A Pitch for the Angels

I know a sales pitch when I hear one.  Lord knows, across the span of my checkered past I've made dozens of them myself.  So I realize that, in the end, what I'm watching (below) is a long pitch for the Lincoln Project, where the tactical use of "we" during the pitch is meant to make you think that the Lincoln lads had anything to do with Trump losing in 2020.

Spoiler:  They did not.  What they did was sop up tens of millions of dollars from credulous Liberals  which they used to hire themselves and their friends to crank out very slick ads which one low-born wag referred to (repeatedly) as political Pornhub for credulous Liberals.   It tickled Liberal pleasure centers and got the Lincoln Lads lots of free publicity on MSNBC (which came back to bite them when various sexual and financial scandals came to light), but there is no evidence that any of that moved the electoral needle one iota.

However, when you subtract the product pitch that Stuart Stevens is making here from the story he is telling, I think you end up with one of the clearest and most honest personal, political inventories of anyone in the Never Trumper universe.  I have always respected his candor, and his book -- "It Was All a Lie" -- sits proudly on our bookshelf at home.  

The story he tells is miles and miles away from Tom Nichols' brittle, angry, and ultimately pathetic Jake Blues-like string of excuses and deflections:

His "None of what happened had anything to do with me/ No one could have seen this coming/ Whatabout Abbie Hoffman? Huh!  Huh! Smartass!  Liberals aren't blameless here!" reaction every time anyone manages sneak a little GOP history into his timeline (which is immediately followed by being blocked.)

Which is why, I think, media appearances by Stuart Stevens are so much rarer than virtually any other Never Trumper in the media, and when he is brought in it's usually to talk about what a monster Trump is (true) and strategies for going forward.  Not to expound on how the his former party came to be what it is now, and definitely not to debate any other recently-former Republican on that issue.

Because Stevens' unexpurgated history of the moral collapse of the Republican party exactly matches -- beat for beat and milestone for milestone -- the longstanding Liberal critiques/warnings about the trajectory of the Republican party (about which a lot more here.)   The inconvenient truth that Trump did not hijack the GOP, he exposed it for what it had been all along.  The Republican base was not suckered into supporting Trump, the base manifested Trump.

And all of that is diametrically opposed to the story that legacy media and the Never Trump media wants to tell.  In their tale, the base of the party were like unto the innocent child Maria in James Whale's 1938 masterpiece Frankenstein.    The base just read Edmund Burke, sang  little peasant songs and and toss flowers into the water.  And in their fictionalized history of the GOP, Trump is the destroyer.  Trump is the despoiler.  Trump is the lumbering monster, built in a lab by a mad scientist, who Maria foolishly trusts and who Trump ends up drowning.  And, to carry the analogy a little further, the Never Trumpers are Ludwig, shocked and saddened, bearing Maria's corpse through the town, believing that such an unbearable outrage will rouse the party leadership and the good people of the town to action.

However,  despite the fact that this "history" is the lie which the legacy media and the Never Trumpers have all agreed on, I am morally obliged to be the buzzkill guy who points out that isn't what happened at all.

Maria isn't the base of the Republican party.  Maria is the legacy media's and the Never Trumper's comforting delusion of what the Republican party was.  However, to quote Stuart Stevens, it was all a lie.  

The base didn't fear Trump as a destroyer.  They greeted him as a liberator.  He didn't have a bad brain.  He had an awesome brain!  Because his brain is just like their brain!

It turns out that real base of the party -- the peasants of the town -- had always hated Maria and Ludwig and their whole sanctimonious family.  They're glad that bitch is dead!  They danced on her grave singing Hallelujah!  It turns out, they were jubilantly pro-monster, so fuck that weepy old Ludwig, and fuck Jeb! and, while we're at it, Hang Mike Pence!

And, being politicians with their damp fingers forever testing the direction of the prevailing wind, the town's leading citizens, the mayor and the burghers (Republican elected officials), all figured this out real quick.  A few of them raised a few objections, but they were quickly chased out of town by peasants with pitchforks and torches.  And now, with the party base and the party leadership united in reverence of the monster, they made it their king and gave it the power of life and death over everything in the kingdom.  

And the terrible secret that dare not speak its name and that Never Trumpers carry in their hearts is that the monster wasn't built by some mad scientist in a faraway lab at all.   The truth is they built it.  It was Ludwig all along. It was all of them.  A group effort carried out by elite Conservatives, Republican leaders, Conservative media and the legacy media.  They created the monster, but in their hubris they thought they could control it.  And as long as they controlled it, no one objected to it.  

Consider that, just this very week, unreconstructed Conservative evangelical and New York Times op-ed guy, David French, spent an entire column explaining how Donald Trump bamboozled the otherwise noble and righteous Conservative evangelical movement into abandoning their faith in Republican Jesus, and investing it instead into an manifestly unchristian monster like Trump.

French spends the first 13 paragraphs (ominous biblical number, that 13) laying out the biography of one particularly odious Conservative evangelical preacher named Douglas Wilson.

Then two paragraphs of #NotAllEvangelicals

In a religious movement as large and multifaceted as American evangelicalism, you can — of course — find all kinds of people and pastors, from the most compassionate and kind to the most self-righteous, zealous and even violent.

To say that a pastor like Wilson exists no more condemns all of evangelical Christianity (indeed, Wilson faces vigorous opposition in the evangelical church) than to say that the existence of radical imams condemns all of Islam. A better question is to ask whether a person this cruel and extreme has real stature and influence — and whether his influence is on the wane or on the rise.

And then:

 There are many reasons for Wilson’s rise, but one of them is squarely rooted in politics. When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he inherited a recent Republican tradition: The Republican president isn’t just a political leader — he’s a de facto religious leader as well.

Yadda, yadda, yadda.  Dubya Bush was awesome.  Obviously no mention of Iraq.  Or Katrina.  Or Teri Schiavo.  Or running for reelection on a gay-bashing platform of which David French fully approved.  Or any of it.  Just Dubya Bush was awesome.

