No, it's not always this linear. Often it's recursive. But I wanted to make it so simple that a
child could understand it.
For example, early on, Trump won over the mob by speaking to
them in their political mother tongue -- the language and lies of Hate Radio and Fox
News.
Later, Trump's lies and slanders got message-tested on MAGA bigots and
imbeciles at his rallies. When they cheered, that line went into the
playbook; when they didn't, that line got dropped or sent back to the workshop.
And since America's bigots and imbeciles -- that ignorant army that clashes by
night -- saw fit to put him back in office, more and more frequently Trump
just commandeers the entire propaganda delivery system. He demands that
everyone downstream of him repeat and amplify his gibbering idiocy, and rise
to defend his indefensible behavior.
So while Trump has risen over the past decade from the Accelerator of Lies to
the Father of Lies, the purpose of the system has changed not at all.
It's still doing what it was designed to do forty years ago: vacuum up the most
incendiary swill it can find -- or, more often, just make shit up -- and fill
the air with it.
And if Democrats are serious about not just eking out narrow victories over
fascism from time to time but crushing it root and branch, then smashing the
Conservatives' Pretty Hate Machine is imperative.
From me,
20 years ago
(and from which I assume Rick Wilson has pilfered the title of his upcoming
book, because aren't all Never Trump critiques pilfered from the archives of
the Liberal blogosphere?)
Sadly, the Democrats' current strategy of pouring crazy amounts of money into
campaign ads every two years and nothing into building a genuine, for-real
Liberal media is exactly the wrong way to go about it.
This was a lead story in The New York Times today.
The short answer, which is actually rather long, is "No".
This is roughly the 12,258th "think piece" on progressive outsiders winning a
few Democratic primaries. It's nearing the "But Her Emails" saturation point. And these articles tend to come either in one of
two flavors.
First, Dire!Warnings! cursing Democrats for risking dooming us all by not
becoming GOP Lite in order to chase the votes of disaffected
Republicans. These articles tend to come from (small wonder)
recently-former Republicans whose "advice" to Democrats has always been --
rain or shine -- to keep moving rightward, ever-rightward -- in pursuit of an
imaginary Center which is always, somehow, slipping over the horizon.
Second, there are the breathless articles touting how a few members of the
Democratic majority (do the math) are fighting back hard against a small
number of progressives with whom they have no intention of sharing even a
small corner of the Democrat's Big Tent. Mind you, they had no fucking
problem when it came to sharing our Big Tent with ghouls like Liz Cheney
who spent their entire career slandering Democrats in the most monstrous
language imaginable...but us New Deal Democrats get nothing but the stink-eye
and a boot in the ass from the gatekeepers who own the velvet ropes.
Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left
One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and
is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.
The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously
for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in
Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful
defeat of the year.
Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into
the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist
candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a
budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next
Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent
congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.
“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan
Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group,
revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and
2028 to discredit democratic socialism.
It will not shock you to learn that Third Way gets its money from Big
Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech as well as outfits such as ExxonMobil and
various health insurance companies. All the usual suspects who would
rather see a MAGA flag flying over this country forever than share the
Democratic Party with actual progressives.
Now, it is rumored that this “Better Dead than Al-Sayed” gang of Regressives
is led by a shadowy figure known only as “David Fucking Brooks”. And
two Fridays ago Mr. Brooks left his Bethesda Maryland compound just long
enough to appear on the PBS News Hour where, practically in tears, he said
this.
Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my
lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote
for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris.
Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He
is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit
there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for
all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private
health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.
That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on
which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and
therefore…
At which point, Brooks co-panelist, Jonathan Capehart, reached his limit of
politely tolerating this old fraud's endless bullshit and interrupted him
with:
I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far
away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists
or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me,
I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this
blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left.
That was the signal for the host – Amna Nawaz – to do the PBS thing of
quickly moving on to the next topic at the slightest sign of conflict.
However, since I do not abide by PBS rules, I will just add that it is a
matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable
definition of "the center" beyond:
"What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".
It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century
publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think
about anything.
