The Tone Police Have Landed. Again.

 

You may have noticed that the media's battalions of Tone Police have begun working themselves into quite a lather over Democrats who have the temerity to speak brutally honestly about their fascist opponents. Because, according to the Tone Police rulebook, Democrats must either win politely and humbly or lose gracefully and humbly.   

As for how Republicans behave... that is of no concern to them.  

The Tone Police do not care what kind of racist, eliminationist language Republicans use, or how many lies-per-second they spew, or how nakedly they pander to the bigots and imbeciles of the GOP base, or what actual atrocities Republicans actually commit every single fucking day.  To the Tone Police—most of whom are former Republicans—that's just who Republicans are.  A fact of nature, not a behavior to be policed.  Might as well shout at the ocean for being wet as try to drag Republicans off to courtesy class.

The Tone Police believe that cordiality—even clenched-teeth cordiality—is both the highest human virtue and a spiritual state Republicans are psychologically incapable of achieving. And so, according to their rulebook, in every political contest, the burden of remaining civil and soft-spoken falls entirely on Democrats.

No matter how deranged or murderous Republicans get, Dems must take the high road, or turn the other cheek, to take the high cheek, or whatever.    Per the Tone Police rulebook, getting sucker-punched is supposed to be our fate.  Our purpose.  We exist to absorb wingnut abuse, which is why, to them, a Democrat punching back is an unforgivable party foul.

Like the Old Men in Kipling's poem -- 

We shall lift up the ropes that constrained our youth, to bind on our children’s hands;
We shall call to the waters below the bridges to return and to replenish our lands;
We shall harness (Death’s own pale horses) and scholarly plough the sands.

-- the bleary old veterans with decades of service in the ranks of the Tone Police are rousing themselves once again to do battle with Democrats who use blunt, clear language:

"Jon Ossoff, my advice to him is, if you start calling your political opponents Nazis, maybe it's time to shut up. That's just not what we do here in this country." -- David Brooks, this evening. Remember, Brooks still gets very handsomely rewarded by the fossilized media for saying shit like this

— driftglass (@driftglass.bsky.social) October 9, 2026 at 10:59 PM

Really impeccable timing on Brooks' part, lecturing Democrats on minding our verbal P's and Q's just days before Trump used his storm troopers to raid the home of a political opponent and his favorite race-based scapegoat.  From the AP today:

Federal agents searched Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home on Monday as part of a criminal investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The search was conducted by Homeland Security Investigations agents, said the people, who were not authorized to publicly discuss an ongoing investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. More details about the investigation and its focus were not immediately clear, though Vice President JD Vance last May signaled that the Trump administration would investigate Omar for immigration fraud allegations, which she has denied.

But Tone Policing is not just those for whom -- 

The Lamp of our Youth will be utterly out, but we shall subsist on the smell of it;
And whatever we do, we shall fold our hands and suck our gums and think well of it.
Yes, we shall be perfectly pleased with our work, and that is the Perfectest Hell of it!

 -- are strapping on their rusty swords and waddling into battle.  

The proto-Brookses still climbing the steep, shit-thick trail up Pundit Mountain toward legacy-media glory are rushing to establish their own Tone Police bona fides.  For example, this idiot who also happens to be Brooks' colleague at The Atlantic:

A Left-Wing Politics Based on Calling People Names

For Jennifer Welch, moving left and reviling Republicans are the keys to victory.
By James Kirchick

Among the many areas of American life democratized by the internet, few have been more transformed than political commentary. Instead of being restricted to an old boys’ club of op-ed writers and Sunday-talk-show guests, punditry is now open to anyone with an internet connection. This shift has created abundant opportunities for once-neglected voices and broadened public discourse beyond a narrow establishment-media consensus. But lowering the barrier to entry has also had its downsides, mainly in the rise of political influencers. Like talk-radio hosts of yore, charismatic social-media commentators are skilled at forming a personal relationship with their listeners. Many of the most successful, however, pay next to zero attention to the details of policy or governance and gain followers mostly by calling the other side names. Consider the case of Jennifer Welch, author of the new book Not Today, Fascists.

