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I Am The Liberal Media!

The Republican Party's Two Sets of Books

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.

For example, from MSNOW:

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 Führer" 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.

And payback is a bitch.  

Temu Reagan

Some days it's hard to understand what put the "Never" in "Never Trump".  Or, rather, why their slogan was not, is not, and never will be "Never Republican".  

Because Temu Reagan actually delivered on their dearest wishes.  And he did so by diligently pursuing the path to political success laid down by St. Ronald Reagan.

First, political strategy.

Pandering to bigots to win elections?  Check.  

From The Washington Post, June 19, 2020:

Ronald Reagan in Philadelphia, Miss., to Donald Trump in Tulsa, a pattern of racially divisive politics.

Welcome the Evangelical Right to the inner circle of Republican power brokers?  Check.

Also from The Washington Post, March 22, 2021:

Reagan tied Republicans to White Christians and now the party is trapped

Republicans have a passionate base that is out of touch with the rest of America.

...Reagan’s first-term record was a mixed bag, as far as cultural conservatives were concerned. Even so, four years into his presidency, Reagan saw an opportunity to use religion to forge a political realignment in the South. Addressing a crowd of 10,000 religious leaders at an “Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast” during the 1984 Republican Convention, the president delivered a rousing speech. Reagan willfully blurred the line between church and state. “Religion needs defenders against those who care only for the interests of the state. The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable — and as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.” He concluded: “If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

Not surprisingly, the Republican platform that year reflected the agenda of White evangelicals. It called for a constitutional ban on abortion with no exceptions and the appointment of federal judges who opposed abortion. It supported voluntary school prayer, ignored the Equal Rights Amendment (which Republicans had supported in every platform from 1940 to 1976 with only two exceptions: 1964 and 1968) and rejected equal pay for women. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, closed the 1984 Republican convention by triumphantly calling the incumbent ticket “God’s instruments in rebuilding America.”

 

Second, tangible deliverables.

Gargantuan increase in military spending?  Check.

From AFSCME Defense Spending Resolution #1, June 18-22, 1984:

The Reagan Administration is seeking an unprecedented peacetime military buildup. The Reagan Administration’s Fiscal Year 1985 budget request for national defense spending is greater, even when adjusted for inflation, than defense spending in any other year since World War II, including the years of the Korean and Vietnam wars. If the Reagan Administration has its way, defense spending would climb an additional 25 percent, in inflation adjusted dollars, between 1985 and 1989. By 1989, Department of Defense spending would be 29% higher (after adjustment for inflation) than during the peak of Vietnam when 50,000 American troops were engaged in combat overseas...

From House.gov, June 24, 2026

Republicans Advance Largest Pentagon Budget in History while Cutting Billions from Domestic Investments

The $1,072,210,299,000 military budget is the most expensive ever, while the Trump administration requests even more funding

Massive tax cuts?  Check.

WTTW, February 25, 2020:

‘Arguing with Zombies’: Paul Krugman on Economic Ideas That Won’t Die

In his new book “Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future,” Krugman calls a number of economic policies “zombie theories” because they have been proved false, refuse to die and keep coming back. 

Another example he cites is that “tax cuts pay for themselves.”

“We both tried tax cuts and tax increases and it’s never happened. The Reagan tax cut led to big deficits. George W. Bush’s tax cut led to big deficits. Trump’s tax cut led to big deficits,” Krugman said. “Bill Clinton raised taxes and, you know, Republicans predicted disaster. It goes on and on.” 

“This is a theory that has – nothing has been tested as often as this one. And yet, when the Trump tax that was passed just about every Republican in Congress said, ‘Oh, I’m sure this will pay for itself,’” he said.

So why does that theory persist? And did Republicans really believe it would pay for itself? 

Krugman has a blunt answer.

“With politicians, do they actually believe in anything?” he quipped. ”The answer is, look at the people whose taxes are cut. A lot of zombie ideas, not all of them, but a lot of zombie ideas are basically kept shambling along eating people’s brains by billionaires.”

Center for American Progress, November 20, 2025:

7 Ways the Big Beautiful Bill Cuts Taxes for the Rich

Overall, the Big Beautiful Bill will harm poor Americans and raise the incomes of rich Americans—driving gains for the rich through cuts to marginal tax rates and the estate tax, along with tax breaks for businesses, business owners, and investors

Over the next decade, the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) will cut taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans by more than $14,700 per year per household and cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). Despite this, there has been comparatively little coverage of the specific mechanisms by which the BBB funnels money to the ultrarich. Meanwhile, tiny tax cuts for the working class have received disproportionate media attention, even as the BBB will reduce the incomes of the poorest Americans.