And of course Third Way is not a solo act. They have plenty of fellow
travelers who are horrified that a few Democratic candidates have won their
primaries in ways that Third Way, LLC does not approve
of.
Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not
socialist’
Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024
are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act
as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion
over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”
The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as
democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.
Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said
they will unveil the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left
conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the
ballot to join them in signing it.
Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New
Deal?
So, the short answer is "No".
The longer answer -- the reason why the answer is "No" -- is
uglier and deeply embarrassing to the legacy media, which is why you will
never hear them speak of it. Because it has to do with what the "Tea
Party" actually was.
For several years I bored you all silly with post after post after post about
how the Tea Party was not some new, insurgent outsider group who were storming
the barricades of the moribund Republican party. That they
were the Republican party: the same ignorant, racist,
shoutycrackers Republican base they'd always been, but now that the Bush
administration had shit the bed hard enough to crack the Earth's mantle, they
needed their own,
incredibly inconvenient past to go away so they could get on with the important work of having a full-on,
eight-year-long, screaming mental breakdown over the election of a Black man
as president.
And they accomplished this by A) Putting on stupid hats, waving Gadsden flags,
and swearing that they'd never even heard of George W. Bush and, B) Getting
the legacy media to go along with this massive fraud, which the legacy media
was only too eager to do, given their own despicable complicity with the
various crimes and treasons of the Bush administration.
And it worked. And, as is our eternal fate, the only people willing to straight-up call bullshit on the whole scam were
usdirty, disreputable Liberalswho no one listens to anyway.
By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican
operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically not a
spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political
affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.
Ed Kilgore
wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and
E.J. Dionne. There was also this
July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:
The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past
year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated
or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed
out,
those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways
indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers
more generally.
But here's the thing. There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway
media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were
nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as
one wag put it in 2009...
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away
from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
No, no, no! Definitely could not say that because that
would violate the post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all
problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is
a "vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who had been moved by
the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.
And to this very day, that lie continues to be one of those "Zombie lies",
which everyone sorta knows is nonsense -- like Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves --
but has so completely passed into the realm of myth that the legacy media
keeps right on pretending that it was actually true.
In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth was so secure that by 2016 Joe
Scarborough could finally come right out and say
of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all
knew it and know with perfect certainty that there would be consequences (h/t
Heather at Crooks & Liars)
And that's the longer answer. The Democrats are not facing their own "Tea
Party" moment because There. Was. No. Tea. Party. There was just the
Bush-Off Machine
goin' like 60 to rebrand the Republican base.
What corporate Democrats are facing are ... New Deal Democrats. People
who revere FDR as the man who crushed fascism, and whose programs built the
Middle Class, strengthened the union movement and helped insure that old age
and poverty weren't a death sentence.
People who remember that FDR was called a commie by the Republican party and
the Republican media every inch of the way.
People who look at the mess the establishment has made of this country and
think the Middle Class could used some help, the aged, infirm and poor could
use some help, that good health care should be affordable, that unions are a
good thing, that robber barons and Republican looters are bleeding us dry and,
most importantly, for any of that to happen, fascism in America must be
discredited and destroyed, root and branch.
I've done some very minor tailoring to this column to turn it into a
fun puzzle for the whole family! So...
Who said it? When? About what?
Go.
___ and the Polls
There's a reason George Washington didn't take a poll at Valley Forge.
There are times in the course of war when the outcome is simply
unknowable. Victory is clearly not imminent, yet people haven't really
thought through the consequences of defeat. Everybody just wants the
miserable present to go away.
We're at one of those moments in the war... The polls show rising
disenchantment with the war. Sixty percent of Americans say they want to
withdraw some or all troops.
Yet I can't believe majorities of Americans really want to pull out and
accept defeat…
…one thing is for sure: since we don't have the evidence upon which to
pass judgment on the overall trajectory of this war, it's important we
don't pass judgment prematurely...
It's just wrong to seek withdrawal now, when the outcome of the war is
unknowable and when the consequences of defeat are so vast.
Some of you will respond that this is easy for me to say, since I'm not
over there. All I'd say is that we live in a democracy, where decisions
are made by all. Besides, the vast majority of those serving... and
their families, said they voted to re-elect ... They seem to want to
finish the job.
