Happy F.A.T. Tuesday

 

That day each year when we gather together to perform the Defragging of the Hard Drive.

IYKYK

I Am The Liberal Media

For Your Friend Who Does Not Understand How Elections Work

Feel free to pass this along to any fellow travelers who were members in good standing of [Insert "You Must Be Fucking Kidding Me" Group Identity Label Here] For Trump" and ask them to pay special attention to Kaspar Gutman's warning: 

That's an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides. Because, as you know, sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.

Because boy howdy did they fuck around and boy howdy are they finding out...and boy howdy didn't their collectively follies end up dragging the rest of us (and the legacy of the Enlightenment) to hell with them.  

Reminder:  Primaries are where you pick your favorite candidate, preferably without heaping so much "I saw my opponent consorting with the Devil behind the barn" invective on your opponent(s) that, if they win, you've succeeded in damaged them so severely that you hand the election to the opposition.  This is called "Reaganing Ford".     

The general election, in the other hand, is where you vote out the fascists -- enthusiastically and without bitching -- even if your primary pony ran out of the money,

I Am The Liberal Media

The "Don't Say The Quiet Part Out Loud" Rule Is Cancelled For The Duration

However you measure modern political history, the media's unwritten rule of politics during this era has been to allow the Republican party to get away with this bit of legerdemain.  Everyone understood that, starting with the Powell Memo and Nixon's Southern Strategy, the base of the party was going to be comprised largely of bigots and imbeciles -- Archie Bunker chumps who listened to Limbaugh and watched Fox News.  

Ah, but the thin, outer shell of the party would be a candy-coated carapace of respectable front men and women who would not embarrass themselves on "Meet the Press", would know which wine paired with what at Beltway cocktail parties, and wouldn't run screaming into the night for fear choosing the wrong Italian meat for their sammich.  

And for as long as I can remember, it has been the job of the media to pretend that the latter was the Republican party...and, despite being the overwhelming majority within the party -- the mob without which Republicans would never win another election -- it was also the media's corollary job to pretend the former did not exist at all, and to mock anyone who said otherwise as unserious kooks and alarmist crackpots.

That was it.  That was the job.  Denigrate Democrats as out-of-touch snobs, laud Republicans as sensible and sober and, when this gigantic hoax inevitably had a containment breach -- when the crazy got  out of the lab and into the world for all to see -- it was time to double down on the Both Sides Do It lie to calm the public and reassure them that, however bad things looked at the moment, Democrats were somehow worse.

My quote searching kung fu has not been sufficient to locate the exact quote, but I distinctly remember, after Trump won and the MAGA lunacy had kicked the doors entirely off the lab and were (and are) abroad in the land, hearing one or more freshly-former Republican ad men or spokescritters -- maybe Michael Steele,  maybe Stuart Steven, maybe Steve Schmidt, but most likely Rick Wilson --- saying words to the effect that of course they knew wide swaths of the Republican base were bigots and loons, but that was irrelevant.  Not their department. Their job was to get their guy elected, period.  And to do that they needed to fire the base up enough to put shoes on, get out of their La-Z-Boys, and get to the polls, all bug-eyed and furious, on election day.  Then shut them back in the basement or attic until next time.

That's how little thought they gave to the toxic waste they were storing in leaky barrels directly under our democracy.  How little thought they gave to doomsday machine they were building, or to what the consequences would be if containment failed completely.  

And then, one day, Donald Trump showed up, swept right past the respectable front men and women, the handlers, the ad men, the complicit media and told they base they didn't have to be ashamed anymore.  That it was, in fact, a great and glorious thing to shout their racism, misogyny, homophobia and batshit conspiracies from the rooftops.   

He shut the containment down.

And that was all it took for the thin, outer shell of Republican respectability to disintegrate almost overnight.  Shown up as the political equivalent of the "whited sepulchres" of Matthew 23:27 -- 

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”

-- as the real Republican party emerged fully into the light.

And you'll never guess what?  That real, emergent Republican party looks exactly like the Republican party about which Liberals had been sounding the alarm for decades, and for which we were dismissed as unserious kooks and alarmist crackpots. Which is why we all have op-ed columns in all the major newspaper now, and, when we can get away from our top-rated, well-funded and heavily promoted podcasts, we try to find time between that and our book tours to hop on MSNOW where we are tirelessly congratulated for being right about the Right all along.

Honestly it's too much!  You're embarrassing us!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we come now to the today's object lesson in containment failure.  

Meet Jeremy Carl.

Who is Jeremy Carl?

Great question!  This is from one dingy wing of the GOP's policy abattoir.  