Overall, the BBB cuts taxes by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, primarily with $2.3 trillion of provisions that deliver most of their benefits to the richest 10 percent of Americans by income, according to new analysis of JCT data by the Center for American Progress. Within that, the BBB delivers $1 trillion in tax cuts to the top 1 percent while cutting more than $1.1 trillion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and other health programs used by the poorest Americans. 

Slashing the social safety net?  Check.

From The Washington Post, August 20, 1981:

Reagan Budget Means Drastic Cuts In Medicare and Medicaid Programs

Fifth of Nation Is Affected Reagan Budget Means Drastic Surgery for Medicare, Medicaid

The budget bill just signed by President Reagan will, as finally drawn, cut federal medical aid to more than a fifth of the American population.

NBC News, April 2, 2026:

Trump says it's 'not possible' for the U.S. to pay for Medicaid, Medicare and day care: 'We’re fighting wars'

Trump urged states to fund benefits programs instead because "we have to take care of one thing: military protection."

He went on to say that he told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought: “Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it too.”

Then add to the mix all the culture war bullshit -- the "Guns, God and Gays" bullshit -- that holds the coalition of Republican bigots and imbeciles together so the donor class can get what they're paying for.

Ronald Reagan was the first sitting U.S. president to actively champion overturning Roe v. Wade and making opposing the 1973 Supreme Court decision a core platform of the national Republican Party.

Ronald Reagan also accelerated the decades-long political and legal push to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges who opposed Roe v. Wade, helping create the conditions under which organizations like The Federalist Society would become enormously influential and raise up crop after crop of lawyers and judges who were Right Wing True Believers.

And Reagan -- along with two Conservative federal judges named Bork and Scalia -- gutted the Fairness Doctrine and unleashed a tidal wave of Conservative propaganda outlets that no longer had to worry about facts or fairness.

What Reagan delivered with a smile and hair dyed unnaturally brown, Trump delivers with a scowl and  hair dyed an the color of a Dreamsicle.   How can any fair-minded human look at the last 50 years of Republican politics and not see that Reagan was the overture and Trump is the finale of one, long, catastrophic Conservative revolution?

Or, to borrow a lightly edit quote from Holy Writ of the Oligarch Class.

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins; it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.

You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and Donald Trump is the man who has granted you your wish.

Update:  For more on these exciting developments we join Charlie Pierce already in progress...

Wait, Did the Republican Party Only Just Realize That It Hired a Bunch of Yahoos and Morons, and That’s Why It’s Falling Apart?

I’ve seen this coming ever since Reagan opened the Gates of Mordor back in 1980.

I Am The Liberal Media

The Dogmas of the Quiet Past

I was pleased and proud to have this man as my president.  Pleased and proud to have his family as our First Family.  I was proud to vote for him for senator once and for president twice.  I was proud to have been one of the panelists who vetted him when he was still a relatively obscure state senator during his ultimately failed primary bid for the U.S. House of Representatives against incumbent Bobby Rush. In fact, I still have my ticket stub from his "Barack the Vote" fundraiser.  

However, as pleased and proud as I was to have Barack Obama as my president, it is also worth remembering the environment in which Obama governed, including taking a moment to remember much furious shit we Obama supporters took from our "allies" on the left.  In case you'd forgotten, here's a sample from a now-deadlinked post on Common Dreams from May, 2013.  I have an archive full of this stuff: 

When Obama finally declares martial law and announces the new Fascist States of American, O-bots like Maddow will eagerly put on their Nazi armbands -- cute little pastel hope & change swastikas, of course -- and join the goose-stepping parade. She's nothing but a propagandist and has absolutely no scruples whatsoever, just like the corporation that pays her, just like the "commander-in-chief" she props up with her lies and half-truths...

That kind of rhetoric was not unusual at the time: over-the-top rage from the whole Conservative media machine and from the dirtbag Left.  And in that environment, the Obama administration constituted a grand social experiment in offering the Republican party base -- which had been trained by Republican leadership and Conservative media to automatically loathe Democrats with an almost unhinged ferocity -- a different option.  Offering them compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect, as well as policies that materially benefited them.

And that grand social experiment failed spectacularly.  Which is why it is worth our time and attention to diagnose why that experiment failed.  But to do that we'd have to journey into the past further back than 2016, which is something that pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" almost all categorically refuse to do. 

That is because to examine the state of our union prior to 2016 makes the pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" either look like arrogant idiots whose opinions should never be trusted again...or ambitious fools who were complicit in creating the ideal conditions for a monster like Trump to emerge...or both.  And since pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" now dominate any media conversation about politics, that once again leaves it to dirty, disreputable outsiders like us to do the work of explaining why everything went to hell.  