And then:

Bush is a devout Christian. Those words, to put it mildly, are not how one would describe Trump.

And yet, each election cycle, Christians were told it was a spiritual imperative to vote Republican, and that imperative did not change even when the party’s positions — and its people — profoundly did.

But while the policies of the Republican party may have shifted around, the basic themes -- the bones of the Reagan Revolution -- are still right there in the Trump regime for anyone with honest eyes to see.  From The Guardian:

Did Reagan pave the way for Trump? ‘You can trace the linkages,’ says biographer

...a critically praised biography of Reagan challenges these assumptions, balancing recognition of Reagan’s strengths with a close examination of his glaring weaknesses on inequality, race and the Aids pandemic. Its introduction poses a provocative question: “Did Reaganism contain the seeds of Trumpism?”

And the book comes not from a progressive Democrat but a former foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Max Boot is himself an immigrant: he was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, gained US citizenship and is now a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank.
...

“Even more fundamentally, Reagan’s policies truly favoured the wealthy and increased income disparity in the United States. You can argue that those policies, whether it was the tax cuts, lack of anti-trust, anti-union activity, all the rest, by widening those income disparities opened the way for populism in America, both from the left and the rightwing populism that Trump exploits today.”

Ultimately, Boot argues, Reagan paved the way for Trump. “He was addicted to faux facts. He would often cite apocryphal quotes and anecdotes and statistics that weren’t really true but would keep citing them anyway, even when it was pointed out that he didn’t have any basis for doing so. You can argue that acclimated the Republican party to the fire hose of falsehoods that you see from Trump.

For the record, Boot does mention Reagan's chilling refusal to take the AIDS epidemic seriously (maybe it was God's will?) but doesn't mention Reagan's cynical use of racism to get himself elected.  

In the end it comes down to this:  Republican elites and donors believe in tax cuts, period, full-stop.  And all the culture war garbage -- from hating gays to hating women, to hating brown people, to hating Liberals, to hating science -- has been deployed tactically, election after election, as a means to get  enough pliant Republican meatheads elected to pass the massive tax cuts, which is all the Republican elite ever cared about.

Or, as one disreputable Liberal podcaster put it years ago, "We are not in the 3rd or 4th year of the Trump presidency.  We are in the 40th year of the Reagan Revolution."

And it worked: that culture war garbage was the hook that brought white, Conservative evangelicals squarely into the heart of the Republican party.  But right here -- where French says that both the "party’s positions — and its people" profoundly changed -- this is where he palms the card and hopes you will not notice. Because while Republican policies may have changes, the white, Conservative evangelicals at the dark heart of the GOP have not.

Having lived through the same history as you and me, David French should fucking well know better.  Which means, like so many other Never Trumpers, French is either lying outright about the history of the modern GOP to cover his own ass, or is so terminally delusional about the modern history of the GOP that his opinions are worthless.

We remember Ronald Reagan welcoming America's most hateful and bigoted white, Conservative evangelicals into the Republican party, back when Donald Trump was just another sleazy New York real estate crook. 

We even remember Falwell's slanderous attacks on Norman Lear all the way back in the 1980s.

We lived through clinic bombings and "Tiller the Baby Killer" becoming Bill O'Reilly's mantra on Fox News, until someone actually killed Dr. Tiller.

We remember Falwell and Robertson, in the hours after 9/11, blaming everyone the Right hates for the attack.  Because for white evangelical Christians scumbags like Falwell and Robertson, every catastrophe was ordered by God and therefor must be divine punishment for not hating women, minorities and the ACLU hard enough.

And yet, Republican leadership didn't grab these scumbags collar and belt and throw them out of the Party of Lincoln, because by then it was no longer the Party of Lincoln.  It was well on it's way to being the Party of Jefferson Davis: hateful, bigoted, White, stupid, superstitious and drunk on holy vengeance.  

Which is why, by 2004, we saw Bush the "devout Christian" getting out the Conservative evangelical vote by running an explicitly gay-bashing campaign in order to get himself re-elected.

Which is why, by 2008, we saw John "Maverick" McCain publicly reverse his scathing 2000 criticism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance" who represented the "outer reaches of American politics" and head down to Liberty University to kiss Falwell's ass.  

Because McCain wanted to be president and he fucking well understood where the power center of the Republican party was located. 

And let's not forget that as late as 2019, Never Trump Resistance Hero #1, Liz Cheney, was out there blithely leveling the most grotesque lies against Democrats and calling people like you and me "the face of pure evil".   Because slander like that has been the Mother Tongue of the GOP since David French was in short pants.

This is the bamboozle that David French is trying to run.  The White Conservative evangelical base of the GOP didn't vote for McCain or Romney because they had joy, joy, joy, joy down in their hearts over the idea of a McCain or Romney administration.  They settled for McCain and Romney because the alternative was a Democrat, and they had been lectured -- over and over again by their pastors, for decades and from the sanctity of the pulpit -- that Democrats are all commie, baby-killing servants of Satan.  

That anyone on the Right is better than everyone on the Left.  

In 2016 we saw Donald Trump win them over by promising to deliver what both Bushes had failed to deliver and what everyone knew neither Romney nor McCain would ever have been able to.

These people firmly believe in a Heaven where they will live forever with Republican Jesus, and a Hell, where you and me and most everyone else will fry for eternity.  The thought of this delights them, but to get there they have to bring about the end of the world, which is why the elimination of Roe was never going to be enough.  Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem would not be enough, nor would terrorizing trans people or rolling back gay marriage, because as the  Henry Drummond says in Inherit the Wind, "Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy and needs feeding."  

These people are shooting for a Year Zero.  The end of history.  A world cleansed of scum like us, and remade in the image of their radical perversion of Christianity.  

These are also people whose whole theology depends on dismissing objective reality, believing in giant, global conspiracies being run by Satan and a bone-deep certainty that they are a cruelly oppressed minority in an America which was designed to be an explicitly Christian country, but which has been stolen from them by godless Liberals.

In other words, as I wrote all the way back in June of 2015:

 ...in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. 