Jeremy Carl is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, where his primary focus is on immigration, multiculturalism, and nationalism in America.

Prior to joining Claremont, Jeremy worked for a decade as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, serving as a policy advisor to many national political figures. While at Hoover, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz praised his “mastery of subject matter” and “ability to write comprehensively and with clarity.”

And right now Jeremy Carl is up for an important job in the United States State Department.  But it looks like maybe he won't get that job.  And do you know why?  From The Rolling Stone:

Trump Nominee Crumbles When Pressed on White Nationalist Posts

Jeremy Carl is the president's pick for a top State Department position, but his confirmation prospects aren't looking good.

Donald Trump last summer nominated Jeremy Carl to lead the Bureau of International Organizations. It’s a top position in the State Department, acting as the primary nexus between the U.S. government and several international organizations like the United Nations, and requires Senate confirmation. Carl served in Trump’s first administration and is now a fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. He’s also a prolific poster with a long history of espousing white nationalism, antisemitism, solidarity with the Jan. 6 rioters, and other extreme viewpoints.

Carl sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, which is weighing whether to confirm him to the key diplomatic position the president wants him to hold. Senators pressed Carl on his social media posts. It did not go well.

Here’s one exchange between Carl and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.), for example:

Murphy: “Tell me how you define white identity and what you think has been erased about white identity

Carl: “Certain types of, umm, Anglo, uhh, derived culture that comes from our history…”

Murphy: “Like what?”

Carl: “Umm, let me think about this. Uhhh, you know, senator, I would say if you were to look at the book by one of your Senate colleagues Born Fighting about the sort of Scotch-Irish military culture and certain, you know, pride that went with that, that would be one example. Obviously, you could have sub-elements of that culture. You could have Italians, you could have Irish…”

Murphy: “But you’re now retreating to ethnic identity. You don’t speak about ethnic identity. You speak about white identity. So tell me the values that stitch together white identity, that make it different than Black identity.”

Carl: “I would say the white church is very different than the Black church in terms of its tone and style, on average. Food ways could often be different. Music could be different.”

Murphy: “And those are being erased?”

Carl: “Well, if you look at the Super Bowl halftime show, which was not in English…”

Murphy: “Our ability to access white churches or white food or white music is being erased?”

Carl then said that mass immigration has “Balkanized” what he described as “common American culture,” that this weakens America and that he won’t apologize for his comments on the issue...

It goes on and on like this, proving that Jeremy Carl is a ball-less poltroon.

Because if he we are real man -- a real MAGA man -- he would've gone so much further.  Shit, even a half-bright skirt like Bondi showed way more gonadal firepower than this sorry excuse for a male.   

If he was any kind man he would've told the committee to go fuck themselves.  Shown them the master race doesn't back down and names will be taken!

He would've told the committee that his white supremacist / Christian nationalist beliefs were entirely in keeping with those of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and JD Vance.  

He would've told the committee that +77 million patriots had put Donald Trump and his white supremacist ideology back in office so he could cleanse the nation of the scum and degenerates who are standing in the way of our national greatness and Trump's thousand-year Reich.  

He would've told the committee that, if they knew what was good for them -- if they didn't want ICE or worse coming for them and their kids... if they didn't want the DOJ, the FBI and the IRS up their collective asses, and raining indictment down on them -- the committee had fucking well better shut up, bend the knee and do as the Dear Leader commands.  

But no, Jeremy Carl didn't do that.  

So much for MAGA solidarity.  So much for 'WWG1WGA'.  

Scandalous!  Shameful!  And don'tcha just bet this limp dick, soy-boy had a big, fat Soros check burning a hole in his pocket the entire time he was rolling over for this so-called committee.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

Coming Soon Everywhere

The Great Forgetting is under way, right on schedule.

And:

I Am The Liberal Media

Who The Hell are "The American People"?

It's language lesson time once again, and the subject today is versatile words -- words that have lots of different meanings packed into one little packet of consonants and vowels. 

If this sounds familiar, I'm doing up a print version of our Professional Left podcast from yesterday for those of you who do not partake, or who want something copy/paste-able suitable for passing along to friends, impromptu Valentine's Day card, TL:DR protest chants, etc.

As an example of what I mean by "versatile words" let's take the most versatile word in the English language.  This is not the one I'm going to be focusing on, but it's a good example, and I think you all know what that word is:

And, just for fun, here's an example from The Wire of writers and actors having an absolute ball pushing that word's versatility to the limit:

Inevitably, there are also words which describe words that are versatile. They're referred to as polyfunctional or polysemous words -- words which are versatile enough to be used in a variety of ways.  

