Our Dangerous Shave and a Haircut Politics.

If you are unfamiliar with the immortal William Shakespeare's "The Tragedie of Roger Rabbit and the Framing Thereof" then you might as well move along. But if you are hip to the tale of the Rabbit, then attend! Attend!

It all begins with a well-known, know-it-all Never Trumper lecturing us po' dumb Democrats on how Real Grown-Up Politics works.

A consistent mistake (imo) that Democrats have made for *decades* is not understanding the thermostatic nature of politics: "I don't like this party being extreme" means "I want moderation," not *the other extreme* /2x

— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) July 23, 2026 at 2:49 PM

Now, this is the sort of thing that sounds very wise if you start from the assumption that both parties are basically interchangeable institutions that occasionally wander too far from the golden mean.

By the way, this is the same well-known, know-it-all Never Trumper who ignored all the dire warnings by some of us po' dumb Democrats that his Republican party was becoming a fascist shithole until it was far too late. Then, when caught flat-footed by the aforementioned Republican party becoming a fascist shithole, reacted with the cheap, dishonest, and automatic bothsiderist reflex which is every Never Trumpers' last line of defense against self-reflection.  This Tweet has since mysteriously disappeared from X/Twitter but lives on in a plain-text form on this here blog of mine:

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

Notice what is missing here: not an admission that the Republican Party created the conditions for Trump, but a quick escape hatch in which everyone gets a share of the blame.

Then, as is also endemic among Never Trumpers, Tom went on to present himself as one of the few Never Trump voices who saw all of this coming, which is why Trump Republicans resent them so.  Which is why, the Bulwark, MSNOW and The Atlantic all looked at his concatenation of arrogant certainty that proved catastrophically wrong, followed by reflexive, defensive false equivalence, followed by sheer puffery about his predictive abilities and all said, we gotta get this guy on staff!

You wanna bring someone on to opine about the threats and probable future trajectory of the Soviet Union during the 1980s?  Tom is your guy.  But given his record, why anyone would seek this Cold War relic's counsel about American politics of the recent past and the here and now is, well, to be honest, bog standards legacy media stuff.  He tells the tale they want told.

So, back to Roger Rabbit and lecturing us po' dumb Dems.

First, let us breeze past ol' Tom's obvious false equivalence which was immediately and effectively booed off the stage by Blue Sky commenters, one small sample of which is here:

Second, if you want to read a much longer (Two Parts!) discussion of how modern politics really works, links are here and here.  The shorter version is this...

As all true Roger Rabbit fans know, there is a certain sequence and cadence of words which all Toons find irresistible.  And when the phrase is left uncompleted they feel an uncontrollable compulsion to finish it, even when doing so will put them in life-threatening peril.

Psychologists have a name because of course they do.  It's called the Ovsiankina Effect, named after  Russian-German-American psychologist Maria Arsenjevna Rickers-Ovsiankina.  In psychology, this effect describes an innate human urge to finish unfinished tasks.  Our brains like order and clear endings. When things are left open or undone -- "Shave and a Hair Cut..." -- this creates stress.  When you finish whatever-it-is -- "...Two Bits!!!" -- our brains reward us with a quick dopamine hit, making you want to cross things off a list. 

(Bonus Info!  Because apparently even psychological concepts need their own spin-off franchise, Ovsiankina Effect should not be confused with the closely-related Zeigarnik Effect, named after Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, and which is more about the tendency of people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.)

Because what is politics, if not a giant collection of unfinished mental patterns competing for closure?

Which brings us to the particular unfinished phrase our national brain has been trained to complete. For a long time now -- decades -- our politics has been overtaken by a very specific form of Ovsiankina Effect.  And you clever dogs already know what it is, because you've read about on this blog thousands of times already.

What the legacy media has pulled off -- in plain view and with the consent of way too many of our fellow citizens -- one of the most successful propaganda campaign in American history.  One that dwarfs the Right Wing's Fox News/Hate Radio "Liberals are Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, commie baby killers" propaganda campaign and, in the long run, has been far more destructive.  

From The Washington Post, before it went completely to shit:

“The Politico model of insider coverage and savvy style of analysis is premised on conditions in politics that became less true over time, which then undermined the model,” said New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. “Conditions like two roughly similar parties obeying democratic norms, with similar establishments in both parties and competing for swing voters.”

The coverage of the 2016 campaign in particular was abysmal. The focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails stemmed from the media’s reflexive both sides-ism, and an obsession with feuds among Donald Trump's staffers reflected an insider-focused approach to politics gone too far. More deeply, the press went out of its way to suggest that the people supporting a candidate who campaigned on banning Muslims from the country and building a wall between the United States and Mexico were expressing “economic anxiety” or a desire for an outsider politician. 

The Guardian, September 6, 2024:

The media is still pursuing the appearance of fairness by treating true and false, normal and outrageous, as equally valid

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

From PressWatch, July 31, 2020

In a seminal tweet early this summer, during the battle over a particularly abhorrent op-ed, journalist Wesley Lowery set down a marker:

American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 4, 2020

Some have depicted this view as radical, demanding some sort of uniform view on all issues. But what Lowery and others (including myself) are arguing for is not moral conformity, just clarity.

From Breaking the News,  October 23, 2022:

Margaret Sullivan has some proposals in her book. So do scores of other organizations and people all scrambling to create a different news ecosystem to replace what seems unchangeable in our current one. So will I, upcoming, in this space.

Significantly, nearly all of these ideas involve less of what Margaret Sullivan has being doing in her columns, and what I have done over the decades, and what many others have emphasized as well: pointing out what is not working in the current media models.

-That seems less and less worth it.

