 20 years past his sell-by
date to pop off about how awful this insignificant little moment was.
They need...
Carville slams DNC over land acknowledgment.
There we go!
Yep. That was the Fox News headline, August 28, 2025.
And this was the Fox News headline, August 29, 2025:
Carville rebukes DNC over woke 'land acknowledgment' ...
And this was the headline in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post,
August 29, 2025:
Carville erupts over DNC's woke land acknowledgment ...
Yay! It's out there in the world now! People are talking!
People like Dan "Turncoat" Turrentine talking to [checks notes] Laura
Fucking Ingraham.
‘It’s Maddening’: Ex-Dem Strategist Slams Party After Day 1 Of DNC
Summer Meeting
Former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine condemned his party on
Monday following the first day of the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) summer meeting.
One of the first items on the DNC meeting agenda was a “land
acknowledgement,” based on the premise that the Minnesota land they
were on was improperly taken from indigenous people. Turrentine said
on “The Ingraham Angle” that the Democratic Party was repeating its
past mistakes that led it to its current diminished state.
“Laura, you said it: it’s the definition of insanity: you just keep
doing the same thing over and over again. And as a Democrat, it’s
maddening that we’re still not serious,” Turrentine told host Laura
Ingraham.
And this is where Cokie's Law kicks in.
Are you familiar with Cokie's Law? If not, let the coiner of the term,
OG Liberal blogger and my Bradcast radio partner, Heather "Digby" Parton,
explain. From Salon,
August 24, 2015:
Many years ago when political blogging was in its infancy, I coined the
phrase “Cokie’s Law,” which referred to a specific comment by pundit
Cokie Roberts about the Lewinsky scandal that illustrated the precise
way the beltway media excused their propensity for cheap gossip and
scandalmongering. In discussing whether or not Hillary Clinton had
actually blamed her husband’s childhood for his philandering, Roberts
said:
“At this point it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not
because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor
yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”
Cokie’s Law is the axiom that says the press can pass judgement
about anything once it’s “out there” regardless of whether or not
what’s “out there” is true. This allows them to skip doing boring
rebuttals of the facts at hand and instead hold forth at length about
how it bears on the subject’s “judgement” and the “appearance” of
wrongdoing without ever proving that what they did was wrong.
Once Carville had popped off, and Egger had written his bitchy paragraph and
worried about those "many more people" who "instinctively recoil against this sort of thing", the pervasive contempt for Democrats which is always roiling just
below the surface at The Bulwark was free to ricochet around like a
fistful of bottle rockets in a phonebooth.
They were obsessed with this story, not because of anything inherent about
the facts of the story, but because of what "people out there", "voters",
"normal people" would think. See! See! Democrats don't
care about normal people stuff. This is why Democrats lose!
No, this is why you can never trust a Never Trumper. Because they've
still got that Conservative media wiring in their heads. Because
whenever the Conservative media machine (which they loyally served for their
entire adult lives) does shit like this, it never occurs to them to attack
the machine itself for wildly exaggerating some bit of nothing into
Civilization On The Brink Of Collapse.
Instead they automatically
react by beating up on Democrats for...what? For letting someone talk
for 90 seconds at a two day conference?
This is why your humble scrivener warned y'all about the Never Trumpers
colonizing the Liberal media and elbowing actual Liberals out of the
way. Because believe it or not, there is another way -- a different
way -- to talk about these garbage stories which the right-wing media is
constantly trying (and, as they did here, frequently succeeding) to
stovepipe into the wider public conversation.
You hang a lantern on it. Contextualize it. Talk about how
the whole Fox News business model is based on taking trivial nonsense and
inflating into crises and expecting us to fall for it. To be
distracted from the Epstein Files by it. Good God how stupid do they think
we are?
Also, I for one would like someone to explain to me how it came to be the
received wisdom of the Legacy Media that low-information or disengaged or
undecided voters can be people who have no idea what's happening in the
country and couldn't tell you who their senators are or their representative
is if you held a bazooka to their heads..
...while at the same time these same low-information or disengaged or
undecided voters are apparently so deeply enmeshed in the
right-of-the-decimal-point organizational details of the Democratic party that
they're going to give up on the Democrats and vote straight fascist party
ticket because of 90 seconds at the 2025 DNC party meeting or some HR dispute that
some anonymous, disgruntled staffer leaked to
The New York Times (which is always only too happy to "report" on
bitchy office gossip.)
And our "allies" will never just use a Fox News talking point to bludgeon
Democrats just once. They recycle them, stacking one high dudgeon atop
another until they have the highest dudgeon of all.
Because it wasn't enough for our "ally" to wildly overreact in the pages of
The Atlantic to what amounted to an HR dispute:
“The Democrats treat their fucking people like kindergartners,” Sarah
Longwell, a former Republican consultant who quit the party over
Donald Trump, told me. Longwell can get exasperated by her new allies
on the left. When I mentioned the DNC’s in-person-work kerfuffle, it
set her off.
“Republicans are over here being straight-up mercenaries,” Longwell
said. “Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life
balance.” She apologized for yelling into the phone. Democrats “are
not built for when the fascists come,” she concluded...
Goodness no. Leibovich just had to recycle the bullshit
Fox News talking point from last year to make sure the knife went
in all the way.
You can watch this shit move through the system like a contrasting agent
moving through a human body during a C/T scan. From the Fox
News Bombast Machine to Megyn Kelly's histrionics to a useful chump like
James Carville shitting pine cones over it, then on to The Bulwark and
cable news...
...then recycled and amplified in The Atlantic, then back to
The Bulwark where any $10 Cassandra knows what comes next.
A stern warning that if Democrats want to win, they need to start picking
fights with other Democrats.
And picking fights with former Democratic presidents.
Oh, and don't forget picking fights with "various groups that make up the
party’s broad coalition".
So yay! More hippie punching. All of which is supposed to make
Democrats more popular with "regular people."
And yet somehow going after Republicans -- y'know, the actual fascists who
actually have a knife to the throat of American democracy -- isn't really
on the menu.
So, should Democrats follow this advice and start a circle of infighting,
what exactly is it that "regular people" are supposed to suddenly
notice? That no Democrat likes the Democrats? That every
Democrat is running against their own party?
In which case this $10 Cassandra predicts that, should any of that happen,
we can all look forward to a chorus of Team Legacy Media and Team Never
Trump voices decrying "Democrats in disarray."
One final note, by way of demonstrating that anyone can have all kinds of
fun with Cokie's Law. Can you believe Sarah Longwell losing her shit and
yelling into the phone while she was on the record?
But, well, what'dya expect? Chicks, amirite! Way too emotional
to be trusted with really important jobs.
And, being a sane and decent person, you would probably bark at me. How
dare I! And rightly demand that I take that misogynist shit
back.
But, see, under the shield of Cokie's Law I am protected.
Because under the shield of Cokie's Law it doesn't matter if it's true.
All that matters is my assertion that some non-specific group of "people" are
talking about it.