To start with, President Barack Obama might as well have been built in a Centrist/Moderate/Both Siderist lab by the New York Times editorial board. He was everything the pundits and the consultant class said would be the "solve" for what was dividing America. 

This is from me 16 years ago, in 2010:

For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.

Since he showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as

Half black and half white...
Half American urbanite, half world-citizen...
Half wonk, half preacher...
Half Harvard Yard, half Back o' the Yards...
Half red and half blue...

And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the Presidency...if this were 1960.

But it is not 1960 -- nor is he dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols -- and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly broken no longer works.

Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two opposing positions and who will, therefore, find a compromise between opposites even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can cede half the playing field.

In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern house divided against itself cannot stand.

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

And that this is your fight, President Obama.

This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be shirked and cannot be delegated.

If you take up this challenge, millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.

But if you cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and truly fucked.

Because in 2008, Democrats took a chance on an outsider conjured out of their best hopes, but by 2010 it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that the Republican party and Conservative media were too far gone to be saved.  That by now there was too much power and too much profit trafficking in racism and conspiracy mongering and hatred for them to change.  That they viewed compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect as weakness, and Obama as a patsy for continuing to offer calm, civility and concessions over and over again.  

That what the nation needed in that moment was a president who took to the bully pulpit every day to beat the shit out of GOP in the Truman style:

“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.” 

And to go after the working men and women who voted against their own interests in the same manner:

But that never happened.  And the reaction from Republicans to this decent, honorable, thoughtful man who begged them to work with him solve our common problems was an eight-year-long, racist primal scream and the to nominate and elect the personification of their most dangerously ignorant, racist fears. 

The King of the Birthers. 

Then they renominated him again in 2020.

Then, when he lost, they attempted a coup to overthrow the government, and spent the next four years screaming that the election had been stolen.

Then they renominated him yet again in 2024, re-elected him, and here we are.  And by now it should be plain enough for even the punditocracy to see that the problem was never Trump.  The problem has always been the bigots and imbeciles of the Republican base who manifested Trump, and the Conservative media which continues to belt-feed the most lurid red-meat lies to that base, which eagerly gobbles it up and asks for seconds.   

So, to quote another president from Illinois whose presidential library and museum are also here, 

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it...

 And to repeat what I shamelessly stole from Lincoln 16 years ago and modified to fit our times:

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

 

Burn The Lifeboats

The Moderate Republican, Centrist and Independent's Lament

First they enacted Nixon's racist Southern Strategy
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they welcomed White Conservative Fundamentalists into the party's inner circle
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they embraced Hate Radio, Fox News and the whole Conservative propaganda grievance machine
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they adopted the politics of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove and Lee Atwater
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they cheered on the War in Iraq and used it to demonize all opposition 
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they put on stupid hats, called themselves a "Tea Party" and had an eight-year-long racist primal scream because Democrats elected a black guy
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they put on different stupid hats, called themselves "MAGA," and nominated and elected the King of the Birthers.
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they nominated the King of the Birthers again
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they tried to overthrow the government when the King of the Birthers lost
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they brought him back and elected him again
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then the King of the Birthers looted the treasury, put armed masked goons in the streets to intimidate and murder American citizens, launched a disastrous war for no explicable reason, torched our alliances, and generally fucked this country up almost beyond repair

But somehow none of that is my fault

Because I'm not "political".

Burn The Lifeboats

Killing The Steel Man

This month's announcement from Liberal High Command of the new regulations will be of special interest to Liberal podcasters and bloggers:

Henceforth it shall be considered a Class Three Code of Conduct violation to perform Steel Man or Steel Man-adjacent* "debates" in public.    

A "Steel Man" argument is defined as taking an ordinary, stupid, easily-debunked Conservative talking point and saying, "Well, OK, but if my opponent were 100 times smarter and not a liar and a lunatic and a bigot, here's the argument they would have made." then debating that.  This absurd ritual is performed because you're so keen to show everyone how smart and civil and according to Hoyle you are by debating a sane Conservative that you invent one (known in the trade as "Sorkening".) Except that species went extinct a long time ago, so there you are, playing chess in the park against yourself.

What you do in the privacy of your own home is, of course, your own business.  If your kink is "Steel Manning" Ayn Rand or Nick Fuentes behind closed doors, have at it.  

But when you put it out on the street, it becomes public ontological masturbation.  

Stop it.

*(Steel Man-adjacent debates can be identified by the use of phrases like "To be fair..." and "The most generous interpretation..." and "Even if we grant the premise...")