As you heard, the word "fuck" is widely recognized as the all-time English language champ. It can be used as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, intensifier, or interjection. It can convey a whole spectrum of emotions and meanings.  Even opposite meanings  -- from anger to surprise to joy to disgust.

This is what makes it both a polyfunctional and polysemous word.  Polyfunctional means a single word can function as multiple parts of speech.  And polysemous means a word that has multiple related meanings.  For example, “head” can refer to a body part, a leader, to be on top of something.

And the specific polyfunctional words and phrases we’re going to talk about today are ones you likely hear a dozen times a day.  If you read or watch the news, you probably hear them two dozen times a day.  You probably use them yourself.  I know I do.  And yet, as often as we hear and read and use those words, in the context in which we hear, read, and say them, we have no clear, concise, agreed-upon understanding of what they mean.

Isn’t that odd? 

If we were sitting back to back, and you were describing to me an object, like a cup or a checkerboard or a carburetor – or something quantifiable like a dozen eggs or a size 13 shoe – I would have a pretty good idea what you meant.  Without a lot of adjectives I probably couldn’t visualize the exact shape and size and color of whatever it was that you were naming, but since we start off broadly agreeing with the basics of what those things are, I would be able to understand you and you would be able to understand me.  

And yet here we are, with our media filled with polyfunctional words that we hear every day -- words that we might use every day -- but that no one can define with any precision.

The  polyfunctional words and phrases we're going to talk about today are at the political end of the spectrum of what George Carlin called "soft language" -- euphemisms, jargon, and politically safe  terms -- that he believed concealed reality, diluted meaning, and softened the truth. In his 1990 HBO special, he argued that such language takes the life out of communication, replacing direct, honest words with evasive phrases. Specifically, we’re going to discuss terms like "America", "The American People", "the voters" and "the public". 

So, what the hell is “America”?  

Well, as Bad Bunny reminded us during the most-viewed halftime show in history, the most basic, factual definition of "America" is a landmass in the Western Hemisphere comprising the continents of North America and South America.  In strict geographic terms, “America” refers to the combined continental landmass stretching from the Arctic in the north to the southern tip of South America.

But we want to be a little more specific, don't we?  So what does the "United States of America" mean?  

Again, the most basic definition of the United States of America is a federal sovereign nation in North America composed of 50 states, a federal district (Washington, D.C.), and several territories.  It is a constitutional republic with a federal system of government, and its authority is defined by the U.S. Constitution.

Sure.  Great.  But what does it mean to be an American!  A United States American!

Once again, at the most basic, factual level, to be an American means to be a citizen or national of the United States of America.  Legally, that status can be obtained by Birth in the United States, Birth to U.S. citizen parent(s) under certain conditions, or Naturalization through the legal immigration process.

And now we move from bare facts to interpretation.  Where, if we were sitting back-to-back and you asked me to describe a hammer, my description would roughly match yours.  You might have been thinking of a ball-peen hammer and I might describe a dead-blow hammer, but we'd understand each other.

On the other hand, if I'm back-to-back with a stranger and they ask me to describe "the voters" or "the public" or "the American people" and what makes "the American people" a "people"... our answers might diverge so wildly that you'd never know we were from the same culture and spoke the same language.  

For example, if you grew up with Schoolhouse Rock, you may remember ''The Great American Melting Pot''.  And if you do, you might describe what "America" means this way

If you're Ralph Waldo Emerson writing in 1837, you would describe “the American people” as a cultural project: self-reliant, intellectually independent, not merely an extension of Europe. More aspirational than descriptive.  He was passionate about the cause of abolition and about the need for Americans to break from the past.

This was Emerson in 1862 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.:

America is another word for Opportunity.  Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence on behalf of the human race; and a literal slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies of this people.

Which, when you think about it, is broadly in-line with Schoolhouse Rock.  

And if you were Emerson addressing the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University five years later in, July, 1867 (just two years after the end of the Civil War) you would be describing the spirit of the American people in hopeful terms, while exhorting American intellectuals to stop being so dithering and weak.

Difficulties exist to be surmounted. The great heart will no more complain of the obstructions that make success hard, than of the iron walls of the gun which hinder the shot from scattering...

Bad kings and governors help us, if only they are bad enough. In England, ’tis the game-laws which exasperate the farmers to carry the Reform Bill. ’Tis what we call plantation manners which drove peaceable, forgiving New England to emancipation without phrase. In the Rebellion, who were our best allies? Always the enemy. The community of scholars do not know their own power, and dishearten each other by tolerating political baseness in their members. …

Gentlemen, I draw new hope from the atmosphere we breathe to-day, from the healthy sentiment of the American people, and from the avowed aims and tendencies of the educated class. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes called that speech America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

But then consider Frederick Douglass’ keynote address at the July 5, 1852 Independence Day celebration where he asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” And his answer to "Who are the American people?" was very different.