And because we Liberals believe in facts, and not bullshit, self-absolving alibis, you are not obliged to just take my for any of this.  There are plenty of former evangelicals who have left the cult who will tell you the same.

You could check out Tim Alberta's "The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism."  

 Or you could check in with Frank Schaeffer, the author of "Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back"

Which is why, in a world of pious frauds like David French and grouchy charlatans like Tom Nichols, those of us on the side of the angels should cherish and celebrate the Stuart Stevenses and the Frank Schaeffers in this world.

I Am The Liberal Media.

They're Not Apologizing So Quit Asking

 

It is neither shocking nor even mildly surprising that the cranky "Me?  Apologize?  Fuck you.  What about  Abbie Hoffman?"  attitude that ol' Tom Nichols keeps in his everyday carry kit  (from August 3, 2025)...

... hasn't abated in the slightest over the years:

You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 14, 2019

BTW, the reason you're getting the bare-bones text of this vintage Nichols' "Fuck you, hippies" Tweet is that Tom appears to have scrubbed his archives of such embarrassments.  And so they no longer exist... except in their plain-text form on this here blog :-)

 For example:

I’d say that the dumpster fire that is the modern Democratic party help create a decade of losses that made Trump seem plausible, but okay.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 13, 2019

And 

I wish people on the left were *nearly* as introspective as Max is being, because mark my words, leftist friends: Trump saved you from yourselves. His emergence headed off some serious intra-left fights that you're still going to have. And you're not going to enjoy them. /4

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 13, 2018

And

Trying to mau-mau the Never Trumpers, or the apostates like Max, because we won't repudiate every single thought we ever had is the kind of Stalinism that helped keep people like me (I won't speak for Max) in place for longer than we should have been. /9

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 13, 2018

And

And when the crackup of the left comes - as it will - I look forward to the shake-out when good-hearted liberals realize that they, too, are sharing a bus with some cranks, traitors, conspiracy nuts, wanna-be totalitarians, and other creeps they ignored because of Trump. /10x

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 13, 2018

 I could go on, but the point is fairly made.  As I wrote back in 2018:

Tom Nichols Shall Leave No Logical Fallacy Unflung

In which Tom Nichols -- a professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College  -- somehow did not notice that his Republican Party had devolved into a shambolic racist treason factory literally right in front of him until it was 25 years too late and then gets mad at us Stalinist Libtards for not greeting him as a Liberator.

...Ad Hominem/Tu Quoque, Straw Man, False Dilemma, Slippery Slope, Causal Fallacy.

The Old Professor has 'em all, kids, so remember, Never Turn Your Back on a Never Trumper.

It is neither shocking nor even mildly surprising that virtually all Never Trumpers lie incessantly about the past, or go waaay the hell out of their way to avoid talking about it at all (except to gripe about Robert Bork, or light a votive candle at the shrine of Saint Reagan), or, like ol' Tom, go ballistic when the past is inflicted upon them.  After all, their whole deal is that they are smarter and savvier that all of us dirty hippies combined.  That their political advice and insights are  ne plu ultra ... which is ludicrous on its face considering that none of these people were capable or seeing what was happening right in front them, in their own political party, until it was 25 years too late. 

Which is why, in a different context, I wouldn't give the tiniest damn that these people want to live in bubble where they believe nothing before 2016 exists, that liberals are the absurd caricatures they have conjured out of some childhood trauma involving seeing "Hair", and that they're the smartest kids in the classroom.

I know lots of people with lots of delusions, most of which involve Chicago sports teams.  Doesn't bother me at all.

On the other hand, it bothers me a great deal that these people have now colonized the legacy media.  It bothers me a great deal their omnipresence there comes at the cost of actual Liberal voices who have actually been right all along. And it bothers me quite a bit that they have been able to leverage their  huge, free media presence into building their own Never Trump media enterprises, where actual Liberal voices who have actually been right all along are also unwelcome.  

If you live out here in flyover country, and you ask your Democratic friends who they watch, who they listen to or who they read to get the skinny on politics, I guarantee you they've never heard of this blog or the Professional Left podcast.  Never heard of Digby or Nicole Sandler or emptywheel or Tengrain or The Bradcast, or Charlie Pierce or Thom Hartmann.  Never heard of Bob Cesca or John Fuglsang or Hal Sparks.  They might have hear of Stephanie Miller and some of her guests, but I wouldn't bet on it since they're not syndicated out here among the cornfields.  

Who is syndicated out here among the cornfields?   Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Chris Plante, Larry Kudlow, Brian Kilmeade, Jeanine Pirro and, of course, Jesus.

So, if average Democrats (and, just for fun, let's throw in "independents" and "Centrists") are oblivious to our rag-tag team of Liberal talkers and writers who have been on this beat and dead-on accurate for decades, which writers and talkers do you suppose they could pick out of a lineup?

Odds are they'll know the faces and voices delivered to them from cable news and "respectable" publications.  They'll know Nicole Wallace and Joe Scarborough.  They'll know Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell.  They'll know David Brooks.  

They'll know all the usual suspects.  

And as you may have noticed, all those usual suspects are selling the same center-right, "Democrats must become Republican-lite" eyewash as our democracy's only path to salvation. 

Burn The Lifeboats

The Parable of the Deadbeats

Once upon a time there were two neighbors separated by a tall fence.  

On one side of the fence, the blue household kept a cozy home and did enough gardening so they could help feed some of the poorer residents of the neighborhood.  They composted, recycled, took in strays and so forth.  Over their house they flew an American flag, a Pro-Choice flag, a Welcoming Community flag and a Pride flag.  

On the other side of the fence, the red household spent most of their time shrieking that their blue neighbors were baby-killing, commie monsters.  Over their house they flew a dozen MAGA flags big enough to blot out the sun, and at night they would dump garbage over the fence.

One day, the giant MAGA flag was supplemented with a giant Nazi flag.  Shortly thereafter there was a knock at the door of the blue house.  It was a few people from the red house.  They had been kicked out.  The whole Nazi thing had been too much for them, and they had said so, so the other reds had run them out of the place.   