Burn The Lifeboats

Reason #1,744 Why I Will Never Have a Column in The Atlantic

I Am The Liberal Media

Open Letter From an Online Democrat

 

Sitting squarely at the intersection of privilege, condescension and cluelessness, we find the Bulwark's own Tim Miller and the Bulwark's own in-house pet Centrist-in-Liberal-clothing, Will Saletan, opining the following garbage in their podcast entitled "Calm Down—Democrats WON the Shutdown!"

I have added emphasis to guide your wandering eyes

MILLER:  Democrats online are big mad. Not me. But before we get to my contrarian take, Will, what what do you make of the deal?

SALETAN:  Damn. Well, Tim, I'm afraid we probably agree more than you'd like. Uh, okay. To me, the key word in what you just  said was online. Democrats online are really pissed off.  This is not an online thing. This is a real life thing. ... So I I don't think it's a terrible loss. I think Democrats are still standing up for what they fought for. Um and I think only if you are so online that you don't feel the pain that a lot of people are feeling over the shutdown would you think this is a total sellout. 

This drawing of a clear, bright distinction between "online" Democrats and "real" people is something the Bulwark is positively riddled with.  And undoubtedly its a big reason why they never engage with actual Liberals living out here in the real world.  

Furthermore, if you are familiar with my family's situation, you know that even though my wife and I are both "online Democrats" we're also about to see the price of insurance for her and our youngest child quadruple come January.   It's already more that our monthly mortgage, so quadrupling that is unsustainable.  

And the hear these privileged clowns giggling and hand-waving -- these same privileged clowns who routinely scold Democrat for appearing uppity and out-of-touch with Real Murricans because we use big words  -- well that was bloody infuriating.

I would expend a few hundred words reminding everyone why is was a terrible idea to cede the moral and political high ground after the GOP nominated and elected Trump, because once our "liberal" media (and far too many of the liberal rank-and-file) started picking winners and losers, they decided that a tiny group of recently-former Republicans would become the official Voice of the Sensible Opposition.

This is what happens.  

However, since the Bulwark keeps its YouTube comment section open, I don't need to, because, bless 'em, actual commentors did all the heavy lifting.

Here is just a sample:

• "I am not an “online” person, I am a senior citizen , this not an “emotional thing”, this is not a laughing matter, this is our day to day life we are fighting for.  Please don’t dismiss us so lightly!"

• I’m online and I’m a real person impacted by this shutdown AND impacted by the insane lawless actions of this Administration. This is maddening. A shutdown shows the chaos of a Trump presidency more clearly.

• Love you Tim, but I hope you’re reading these comments. Millions of us (myself included) are losing healthcare because of this. The pain is very real for us “internet people”.

• the fact that “Raging Moderates” is more outraged than the bulwark by this is CRAZY!

• Its hard to giggle along with Tim when my local hospital in rural VA just announced theyre closing their OB/GYN dept. Now the closest L&D dept will be an hour away. There will be women and babies dying because of it. Listening to Tim laugh off our anger was just another slap in the face.

• I'm on SNAP and Medicaid. Your suggestion that only people online who weren't suffering were willing to hold out longer. It's wrong to think americans who are hungry or sick would instantly cave, like we're  weak We are as strong as any one.

• I feel sick. I can no longer bear this cynical cheerfulness between these two privileged men.

• I am a real person whether I'm online or not and this sucks and I'm really super pissed. We were winning and now we're losing. You're wrong.

• You're right, I'm online watching the Bulwark too much. No more.

• I've spoken to 5 democrats today IN PERSON who are pissed about this. This isn't just the 'online' people.

• The Bulwark just dropped several levels of respect for me.

• Calling people who want health insurance "The very online crowd" is not a good look, fellas.   We're not all members of the millionaire elite media class.  We don't get to pay our bills with MSNBC media appearance money - we've got these things called jobs, and they only go so far.

• My whole family is affected by the shut down. Guess what? I still say we chickened out. Don’t tell me about how I’m “just online.” I lived this shit. It’s the one time it would have been worth it.

• This is super alienating - how can you not get it? I might be “online” to you, but I promise I’ve lost my real job, im losing my real healthcare and may well lose my real life. It’s not hypothetical for me and I’m furious they caved.

• WTF, real person here and I’m gonna lose my Healthcare.   I can barely pay what they are asking now.  If my premiums go up, I am done.   My sister just passed away from cancer 

• Gosh, I guess I must be "online", which I suppose means to you two that I'm not a real person with real concerns. I live entirely on Social Security benefits and I have a spouse suffering from Alzheimer's. My 38-year-old son, who is autistic, cannot manage to keep a job because of his awkwardness.  We're all just hanging on by a thread, but we're not real people because we're "online". 

• Wow. To be so disconnected from one's own listeners and supporters.

• This is the most out of touch crap I've ever heard. 