I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

Sojourner Truth had this to say on the subject in her 1850 “Narrative”:  

 O the 'fantastic tricks' which the American people are 'playing before high Heaven!' O their profane use of the sacred name of Liberty! O their impious appeal to the God of the oppressed, for his divine benediction while they are making merchandise of his image! Do they not blush? Nay, they glory in their shame! 

Once a year they take special pains to exhibit themselves to the world in all their republican deformity and Christian barbarity, insanely supposing that they thus excite the envy, admiration and applause of mankind. The nations are looking at the dreadful spectacle with disgust and amazement. However sunken and degraded they may be, they are too elevated, too virtuous, too humane to be guilty of such conduct. Their voice is heard, saying--'Americans! we hear your boasts of liberty, your shouts of independence, your declarations of hostility to every form of tyranny, your assertions that all men are created free and equal, and endowed by their Creator with an inalienable right to liberty, the merry peal of your bells, and the deafening roar of your artillery; but, mingling with all these, and rising above them all, we also hear the clanking of chains! the shrieks and wailings of millions of your own countrymen, whom you wickedly hold in a state of slavery as much more frightful than the oppression which your fathers resisted unto blood, as the tortures of the Inquisition surpass the stings of an insect! 

We see your banner floating proudly in the breeze from every flag-staff and mast-head in the land; but its blood-red stripes are emblematical of your own slave-driving cruelty, as you apply the lash to the flesh of your guiltless victim, even the flesh of a wife and mother, shrieking for the restoration of the babe of her bosom, sold to the remorseless slave speculator! We catch the gleam of your illuminated hills, everywhere blazing with bonfires; we mark your gay processions; we note the number of your orators; we listen to the recital of your revolutionary achievements; we see you kneeling at the shrine of Freedom, as her best, her truest, her sincerest worshippers! 

Hypocrites! liars! adulterers! tyrants! men-stealers! atheists! 

Professing to believe in the natural equality of the human race--yet dooming a sixth portion of your immense population to beastly servitude, and ranking them among your goods and chattels! Professing to believe in the existence of a God--yet trading in his image, and selling those in the shambles for whose redemption the Son of God laid down his life! Professing to be Christians--yet withholding the Bible, the means of religious instruction, even the knowledge of the alphabet, from a benighted multitude, under terrible penalties! Boasting of your democracy--yet determining the rights of men by the texture of their hair and the color of their skin! Assuming to be 'the land of the free and the home of the brave,--yet keeping in chains more slaves than any other nation, not excepting slave-cursed Brazil!   Vaunting of your freedom of speech and of the press--your matchless Constitution and your glorious Union--yet denouncing as traitors, and treating as outlaws, those who have the courage and fidelity to plead for immediate, untrammelled, universal emancipation! 

Monsters that ye are! how can ye expect to escape the scorn of the world, and the wrath of Heaven? 

Emancipate your slaves, if you would redeem your tarnished character--if you would obtain forgiveness here, and salvation hereafter! Until you do so, "there will be a stain upon your national escutcheon, which all the waters of the Atlantic cannot wash out!"

James Baldwin wrote about how "the American people" were not defined by a shared myth, but by a shared history, about which we are often in denial.  And you have to go no further than Trump ordering the National Park Service to tear down plaques and cancel videos and displays that don’t agree with the MAGA whitewashed version of American history to see how true this is.  

From The New York Times, January 27, 2026:

How the National Park Service Is Deleting American History

Philadelphia sued the Trump administration after it directed the Park Service to rip out a memorial to slavery. Elsewhere, materials about climate change and labor history were being removed.

At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the Trump administration took down an exhibit on the contradiction between President George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people and the Declaration of Independence’s promise of liberty.

At Muir Woods National Monument in California, the administration dismantled a plaque about how the tallest trees on the planet could help store carbon dioxide and slow the Earth’s dangerous warming.

And at Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts, Trump officials ordered the National Park Service to stop showing films about the women and immigrants who once toiled in the city’s textile mills.

Across the country, Park Service workers have started taking down plaques, films and other materials in connection with a directive from President Trump to remove or rewrite content that may “disparage Americans” or promote “corrosive ideology.” 

In theory at least, and no matter what Nazi Stephen Miller believes, America is not supposed to be about blood and soil but a nation born of an idea.  Ironically, one of the best quotes on this subject is from the man Republicans still sanctify.  This is Ronald Reagan, from his last speech as president:

Since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote to me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American. 