-If critiques were going to stop “both-sides-ism,” that would already have occurred.

And this next bit takes us where we're going next.  From News Literacy Matters, October 21, 2022 

What’s wrong with bothsidesism?

...a knee-jerk response to include both sides in a story can lead to what is now known as bothsidesism. This misguided pursuit of balance sets up a false equivalence, a form of specious reasoning in which two sides are treated as the same when they are not.

Part of the problem is that the public both expects and wants bothsidesism, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Three-quarters of people surveyed say journalists should always strive to give all sides equal coverage, while more than half of all journalists think the opposite.

And there -- right there -- is why our politics is no longer reliably thermostatic.  Because for decades the general public has been enveloped in a media bubble where comforting Both Siderist false equivalences are delivered every hour of every day on the house by Savvy Media Experts from America's most prominent and influential media corporations.   

And because of this relentless conditioning from trusted sources, the public has developed a reflexive Ovsiankinan response to every Republican act of depravity and treason.   To get rid of their nearly subliminal sense of disquiet and anxiety, and to get that nice little bump of Dopamine, when confronted with any news of Republican perfidy, they will automatically balance out an equation which their nagging  subconscious is telling them is unbalanced with "...but the Democrats" or ...and the Democrats" or "Sure, but, y'know, Both Sides".

This legacy media propaganda is so much more insidious and toxic than Fox News/Hate Radio propaganda because in comes disguised as "fairness" and "impartiality" which, in different country along a different timeline, would be admirable traits.  But here and now, it's just propaganda which both prevents the general public from actually fairly adjudicating the vast moral and policy differences between the two sides, and provides an all-purpose, every-occasion alibi for Republicans who are sick of Trump and MAGA but could never in a million years bring themselves to vote for an Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, commie baby killers.

Of course, that's just my two-bits worth.  You are free to leave your support, or rebuttal in the comment section.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1002: It’s Still the Republican Party

“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”  -- Ron Swanson

• 
  

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

PBS Steel Cage Death Match...

...are words no sensible person would ever hammer together into a sentence.  But you good people get a sneak peek at the reason for that sentence, which we will be covering in greater length on the 1000th episode of the Professional Left Podcast on Thursday (weather permitting.) 

The reason that sentence makes no sense is because anyone who has watched PBS panels for more than a minute can identify their unique set of cultural expectations.  Avoid profanity.  No muttering asides about what a dumbfuck so-and-so is.  No reality teevee 'confessionals" after the panel where a participant can really cut loose.  Always be collegial, even when your "colleague" is lying their ass off.  

And above all, no shouting.  Business must be conducted in the proper tone -- interactions kept within the 50 to 60 decibel "quiet conversation" range.  Maybe jump it up to 65 when propping up someone's lame joke with some PBS-brand jolly laughter.  

But however hard they work to sand down any differences, then pack those differences in the cotton batting of PBS-speak, there are moments more and more frequently when it's clear that the Left side of the panel would very much like to call the Right side of the panel out for being a lying sumbitch. 

So this banal exchange is about as close as you're going to get to PBS News Hour panelists rasslin'.

From The PBS News Hour, June 12...

This is the exchange on PBS Friday between Mr. David Brooks and Mr. Jonathan Capehart, with emphasis added:

David Brooks:  ... The Trump thing is just weird. He's just -- he appoints Bill Pulte, who's clearly not even close, within a Pacific Ocean, of being qualified for this job. And then he turns around, and to make the permanent acting, not acting, but the permanent director of DNI, Jay Clayton, who's totally like superstar level by Trump's standards.

So how does the same guy pick two people, one with such radically different qualifications? The one thing I should add is that I don't like what the Democrats are doing here. I understand you don't like Bill Pulte. I understand you think he should not have been appointed. And that, you're absolutely 100 percent correct.

But the FISA program works well. We are now -- as Speaker Johnson made the point, we're now -- we got the World Cup here. We got the Iranian thing going on. We need all the intelligence I can get. And that FISA program supplies, I'm told, half the president's daily intelligence brief.

That's a lot of information and valuable information. It's a very well-working program. And the Democrats are not repeal -- or not renewing it sort of in my view out of spite, but they're making us less safe.  

The moderator then turns to Jonathan Capehart, who asks an obvious question

Jonathan Capehart:   How this became the Democrats' fault is curious to me.

One -- a couple of things to keep in mind. One, even though the law has expired, it was reauthorized by a FISA court in March of 2026', this past March, which goes through March of 27. So Congress has time to come back and reauthorize it, do whatever they need to do, because it's not just Democrats who have concerns about the law. It's Republicans as well.

So I just don't think it's right to say it's all the Democrats' fault, especially when they're not even in the majority in either house.  

After which the moderator, Geoff Bennett, immediately changes the subject, which is what the moderator always does whenever there is the slightest danger of David Brooks being made a fool of by someone who came armed with facts.  

So, rather than pursuing the question of, hey, why the hell are you blaming Democrats when they don’t control anything, we get, "In the time that remains, David, do your Sunday night plans involve being at the White House for a UFC match, by chance?"

Ha ha ha.  Potential unpleasantness averted.  Collegiality restored.  Audience soothed.    

Trivial, right?  Hardly worth mentioning, right?  And I wouldn’t have mentioned it were it not for the fact that it is one more example of an unholy ritual performed over and over again on that set, involving the same people, operating according to the same assumptions.

For example, you will undoubtedly remember that, one day after one of Trump’s ICE goons murdered Rene Good in cold blood on camera, the same Messer's. Brooks and Capehart were invited to share their opinions about that murder.