Seems that freedom of speech wasn't as free as they thought.

Now they were homeless, and they knew softhearted blues took in strays, so...

"Here's the deal," their spokesperson said. "You'll feed us and clothe us.  We'll sleep in your beds.  And you'll pay us for the privilege of allowing you to wait on us.  Deal?"

"Will you stop calling us commies?"

"No."

"Will you stop calling us baby murders?"

"No."

"Will you help with the chores?  Composting, gardening and such?"

"No."

"Well what exactly do you plan of doing while you're here?"

The red spokesperson sighed and great, impatient sigh.  Such ingratitude!  Wasn't in enough that they were letting these lowly, baby-killing commies cook their meals and do their laundry?  

"Ok, here's our final offer.  When they throw garbage over the fence, we'll throw some of it back.  In exchange for this service, you will pay us ten million dollars.  A year."

A few of the blues objected on the grounds that this was insane.  These clowns had created the very mob that had kicked them out, and they had created that mob by calling us baby-killing, commie monsters every day for the last 30 years.  For fuck's sake, instead of continuing to call us baby-killing, commie monsters and acting like they're doing us a favor by letting them take over our house, at a minimum don't you think they should apologize?  Y'know, own up to what they did just like we teach every kindergartener to do?

But these Grump Gus were overruled and, ironically, scolded for being so intolerant.  You can't ask these adult professional who made a career out of slandering us in the ugliest ways imaginable to say they're sorry.  That's crazy.  Besides, with these few, unreconstructed reds now signed up to help throw garbage back over the fence, surely the other reds on the other side of the fence would soon see the error of their ways and back off.

But they didn't back off.  

In fact, the shouting got louder.   The flags they flew got even bigger.  And they started building catapults so they could heave a lot more garbage over the fence.  It was killing the blue's garden.  Polluting their water.   Some of it was flung so far it landed in the Centrist suburbs, where residents reacted by shaking their fists at the sky and cursing Both Sides.

One morning the blues were awakened before dawn by a racket in the yard.  Bleary-eyed they walked out into the yard and found their red "guests" cutting down their flags.  The Pro-Choice flag and the Welcoming Community flag were already down and being burned in an oil drum, and the Pride flag was fluttering slowly to the ground.

"We figured out what you're doing wrong," their leader said. "You can keep the American flag, but the rest of them were making some members of our former family mad, so we're getting rid of them. That might convince a few of them to stop throwing so much garbage over the fence."

The blues stared at them, speechless.

"This also might get some of those sweet, sweet 'independents' to hate you just a little bit less."

The blues continued staring, speechless. 

"You're welcome,"  their leader snarked.  "Now go make me my fucking breakfast."

I Am The Liberal Media

They Say Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of...Something

This is my artwork from 2014.  I've used it many times since.

And this is a metaphor of mine from 2022, or possibly earlier.  I've used it many times since.

For decades, while the establishment media masturbated itself blind in their Platonic Cave, the GOP has been worked diligently to create an unstoppable Gingrich/Limbaugh political Doomsday Machine.

A Doomsday Machine that could not be reasoned with or bargained with.

A Doomsday Machine with no "off" switch.

And they succeeded. 

 This is the artwork The Atlantic put together for Peter Wehner's article:

This is the headline:

Trump Discovers MAGA Has No ‘Off’ Switch

This is his conclusion:

Having created that movement, Trump is discovering there’s no “off” switch.

This all may or may not have been a coincidence.  Probably was.  However, given how thoroughly Never Trumpers have ransacked longstanding Liberal critiques of the Republican party while never acknowledging that we exist at all outside of a still-punchable straw-men, date back to way before Trump, it wouldn't surprise me.

Whatever the facts may be, it does afford me the opportunity to, once again, repeat this for the benefit of sloooow Never Trumpers who, for some reason,  now have all the microphones.

You are the ones who created this doomsday machine.  

You are the ones who made sure it had no "off" switch.  

You are the ones who did this because you were sure that you could control it 

You are the ones who profit hugely from it.

And when Trump snatched it out of your hands by doing nothing more than speaking to the base in the language of rage, racism and paranoia you taught them, only then did you jump up and demand to know where all these fascist MAGA zombies had suddenly come from.

Burn The Lifeboats

The Girl Can't Help It!

Magnets!  No one even knows how they work, but there they've been, since the world began 9,000 years ago, making it possible to manufacture extremely inexpensive bolt and screw holding dishes, and providing crucial plot points for groundbreaking teevee shows.

Magnets are also useful in one other way: generating metaphors. 

For example, did you know that, despite the name "magnet" as in "magnet", they can also repel each other?  It's true!  I proved this using Science and two Scotty dog magnets I bought from a train station vending machine when I was five or six.  

As I recall, we were waiting on the Denver Zephyr to take us out west to see relatives.  One round-trip coach ticket cost $47.30. It was good for six months.  

Anyway, one of the things you can do with magnets is force two north or two south poles together, if you apply sufficient force.  I could push my Scotty dog magnets (but were they really "mine?"  Do any of us really "own" the magnets in our lives?) and make them touch north to north or south to south, then let go and they would jump apart.  Hours of entertainment on the long trip to Denver!

Later in life I learned that there were different kinds of magnets, but you could still play with them the same way -- forcing north to north or south to south.  However the amount of force required was...considerably different.

And this is what our little alliance with the Never Trumpers has been so far: the smothering, hydraulic fascism of Donald Trump and the Republican party were enough to hold this coalition of otherwise repulsive forces together.    

But this also where our analogy begins to fall apart.

First, because the two forces were wildly asymmetrical in size: 97% the OG Democratic party coalition smooshed in with 3% recently-former Republicans cast out of the shithole empire they had made. 

Second, because the two forces were wildly asymmetrical in terms of expectations.  Dirty hippies like me were scolded repeatedly that it was just plain rude to expect these arrivistes to, y'know, admit they'd been wrong.  Or apologize.  Or even minimally acknowledge that us dirty hippies got it right.  Or reflect honestly on the lifetime of labor they had spent on behalf of Team Evil.  Or talk about the Before Time and how we got to where we are.  