A co-host of the left-wing podcast I’ve Had It, Welch commands millions of followers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms. Multiple times a week, she delights her legions of fans by mocking Donald Trump, whom she calls “America’s dumbass dictator,” and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whom she derides as “Chuckles,” for his insufficiently ardent resistance to the “fascist” GOP. She has called Erika Kirk, the widow of the murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk, an “absolute grifter,” and the MAGA movement an “anti-family, pro-pedophilia death cult.” Her response to Lindsey Graham’s death was to say, “He liked cock, as we all know.” (No, we don’t. No evidence that the bachelor senator was gay has ever surfaced.)

And that's where the paywall kicked in.  Since I'm never going to be fool enough to pay for a publication where so many Neocons and unreconstructed Conservative hacks have found safe harbor, that's all you'll be getting from me today.  Although a thoughtful soul has passed along to me that this perfect little Both Siderist turd --  

The American left has decided to mimic the right by cocooning itself in its own echo chamber.

-- is to be found further down.

No, James, we're not cocooned in our own echo chamber. We're doing the day-to-day scut work of protecting our democracy—the work the legacy media all but abandoned decades ago in favor of [checks notes] the lazy, toxic, very profitable cult of Both Sides Do It.

Hey, speaking of the legacy media, let's check in with James Fallows to see what's happening with America's longest-running and most revered network political talk show, Meet the Press:

See, it's this sort of shit that convinced me to wind down my twenty-year-running Sunday Morning Comin' Down breakdown of the Sunday shows.  Because as the GOP moved inexorably towards open, leering racism and fascism, the legacy media kept scuttling further and further to the right to maintain the false equivalence between Republicans and Democrats on which their entire industry is based.

If you're interested, there's more on the history of Tone Policing here: "The Tone Police".

And here: "Meghan McCain and the Triumphant Return of the Tone Police".

And here: "The Hughing and the Crying".

And here: "Today In Both Sides Do It: Advice From The New York Times On The Proper Use Of 'Fuck'".

And here: "On This Week's Exciting Episode of Tone Cop: Matthew Dowd..."

And here: "The Tone Police Never Sleep".

Modesty demands that I stop there, but there are dozens more, but I shall play you out with a little ditty...

The tone police

They live on cable teevee

The tone police

They're paid to shush and decree

The tone police

They're coming to denounce me

Oh no...

No Fair Remembering Stuff

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1029: Elois And Morlocks and MAGAs, Oh My!

"What really matters is what you do with what you have."  --  H. G. Wells

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The Never Trump Foxtrot

There's an old spinning wheel in the parlor, 

Spinning dreams of the long, long ago...

-- "The Old Spinning Wheel",  1933.

For your edification, the former-Republican dance in four easy steps.  

Step 1:  Reagan!  Sigh.

Sarah Longwell, from this podcast, beginning around the 7:00 minute mark:  People [are] always like, "Well, you guys were Republicans and so back then, how could you have done this?" I can't tell you.. Ronald Reagan used to have this whole bit about and and [George H.W. Bush] they talked about immigration...Uh Ronald Reagan would say the greatest thing about America is...

Step 2.  It was never like this in the Before Time.  

Longwell:  It was never like this coming up...

Now we have to strap on the seven-league boots and jump all the way over the actual history and actual trajectory of the actual Republican Party during Ms. Longwell's entire adult life.  Because, fun fact, Ms. Longwell was born the same year Reagan was elected.  

She was eight years old when he left office.  

She was 12 when Bush Sr. got whupped by Bill Clinton.  

So her "memory" of what the Republicans were like back in the day is based entirely on myths and fairy tales passed down by people whose political, social, and economic viability depend on the curation of Reagan myths and legends. 

Step 3.  If you look under the surface of the GOP, you'll find all these "good" Republicans, just waiting to be shown the light!

Longwell:  Like that's [the myth of Reagan] who we are.  And I still think there's a lot of that in there. And so we have to show them what they [the real villains] are doing.

Step 4.  Yes, there are real villains, and they need to be held accountable.  But they're all of relatively recent vintage, and they're not like all those "good" Republicans.

Longwell:  And the Stephen Miller of it all, the masked thugs of it all, like that. Exactly.  Let them keep putting that ghoul on Fox News. Like, that guy's not mainstream.

Then...repeat Step 3.