And Brooks did his thing like a man dispatched from Centrist Thought HQ with a very important mission: whatever the question is, the answer must always be “both sides are basically the same kind of confused, noble, tragic souls squinting at reality through fogged-up moral lenses.”

And in this case, the prompt is not subtle. It’s a video of a woman being shot in Minnesota. A real-world, immediate, ugly, concrete thing. The sort of thing that, historically speaking, usually calls for at least a directional opinion.

Instead, Brooks doesn’t just bend over backward – he gave it the full Cirque du Soleil routine of intellectual contortion, folding himself across multiple dimensions just to avoid saying, plainly, what he thinks of what people just saw.

And you can almost hear the gears turning: how do I not take a position, but still sound like I am wisely refusing to take a position?

So he doesn’t say “I’m not taking a side.” No. That would be too simple. Too honest. Instead, he goes searching through the attic of American memory and drags down a dusty old artifact: a 1951 football game film.   A filmed college football game where both teams watched it afterward and each concluded the refs had screwed them differently. Which, apparently, is now the master key to understanding modern political violence.

And the argument emerges in its full Brooksian foulness: people interpret reality through bias, everyone sees what they want to see, therefore everything is politics, therefore no interpretation is more grounded than any other, therefore the wise posture is… eternal suspended judgment.

It’s the same fucking column he’s been writing for 24 years. Different props, same stage play. Swap in Iraq, swap in Trump, swap in a shooting in Minnesota—doesn’t matter. The conclusion is always hovering in a nonexistent middle ground.  

Meanwhile, sitting across from him was Jonathan Capehart, doing that very modern cable-news thing where you are professionally required to witness something grotesque and surreal and respond with PBS impassivity.

You can see the “are you hearing this shit?” energy radiating off him. The body language of someone who is one sentence away from standing up and walking off set, but is restrained by the invisible PBS leash that says: we will discuss your feelings, but only in approved tonal ranges.

And he tries to steer it back toward something resembling the actual subject. Because the question was not “what does 1951 college football teach us about epistemology.” The question was: what do you think about this shooting?

Brooks, however, has already made track for Centerville.  He’s back in his seminar on the Sociology of Perception mode, concluding that all humans are basically trapped in interpretive fog banks and therefore—surprise—we should be very cautious about concluding anything at all.

Which is how you end up in that very familiar elite media cul-de-sac where:

Something happens in the real world

It is immediately translated into a meditation on perception

The meditation conveniently avoids any judgment about the thing that happened

And the absence of judgment is reframed as wisdom

And the segment lands where it always lands: in that posture of cultivated detachment that looks, from the outside, less like intellectual humility and more like refusal to face reality. 

You will also remember these same people on this same stage back in August of last year.  Brooks "Both Sidesed" Trump ordering Texas to gerrymander him five new congressional seats out of thin air, and Gavin Newsom fighting back with the only weapon he has.  

He also bitched that "no one is marching in the streets" over this shit because apparently from the Acela corridor quiet car he can't see the millions who have been out in the streets in all kinds of weather for all kinds of marches.  Or maybe he's just a legacy media troll who shoulda been given the hook 20 years ago.

You see, it’s not any one of these examples – and there are dozens more on PBS alone.  Hundreds more from Brooks over the years.  And hundreds of thousands more across all legacy media platforms over the decades.  

It is the collective weight of all of them.  The relentless repetition of variations of this one lie that has incepted that lie as an axiomatic truth in the subconscious of millions and millions of our fellow citizens.  

That's when you get the 10,000th iteration of garbage like this.  From Wake Up To Politics:

Could There Be a Third Party for Moderates?

It turns out, Americans agree on an awful lot.

Burn The Lifeboats

Quantum Entanglement Politics Part 2: An Issue of Scale.

Where were we?

Oh yeah!  I promised we'd talk about propaganda and "scale" and then wandered off into a side-quest about the collapse of thermostatic politics and the rise of quantum politics caused by the long-term toxic effects of the legacy media's Both Sides Do It fetish.  

And then I figured this would make for a very on-topic theme for the Professional Left podcast, which it now is.  

So if you're a regular podcast listener, much of this will sound familiar.  

If not, I'll remind you that our point of departure on the last post was midway through a chat among the Pod Save lads about why the Democratic party sucks.  Yadda yadda.  Joe Biden.  And so forth.  And now that we're all caught up, onward!  

Back to the lads, and for your convenience I've highlighted the phrases that are doing a backbreaking amount of heavy lifting.  

Jon Favreau:  But I do think that there is just a... a... a severe lack of trust in the Democratic party, um, and the Democratic brand that comes from, I mean, come ... comes from decades, but it also comes, like. specifically from everything that happened in... in... at the end of the Biden administration. Joe Biden running is part of it.

Um, you know, Lakshya [Jain] points out uh the Democratic position on crime, uh, is a big part of it ... or at least what the perception of the Democratic position on crime is.  Which was unfortunately, um, hurt by the defund the police discussion. Um which of course, you know, [inaudible] you didn't have Democratic candidates saying defund the police, but enough activists were that the perception became that Democrats want to wanted to defund the police. 

Lovett:  Most Democrats didn't, but a few did.  

Favreau:   A few did... few did.  And those were the voices that were elevated by some often by the other side...

 Ah, perception.  That's always the question, isn't it?  To quote Aldous Huxley from "The Doors of Perception":

I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

What does that have to do with where we're headed?  Not a lot, but it's always fun to quote people like Huxley, if for no other reason than to remind the Very Serious People that it is possible to be a "normal person" and still savor big concepts and deep reading.  

Anyway, since "perception" is hauling the Pod Save lads whole thesis here, it seem nuts to shrug the concept off as just, y'know, a thing that happened.  Like an unfortunate weather event, that was often elevated "by the other side"...