In fact, quite the opposite has happened.  They have been left free to go right on blaming the Left for much of the mess they had made.  To continue to "Both Sides" Republican atrocities.  To carp about how we ran our party and roll their eyes at issues that matter to us: issues on which the Democratic party -- which now shelters them -- was built.  And, in general, carry on like aggrieved elite guests who had expected 5-star service from us Democratic menials and loudly complain to the management when they don't get it.  

And above all, they demanded the media spotlight.  To be the center of attention, and the arbiters of public discourse.  And what little was left of the "liberal" media consented, no strings attached.   

But this was all supposed to be temporary, right?  They were to cohabit with us, and we were charged with putting up with their bad manners and sense of arrogant entitlement, until such time as Trump was defeated.  Which they supposed would be fairly easy given their delusion that the problem was just a handful of bad actors, while the rest of the GOP were just dupes and innocents who Trump bamboozled.  

And then they found out the ugly truth.  The truth we had been trying to tell them all along, and which they refused to believe.  That it's not just Trump.  Not just a few bad actors.  It's the whole shebang.  The whole fucking party, from "the root to the fruit" as the saying goes.  

That means the Republican party is going to be a bone in the throat of American democracy for decades to come, and ridding ourselves of its toxins is going to be a long, slow grind, against which the fascists will fight us every inch of the way.  Which is not what our Never Trump allies signed up for.  They were, as the saying goes, "here for a good time, not a long time".  The plan was to use our party, our media, our energy, our resources to, as the saying goes, "decapitate the regime".  They would then return to their own party where, as the saying goes, the would "be greeted as liberators".

But that dream is dead.

And so, facing the realization that there will never be a hospitable Republicans party to go back to, and the only viable alternative are people you spent the last 30 years professionally hating, for many Never Trumpers the external force keeping them in grudging alliance with us dirty hippies has begun to falter, and they find themselves in a kind of civic freefall.  So, with nothing to orient them but their own, internal ideological gyroscope, they are returning to their truest forms.

For example, this is where you find the one-time main pitchman for The Bulwark, Charlie Sykes: decamped to a standalone podcast where he has the likes of Adam Kinzinger, Ryan Lizza, Tom Nichols and Chris Cillizza on continuous rotation.  A frictionless environment where the strawman Left can catch strays all day long without a discouraging word ever being uttered.

Or Mona Charen (above) who, in this Trump 2.0 timeline, has also shed herself of her weekly Bulwark  roundtable podcast.  In her new digs she can hang out with the likes of disgraced former The Atlantic writer, Kevin Williamson, and Both Sides to her heart's content, and there's no one around to say otherwise.

Or Bloody Bill Kristol, reverting to type like neocon memory plastic the minute the prospect of invasion and conquest in the middle east was raised.  

Do not doubt that it is a new world, because it is.  And these unreconstructed Republican "allies" of ours are figuring out that there is no going back to the way things used to be.  But their creed is a brittle one, and reverence for an imaginary Conservative golden age is the only scripture they have left, and frankly they're too old to change now.  So within the political physics of this new and frightening world, they  seek out/create habitats where they can continue, as much as possible, to wear the old vestments, practice the old rites, and chant the old holy words.

I Am The Liberal Media.

I Did Try To Warn You

When a handful of Republican media hatchet men, ad makers and pundits showed up at the door of the Democratic party, shocked and shivering, having been run out of the fascist party they helped to create, I thought, "Fine.  Great.  First step, apologize.  You were wrong.  Catastrophically.  We were right.  Be fucking grownups and own up to it.  Then grab a beer and step to the back of the line.  There's plenty of thankless, dirty work that needs doing."

Then I took a short nap, and when I woke up, they weren't at the back of the line.  

They were at the front of the line.

And the line was now closed.  

But the most darkly hilariously part of this entire farce was this: Now that Never Trumpers had become the issuers of indulgences and bouncers at the doors of media acceptability, they started demanding apologies and atonements from any new Republicans who showed up at the door looking for some of that sweet, sweet legacy media spotlight.

They had knocked together a couple of websites where they sounded exactly -- and I mean exactly -- like the Liberal bloggers of yesteryear.  

 The same Liberal bloggers they used to mock as alarmist crackpots.  

But unlike us Liberal bloggers, who were almost universally ignored and shit upon by the legacy media, every one of these recently-former Republicans were suddenly in heavy and glowing media rotation everywhere.  MSNBC was gifting them tens of millions of dollars in free publicity every year.  They were being offered their pick of op-ed gigs at leading publications.  Book deals followed.  A pop-up advertising shop that soaked credulous Liberals for tens of millions of actual dollars and delivered absolutely nothing but scandal after scandal.   And on and on.

And all of these treasures and privileges laid at their feet for literally doing nothing more than, almost overnight, transforming themselves into Brand New Media Creatures, who had no pasts and who spoke and wrote exactly like Liberal bloggers circa 2006.  

Except amid all the posts and podcasts and the blizzard of free promotion from the legacy media, there was never a hint that actual Liberals even existed, much less had been right all along.  Instead, these recently-former Republicans continued using Liberal straw men exactly as they had always done back when Team Evil was paying them: as punching bags and sourced of mockery.  

No apologies were forthcoming for being the co-authors of the ruin which their former party was inflicting in the country.   No acknowledgment that history prior to 2016 existed at all.  Instead, there was a great dealing of moaning and bitching about how they had been right all along, and how awful it was that no one had believed them. 

And while all of this was going on -- while credulous Liberals were enraptured to hear former Republicans calling Donald Trump a naughty bad man -- a few lonely, Liberal voices in the wilderness  were annoying everyone with warnings likes these.  [Note:  Since I left Twitter and deleted my account, none of my original Tweets still exist in their original form.  However, a number of them, such as this one, have been preserved in plain text form since I embedded them in my blog.]

