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

Shorter Tom Nichols: Driftglass Was Right All Along

As longtime readers are aware, the chorus of hundreds of Liberal voices which, for decades, provided ample evidence and brutally accurate warnings that the Eisenhower cheese was sliding off the Republican party's cracker and into the fascist abyss was, by, turns, scornfully, mockingly, angrily and then airily dismissed for years by Mr. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic.  

Ol' Tom held those critiques to be ludicrous on their face.  Or, at best, wild over-reactions by alarmist, Liberal cranks.  

Then some time passed and, ok, something has clearly come undone inside the party of Reagan, but it is asinine to suggest that the rise of Trump has its roots deep in the Republican party.  Gotta be something mechanical and fixable like a spun bearing or a cracked dilithium crystal, not structural.  And whatever is going on, calling it "fascist" is waaaay out of line.  At best, Trump was a black swan event.  A fluke.

[brief driftglass aside:  No Tom.  It wasn't something mechanical and fixable.  It wasn't a spun ideological bearing.  It was your party's Pretty Hate Machine with a fatal leaking coolant...

...which I was writing about in detail 20 fucking years ago.: end brief driftglass aside.  We now return to the cartography of ol' Tom's long, winding, through-gritted-teeth journey to where the Left has been all along.]  

Or, ok, so, Trump's not going away.  The fever is not breaking.  But -- and I want to make this 100% clear -- as a child of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!), there is no way I personally could have known what was happening with the Republican party in faraway lands like Georgia and Mississippi.  Despite the fact that knowing what's happening with the Republican party is my job.

And anyway, ol' Tom's got nothing to feel guilty about because the Left's hands are plenty dirty here!  (From a since deleted Tom Nichols Tweet barking at brother Charlie Pierce who had the temerity to point out that Tom was full of shit.)

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

And now, at last, in February of 2026 -- decades too late -- we arrive here.  

Call Them What They Are
The Republican Party has become a haven for Nazi sympathizers.
By Tom Nichols

And this is the front-page teaser or "refer" for that story:

The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem
How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich?

Great question! Which we will definitely get to in a minute.

But at least as important as what ol' Tom says in this article is where the article was published.    It's in The Atlantic.  

And knowing that, you may ask yourself this question:  how exactly does ol' Tom  -- who has been wrong, tardy and dismissive all along -- rate a column in The Atlantic, while the folks who have been right all along -- folks who ol' Tom routinely derided, ridiculed and blocked from his perch at The Atlantic -- are still legacy media pariahs?

Again, great question.  And I would suggest that it's the same reason so many other recently-former Republicans and Neocons have found a home at The Atlantic.  Because in that pundit world, the fact that you have been wrong all along matters so very much less than the fact that you were wrong in all the right ways.  Ways that flattered the average legacy media reader or viewer.  A writer of things that are declarative, but cautious.  Timid.  And always, always riding that Both Sides Do It lane right down the middle, so that however harsh your Trump critique of the day may be, you make sure to take snide shots at the Left every step of the way.

Which is why this guy --

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

-- was such a perfect fit for The Atlantic.  

Four-fifths of this thing reads like an utterly anodyne, Wikipedia-style history of the modern Republican Party.  Just another 9th grade book report recitation of the familiar facts and milestones of the modern Republican party with which, I'm sure, most of you are not only drearily familiar, but have been shouting from the rooftops since forever.  Of course, St. Reagan’s image is carefully guarded and burnished, but from Nixon to Gingrich to Trump, there’s nothing here we haven’t known, discussed, dissected, blogged about, podcasted about, and thoroughly masticated for decades.

And the striking thing is, it doesn’t sound like Tom Nichols at all.  None of the snark and bile he routinely unlimbers in the cause of belittling and tone policing any Liberal who disagrees with him.  Instead it reads like a second cousin to Jay Rosen's "View from Nowhere".

The only time it even begins to sound like Nichols is when he dips into a wide-eyed, golly-how-did-this-happen voice -- as if he’s a child just discovered that Santa Claus isn’t real. What? When did this happen? How did this happen? 

Then he ambles back over to Wikipedia, looks up the history of the Republican Party during his entire adult life, and says, "Oh, so that’s what happened."

However, to give Nichols his due, there is at least one sentence that had to cost him dearly to see published in a national magazine, and here it is:

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Then Nichols asks the next obvious question:

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party?

And here was my reaction:

Now you and I both know that, in this life Tom Nichols  -- Mr. "Expertise" -- is never gonna call on a dirty, disreputable hippie to explain [checks notes] his own political party to him.  However, he did the next best thing.  