So instead of that, let’s do some arithmetic in the specific subject of "Defund the Police".

In early June of 2020, right after the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed, the phrase “Defund the Police” begins to show up on Fox News. Within days, it’s everywhere in their ecosystem. By summer, it’s not just a phrase -- it’s a frame. By fall, it’s a weapon.

And then never leaves.

According to data aggregated from the GDELT project and cited by RealClearPolitics, by March of 2021 -- less than a year in -- Fox News alone had aired the phrase 4,116 times.

That’s one network.

Not Fox Business. Not Newsmax. Not OAN. Not talk radio. Not podcasts. Not YouTube. Not the Daily Wire or Breitbart or the email blast industrial complex.

Just Fox.

Now, let's scale that out conservatively.

Across the entire conservative media ecosystem between 2020 and 2022, a reasonable estimate lands somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 uses of the phrase “Defund the Police.” Call it 200,000 as a midpoint.

And that’s just utterances. That’s not counting amplification -- the chyrons, the viral clips, the retweets, the repetition across platforms, the algorithmic juicing. If you count exposures, you’re easily into the millions.

Now hold that number in your head -- 200,000 -- while we look at the other side of the ledger.

How many Democrats actually ran for office during those same cycles?

Back of the envelop figuring puts federal, state, local -- that'd be the House, the Senate, state legislatures, mayors, city councils, school boards, judges, water reclamation districts, mosquito abatement districts, etc. -- you’re probably looking at something on the order of 50,000 to 150,000 Democratic candidates across 2020 and 2022.

That’s the statistical universe.

Now: how many of those candidates explicitly ran on a “Defund the Police” platform?

Not “police reform" or “reallocating some funding.” or "rethink public safety.”

The actual slogan. The actual Fox chyron.

Maybe, what?  A dozen of two dozen at most?.

Out of tens of thousands.

That’s not 10%.
That’s not 5%.
That’s not even 1%.

That’s somewhere in the .01-something percent range.  In terms of probability, you had about as much chance of stumbling across a Democrat in the wild running on "Defund the Police" as you would of drawing a royal flush in poker on your first hand while being hit by lightening.  

Which means 99%+ of Democratic candidates did not run on “Defund the Police.”

Now let’s put the two numbers together.

Around 200,000 uses of the phrase across conservative media
Let's say 24 candidates actually running on it for some office somewhere.  

That gives you a ratio of about 8,300-to-1.  

Eight thousand three hundred repetitions of the phrase for every one human being actually advocating it on a ballot, and once you see the ratio, the game gives itself away.  No sane person or fair-and-balanced media outlet could possibly believe that “Defund the Police” was a reasonable and fair description of the position of the Democratic party.   It was propaganda.  Slander.  An exploding dye pack, used to stain every Democrat everywhere with the same color, regardless of what they actually said, did, or ran on.

Did your local Democratic candidate for county board run on fixing stormwater drainage and keeping the library open on weekends? Doesn’t matter. Defund the Police.

Did the moderate Democrat in a swing district explicitly oppose the slogan? Doesn’t matter. Defund the Police.

Did the Democratic mayor increase the police budget? Doesn’t matter. Defund the Police.

Because the point wasn’t accuracy. The point was saturation.   And while Fox and it's imitators yelling into the conservative media bubble 200,000 times is powerful, it’s not sufficient. It needs help.  And that's where the legacy media leaps into action, because what makes propaganda saturation decisive is when the rest of the media ecosystem treats the frame as legitimate.

And they did.

They “both-sided” it.
They hosted panels about it.
They asked every Democrat from dogcatcher to president, “Do you support defunding the police?” as if it were a party plank instead of a niche activist slogan.

They turned it into a litmus test.

Which is how you launder propaganda into “the conversation.”

By the time CNN and the rest got bored and moved on -- as the data shows they largely did by late 2020 -- the damage was done. Fox kept hammering. Talk radio kept hammering. The clips kept circulating.

And the frame stuck, which is how modern propaganda works.

Not by persuading you of a specific policy, but by creating a feeling that something is broadly true, even when it is numerically absurd.

It’s what we refer to at The Professional Left as Velveeta Media.  Engineered. Shelf-stable. Smooth. Consistent. Melts the same way every time.  It doesn’t matter that it isn’t cheese. What matters is that it behaves like cheese under the right conditions.

“Defund the Police” was treated like a Democratic platform plank because it was processed, packaged, and reheated until it achieved the right consistency.

If you take nothing else away from this, remember that somewhere north of 99% of Democratic candidates had nothing to do with “Defund the Police.”  Compare that to the majority of Republicans running for or holding office -- 

A majority of GOP nominees deny or question the 2020 election results

Experts say their dominance in the party poses a threat to the country’s democratic principles and jeopardizes the integrity of future votes

-- and an even larger majority Republican voters  -- 

Trump's election fraud claims spread distrust before midterms, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds 

...Some 46% of respondents said they agreed with the statement that there are large numbers of fraudulent ballots cast by non-citizens in U.S. elections, with 82% of Republicans agreeing compared with 18% of Democrats and 38% of independents.

About 53% of respondents said ​they were worried about fraudulent mail‑in or absentee ballots, compared with 43% who said they were not, with partisan division again apparent: 83% of Republicans expressed concern, versus ​33% of Democrats.

Taken together, the responses indicate that years of messaging by Trump and his allies casting doubt on voting have resonated strongly with ⁠Republicans, particularly around claims that non‑citizens vote in significant numbers and that mail‑in ballots are unreliable, despite repeated audits and academic research finding fraud in either case to be exceedingly rare.