Donald Trump exists to normalize Bill Kristol. After Trump, cable news "debates" will be between Charlie Sykes/Rick Wilson/National Review on one side, Eric Bolling/Hugh Hewitt/Breitbart on the other, "moderated" by Joe Scarborough. Liberals will vanish altogether.

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) November 15, 2018

Now that the Never Trumper colonization of the media is complete, and actual Liberals have all but vanished, here are a list of major themes that run through the "Liberal" media.

• The major event of George W. Bush's administration was PEPFAR.   There were also a buncha other minors items that aren't even worth mentioning.

• George W. Bush's name is now "myformerbosswhateveryouthinkofhim"

• The major event of Joe Biden's administration was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was a terrible idea and ruined America's reputation forever.   There were also a buncha other minors items that aren't even worth mentioning.  Biden is old and he is pretty much entirely responsible for destroying Murrica.  

• Joe Biden's name is now "I know we promised we'd stop hating on Joe Biden but I just hate him so much." or "Joe Biden needs to stop trying to defend his legacy because I hate him so much."

• We'd like to welcome former rabid, hard Right Evangelical gay-bashing, Liberal hater, David French, to the op-ed page of The New York Times.  

• We'd like to welcome former RNC Chair, Michael Steele to our Very Large Never Trump media company.

• We bid a fond farewell to former RNC Chair, Michael Steele, who will be leaving our Very Large Never Trump media company for his own show on MSNBC.

• Our guest once again is once and future political superstar Adam Kinzinger.

• Our guest once again is the American hero who very nearly single-handedly saved the disastrous Harris campaign, Liz Cheney.

[Side note:  Ever wonder how these pinheads got it stuck in their brains that Democrats are evil, baby-murdering monsters?

Oh yeah.  Now I remember.  It was slander like this, repeated over and over, for decades:

Once again, no apologies.  No retractions.  Not even any acknowledgement that Liz Cheney's bloody fingerprints are all over the Republican doomsday machine that eventually spit her out of the party.  

Because apparently that's just too damn much to ask.  

Instead those who were the targets and victims of Cheney's slanders were told to sit down shut up and get over it.  

And for the record, this is the same Liz Cheney who, as a leader of the Republican party, voted against women being able to leave a state to seek reproductive health access elsewhere, voted against a bill that would require reporting white supremacists in the U.S. military, begged Democrats to vote for her in Wyoming and then swore that she would never vote for a Democrat.

End of side note.]

• Next up, highlights from our 565th consecutive focus group of Trump voters who think Democrats are baby-murdering Communists and that Donald Trump built the pyramids...and what Democrats must do to reach out to them!

• If Democrats ever want to win another election they have got to be more Centrist!

In 2007, if you wanted the base to take you seriously, you went to Chicago and walked a gauntlet of raucous, passionate, well-informed bloggers who had serious questions and expected thoughtful answers.  I know.  I was there.  

From The New York Times, August 5, 2007:

Democratic Candidates Spar at ‘Netroots’ Forum

All but one of the party’s candidates took a detour from their summertime routines of Iowa fairs and New Hampshire festivals to appear before the bloggers, a constituency that is rivaling the significance of party activists in early-voting states. The contenders answered questions on stage and adjourned for smaller sessions with the political enthusiasts whose online journals are influencing the race in new, broad ways...

The candidate forum served as the finale to a three-day assembly of the so-called netroots -- Internet meets grassroots -- that carried the feel of a mini-national political convention. Bloggers submitted questions, read by moderators, that included three categories: foreign policy, domestic affairs and philosophy and experience...

“What you have here is a bunch of micro-media outlets that connect to thousands upon thousands of people -- influential people,” said Baratunde Thurston, who writes a political blog in Boston. “The candidates would be foolish to miss out on an opportunity like this.”...

But now, "blogger"? What is "blogger"? 

If a Centrist goon with presidential aspirations like Rahm wants his rep shined up from a trusted source that'll increase his base appeal, he reports to The Bulwark for a flattering round of Wiffle ball.   

This is the state of things today, and I have no reason to believe it will change any time soon.  

However,  I also believe that at least one, lone crackpot alarmist dirty hippy blogger should put it on the record that, if credulous Liberals hadn't been so god damn willing to immediately hand over our hard-won moral authority to a handful of former Republicans who still really, really despise us, Rahm's road to the White House would not involve getting a foot massage from The Bulwark.  Instead, it would require him to field serious questions from the likes of Digby Parton,  Rick Perlstein, Josh Marshall, Brad Friedman, Bob Cesca, Nicole Sandler, Charlie Pierce, Marci Wheeler, Tengrain, Frangela, No More Mr. Nice Blog, Allison Hantschel,  Dan Froomkin, The Field Negro, Bleeding Heartland, Jay Rosen,  Progress Michigan, Hal Sparks, Blue Virginia,  Cliff Schecter, John Amato and the Crooks and Liars crew, my lovely wife, and on and on and on.

We still have an incredibly deep bench of smart, articulate, well-read Liberals, and don't try to tell me that The Rude Pundit putting the screws to Rahm Emanuel wouldn't be Must See Teevee.

Which is not to say that Never Trumpers would not have a place in my Better Universe.  Of course they would.  It'd be crazy to turn away able-bodies volunteers because, in any large organization, there's plenty of scutwork that needs doing and our Big Tent sometimes needs patching and vacuuming.  

For example, I think some of those Never Trumpers would make pretty good sidekicks to the featured Liberal talkers.   In fact, not so very long ago, before the Never Trumpers became a subsidiary of MSNBC and colonized the media, Tim Miller was the "cuck" sidekick of the Pod Save lads.

These days, the Pod Save lads are going out of their way to help repair Glenn Greenwald's image, rehabilitate Chuck Todd's reputation and give Jake Tapper an open mike to pimp his Biden bashing book, and The Bulwark is giving Rahm Fucking Emanuel a glow up.

Funny old world.

I Am The Liberal Media

Elmo Just Broke the Most Sacred Rule of the Legacy Media AND Republican Politics AND Never Trumpers

🤨 https://t.co/DTdfJWydLS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2025

Oh noes!  The richest asshole in the world has breached barrier that walls off the Before Time!