And because we are a nation born out of an idea, since the day we were founded there has been a running battle over who gets to claim to speak for America, and for all those other adjacent  polyfunctional words and phrases like  "The American People", "the voters", "the public", “the people” and “the country” 

This is the grand prize in politics and in the media.  The brass ring.  And the fight over who gets to speak for America has been going on as long as we've been a country.

So, here's a fun question:  Were the "Confederate States" still part of "the American public" while they were in rebellion?  

And the answer to that depends entirely on who you ask. Who you ask and what you mean by “the American public”, which was exactly why the question mattered so much during the Civil War and still matters today.  

Legally and constitutionally, the Union’s position was "Yes". Lincoln's administration insisted that the Confederate states had never actually left the United States. Secession was treated as illegal; the states were “in rebellion,” not foreign countries. Under that logic, white Southerners were still U.S. citizens, the states still existed, and the rebellion was an internal insurrection. This is why Lincoln could claim to act on behalf of the American people as a whole and why Reconstruction was framed as “restoration,” not conquest.

But in rhetoric and practice, the Confederacy was often excluded from “the American public” as a moral and political community. Union rhetoric regularly contrasted “loyal Americans” with “rebels” or “traitors,” effectively redefining the American people as those who accepted the Union and its authority. The phrase “the American people” narrowed in wartime to mean the loyal public, not everyone living within U.S. borders.

And from the Confederate perspective, the answer was "No". The Confederacy claimed to be a separate people altogether, with its own public, sovereignty, and national will. Confederate leaders explicitly rejected membership in the American public and framed the war as one nation fighting another -- even while demanding international recognition on that basis.   Also, Confederate leaders very explicitly portrayed themselves as the true heirs of the American founders.  It claimed to be the truer, purer America -- a successor state that preserved what it said the Union had abandoned.

They were the “real” Americans.

Jumping ahead a century to1969, with the unpopularity of the Vietnam War growing, in his televised “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam” this is how Nixon began to wind down his speech.  And, of course, I apologize profusely for quoting both Reagan and Nixon, but it couldn’t be helped.  

Today we have become the strongest and richest nation in the world. And the Wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the moral stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free world leadership.

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.

And so tonight--to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans--I ask for your support. 

And there it is.  Not just mentioning the American people, but calling on the “great silent majority” to back him.  And Nixon would use that phrase again and again, contrasting his invisible “silent majority” with the anti-war protesters who, he insisted, were just an unruly minority.  And this has been the Republican playbook ever since.  The Decent People versus the Indecent.  The Stoic and Silent versus the Loud and Dirty.   

You will remember George Dubya announcing: 'You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists'.  That was Iraq War cheerleaders versus us Murrica-hating, terrorist loving Left, which was the running theme in every right-wing publication and every Hate Radio broadcast and every night on Fox News for years.

Now it’s MAGA Patriots versus the Baby Killing Commie Democratic Left.  

Because it always comes down to legitimacy.  Whose vision has been endorsed by the people?  Whose policies have been ratified by the nation?  

This is why Gingrich and his Republican henchmen were so fanatically single-minded about impeaching Bill Clinton. 

This is why the Republican party – led by Conservative Hate Radio – were so fanatically single minded about sabotaging Barack Obama’s policies and delegitimizing him personally as a Kenyan Commie Usurper.

And this why Trump and his Republican henchmen have been so fanatically single minded about discrediting the 2020 election results.  It’s why Trump and his henchmen can’t go five minutes without vomiting out some garbage about the radical looney communist left.  It's why Trump Orthodoxy-Enforcer, Laura Loomer, went on a long shrieking rant on Twitter, accusing Republican Senator Tim Scott of secretly siding with Democrats and trying to destroy the Republican party because he said Trump's incredibly racist post should be taken down.  It’s why she ended the post with "Fuck you! [Tim Scott]" and "Resign, Traitor!"  

So, let’s get back to the question of who are “the American people” and who speaks on their behalf?

This was from John Kennedy.  Not John Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, but garbage John Kennedy, Republican senator from Louisiana:

My Democratic friends just can't accept the fact that the American people chose Donald Trump to be president - it's called democracy. My advice to them, and I say this gently: Fill out a 'Hurt Feelings Report' and let's move on.

This was Lindsay Graham, May 20, 2017:

The American people chose Donald Trump.

This was David Bossie on Meet the Press, December 3, 2017:  

 It's been litigated and the American people chose Donald Trump to be their president."

On February 17, 2017 (and a million times since), Trump called the “FAKE NEWS media” the "enemy of the American people.”

Now, consider how that same mysterious aggregation of humans – “the American people” – are referenced by respected historian and all-around good egg, Heather Cox Richardson.