-- who would still swear on the lives of their children that they believe the outrageous lie that the 2020 election was stolen

And yet it was "Defund the Police" which was blasted across the conservative media ecosystem hundreds of thousands of times, amplified into millions of impressions, and laundered into mainstream discourse.   At a ratio of roughly 8,300-to-1.

Talk about straining at gnats and swallowing camels (Matthew 23:24).

That’s not politics.  That’s industrial-scale message warfare.

And it works.

I Am The Liberal Media

Quantum Entanglement Politics Part 1.

Today we're going to take a break from the daily barrage of life-and-death lies pushed by fascists and talk about the importance of scale.

Not vibes. Not anecdotes. Scale.

Because one of the things the last decade has taught us—over and over and over again—is that if you don’t understand scale, you don’t understand propaganda. And if you don’t understand propaganda, you’re already losing.

The subject of scale -- or, rather, the conspicuous avoidance of the subject of scale -- glided quietly past during one of the Pod Save lads’ daily recitations of the “Why Democrats Suck” rosary—Kamala was a bad candidate, Joe Biden is history’s greatest villain, etc.

Anyway, then there was this (with emphasis added)

Jon Favreau:  Yeah. I mean to the ... to the broader question of that Lakshya [Jain] raises in that in that Argument piece about like why Democrats aren't gaining on the generic ballot by as much as Trump's approval is falling. I do think there's a probably a number of reasons. 

Jon Lovett:  Oh, definitely. 

Before we move on, a quick side quest into a subject these people never discuss in depth... and which I have been writing about on this blog since these gentlemen were fresh outta college, Kerry campaign volunteers.  

Both Siderism.

Let's start with how most people have traditionally understood politics for a long time.  The idea that politics behaves like a thermostat.   From Good Authority:

Good to Know: The public is a thermostat

Why there is a never-ending cycle of governments doing something and the public wanting the opposite.

...one of the most enduring puzzles of democracy [is that] governments, no matter what they do, often seem unable to satisfy voters. When governments take action, the public often seems to want the opposite. Push policies left, and opinions shift right. Increase spending, and people want cuts. 

This phenomenon – where public preferences shift in the opposite direction of government action – is known as thermostatic politics.

The thermostatic model, first formalized by political scientist Christopher Wlezien in 1995, describes the public’s reaction to government policies as akin to a thermostat adjusting a room’s temperature. Just as a thermostat signals when to cool down or warm up based on current conditions, public opinion signals to policymakers when to increase or decrease policy activity. 

A little like Newtonian physics, right? Push and pull.  Action, and equal and opposite reaction.

But that Newtonian model is broken.  Broken by 40+ years of Both Sides Do It bullshit from America's Very Serious pundits and professional opinion-havers.  Despite the fact that America's two major parties are almost exactly diametrically opposed on almost every issue, thanks to the daily barrage of media Both Siderism, for millions of voters, that Newtonian model of action and reaction has been replaced by a kind of Einstein/Schrödinger quantum politics, with the parties becoming "entangled" in the public mind regardless of how distant and different they are from each other.

By now you all know how this entanglement shows up in the everyday language of way too many American voters.  For example, a few months ago we talked "Steve" who was one of the subjects of a Vox article titled, "Meet the newly uninsured --  Millions of Americans will soon go without insurance. We spoke with some of them."

"Steve" is a retiree. who had insurance through his wife's job.  But then the company shut down her division, so she decided to retire, and off they went to the exchange to shop for new coverage.  His story is tragic and, with minor variations, is being experienced by millions of American families including ours.

But when you hit that last sentence, remember that "Steve" is saying this in the Fall of 2025, living in the rubble of a full decade of felonies, conspiracy mongering, corruption, lying, bigotry, treason, insurrection, fascism and assorted other catastrophes that a Trump-led Republican party has left in its wake.  

Up until last year, his family of three was covered by his wife’s insurance, provided by the large corporation for which she worked. It was $500 a month with a low deductible. But then, the company shut down her division, she decided to retire, and the couple and their son enrolled in the same plan on the state’s ACA marketplaces.

They couldn’t get such a great deal, but they found something usable: about $1,000 per month — pricey, but they were able to keep all of their doctors, who were in network. Their deductible was about $4,600.

But next year, their current plan would cost $2,700 every month to keep, and their deductible would be higher — up to $5,300. They could consider dropping their college-aged son off the plan, but he would struggle to afford health insurance on his own, and it would only save his parents $300 a month.

Steven says he feels trapped. Given their age, he and his wife don’t feel they can afford to go without insurance. But they’re now going to have to pull money out of their retirement accounts to cover the cost of their health plan.

“We cannot wing it and not have health insurance,” Steven said. “I’m spending a lot of money that I really do not have on health care.”

He’s done the math. If he kept his same plan, paid all of the premiums, and paid the maximum out-of-pocket costs, he could spend $50,000 on health care out of pocket — even with a health insurance plan.

“It kinda seems like the two political parties want to be right and not care about people,” he told me.

Even when the stakes are life and death -- and even when proof of who is right and wrong is at everyone’s fingertips -- allocating blame correctly feels literally unthinkable to tens of millions of citizens who have come to believe the “Both Sides Do It” lie as gospel.

So, when Republican corruption, lies and policies fuck them over, in order to make the quantum entanglement between the two parties balance out, somehow, in some mysterious way, these people hold as irrefutably true that Democrats must be equally to blame.  

Every time you hear another "undecided" or "independent" or "centrist" or "unhappy Trump voter" bitching about "Congress" or "politicians in Washington"  or "both sides of the aisle" in the the face of a Republican party which has devolved into a mob of violent bigots and imbeciles, fueled by lurid, home-grown fascist propaganda masquerading as news, and ruled by monsters and demagogues...you are seeing the effect of 40+ years of Both Sides Do It media curb-stomping thermostatic politics and replacing it with quantum entanglement politics.