Who knows what inconvenient creepy crawlies might start slithering out?

I Am The Liberal Media

Irony So Dense It Can Block Neutrinos

Imagine if you will a political movement invented out of whole cloth by a few dozen refugees from a mighty political party which those refugees had spent decades building out of the dregs of humanity.  Bigots. Imbeciles.  Homophobes.  Xenophobes. 

Gun nuts.   Conservative evangelicals. Misogynists.  

Monarchists.  Anarchists.  Nihilists.  

White nationalists.  Actual Nazis.  And Grover Norquist.  

Imagine further that this party's molten core of rage, paranoia and racism was contained within a thin outer shell of outward-facing media respectability.   I wrote about the machinery of it all here, 19 years ago.  

But, as predicted, that toxic molten core eventually became impossible to control.  After decades of ominous leaks, dangerous control systems failures and denial after denial by party leaders,  in 2016 the Republican party's toxic molten core finally and spectacularly broke containment --

-- sending many of its architects and engineers scurrying into exile as political refugees.  Eventually those refugees showed up at the doorstep of my Democratic party.  Y'know, the party that didn't destroy itself by building a foundation of lunatics, grifters and racists...and then lying to the rest of the world about it until it all blowed up real good!

These refugees were all former big-shots in the Republican party.  People who had made their living getting monsters elected by slandering people like me as evil, baby-murdering demons --

-- while ignoring our warnings that, if things went on this way, the toxic core of their party would sooner or later melt down and destroy this country.  

So, as a condition for joining our cause, some us asked for an apology.  Not a lot to ask.  Just to act like fucking adults and own what they had done. Cop to the fact that they they had been wrong, and that we had been right.

Instead we got...nothing.  No apologies.  No retractions.  Not even any acknowledgement that their bloody fingerprints are all over the Republican doomsday machine that eventually spit them out of the party.  

Apparently that was just too damn much to ask.  

Instead those who were the targets and victims of their lies and slanders were told to sit down shut up and get over it. That this was an emergency, and in an emergency it was rude and wrong and potentially put our democracy at risk to ask any questions of our new "allies" or to hold them accountable for anything they had ever said or done.

From that day forward,  any ally who would say that Trump was a naught bad man was a good-enough ally, and the watchword from then on would be "The enemy of my enemy is my friend".   And lemme tell ya, the absolute raft of shit I took as a voice in the wilderness, warning that if we didn't screen these assholes at our party's political borders, sooner that you could imagine, our voices -- the voices of those who had actually been right all along -- would be swept aside and displaced by this politically homeless contingent of outcast Republicans who still thought Liberal's were scum, Reagan was a saint, and that Trump was just a temporary glitch in the otherwise-morally superior Conservative matrix.

And so it was written that no potential ally --  no matter what kind of morally malformed godawful ruinous nightmares they may be -- could be turned away if they said the magic words "Donald Trump is a naughty bad man".  They must automatically be let into the inner circle, no questions asked, and rewarded with book-deals, op-ed gigs, permanent seats on cable teevee panels.  

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" quickly became a universal and axiomatic truth that was never to be questioned.  And once that was accomplished, Never Trumpers used it as a battering ram to colonized what little was left of the "Liberal" media and all but silence actual Liberal writers and speakers.   

So when I saw this Dire Warning Banner Headline over at Never Trumper HQ I laughed and laughed and laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed

For the record, of course I think Democrats shouldn't go anywhere near Musk.  Shouldn't touch him with a barge pole long enough to snatch Starlink satellites in orbit.

"You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye." -- Hunter S. Thompson

That's not the point.

The point is, Never Trumpers conjured up the cheap grace dictum of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend no questions asked." out of thin air and conned credulous Liberals in to repeating.  It became  their very own political "letters of transit" --

-- which they used to wheedle the kind of high-level/highly-profitable access to our party and our media which us dirty hippy pariahs (who had been right about the Right all along) never had and will never have in a thousand years.

And once they were on the inside -- once they had gained access to the cogs and levers of the Democratic party and what passes for the "Liberal media" -- they immediately began using that access and influence to transmute our party to their liking.  

The point is, thanks in no small part to your energetic efforts before the Republican party ran you out, your former party is now a rapidly expanding fascist sinkhole that threatens to engulf the nation.  So howzabout you head back across the aisle, use all the influence and wealth you have been given and all the media and political contacts you still have among Republican brutes and grifters, and devote all of your energies to trying to clean up your former party before it kills us all...and keep your damn, dirty hands off of my party?

I Am The Liberal Media

Rush Who? Newt Who?

Never heard of them.

While fighting off this stupid cough that interrupted our podcasting schedule, for my sins I listened to Mona Charen's "new" podcast interviewing David French.  

I listened all the way to the end, and I have some thoughts.  Many thoughts.  So, before we begin --

-- I am contractually obliged to contextualize the interview for you.

Charen and French represent the moral and intellectual pillars of the Right.  The one, unique thing they supposedly brought to every table and panel and podcast and program to which they were invited (and they were invited to a lot of them) was their penetrating insight into politics.  It's why The Bulwark hired Charen.  It's why The New York Fucking Times whitewashed French's inconvenient past and added him to their already top-heavy lineup of  Conservative opinion-havers.

Because these guys, above all others, knew the skinny.  They knew the deal -- the real deal.  They were tight with the shot-callers.  They were in the little rooms with the Big Thinkers who were making the Big Decisions.  They could be trusted to reliably report on what was really going on deep in the heart of Conservatism.  And, even more important than all of that, they knew all what all of us sneaky terrorist-loving, Murrica-hating, baby-killing, commie Liberals were up to with our schemey schemes.    

Using their credentials and character-references from all the other unimpeachable pillars of Conservative credibility, they spent decades stamping their imprimatur all over reassurances that the Right was, in every way, oh so much better than the petty, addled, hateful Left.   More noble.  More thoughtful.  More respectful of the rule of law.  More decent.  More honest.  More generous.  More virtuous.  