Longwell:  And so we have to show them [those] people. This is where you can start to turn Americans who even voted for Trump, but people of good conscience against what is happening here.

And there it is.  The Never Trump thesis right there on the table.  Endless digging and sifting and pawing through the Mount Everest of shit that is the Republican Party, cocksure that there are scads of "people of good conscience" in there somewhere who voted for Trump over... and over... and over again and yet somehow had no idea what they were doing or what was going on -- and still don't 

And all they need to be redeemed is The Bulwark to gently remove the scales from their eyes.  You know, like Paul on the road to Damascus!  Which is why you should subscribe, why you should Buy!Her!Book!, and why Democrats should focus lots of our limited time and energy and money on persuading these "good" Republicans to vote for us baby-killing, commie scum.

Hey, it's still a notionally free country, and you're free to buy her book if that's your thing.  But before you take anything she, or any other Never Trumper, says about Reagan or the history of the Republican Party during the Before Time at face value, may I suggest you read about it from actual historians who have done decades of painstaking original research, and not from the publisher/PR flack for a media corporation staffed with former Republicans. 

An actual historian like, say, Rick Perlstein.  

I realize that the notion of summarizing Rick's scholarship in a few paragraphs is ludicrous, but if I were to do so, I think it would be fair to say that Rick argues that Reagan was the genial, affable spokesman for a political machine that successfully turned cultural grievance into a governing philosophy. By fusing white backlash, conservative evangelical activism, free-market fundamentalism, anti-feminism, and sophisticated conservative organizing, Reagan helped create the modern Republican Party. His real legacy was making the conservative movement the dominant force in American politics for decades and normalizing ideas and tactics that eventually culminated in Trumpism.

One recurring theme across his four monumental histories of the modern Republican Party -- Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland -- is that Reagan didn't conjure these forces from scratch; he successfully united and legitimized them, and gave disparate right-wing anti-government factions a charismatic leader and a winning electoral strategy.

Trump didn't overthrow the Reagan Revolution. 

He completed it.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1028: Here Come The Bribes!

"They have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation and public robbery a science."  --  Denis Kearney, 1878

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Today In Lifeboat News: Jim Durkin.

From the Chicago Tribune today:

Former Illinois House GOP leader Jim Durkin endorses Democrat JB Pritzker over Republican Darren Bailey

Wowsers.  Not an Onion headline.  This actually happened. But if you're from here, the more you know, the less surprising it is.  

The Trib continues:

Accentuating the schisms that have helped make Republicans the superminority political party in Illinois, former Illinois House GOP leader Jim Durkin said he is endorsing Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker for a third term over Republican nominee Darren Bailey in the Nov. 3 general election.

“His campaign is going nowhere, and he’s on a foolish escapade,” Durkin said of Bailey, adding that the Republican governor nominee has “a delusional egomaniacal view of the world.”

Durkin’s refusal to support Bailey’s second consecutive bid against Pritzker is not surprising. But his public endorsement of the Democrat, in a video the governor’s campaign is scheduled to release Monday, marks a major break for Durkin, who still considers himself a Republican.

“I’ve worked with Pritzker, and I don’t agree with JB on a lot of things. But the fact is, he and I have worked together,” Durkin said. He cited Pritzker’s investment in infrastructure, the credit upgrades to steady the state’s finances and the governor’s support for “commonsense gun reforms.”

“I look at something that he (Pritzker) has done and this is nothing that Darren Bailey could ever, in his wildest dreams, if he was governor, would he ever be able to accomplish,” Durkin said. “We’ve got to shed Darren Bailey from the party and, I’m speaking for myself, but I am not going to throw away or waste a vote for governor this November, and that’s why I’m voting for JB Pritzker.”

For the record, Durkin is not some relic from the Before Time, forgotten by history.  

He was the Minority Leader of the Illinois House of Representatives from 2013 to 2023.  He was appointed to the Illinois House of Representatives on January 6, 1995, and served until 2002.  In 2006, he was appointed to the Illinois Senate to replace Judy Baar Topinka.  In 2000 he was state chairman for John McCain's presidential campaign in Illinois, and in 2007 he was Illinois co-chair and national legislative co-chair for McCain's second presidential campaign.  