And even at the cost of our democracy, the legacy media would rather go right on pumping that narcotic lie into our politics than risk the wrath of the MAGA mob and the loss of revenue that would surely accompany telling the masses the simple, ugly truth.

But this was just supposed to be a side-quest, wasn't it?

Damn.

Well, let's pick it up in Part 2, which I'll get to later today or tomorrow when we get back to the subject of "scale" in what I am sure will end up being a TL;DR post.

See you all in a bit.

I Am The Liberal Media

The Triumphant Return of Magic Ruralism ™

There's only one thing wrong with the title of this post.  It's the word "return", because Magic Ruralism never left.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term:

Magic Ruralism:  Noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.

As I have mentioned once or twice before, after Trump slithered down the escalator and into the hearts of Americas bigots and imbeciles, Magic Ruralism became the Beltway media's favorite new genre of fiction:

...just as Thrilling Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly were in the business of cranking out hard-boiled crime genre fiction for the titillation of their readers, so have The New York Times and the Washington Post gone into the business of cranking out True Tales Of Rust-Belt Trump Murricans! for the titillation of their readers.

And at this point, we as a country have already run enough versions of the "Just reach out humbly and respectfully to Republican base voters with policies that will materially benefit them and they'll see reason and stop voting for lunatics, grifters and fascists" experiment to understand that it never fucking works and never will.   

This strategy was the sum and substance of the entire Obama administration, which had to immediately set to work cleaning up after the various catastrophes Bush and the Republicans had left behind.  The Right reacted with an eight-year-long racist primal scream followed by the nomination and election of the King of the Birthers.  

The coastal media remained positively obsessed with that goddamn Ohio diner, because rich city folks live a million social and economic miles from the actual Middle America and their lives were substantially untouched in any material way by the Republican madness abroad in the land, they were free to savor hair-raising tales (from The Washington Post July 30, 2018) --

White, and in the minority

She speaks English. Her co-workers don’t. Inside a rural chicken plant, whites struggle to fit in.

-- of rural Murrican pity and terror (the New York Times also from July 30, 2018)  --

How to Talk to a Racist

White liberals, you’re doing it all wrong.

-- from a safe distance.

After the disaster of Trump 1.0, the Biden administration's policy of reaching out to people whose lives have gotten worse under Republican administrations and yet still fucking hate Democrats and always vote for the party that screws them was directionally the same as the Obama administration: focus on manufacturing in red states, infrastructure, raising the standard of living for the working class, and lifting poor children out of poverty.  

Once again the Right reacted by ignoring reality, obsessing over the lies and slanders being cranked out all day, every day by Conservative media, nominating the King of the Birthers for the third time, and electing him again.  

 As has been proven time and time again, the whole notion that ignorant ofay "Ohio diner" voters are driven by "economic anxiety" is bullshit.  They are driven by fear, paranoia, rage and racism and no matter how genteel your language or calm you approach, it doesn't work and it's never gonna work. 

 And so, of course, from the Department of Infinite Credulous Mulligans...

The author's case for wasting time and energy pursuing the same outreach to the unreachable strategy that has already failed more often than Trump Mortgage, Trump University, Trump Steaks, and Trump Vodka combined is based entirely on her conversation with one woman and her brother-in-law, six years ago.

Roxanne lived in a double-wide trailer with her husband, plus her parents-in-law and brother-in-law. It was during the Covid-19 pandemic, so we sat distanced on her porch to talk.

Because of the garbage she'd read online, Roxanne was very confused about Joe Biden.

Some of them said Biden was the worst thing that could happen to America, while others said they were relieved at the outcome of the election because Trump was evil and had to go. She was open to talking with me because she was trying to sort through all of it for herself, to figure out what she believed. “Regardless, I don’t plan on voting in the runoff election,” she told me. “I don’t think it makes much of a difference.”

At least one of the presumably many reasons Roxanne was worried about Joe Biden was based on some absolute bullshit which she had picked up from somewhere and had apparently never bothered to find out the truth of it. 

Roxanne had voted for Trump in the general because she had been told Biden would take away their disability. Now that Biden had won, fear of losing their benefits kept her up at night. “I don’t know how we’d live without it,” she said.

And here comes her brother-in-law Jeremy who is also full of stupid opinions.

While we were talking, her brother-in-law, Jeremy, came outside. He had splurged and gotten his nails done, and they looked fantastic, which I was sure to compliment him on. They were long purple stiletto-shaped acrylic nails. Roxanne told him I was there to talk about the runoff elections, and he quickly told me of his distrust of the Democratic candidates, especially Jon Ossoff. “For someone that young to be that successful, they had to do something crooked.”

Then Astral Projection David Brooks entered the chat...

“Hold on now,” Roxanne told him. “She’s here to talk about voting for them. Let’s be polite.”

“Well, I don’t hate them,” he said, “but I don’t like any of them — neither side. I won’t vote for any of them anyway.” 

Because Both Sides...  Both Sides...  Both Sides...  

You can practically hear a generation of legacy media Both Siderism and Republican excuse-making pinging around Jeremy's head like a BB in a rain barrel.  

As they talked, I listened for what was underneath their distrust of the political process. They were afraid of losing their health care, their disability benefits and their home. They were worried about losing their family members who were sick. Roxanne grieved the loss of her health. They worried about their neighbors who didn’t have heat in the winter. These problems had only gotten worse over the years, never better, no matter who was in office. “It hasn’t mattered if there was an R or a D after their name,” Roxanne said.