• Fed family here. We were being crushed without my husband's paycheck. And I called every rep I have asking them to keep fighting. Temporary pain for me, but longterm pain for my neighbors who cant afford healthcare. This isnt a win, and Im tired of Tim's smugness toward his own audience.

• Good to know your guest doesn't think online opinion matter. I'm a professional who lives in VA just outside DC. I've had family in the federal government for decades. That comment was ignorant and offensive.

• This isn’t just the worst take you’ve had Tim, it’s the one that myself and others will leave over. My feelings are hurt a bit, and I feel some kind of way about your comments about ‘online’ outrage. 

• Will either of you lose your healthcare  come January? Will you lose the ability to afford medication that you will die without? There are people who won't live to see the end of January. Without ACA subsidies, I will die before the end of 2026. But yeah, I'm just an out of touch online weirdo. I'm delusional about my health conditions and my financial situation.

• Since you guys think the “Online” community is the lesser of the communities , if that’s the case then stop peddling the Bulwark!

• Boy I am glad you guys were never in a foxhole with me.

• I am on the internet, and I’m suffering. Please don’t talk down to us too.

• This "online" retiree will lose health care insurance on Jan 1.  I will lose the $737 subsidy and the cheapest plans will be over $1400 per month with a $10K deductible.  That is more than my mortgage and, in fact, more than my entire pension.  So keep your holier than thou "only online dems are mad" bullshit.

That about covers it.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 946: So Much For The 'Tolerant Right'

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" -- Captain Renault, Casablanca

• 
  

Losing Our (Secular) Religion

Note:  Given all the time and effort we put into putting together every episode of the Professional Left podcast, it occurs to me that it is madness just to let our show notes disappear into the ether.  From time to time, why not use all the stuff we'd already researched and structured into a long for audio essay and reuse it for a... long form written essay!  I know.  I can be kind of slow.  

Anyway, the word of the day today is “effective”.  Read it, learn it, use it in a sentence!

So let’s talk about what it means to be “effective”.

First, you gotta figure out what is it you want to accomplish?  So let’s start there, armed with the foreknowledge the place we'll inevitably end up will not be as satisfying as you would like.    But we’ll have some rueful laughs  along the way.

What does "effective" mean?  And as long as we’re doing this, lets also ask what its antonym, “ineffective”. mean?

Here's an example of "ineffective" from 20 years ago.   From The New York Times,  March 31, 2005:

Editor Hit With Pie

William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, was splattered by a pie thrown by a student during a speech on Tuesday about foreign policy at Earlham College. Members of the audience jeered the student, then applauded as Mr. Kristol wiped the pie from his face and said, "Just let me finish this point."  

The pie incident went on to make headlines in the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, NPR and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Was it satisfying to the person who threw the pie?  Definitely.  Was it satisfying those of us who loathe Kristol?  Sure.  A little bit.

But did pie-ing Bill Kristol 20 years ago slow down the Iraq War or derail his career or undo the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush?  No.  Like Haldeman in the early days of Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein screwed up, it actually ended up making him more sympathetic to his audience.  

That was ineffective! 

Did you know that Rupert Murdoch got hit in the face with a pie in July 2011?  It's true, and yet Fox News remains. Westboro Baptist Church’s hatemongering scumbag Fred Phelps took one in the face in May, 2003.    Phyllis Schlafly, April 1977.  Tom Friedman, April 2008.  Milton Friedman, October 1998.  Ann Coulter, but she ducked in time.    Bill Buckley.  Anita Bryant. Dozens of others.

You might also remember that on May 17, 2011, Nick Espinosa threw a box of glitter over Gingrich and his wife, Callista, at a book-signing event in Minneapolis.  Espinosa, a gay rights activist, shouted, "Feel the rainbow, Newt! Stop the hate! Stop anti-gay politics!".   And yet, Gingrich abides.  

Remember David Vitter?  The senator from Louisiana who may or may not have had a thing about diapers?

At Netroots Nation there was a movement afoot to send dirty diapers or something to Vitter which got eyerolls from professional comedians, who went on to explain why this was a dumb idea.

Do you remember the consistent refrain from the Mark Rylance character in Bridge of Spies?  Every time Tom Hanks asked him why he wasn't alarmed or afraid he replied, "Would it help?"

Good question.  And if you are interested in saving our democracy, this is the question you should always be asking yourself:  Will what I plan to do help?  Will it be "effective"?  So let's move on to defining what "effective" looks like within the context of what we want to have happen. 

Here's an example of something that worked. That was effective.  The grapefruit ladies of Ireland.