Her January 13, 2026 politics chat video is entitled "The American People Refuse to Obey in Advance."  

In conversation with Chelsea Clinton she said: “The American people are the source of our power.” 

And this was Dr. Richardson on September 18, 2025:  "It's extremely difficult to bear down on 341 million people all protesting in different ways."   And  "If you stop thinking about the country as us versus them and start thinking about it as the American people versus an autocrat, the lens changes a lot, doesn't it?"

So it seems pretty clear to her whose side she thinks the American people are on.  

But even if you stop thinking of that thing charging at you as a rabid beast and start thinking about it as a lightning bug, that doesn't mean the "lightning bug" isn't actually 200 pounds of rabid fangs and muscle that’s very dangerous and that’s going to make you very, very unhappy unless you are very careful.  

However, I really want to dial in on this one.  It's from The Bucknellian, which is the weekly student newspaper of Pennsylvania’s Bucknell University, November 14, 2024:

When the American people chose Donald Trump as president-elect on Nov. 5, it came as a major shock to much of the country.

Believe me, I am not picking on this student newspaper.  More power to them and may they go on to do great things.  I bring it up because it sums up our language lesson for today so concisely.  Because how can it be that "the American People chose Donald Trump"... and yet that choice comes as a major shock to "much of the country"?

How can "much of the country" not be part of "the American people"?

And on the subject of “the American people”, this is from a single press release from Mike Johnson,  this week, February 11, 2026:

What Democrats are doing in this process is they're putting hurdles in the way of the goal, and it hurts the American people...

Remember, they forced upon us the longest shutdown in US history last fall, 43 days, and did real harm to the economy and to the American people for no reason...

It's all politics, and we're asking them to put that aside and do what's right for the American people...

The Democrats want to stop that, and if their policies were enacted, we would just have open borders. We'd have open unimpeded immigration and that is not what the American people voted for and we're doing the right thing.

And this is from a single press release from Mike Johnson, one day earlier, February 10, 2026:

The American people have good reason to feel this optimism...

We promised the American people we would do it; we got it done...

You're watching the economic growth numbers that are off the charts... We think that's going to happen all the way through the year. And so do the voters. So do the American people. 

The idea that "the American people" are overflowing with optimism and are super excited about the way the economy is going is, of course, so much piffle.  From The Guardian, January 21, 2026:

An assessment by the Century Foundation’s new democracy indexing project found that the US had recorded a staggering 28% “collapse” in democratic health over the past year – from 79/100 in 2024 to 57/100 in 2025, the kind of sudden decline more typically associated with a coup or other major shock.

Nate Schenkkan, the report’s lead author and a former research director at Freedom House, hoped to help Americans distinguish between the “push-pull” of partisan politics and the “authoritarian behavior” of the current administration.

“When a major change happens in a political system, it’s very unevenly distributed,” Schenkkan said. “Certain people will feel it first. Certain communities will feel it harder and faster. And it is really important to recognize that just because it hasn’t come to you doesn’t mean that it won’t.”...

Last year, millions joined No Kings rallies to denounce a president they say has wielded power like a monarch.

At the ballot box, Democrats won a series of victories in the 2025 off-year elections, and are well positioned to retake the House – and possibly the Senate – in the 2026 midterms. Trump, meanwhile, remains unpopular nationally – a vulnerability for his party heading into this year’s elections. A CNN poll found that a majority of Americans believe Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, and 58% call his first year a failure.

From ABC News, January 13, 2026:

Trump boasts of 'economic boom' as voters remain concerned about high prices.  Trump claimed inflation was "defeated" despite it holding steady at 2.7%. 

Then there’s this from The Hill, February 6, 2026:

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) claimed Sunday that the “public has turned against” President Trump, whose polling numbers have recently slumped following multiple controversies.

“The public has turned against him. In every election we’ve had since his election, the voters have swung wildly against him. And as you know, he said at that prayer breakfast, his ego cannot stand another loss,” Schiff told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl on “This Week.” 

Ok, there's a lot going on here.  Second part first.  To "turn on" someone means a sudden and usually unexpected switch from being an ally, friend, or supporter to being hostile, treacherous, or antagonistic. It represents a shift from loyalty to betrayal or direct attack.   So, was "the public" supportive of Trump until now?

Now the first part.  Who, exactly, is "the public"?  Is it the same as “the American people”?  As “the voters”?  As “the country”?  The technical definition of “the public” is  "of or concerning the people as a whole" from the Latin "publicus", meaning “pertaining to the people, state, or community.”  

Which isn’t helpful at all is it?