Others will say we shouldn't be there in the first place. You may be
right. Time will tell.
But right now, this isn't about your personal vindication…
As you probably already know, Donald Trump has turned the USS Abraham Lincoln
into a floating gulag for any sailor unlucky
enough to be stationed there:
Trump says record USS Lincoln deployment 'not nearly long enough'
President Donald Trump reacted to reports of poor conditions on the USS
Abraham Lincoln on Friday, claiming that families of service members are
"not" concerned and saying that the vessel hasn't been deployed for
"nearly long enough."
The president also confirmed that a new aircraft carrier is headed to the
Middle East to replace it during a very brief gaggle with reporters on the
tarmac at Joint Base Andrews Friday afternoon.
The aircraft carrier's movements come amid reports of mental health and
supply issues aboard the USS Lincoln, whose long deployment to the Middle
East in support of the Iran war includes a record-setting time at sea of
more than 200 days. Navy leaders, including the Navy's acting Secretary
Hung Cao, last week held a heated town hall for families of the USS
Lincoln who had raised concerns about the conditions on the ship.
Tapper: What is your husband saying about conditions on the ship? Wife of
Service Member Aboard USS Lincoln: My husband is appalled at the
conditions on this ship. This is not his first deployment. And he is
saying that it is the worst deployment that he's ever been on. His
shipmates say the same.
This should come as no surprise, as Donald Trump has never given a shit about
the United States military except as a toy for him to play with. Trump
also thinks anyone willing to risk their life for their country is
a "sucker" and a "loser".
John Kelly confirms Trump privately disparaged U.S. service members and
veterans
Trump called fallen soldiers "suckers” and "losers" during his presidency,
according to a 2020 report in The Atlantic.
But do you remember the fate of the USS Abraham Lincoln during the last
Republican administration that lied us into a disastrous war in the Middle
East and then catastrophically botched it?
It was in all the papers.
That would be Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, delivered on
May 1, 2003.
And that, just two days before that speech, the cover story of the now-defunct
Weekly Standard featured David Brooks declaring that The War Was Over!
Yay!
The Good Guys had triumphed! Neoconservatism had been vindicated. And it
was time for the resistance to crawl under a nearby porch and quietly die, or
dry up and blow away or dissolve into laughably delusional
absurdism.
Pieces of Mr. Brooks' radioactively reckless and vindictive claptrap can be
found
here.
As you literati know, maritime myth and literature are full of stories about
ships "sailing under a doom." The story of Jonah from the Bible.
The tale of the Mary Celeste. The legend of the Flying Dutchman.
Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Poe's
MS. Found in a Bottle. Melville's Moby Dick. And so
on.
Now I'm not saying that the USS Abraham Lincoln is cursed. I am saying
that, if it is cursed, we definitely know why. And that, out of
an abundance of caution, it wouldn't hurt to burn some sage, flick a little
holy water around, ring some church bells, and never, ever put another
Republican in the White House.
You can take the boy out of [checks notes] The Wall Street Journal, The Neocon
Weekly Standard, The New York Fucking Times, Meet The Press, PBS and NPR...
...but you can't take The Wall Street Journal, The Neocon Weekly Standard, The New
York Fucking Times, Meet The Press, PBS and NPR out of the boy.
David Brooks: Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my
lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for
that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden
seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is
handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there
and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so
that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health
insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.
That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which
the party is moving further and further away from the center, and
therefore...
Jonathan Capehart:I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far
away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or
people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I
just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket
argument that the Democratic Party is running far left.
Let's hold on that a moment, because yesterday on the BlueSky Ana Marie Cox
asked:
What are David Brooks' worst columns? Everyone can cite the sandwich one,
and the Epstein one but of the top of dome--what else? He did say that
wearing a Mets hat could save democracy once? (I'm making a video.)
My Bat Signal lit up and I replied as follows:
I'd ask "alphabetically or chronologically", but it's a trick question,
since David Brooks has only ever written one column -- the same column --
over and over again. But if I had to choose...it's "Collapse of the
Dream Palaces" April, 2003,
excerpted here.