During the Civil Rights movement, in places like Birmingham and Selma, the mere fact of the stark contrast between the protesters' peaceful discipline and the violent, segregationist thugs with police dogs and fire hoses was not enough to force the system to change.  It was the fact that it made the national news.  That people outside the Jim Crow South got an unsparing first-hand look at how the South really was.   This shocked the public and helped build the political pressure needed for the federal government to take action.

The difference between then and now is that thugs with jackboots and tear gas are there because the White House put them there.  The difference between then and now is that the president of the United States is orchestrating and applauding state violence, shopping for a race riot, not trying to stop it.

In our bones we know this is all horribly wrong, because in our bones we know what "fairness" should look like.   It's all over our popular culture.   Jack Reacher.  Justified. The Black List.  Hell, Superman.   Ideally, when we are treated unfairly, we as Americans believe we should have recourse to someone, somewhere who will make it right.  Beat up the bully.  Put the crook in prison.  Some higher authority.  

We're sure most of you remember that, in June of 1963, the segregationist governor of Alabama -- George Wallace -- planted himself in the schoolhouse doorway of the Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to block  two African American students -- Vivian Malone and James Hood -- from entering 

Malone and Hood had done everything by the book -- signed in early at the courthouse, picked their classes, and filled out their papers. But when it came time to actually walk into Foster Auditorium and finish registering, President John Kennedy's folks knew things could get very ugly very quickly, because Wallace was itching for a confrontation.  He was shopping for a race riot.  So Attorney General Bobby Kennedy basically said, fine, let the asshole put on his little show -- better that he preen for the cameras than spark a riot. The feds kept the students in the car so it wouldn’t turn into some ugly face-off between a segregationist governor and two Black students. They wanted it clear: this was the federal government versus one stubborn governor, not Black versus white.

So there’s Wallace, literally standing in a schoolhouse door, putting on his show for the press. Deputy AG Katzenbach steps up with marshals and tells him to move. Wallace filibusters with some bullshit about states rights, so Katzenbach calls President Kennedy, and that's when Kennedy finally lost his patience and federalized the Alabama National Guard. 

Hours later, a Guard general ordered Wallace to move.  Wallace rants a bit more, then steps aside. And then, without fanfare, Malone and Hood walk in and register.

Wallace was the racist thug.  Malone and Hood were the victims.  And President Kennedy was the higher authority which could be appealed to for justice.  

In the here-and-now, you may have noticed that there is now a whole cottage industry of centrist goofs and social media complainers who spend day and night carping that Democrats are not fighting hard enough, or doing enough, or swearing enough.  But when you push against that even a little bit and ask what, specifically, should Democrats be doing.  

Remember the word of the day?  "Effective".

What should Democrats be doing that will be effective?  No answer.  You get a lot of handwaving about stuff that is never going to happen or is structurally impossible without a Democrat in the White House and a supermajority in the Senate.  Something something Citizens United or Fairness Doctrine or pack the Supreme Court or DC statehood.  They just know that, damnit, somebody oughta do something!  

Because in the here-and-now, what we have lost, possibly forever, is a deeply ingrained, American sense that out there, somewhere, there should be some corrective mechanism to which we can appeal for justice.  

But thanks to all the millions of Republican voters who voted for this, and the millions more who stayed home or pissed away their vote because voting for the smart black lady would have made them feel icky,  the fascists who are now in charge are in the process of smashing those corrective mechanisms or are turning them against the rest of us

Because now, thanks to decades of work and billions of dollars spent building a relentless Conservative propaganda machine, the whole Wallace-in-the-schoolhouse-door dynamic is backwards.  

Now the racist thug is in the White House, and runs the Congress and the Supreme Court by proxy.  Now state power -- a federalized national guard and the United States military -- is in the hands of monsters because Republican voters wanted it that way.  Now the innocent victims are ... anybody Trump and Stephen Miller want to harass and destroy.   Parents snatched off the street.  Innocent kids, zip-tied and dragged off naked in the middle of the night.  FBI agents fired for honoring George Floyd.  James Comey being indicted for ... nothing.  

Now the schoolhouse doors are the cities of Portland, Los Angeles and Chicago, where brave citizens are working hard to try to find ways to block the fascists who Republicans have put in power.    

In case you didn't know it, this dynamic where the whole idea of the Apocalypse and the End Times originally came from.  

Hong tight because we're going to take a quick jump back in time almost 2,200 years. During the 160 BC's.  For centuries, the foundation of most Jewish thought rested on the biblical idea that if Israel obeyed God's covenant, God would bless them in this world with peace, land, and prosperity.  

And while the American Dream elides the presence of God in that equation, the ideals behind it are remarkably similar: if you work hard and play by the rules, you will succeed and prosper.  

In 200 BC, the Seleucids beat the Egyptians at the Battle of Panium and took control of Judea, and for 40 years or so things went along fairly smoothly.   Then under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, things took a hard right turn.  