Both Sides...  Both Sides...  Both Sides...  

And rather than perhaps, y'know, gently pointing out the many Democratic policies that already have materially improved Roxanne's life and would have improved it even more had it not been for Republican obstruction, sabotage, slander, and gutting, the author opts instead to... 

I affirmed their experiences, validated their feelings and pointed out the very real injustices in their lives, the very real failure of either political party to help...

Again, Both Sides...  Both Sides...  Both Sides...  

In the words of BlueSky user Always Jae...

Ohhh...that's what kept them voting for all this?  They weren't "welcomed" enough?  Seriously?  The interference that the media continuously runs for white people in the sticks is almost pathological at this point.

To which I would only add that, when it comes to the way legacy media runs cover for these people, we no longer need to modify the word "pathological" with the word "almost".  

Which is why we need to...

Burn The Lifeboats

Once Everyone is a "Centrist Independent"...

...will we all get along?  

Will all of our dreams will come true?

In what is the stupidest claptrap I've read so far this month, Mr. Gary Cosby Jr. in the Tuscaloosa News seems to think that's the direction things are heading in.  That can't make up their fucking minds if their life depended on it and former Republicans who don't want to take shit for it "independent" voters are the most powerful voting bloc of all .  Because, as you all know, all "independents" are all "independent" for the same reasons, right?

To be clear, Mr. Gary Cosby Jr. is not breaking new ground in being stupid.  No brave new worlds of stupid are being discovered here.   Instead, this Temu Tom Nichols has swept up every extant stupid cliche about "Independents" and the Extremes on Both Side, and heaped them into a big ol' pile of stupid that is impressive in its own right.  

It reads as an extended Onion parody.  But it's not.  It's real.   More than real.  Super-real.  As if every asinine New York Times editorial on the subject dating back to when the world was young had been compacted into a single mighty ziggurat of stupid that rises so high above the dribbling of workaday pundits that it pierces some hitherto unbreachable barrier and enters into some noumenal realm of stupidity perfected.

As you read this, keep in mind it was written in the 21st century, not the 20th.  In February of 2026, not February of 1996.  I have helpfully emphasized the bits to which you should pay special attention, and will follow it up with a callback to a thing I wrote during The Before Time.

Independent voters increase as party extremism rises 

President Donald Trump’s approval rating continues to fall with 60% of Americans now disapproving of him and only 39% approving, according to a story published by USA Today. While this spells trouble for Trump’s controversial agenda, both Republicans and Democrats are in trouble as both parties bleed voters. 

Roca News, an independent online source, reported that a record number of American voters are identifying themselves as independents. Gallup polling indicated that 45% of voters now classify themselves as independent. Twenty-four percent said they were Republican, and equally, 24% said they were Democrats. 

Roca said the trend was growing because many young voters refuse to register as either Democrats or Republicans as they seek to maintain political independence. This growing voter bloc, positioned in the political center, is now the most powerful group of voters in America. 

While the number of independents is impressive, the numbers I found most enlightening were the 24s. Both major parties only have 24% of registered voters each. This spells trouble with a capital “T” for both parties. 

Extremism in both traditional parties is driving away voters. I can tell you that, although I had always voted Republican before Donald Trump took over the party, I will not do so again, not as long as Trump and his philosophy dominate the party. 

I have little desire to vote Democrat, except for the purpose of ending what I see as a festering tyranny in the Republican Party.  Apparently, a growing number of voters feel as I do. This means that both parties must have independent voters swing their way to win elections. When so many voters are situated in the middle, astute political operatives will refocus their party to reach them, or someone will form a third party positioned in the political center. 

I never believed for a moment that a second Trump term could be this bad. I was wrong. It is far worse, far more extreme, than my darkest fears painted it. Maybe I am not alone. Maybe there is a huge number of Americans who feel as I do. Maybe, despite the Trump administration pressuring states to redraw their voting maps to favor Republicans, enough of us exist to, in the classic American political ideal, throw the bums out at the midterm elections. 

When Barack Obama was president, there were many issues on which I completely disagreed with him. There were some issues I found on which I did agree with him. That is pretty normal. It is rare for a president, or any political leader, to be so egregiously bad that I couldn’t find something to like or agree with him or her about. 

In Trump’s first term, I gave him full marks for having a good economy right up until the 2020 global pandemic shut down the entire world economy for months. Had the pandemic not hit, I believe Trump would have been easily reelected. As it happened, the pandemic exposed him as a truly ineffective leader and an incompetent crisis manager.

The problem for voters like me is obvious. The right has drifted too far to the extreme right, and the left has drifted too far to the extreme left. We have lost our ability to carry on civil discourse and, as a result, we have lost the ability to compromise for the common good. 

This big independent voting bloc gives me hope for a better political future for the nation. If this group of voters finds a unifying candidate in the center, we might see the first independent president in a coming election cycle.

While an independent in the White House is unlikely, the power of this group of voters could well draw both parties back into a more reasonable position and balance. That might be even more important than forming a third party. 

Extremism kills democracy. We must rein in the country’s political parties soon, immediately, if we have any hope of saving this nation’s position as the world’s most stable democracy. Perhaps even more important, we must bring these parties back toward the center to ensure freedom and civil rights for everyone in the population. 

Oh Gary, Gary, Gary.  Of course you've always voted Republican.  Your whole column screams that, because right at the top you say that "Donald Trump took over the party" which is simply not true.  In fact, it is exactly backwards.   Your party dropped trou, grabbed ankles, waved its rosy red ass around and begged Trump to take it, body and soul.  They did this because the base of your party is largely made up of bigots and imbeciles, and Trump spoke to them in their native language.  The language of hate and grievance and dire conspiracies.  The language of Limbaugh, Levin, Hannity, Beck, Ingraham, O'Reilly.  