A close second is the full-blown freakout when his very good friend
& fellow Iraq war pimp, Joe Lieberman. lost to Ned Lamont in the
Democratic primary in 2006.
And then lied about it later.
Now back to his PBS performance.
It is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable
definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at
this moment".
It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.
All of which says a whole lot more about the people who keep paying him to confidently spout his poisonous claptrap decade after decade than it does about David Fucking Brooks himself.
As most of you know, on this blog, on our podcast, and on stage and screen, I
have long maintained a particular theory about how the Republican Party got itself
into this mess.
They kept two sets of books.
The first set of books was for the rubes, the bigots and the chucklefucks, who
make up the Republican base. And those books were full of absolute nonsense.
Liberals are baby killing, gun-grabbing Commie demons. Trans people are coming
for your children. Immigrants are rapists. Tax cuts pay for themselves. The
government is always the problem. Whatever scary story or conspiracy theory
would keep people angry, frightened, and voting Republican -- that was what
went into the first set of books.
And there is no bottom to it. No limit. The Republican base will believe
whatever they were told, because the Republican Party spent decades training
them to believe it. But the point of those lies was never really
governing. The point was power.
The racism, the conspiracy theories, the fear, the culture-war panic -- those
were the keys that unlocked the public treasury. The Republican Party could
use Fox News, talk radio, and an entire conservative media ecosystem to push
those buttons whenever they needed votes. Then, once they were in power, they
could do what they actually wanted to do: deregulate everything, cut taxes for
wealthy people, and serve their donors.
That was the first set of books.
Ah, but to keep the country from complete collapse, Republican leadership had
to keep a second set of books. This one contained reality.
That was the book with the spreadsheets and the data and the boring stuff: how
economies work, how wars work, how logistics work, how science works, how
diseases work. It was the book you actually need if you are trying to run a
country.
And for decades, the Republican Party had a strange arrangement. They would
loudly scream about all the imaginary horrors from the first set of books to
get the base furious enough to elect them, then quietly operate from the
second set of books once they were in office.
They would tell their voters that they were going to deport everyone they
hated, crush their enemies, restore some imaginary golden age, and punish all
the people they had been taught to fear.
Then they would get into office and discover that reality existed. They never
delivered the fantasy. They never actually purged the country of all the
people they demonized. They never delivered the revenge fantasy they sold
their voters. OMG, they even -- gasp! -- cut deals with those baby
killing, gun-grabbing Commie demon Dems!
And as long as the Republican elites and donors controlled the party, the
arrangement sorta worked.
Then along came Trump, and the important thing Trump changed was not the
Republican Party's nature. It was that he simply burned the second set of
books. Trump decided he didn't need the reality-based ledger anymore. He
operated entirely from the first set of books.
He told the base: Yes. I really am going to give you everything you dreamed
of. I will punish the people you hate. I will hurt the people you fear. I will
break the rules for you. And in exchange, you will let me loot the place.
That was the deal. And it still is.
The Republican Party had always used fantasy as a political weapon. Trump
simply stopped pretending that reality existed at all. He looked at the
spreadsheets, the facts, the experts, the institutions, and basically said:
screw it. We don't need any of that.
It was the same kind of thinking that led people throughout history into
disasters: don't worry about the details, don't worry about logistics, don't
worry about reality. We can definitely invade the Soviet Union and
conquer it in two, three months tops because we're awesome! We always
win because we are awesome!
A triumph of the will, if you will. And when the Dear Leader lives in
that mindspace, facts are no longer an issue.
This was from me in September of 2016 -- years before anything called "Never Trump", and decades before Never Trumpers sloooooly and grudgingly began to accept that the real problem with the Republican party is that it's full of Republicans.
Once you start to notice that a depressingly large number of our fellow
citizens have become reprogrammable Orwellian meat-puppets, the rise of
Trump is not hard to understand at all.
And this was the citation from Orwell I was using:
"Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There
is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I
could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish
to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those 19th
century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of
Nature." -- O'Brien, 1984
And this is how Republicans operate all the time now. Everywhere.