Antiochus IV decided to make it his mission to suppress and destroy Jewish religious practices.  He installed a pagan altar on the sacred altar of the Jerusalem Temple and slaughtered pigs there as an intentional insult to the God of Israel.  Circumcision, Sabbath observance, and Torah study were all outlawed.   Mothers who circumcised their sons were executed, sometimes with their infants killed alongside them. Possession of Torah scrolls became a capital offense. These weren’t political laws—they were aimed at erasing Jewish identity.

This all led to what became known as the Maccabean Revolt, which radically reshaped Jewish thought because it wasn’t just a national uprising.  It was an existential crisis.  A spiritual crisis.

Under Seleucid persecutions, the most righteous and faithful suffered the worst precisely because they were righteous and faithful.  So where was God's covenant in all of this?  What happens when God’s people do everything right and are made to suffer for it?

And because these deeply religious people could not give up on the idea that God existed, that God was just and God honored his contract they ... invented the idea of the End of History.  That at some point in the future God would intervene in history and clean all this shit up.  God became like the divine cable installer: please be in your homes obeying the law between the hours of Right Now and Forever, and eventually God’ll show up and get you all straightened out.  

The Jewish sects that you might be familiar with that grew out of this belief in the End Times were the Pharisees -- with whom Jesus has a huge beef in the New Testament -- and the Essenes, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.  As part of their End Times theology, they invented the ideas of the resurrection of the dead, the coming of a Messiah, and the divine judgment of the wicked.  

And psychologically we are right about where the Maccabees were before they took up arms against the Seleucids.  

We might still pray, but as a practical matter we don't look to God to save our democracy: our democracy has always rested uneasily on the foundation of "Vox populi, vox Dei".  The voice of the people is the voice of God.  And the voice of the people has deserted us, which is why this is a spiritual crisis and not just a political one.   

What are we to do with the fact that, on three separate occasions, nearly half the people who bothered to show up for elections voted for Donald Trump?  That the first time it wasn't a fluke?  That our neighbors and colleagues are now actively siding against democracy, and have knowingly put the instruments of government into the hands of fascists and sadists, and lunatics?  That many of those institutions that we supposed would protect us, are run by cowards and bean counters for whom protecting their corporate mergers is much more important than protecting democracy.  

And very much as it was in 167 BC under the Seleucids, so it is right now under the Trump regime: those who are the most vocal in speaking up for democracy and defending our constitution are some of those who are targeted most aggressively by the regime.   

This is White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt

From The ACLU, October 15, 2025:

...on September 25, President Donald Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” essentially adding them to an ever-growing list of what he calls the “enemy within.”

Civil society nonprofits and activists thus join segments of academia, the legal profession, public health professionals and scientists, and so many others President Trump sees as his political opponents and critics.

From The Hill:

A typical academic year for Mark Bray, an assistant teaching professor of history at Rutgers University, turned into a nightmare after President Trump signed an executive order to designate antifa as a terrorist group. 

Soon after the order, conservative activists targeted Bray, who wrote “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” and he began to receive death threats. Once his home address was posted online, he knew it was time to act. 

With the support of Rutgers, Bray and his family fled to Spain, where he will remain at least through the end of the school year as he fights what he calls false allegations regarding his beliefs and work... 

The further irony is that, on an emotional level, the source of their anger is very similar to ours.  MAGA meatheads believe the system has failed them, and from their point of view, it has.  We also believe the system has failed us, and from our point of view, it also has.  Each side believes their government has failed to deliver what they wanted it to do, and what they thought they had been voting for, for decades.  

The problem is, our goals are diametrically opposed to one another.    

Broadly speaking, we want clean air and clean water for everybody.  Good, safe schools for everybody.   Enough to eat for everybody.  Affordable health care for everybody.  Affordable housing for everybody.  A decent standard of living for everybody.  We want women to have control over their own bodies.  

We want all the things, and all of that horrifies MAGA.   

Modernity and change terrify them and have left a lot of them confused and angry, because they want the 1950s back.  They firmly believe their straight, white, conservative, Christian, male privilege was stolen from them by George Soros and us dirty, commie Liberals, and they want it back by any means necessary.

Which is why they are immune to Democrat persuasion.  Because while Democrats keep trying to talk about policies which would materially improve the lives of the working class and the poor -- as flawed and imperfect as Democrats may be -- demagogues on the right, who never gave a shit about the poor or the working class, continue offering their base something much more emotionally satisfying.  

Scapegoats!  

Back in 1981, when Reagan told his supporters that their government was the problem, the Republican Party had already begun its long march down the road to Donald Trump.  To the Republican base, Reagan offered up black and brown people as the scapegoats for all their fears and troubles.  