Throughout all of recorded history, the desire to know the future, to predict the outcomes of battles and harvests, has been nearly universal.  It's why the Greeks trekked to the Oracle of Delphi to consult the Pythia, a priestess of Apollo, for prophecies about the future.  

It's why the Romans revered the sacred chickens and routinely consulted them on matters of the utmost importance. They believe the  ‘sacred chickens’ could confer power on those who heeded the predictions about the future that were gleaned from the way the chickens were eating. 

How seriously did they take the sacred chickens?

During the First Punic War, Publius Claudius Pulcher turned to them for approval of his plan to launch a surprise attack on the Carthaginian fleet.. When the chicken watcher told  Pulcher that they were not eating, which was a bad omen, he replied, ‘Since they do not want to eat, let them drink!’ and had them thrown into the sea .  In the naval battle which ensued nearly the entire Roman fleet was annihilated, and humiliated Pulcher returned to Rome where he was tried on the charge of impiety. 

You do not screw with the sacred chickens.  Which seems hilarious and weird to us modern folk, until you consider how many billions Very Serious People spend on our own version of the sacred chickens  

Focus groups.  Research polling.  White paper factories.  Apocalyptic cults.  Associate Professors of the Practice of International Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.   And, of course, the punditocracy, which excels at making ambiguous yet declarative statements.

But in our country the state of the future isn’t usually determined by naval battles or the death of kings or predicted by comets and strange weather.  In our country, the fate of the future very much depends on the next election.  In other words, which way will “the American people” will jump this time? which is why polling companies and focus groups and pundits do a land-office business. 

It’s also why groupthink and conventional wisdom doom the pundit class to being mostly wrong most of the time.  Because they’re not really paid to predict the future.  They’re almost always paid to tell their readers, subscribers, patrons, or publishers what they want to hear.  So they spin fairy tales about the wisdom and righteousness of “the American people” and make sure that their version of the American people either includes their readers, subscribers, patrons or publishers or flatters them.

But since we here at The Professional Left are all about clarity, for clarity’s sake, let’s turn to one of the books on every poli sci major’s shelf:  Richard Hostadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” published way, way back in the before time of 1964.

Hofstadter makes it clear that talk about “the American people” is usually doing political work, not descriptive work. In paranoid rhetoric, the people are glorified as a single, innocent mass – they are pure and unified, and always being betrayed and sold out. And anyone who disagrees is probably part of a shadowy conspiracy against them.

Hofstadter’s language – “heated exaggeration,” “suspiciousness,” “conspiratorial fantasy” – captures how this rhetoric feeds on fear while pretending to channel popular will. The speaker isn’t listening to the people; they ventriloquize them. Invoking “the American people” becomes a way to shut down argument, short-circuit complexity, and turn political disagreement into a loyalty test.

In his 1948 book, “The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It” Hofstadter is even more blunt.  He argues that American politics, for all its supposed passion, has long been trapped inside a narrow ideological cage, bound by an “unusually firm and widespread consensus” around property, capitalism, and individualism. 

That consensus defines who counts as “the people” before anyone ever opens their mouth. So when politicians invoke “the American people,” they’re rarely expanding democracy.  Instead, they’re guarding the fences around it.   However apocalyptic the rhetoric gets, the assumptions underlying it rarely change; the “range of vision” is tightly policed by gender, race, class, sexuality, wealth, all the usuals.

Taken altogether, Hofstadter’s work suggests that “the American people” is one of the most effective lies in American political language: a phrase that claims universality while doing exclusion, that promises popular power while consolidating authority, and that turns a messy democracy into a moral fairy tale with villains conveniently pre-labeled as un-American. 

And that lie fits hand-in-glove with another of the most effective lies in American political language: 

The “Both Sides Do It” lie.

In our politics right now there are actual fascists trying to eradicate American democracy and replace it with a white Christian nationalist autocracy.  Those are the Republicans.  All of them.  

And yet they are “American people” and “voters” and members of “the public” every bit as much as the patriots who are actively opposing the fascists in every way they can think of.  That coalition is 95% the Democrats, plus a few independents and now-former Republicans who have seen the light and joined the good guys. 

And those two groups – the fascists and American democracy's allies – are also “American people” and “voters” and members of “the public” every bit as much as the vast, dull, uninformed wad in the middle who are determined to stay in the middle no matter what.  They don’t  know what’s going on, and don’t want to know what's going on. All they know is that The Extremes on Both Sides are yelling at each other, and that Extremes are Bad, and that every day the legacy media reassures them that they – the sensible centrists and independents – are more virtuous and morally superior because they won’t lower themselves to taking sides in this loud, confusing pie fight between two extremes who are both somehow equally wrong.  