Except there are still places where reality has a way of forcing itself back
into the room.
The courtroom is one of those places.
Outside the courtroom, operating from the first set of books, Republicans can
and do say anything. They can invent stories about reflecting pools, election
fraud, conspiracies, whatever. They can feed the base whatever toxic slop they
want because nobody is forcing them to prove it.
But eventually somebody crosses the border between fantasy and reality.
That's what happened to Jeanine Pirro.
When she is on television, playing to the audience, she can live in the first
set of books. She can repeat whatever bullshit the audience wants to hear.
But when she walks into a courtroom, she has crossed into domain of the second
set of books.
Here, there are rules. Here, tangible evidence matters. In fact, it's pretty much all
that matters. In here there are questions that can't be dodged, wriggled out of, or
dismissed with a demeaning insult. And most importantly, in here there
are now consequences for lying.
And once you've crossed the membrane between the domain where Boxwine Pirro spends most of her time, where Doug Burgam and
Donald Trump can lie all they want to because, as long as they keep feeding
the bigots and imbeciles the lies they want to hear, they are rewarded for
lying...
...and the domain of the courtroom, suddenly all the things that worked
outside the courtroom don't work anymore.
In here lawyers and judges get to demand that you show actual evidence.
Where are the photographs? Where are the witnesses? Where is the chain
of proof ? In here, Trump regime's lies and bluster evaporate like fairy gold once the enchantment has been broken.
This stupid Reflecting Pool fuck-up is the Decline and Fall of the Republican Party in microcosm, because reality is the wall Republicans keep slamming into. They have spent decades
building a political machine fueled entirely by bullshit from a fantasy
universe where nothing has to be proven. Because the base doesn't want
facts. They hate facts. They demand the story they were promised
-- the toxic slop they now crave like crack, which is why the people who feed
them that slop keep getting elected.
But science doesn't work that way. The law doesn't work that way.
Reality doesn't work that way.
We saw it with COVID. The refusal to respect facts and science had real
consequences. People died because this administration and its allies chose
political fantasy over reality. And now we see the same pattern in something as small and ridiculous as the
reflecting pool fiasco.
Trump made a bet that he could hire one of his mobbed up stooges to slap some paint, declare victory,
and everyone would accept the story. Which is pretty much his same "strategy" in Iran. When reality pushed back, the response was exactly what it has always been. Find a scapegoat. Find a boogeyman. Blame somebody else.
On questions about depleted munitions, Team Trump struggles to keep its story straight
To recap, the depleted stockpiles aren’t depleted, though they could be better, and everyone should blame Joe Biden.
But eventually you run into the problem that every authoritarian movement runs
into. There are still places where facts matter. There are still institutions where you cannot simply scream louder than
everyone else and reality goes away.
Which is why they keep losing. The more you force them into arenas where they have to answer questions,
produce evidence, and defend their claims, the more exposed they become.
Because their alternative to reality is always the same thing: Scream louder. Blame immigrants. Blame Muslims. Blame liberals. Blame trans kids. Blame anyone except themselves and their catastrophic decisions and failure. And the louder they scream, the clearer it becomes that they have nothing
else.
Look at the Republican campaign ads flooding the country right now. They have
money. They have the machinery. But what do they have to run on? Trump has wrecked the economy. He has driven up prices. His tariffs have hurt
consumers. His foreign policy disasters are piling up.
So what is left?
The first set of books. Fear. Rage. Racism. Resentment.
Because that is all they have.
It cracks me up with I see headlines from anonymous sources about Republicans getting nervous about Trump
hurting their chances in the midterms. Hey dum-dums, what it is about ""Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein FĂĽhrer" that you do not understand? Because that, sure as shit, is what you signed up for.
Trump is the Republican Party. Trump is the movement. You no longer have an independent identity separate from him. You are not partners, or pals, or peers. You are a tool he can use and discard. You are mere cells in the body of Trumpism.
This is the bargain you accepted when you handed your party over to someone who never cared about the second set
of books. Someone who never cared about reality. Someone who only cared about the first set of books — the one where every lie
is true as long as enough people want to believe it.
But eventually, reality always comes looking for payback.