43 years later, when Democrats were proposing to help the poor and the working class by doing what used to be bipartisan things like extending the child tax credit, and more progressive things like offering serious, detailed plans to lower the cost of housing,  Republicans countered with this.

Trump: Can you imagine you're a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school and your son comes back with a brutal operation. pic.twitter.com/ChmwpavFAH

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 7, 2024

And this:

As you can hear, the propaganda is the same.  It’s just gotten so much stupider, because the Republican base has gotten so much stupider.  

The Republican base don’t see themselves as villains, and they never will.  They see themselves as patriots, who have been cruelly forced by decadent Liberal culture to endure gay and interracial couples on commercials for Tide or Cheerios --

-- or just knowing that out there, somewhere, there is a thing called “Ru Paul’s Drag Race”.

From their point of view, our mere existence and our insistence on diversity and tolerance and treating people humanely might as well be Antiochus IV defiling the temple.  Monstrous!  Intolerable!  And, most importantly, the mystical reason why their lives suck. 

Over and over again, they have been told that we -- you and  I -- hijacked their American dream, drowned it in soy milk, wrapped it in a Rainbow Flag, and buried it in Benghazi, while Obama and Hillary and Kamala and Joe Biden and George Soros watched it all on closed-circuit TV and laughed and laughed.  Solar panels and windmills are the graven images of our blasphemous modern god, and Trump is the anointed one who will smash them.  So through the power of “Vox Populi”, they have raised up their own god based on a new covenant:  a promise to smite their enemies and make Liberals cry

The problem is that the Right has a 40-year propaganda head-start on us, which is why we’re stuck in this kind of asymmetrical warfare.  Where, through the power of massive fascist propaganda, Fox News can just make up a story about how “The Entire Democratic Party Is Giving Away YOUR Health Care to lazy bums and illegals who are also stealing your job!!!” and have it turn into something which Democrats are obliged to carefully debunk over and over again.  

It’s the same with the ICE goons who are terrorizing American cities.  All the violence and criminality and thuggery is on one side, but let one person coldcock some anonymous masked brownshirt beating up a kid and everyone knows, through the power of massive fascist propaganda,  within the hour the headline from the White House all the way down to your MAGA neighbor will be “Out of control Antifa terrorists attack innocent police trying to protect your Freedom and your grade school son’s junk”

To repeat, this is not a Trump problem or a Mike Johnson problem, this is a voter problem.  A Vox Populi problem.

Through lies and conspiracies and direct appeals to racism, homophobia, xenophobia and some good, old fashioned bribery, Republicans convinced enough people to hate the imaginary Democratic boogeyman under their bed enough to install a dictator in the White House.  Twice.   And so, with appeals to God not an option, and appeals to the government a lost cause since, at last, Reagan is right – the government is the problem – the only alternative left is an appeal to the people.  

So, back to the word “effective”

No Kings marches are a good start since it clearly scares the hell out of the Trump regime.  October 18, 2025 was too big to ignore, which is the point.  Record numbers.  Millions of peaceful, loud patriots in the streets.  Catnip for the media.  And the next one will probably be even bigger.

And those patriots in frog and unicorn costumes are also using an excellent strategy.  No one is hitting anyone in the face with a pie.  Instead, the ICE goons and their paymasters are being made to look ridiculous.  

And the devil cannot abide laughter.  As Thomas More said, the devil…that proud spirit…  "cannot endure to be mocked". 

Also kudos to Nancy Pelosi for wheeling around and going straight after the blond whore from My Pillow TV.  Here’s a pro-tip:  do not meet any MAGA person on the ground of their choosing.  Do not accept any premises of their arguments.  Instead, be like Nancy.  Tell them to shut up and, for good measure, call them liars and whores.

Also be prepared to deal with the reality that, at some point, some decent citizen may very well find themselves so shocked and indignant at the way some ICE thug is treating a child or a senior citizen or a pregnant woman that they will rise in defense of them against Trump’s gestapo and kick the that ICE goon's ass.  

Be prepared for the fact that some "allies" have so completely internalized the asymmetry of this war that they take it as gospel that all Democrats at all times, everywhere must never lose their cool no matter how brutally they’re provoked.  They believe this so strongly that they’ll be pissed off at the citizen who aggressively got between the fascist in the mask and the person the fascist was clubbing,  because now Trump has an excuse to escalate.  

I don’t buy that.  If none of Trump's dickless Cossacks are ever coldcocked by a righteous citizen… then fascist propagandists will just make some shit up, just like they’re making up reasons to murder people on the high seas.  

But for now, enjoy the fact that we are many --

-- and we are being heard.

I Am The Liberal Media

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