After Illinois Republicans got stomped (again) in 2022, Durkin announced he would not be running for re-election. 

And then...

From the Chicago Sun-Times, November 11, 2022:

Man in the middle: Departing state House GOP Leader Durkin says Trump so ‘harmful’ to nation that RINO tag is ‘badge of honor’

In a no-holds barred interview with the Sun-Times — the 13th interview he gave on Thursday — Durkin rated the state’s last five governors, bashed former President Donald Trump and railed on the current climate of the state’s Republican Party.

He’s part of a vanishing breed in Illinois — a moderate Republican more interested in reaching across the aisle than giving the ruling Democrats the back of his hand.

But Western Springs Republican Jim Durkin is relinquishing his role as House minority leader, a largely thankless job as his party moved further to the right and the state moved further to the left.

And he said being called a RINO is a “badge of honor.”

That stands for “Republican in name only,” a taunt conservatives spit at moderates — and an idea that Durkin argues is killing his party.

All in all, I don't have much sympathy for Mr. Durkin, but I don't have a lot of enmity for him either.  

On the one hand, it looks like he's trying to make amends.  

On the other hand, not endorsing a doomed tomato can like Bailey, and endorsing Pritzker, who is going to beat Bailey like the proverbial rented mule, is a very low-risk investment in future political/media viability for a former Republican who sees no place for himself in the current Illinois GOP.

On the other hand, he did bail on his party and correctly identify the rot within it that starts at the very top.  And so far he hasn't tried to tell Democrats how to run our party, or insist that the only path forward is to move further to the right.

On the other hand, he waited until it looked like Trump was safely headed for the ash heap of history before discovering his inner dissident, and the Illinois Republican Party began losing its mind long before that.

Exhibit A, from The Illinois Times,  August 12, 2004:

Keyes to victory?

The Illinois Republican Party goes to extremes to find a Senate candidate

The new Illinois Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Maryland activist Alan Keyes, may be most famous for his most liberal act: jumping into a mosh pit while Rage Against the Machine performed, body-surfing the crowd, and exchanging body slams with a spiky-haired teen as a means of getting filmmaker Michael Moore’s endorsement for president in 2000. As Moore put it, “We knew Alan Keyes was insane. We just didn’t know how insane until that moment.”

“Insane” is an adjective that voters may be hearing a lot in association with Keyes before Nov. 2. The reason: The opinionated candidate has a long record of far-right statements that have been largely overlooked. In the 1996 and 2000 Republican presidential contests, no candidate saw Keyes as a threat or wanted to risk criticizing an African American. Since then, Keyes has been a little-noticed commentator favored by the extreme right wing. That will soon change, and many of Keyes’ comments may shock the Republican moderates who grudgingly accepted him as their candidate.

In 2002, Keyes argued that the abortion issue should determine the outcome of every election. “This issue alone, which I believe dominates our moral decline as a people, should decide this and every election cycle,” he said. During a campaign appearance in Bedford, N.H., in 2000, Keyes asked a class of fifth-graders, most of whom were 10 years old, “If I were to lose my mind right now and pick one of you up and dash your head against the floor and kill you, would that be right?” He then went on to tell the children that some courts and politicians think it’s OK to murder 6-month-old children...

And with that, I'm all out of hands.  

Burn The Lifeboats

The Great MAGA Trucker Strike That Never Was

I got my COVID booster (my "Fauci Ouchy", as certain infantile public hand-jobbing Republican Congress critters referred to it) on Wednesday at the pharmacy department of a local grocery store (which I will never get used to), and other than my arm being a little sore the next day, I remain alive and unzombified.  

Which reminded me...

One occupational hazard of living inside the Right Wing Cinematic Universe is that, after a while, you start to believe the mob's hooting is power. That if enough people cheer loudly enough on Facebook, reality itself is obligated to bend the knee.  That if Ben Shapiro tweets it, if Newsmax panels it, if fifty YouTube patriots thumbnail it in red letters next to a picture of a screaming eagle, then the thing has already happened. Reality's only remaining job is to catch up.

Which brings us to the Great October 1st Trucker Strike of 2026. Remember that? Of course you don't. Nobody does. It was supposed to be huge.  50,000 truckers?  A 100,000 truckers?  A million?  