In fact, the Right was so incomparably superior to the Left in every way, that there was barely any point in comparing the two.

So, please read the following excerpts which I have faithfully transcribed in the knowledge that this is how people like Charen and French were regarded by the Right and the legacy media, and it was the basis of this unique expertise that they have been paied  as writers and speakers.  

Ahem.

FRENCH:  But here's what ... I'm more worried about, us, the American people.  Because if you ... what [Trump is] also doing is he's fostering in his followers the same hatred that he feels.  And so what when I learned this, y'know, I, in 2016 I voted third party. And 2020 I voted third party.  In 2024 I voted for the Democrat -- for Kamala Harris. First time I ever voted for a Democrat for president in my life. And when I wrote about that the blowback from ordinary people, like, ordinary Republicans that I know was really surprising to me.  Especially considering that they knew I hadn't voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. 

FYI, being taken completely by surprise by things Liberals have been writing about and warning about for decades is going to be kind of a theme here.     

FRENCH:   But they had been so inculcated with this hyper-partisanship, of Democrats as "Demoncrats", and the dehumanization of their political opponents that they really saw me as joining the enemy of the country.  Whereas if I was... if I'd voted third party again they would view me as sitting out the fight.  By voting for the Democrats they viewed me as joining the other side, and it's that internal hatred that is the fuel for this fire.  And that's what I'm more worried about than any specific actions.  Because all of these actions are empowered by that hatred.  And then Trump milks it and fuels it and fuels it.  And so I don't know, Mona, what we do with all that hatred after Trump leaves the scene?

Then, after some hand-waving and throat clearing about how awful the Elites are (that's you and me) and how "they" look down on Christians...

FRENCH:  ...and then, when I got on the wrong side of the Christian conservative World by not supporting Donald Trump what I experienced was something worse than anything I'd had experienced at the hands of the left...

Then after still more hand-waving and throat clearing about how awful the Left was on few college campuses...

FRENCH:  ...and so then I began to hear the stories of... and when I got, y'know uh my feet in, when I got in mainstream media [ed. he means, when the New York Fucking Times whitewashed his record and gave him a job], um, I began to hear stories from people who had interacted with Christian conservatives and the stories of hatred and vitriol and abuse were horrifying.  And, so, y'know one of the things that I wish I could say is, like, go back and go to these churches where they say "Why are they looking down on us?" and say guys you don't know what other people in the pews around you are saying and doing to your opponents.  And if you could sit... if you  could walk a mile in their shoes you would know this.  You would know that if I cross the Evangelical conservative movement I can expect terrible things. Terrible treatment.  Horrible treatment.  Threats.  I can expect threats.  I can expect intimidation.  I can expect the worst kind of name calling and slander. 

Then more throat clearing about how most Conservative evangelicals are not this way.  

Really?  And how the fuck would you know that?  After all, you claim you had no fucking clue about any of this heinous shit your chosen party, your chosen movement and your chosen faith were up to until it bit you personally in the ass.  

FRENCH: ... but I've gotten to the point where I'm not... I'm ... the fact that you are sitting in institutions in which many, many, many of the members in good standing are abusing their fellow citizens and you don't do anything about it...

...but when you're a part of a movement and you're part of an institution that is supposed to be following the person of Jesus Christ and it doesn't alarm you when you hear of all of the abuse towards critics etc. emanating from your own institutions? And that doesn't alarm you? Uh, that is that is very difficult to deal with, Mona. 

No shit, Sherlock. 

FRENCH:   It's very difficult to deal with the fact that there is such indifference to the suffering that their own institution inflicts on its critics.

Golly, if only there had been some sort of warning.  A hint.  Some subtle clue that Conservative Evangelical are monstrous hypocrites. 

Fun Fact:  In two months it will be the 20th anniversary of "Little Red State Fundy".  I am so fucking tired of these people.  

Then it was Mona Charen's turn for some throat clearing about how she used to get some hate mail from the Left, and how "people" would compliment her on how brave she was to be out there in the world calling Liberals naughty bad people.  And then...

CHAREN:  But when I got on the wrong side of MAGA, um, it was off the charts. I mean, on Twitter in 2015 to 2016, uh that was when I first started getting the unbelievable misogynistic antisemitic... y'know, uh all of that stuff, hatred aimed at me, um, y'know, the contempt that, y'know.  And so I ... I have a limited amount of sympathy for the people who are constantly saying how, y'know, we really need to understand that MAGA is just a reaction to the way they're being badly treated...

Here's more good news!  After 40 years of playing dumb, these two brain wizards seem to have finally cracked the code for how Conservative propaganda works!   

FRENCH:  ...but this sort of idea that a lot of people take so personally in their own lives -- they're so personally offended in their own lives by the disdain, like, that the Women's Studies Department in Oberlin might have for them.

CHAREN: I know... I know!

FRENCH:  When they have nothing to do with their lives, y'know.

CHAREN: Exactly!

FRENCH:  But I think what.. what also happens, you have to realize, a lot of the business model of right-wing media is to go find the most contemptuous leftist...

CHAREN: Yep! 

FRENCH:  ...and put them front and center and saying "Look and see what they think of you!"

CHAREN: Yes! 

FRENCH:  ... and they're not representative.  They're not the normal person left of center.  But it's all about sort of feeding the sense of grievance.

CHAREN: Yep.

Also, did you know that Republican voters are morons?  Yeah, its true! They don't actually sit around pondering the deficit and quoting Edmund Burke.  In fact, they don't know fuck all about anything! 

FRENCH: Trump couldn't return without civic ignorance at mass scale.  And so what's what you saw if you looked at the data was that amongst the people who are well informed about the news, Kamala Harris won those people pretty substantially.  Trump won people very substantially who got their news from nowhere at all.

Mr. French, Ms. Charen, those are your people you're talking about.  Your people and your party.  

And since you have now succeeded in making your failure my problem, this would be an excellent time to consider spending the rest of your lives apologizing to those of us who warned you this would happen, and who will have to spend the rest of our lives cleaning up your catastrophe.  

 

Burn The Lifeboats