I guess you never noticed.  Which, I guess makes you one of the not-very-bright ones.  So cool beans you snagged yourself a White Guy DEI position at your local paper!

See, we over here on the left understand quite well what it means when guys like you go about stomping and fuming about  The Extremes on Both Sides, because we have been dealing with clowns like you our entire adult lives.   You -- a member of the Party of Personal Responsibility -- cannot accept that your side is the fucking problem and that you are, in a very real way, personally responsible for your side being the fucking problem.  Such a thought would fry your circuits right down to the motherboard, so you conjure out of thin air an Extreme Left to counterbalance the very real and very fascist Extreme Right, then stamp your feet and insist that you're actually the Sensible Ambassador from a nonexistent Sensible Center, and if only everyone would drop what they're doing and meet you there... 

As to all the rest of the yadda yadda about Independents and The Extremes on Both Sides and the Glorious Center, I guess the news hasn't filtered all the way down to Tuscaloosa yet that that particular stick of Bubble-Yum lost its flavor about 20 years ago, even though grifters like Third Way, The Purple Project, No Labels, Country Over Party, and Forward have succeeded in bilking wealthy, credulous idiots out of their coin by feeding them wishful codswallop like this.  

And seeing as how you're from Alabama, I'm quite surprised that you are unfamiliar with the most successful third party bid in American history, seeing as how the candidate was a governor of your state, and ran for president using language that was very nearly identical to the language you used in your column.  That's right, it was George Wallace, and you can read all about it here, "More Adventures in Third Party History: Today, The Most Successful Third Party in Modern American Politics" if you are interested.

We also did a whole podcast on the subject which people can still listen to here.  

Now it's time for the PSA in which I remind readers of a fun word, coined by Kurt Vonnegut his 1963 satirical novel "Cat's Cradle" , which I used all the way back in November of 2009 when David Fucking Brooks wrote almost exactly the came column as yours for almost exactly the same craven reasons.  

From The "Independent" Granfalloon, November 08, 2009:

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":

"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

I Am The Liberal Media

More Thrilling Tales of Both Sides Do It: One Hell of an Epitaph.

As you all know by now, the Both Sides Do It lie has been the legacy media's default setting for so long, and is now, for millions of Americans, so automatic that it has become what psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton called a “thought-terminating cliché".   Or what Orwell termed "crimestop":  the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.

When the conversation veers anywhere near holding Republicans solely responsible for the evil that they do, these crimestop conditioned citizens have been trained to immediately chuck a "Both Sides Do It" flashbang into the mix and then scurry away to safety. 

Even when the stakes are life-and-death, and even when the irrefutable proof of who is right and who is wrong is literally at every citizen's fingertips, for far too many Americans the thought of allocating blame where it belongs is so terrifying that these stubbornly sleepy citizens would rather dream reassuringly about "politicians in Washington" or "both sides of the aisle" than wake to find that the Republican party is a mob of violent bigots and imbeciles, fueled by lurid, home-grown fascist propaganda masquerading as news, and ruled by monsters and demagogues. 

And even at the cost of our democracy, the legacy media would rather go right on feeding them the narcotic lie that keeps them docile and somnolent than risk the wrath of the MAGA mob and the loss of revenue that would surely accompany telling the masses the simple, ugly truth.

Which brings us to this excerpt from a November 14, 2025 Vox article entitled "Meet the newly uninsured --  Millions of Americans will soon go without insurance. We spoke with some of them."

It's the story of "Steve", a retiree. who had insurance through his wife's job.  But then the company shut down her division, so she decided to retire, and off they went to the exchange to shop for new coverage.

The story itself is appalling, and is being felt, with minor variations, by millions of American families including ours.

But when you hit that last sentence, remember that "Steve" is saying this in the Fall of 2025, living in the rubble of a full decade of felonies, conspiracy mongering, corruption, lying, bigotry, treason, insurrection, fascism and assorted other catastrophes that a Trump-led Republican party has left in its wake.  

Up until last year, his family of three was covered by his wife’s insurance, provided by the large corporation for which she worked. It was $500 a month with a low deductible. But then, the company shut down her division, she decided to retire, and the couple and their son enrolled in the same plan on the state’s ACA marketplaces.

They couldn’t get such a great deal, but they found something usable: about $1,000 per month — pricey, but they were able to keep all of their doctors, who were in network. Their deductible was about $4,600.

But next year, their current plan would cost $2,700 every month to keep, and their deductible would be higher — up to $5,300. They could consider dropping their college-aged son off the plan, but he would struggle to afford health insurance on his own, and it would only save his parents $300 a month.

Steven says he feels trapped. Given their age, he and his wife don’t feel they can afford to go without insurance. But they’re now going to have to pull money out of their retirement accounts to cover the cost of their health plan.

“We cannot wing it and not have health insurance,” Steven said. “I’m spending a lot of money that I really do not have on health care.”

He’s done the math. If he kept his same plan, paid all of the premiums, and paid the maximum out-of-pocket costs, he could spend $50,000 on health care out of pocket — even with a health insurance plan.

“It kinda seems like the two political parties want to be right and not care about people,” he told me.

To put this in medical terms that maybe "Steve" can understand, his Both Siderism is symptomatic of a media-made pandemic which has become a chronic, long-term public health crisis and which may ultimately prove to be fatal.   

And if there is any hope for "Steve" to learn the truth about his condition, he'll need to seek out experts who are  way, way "out of network".

Burn The Lifeboats