It was supposed to be something like the 1967 haulers strike:

7-Week Strike by Steel Haulers Spreads Disruption in Industry

Or, at the very least, the 1973 wildcat trucker strike protesting the OPEC oil crisis:

When Truckers Shut Down America to Protest Oil Prices—and Became Folk Heroes

The strike started when one driver, mad as hell about the OPEC oil crisis, turned off his engine and got on his CB radio.

You know, the nation's supply chains grinding to a halt. Empty shelves. Panic buying. And truckers in their MURRICA FIRST regalia being carried on the shoulders of a grateful nation.  The usual End Times porn led by faux folk heroes that has become the stock-in-trade of the right-wing media ecosystem. Day after day, the algorithm fed its addicts a steady diet of warnings and promises. This was going to show them. This was going to bring the country to its knees and prove who really keeps America running.

And then October 1 arrived.

And nothing happened.

Compare that to the People's Convoy of 2022. It was ridiculous, built on right-wing hysteria and nonsense. It was a rolling cosplay convention for people who desperately wanted to imagine themselves as the French Resistance while being interviewed by Fox News from the cab of a Peterbilt. But credit where it's due: they did understand politics as theater. They understood that television needs pictures, and that MAGA outrage always needs a slogan and a scapegoat. 

So they identified their villain, planned their route, and stuck to their script. They had Republican politicians embracing them and a conservative media machine eager to turn every traffic jam into the Second Coming of Lexington and Concord.

Most importantly, they knew who they were supposedly fighting. They were against vaccine mandates, mask mandates, government overreach, Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, George Soros, the World Economic Forum, and whatever else was on the grievance menu that week. The list was incoherent, but it was a list -- it told the cameras where to point, and the audience who to boo.

But the October strike promoters couldn't answer one very simple question:  Who exactly are you striking against?

Seriously. Who?

The President? Congress? Freight brokers? Oil companies? OPEC? Physics? Inflation? The invisible hand of the market that conservatives used to dearly, dearly love? A strike is a show of numerical strength designed to create leverage.  To exert pressure on somebody or some institution capable of granting concessions.   But the rationale for this stupid idea always dissolved into a cloud of hashtags and vibes, and YouTube monologues. The "movement" turned out to be nothing more than a tantrum being thrown by people who believed that if they yelled loud enough about how mad they were, somewhere, someone would do something.  

Because in this case, the only viable villain behind the trucker's suffering was...the Dear Leader.  And if the villain is the Dear Leader, and everyone knows it, but no one dares say it, well, that seems...problematic.   

The real lesson isn't about trucking. It's about the difference between attention and power.  Modern conservatism has become almost entirely dependent on fear-mongering as a substitute for organizing. A movement that once boasted about discipline and institutions now runs on engagement metrics, where every crisis is marketed like a summer blockbuster.  

The 2022 convoy attracted attention because it was designed to attract attention. It was a media event disguised as a political movement. The October 2026 strike failed to even clear that very low bar.  Its organizers appeared to believe that if enough influencers posted enough videos predicting a shutdown, the shutdown would simply materialize on schedule.

But what they got was a wet fart in a kiddie pool. Freight continued rolling along. Stores remained open. And somewhere in the vast digital landfill of abandoned right-wing prophecies, beside the red wave that never came, the indictments that never came, the arrests that never came, and the secret evidence that never appeared, now rests the Great October 1st Trucker Strike of 2026.

And now a fun fact for any science fiction fans who made it this far.

Robert Heinlein's classic short story "The Roads Must Roll" was first published in June of 1940 and is frequently cited as identifying the major elements of possible future labor disruptions based on logistics and the nation's critical transportation infrastructure.  Specifically, how an entire economy that comes to depend on, in Heinlein's story, a highly interconnected network of massive, 100-mph moving sidewalks means that system becomes extremely vulnerable to disruption, and its strategic workers come to have enormous leverage.  

So, for your entertainment, I bring you the 1950 "Dimension X" radio adaptation of "The Roads Must Roll".   Enjoy.

Keep 'Em Rolling But Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1027: Fair Weather Fiends

"I am the Senate."  --  Sheev Palpatine, Revenge of the Sith.

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The Autocrat's Most Reliable Autopen

No Half Measures