So when you hear anyone – even the good guys, even us – using polyfunctional words and phrases or using “soft language” to sand the rough edges off our politics, or to distribute blame so widely that ultimately no one is responsible for anything, ask yourself, what is this person trying to do?

Are they trying to provoke a possible and hopeful future where enough of the American people really do wake up to the threat at our doorstep, and really do care enough to vote against it?  

Or are they desperately lying to their base, trying to convince them they are still as one with  “the American people” while Trump’s poll numbers continue to plummet?

Speaking of which, according to The Economist this week, Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 38 percent!    That being the case, this headline should come as no surprise.  From The New York Times:

Gallup Will No Longer Track Presidential Approval Ratings 

The monthly poll has been used to measure presidential performance for almost nine decades.

After nearly 90 years, the Gallup Organization will no longer track presidential approval ratings, which served as a steady way to measure Americans’ views of their elected leaders.

Fuck those sacred chickens!  Throw 'em in the water!

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 969: Whatever Happened To 'The American People'?

"It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."  --  James Baldwin

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 968: Their Loyalty Test Never Ends

"Senator McCarthy's reckless and unfounded attempt to impugn my loyalty is just one more example of his typical tactic of attempting to tie up to Communism anyone who disagrees with him."  --  Edward R. Murrow

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I Just Threw Up In My Mouth a Little*

The fact that it's a Guest Essay in the New York Times.

The fact that they're casting themselves as the wise and far-seeing "we" here, and apparently everyone else is the "you" that got it all wrong.  

The fact that about halfway through they haul out the hoariest and (surprise!) most New York Times-pleasing of all media lies to elevate themselves above Both Sides:

Each of the major parties has pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it.

The fact that it's the fucking Libertarians.

And the fact that it just ain't so.

Meet Anthony L. Fisher:

When I worked for Reason magazine during Trump's rise to power in 2016, I was explicitly forbidden by the editor in chief from writing about Trump's racism, or the violence and racism at his rallies. It was a "sideshow," I was told.

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— Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonylfisher.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 8:10 AM

Then there is this from The Daily Beast, which was cited further down the BlueSky thread:

A leading critic of “cancel culture” is being accused of canceling one of its own—for speaking out too loudly and too often against President Donald Trump.

Throughout the Trump era, Reason magazine, a digital and print publication published by the nonprofit libertarian Reason Foundation, has routinely sounded the alarm about the perceived threat posed by “cancel culture,” the modern phenomenon in which people are publicly and professionally ostracized for heterodox beliefs or remarks. The magazine has lambasted other outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Intercept for firing or pushing out key staffers whose views or actions were determined to have conflicted with their respective editorial missions.

And yet, a long-time Reason columnist and policy analyst alleges that the libertarian magazine dropped her over her vehemently anti-Trump views.

“After 15 years, the curtains came down for me at Reason today. My views, I was told, had become too out-of-step with those of the organization,” Shikha Dalmia announced Tuesday evening in a Facebook post.

“Reason has some amazing writers who do great work on a whole host [of] issues that I will continue to read and share. And it has been an honor and pleasure to work with them,” she added. “However, I had a staunch and uncompromising anti-Trump voice calling out his authoritarian tendencies unambiguously. That this made many libertarians uncomfortable raises all kinds of interesting questions about the state of the liberty movement.”

From The Cato Institute (yes, it makes me feel dirty just writing that, but onward):

What’s Donald Trump Doing at the Libertarian Party Convention?

The Libertarian Party presidential nominating convention is coming up this weekend, with Donald Trump as a featured speaker. This is apparently the first time in US history that a political party has had another party’s nominee at its own nominating convention. And what a choice!

The Libertarian Party was founded to “challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual” and to specifically run candidates for office on a platform of personal liberty, economic liberty, and a peaceful foreign policy.

Needless to say, that’s not Donald Trump’s platform, nor does it describe his actions as president...

To be clear, I do appreciate various Johnny-Come-Latelies (even the Johnny-Galt-Come-Latelies) finally arriving where Liberals have already been for decades

I appreciate it even though, when they finally got to the party, it was already far, far too late. And I appreciate it even though these same people mocked and dismissed those of us who were right all along as alarmist crackpots right up until they had their long overdue moments of clarity.

What I do not appreciate -- what I might even call vexing (if you'll pardon the salty language because I know how important "tone" is in determining whether someone is right or wrong) -- is that every new arriviste to where the Left has been all along carries with them the same overweening, self-aggrandizing, and very thirsty, psychological disorder, best summarized here by the character of Bert Cooper on Mad Men

*(H/T @airbagmoments.bsky.social on Blue Sky for the heads up)

I Am The Liberal Media