To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

In Nichols' view, it was Reagan's personal charisma that kept the various Republican factions -- gun nuts, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, bigots, imbeciles, paranoid conspiracy junkies, millionaires, Conservative evangelicals, Bill Kristol, George Will and Charles Krauthammer -- in line and pulling in the same direction.  But once Reagan died...

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs.

Allow me to repeat that which I have already said a dozen times on this blog and on The Professional Left podcast:  it's not a "hijacking" when they throw you the keys and beg you to drive.  

And given that the base of the party threw the keys to Trump three times in 10 years...? Sure as shit doesn't sound like a hijacking.  Sounds like the fascist Meathead Messiah had arrived and the bigots and imbeciles were and are ecstatic about it.    

But the best -- the very best -- use of the view from nowhere comes in the form of a very familiar dodge.  A dodge I hadn't heard deployed so brazenly since Matthew Dowd was making the rounds with it. 

Nichols, who has a long and well-documented history of dismissing or swatting away criticism of Republicans from the left, suddenly transported himself up, up, up to David Brooks' "view from nowhere" orbital punditing platform where he can safely opine about the deplorable Both Siderism of "Conservatives..." and "People on the right..." -- 

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

-- without having to add the damning modifier,  "Conservatives like me..." and "People on the right like me..." 

Moral grandstanding with a big bump of selective amnesia is a helluva drug.  Because what Nichols was up to during all the years he was averting his eyes from what his party was doing was busying himself telling liberals to calm down. Informing Democrats what they should and shouldn’t say. Tone-policing anyone who challenged his perspective -- a perspective now definitively disproven. 

What’s striking isn’t simply that he’s arrived at this realization.  After all, the world is full of slow learners and thumb-suckers who need to be told, over and over again, in the immortal words of Wade Garrett, "Don't Eat The Big White Mint."

What's striking is that Nichols is my age and he is only now, grudgingly, arriving at this revelation.  

What's striking is that, instead of being some waterhead propping up a wall at a dive bar, Nichols' whole deal is Expertise.  Right from jump he'll let you know that, in his expert opinion, he is always the smartest guy in the room.

What's striking is that he holds a column at The Atlantic based on his alleged expertise in this very subject. One he appears to have been in denial about until roughly ten minutes ago.

And so to wrap this up, we circle back to these questions.  Why does The Atlantic staff itself with people like this? Why are the people who were right about the Right all along still treated as pariahs? Why are they not only unwelcome in the circles where Tom Nichols, David Brooks, David Frum, and the rest circulate, but are treated as if they do not exist at all?

Because The Atlantic is in the business of telling its audience what it is prepared to hear. Its readers are ready to hear that Donald Trump is as bad as he appears, that the people around him are terrible. But they are not prepared to hear that the Left was right. They cannot bear the thought that the highly paid columnists of legacy media were wrong -- and that their readers were misled along with them -- while the so-called dirty hippies were right all along.

That possibility is unbearable. It’s unthinkable.

I Am The Liberal Media

Tom Nichols Puts On His Tone Police Girdle And Goes To Work On...

...Kamala Harris?

I am convinced there is a hitherto undocumented organ in the body of every professional, opinion-having Conservative.  Think of it as a kind of overactive ideological bladder that fills up with bile every few days.   And irrespective of what atrocities Trump has committed on any given day, to relieve the agony of their OIB, every 24 to 48 hours they absolutely must find a Democrat to piss on.

Sometimes these vitriolic micturitions are swaddled in Both Sides Do It diapers, and frequently -- like our example today -- the proximate cause of the outburst is so stupid and trivial that it leaves readers scratching their heads, wondering, "Really?  Someone actually got paid to be mad about that?" 

But the cause isn't the point.  Every 24 to 48 hours, these desperate souls must find some Democrat somewhere on which to unleash their pent-up bile, and as the corrosive acid of their creed begins to burn and sting, the "cause" they will use as cover for their splenetic opinion becomes less and less important.

And so, today, this.  From The Atlantic:

Politicians Aren’t Cool Enough to Curse This Much

Political leaders once watched their language. Now they delight in using obscenity.

By Tom Nichols

...Actually, the Mother of All Obscenities might be the one that includes mother, and if you haven’t heard it lately, former Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris would be happy to refresh your memory. Addressing a gathering in Los Angeles a few days ago, Harris delivered her verdict on the current Trump administration: “These motherfuckers are crazy.”...

Nichols goes on to namecheck others, and ultimately relieves himself of the balance of his bile into a big, Both Sides Do It diaper.  

The Democrats have some true public-swearing champs, but President Donald Trump and the wannabe tough guys who surround him are no slouches in the profanity competition.

But he had to start his laundry list of disapproval with Harris.

Because that is his nature. 

Also, for the record, Nichols knows nothing about what constitutes "cool".

I Am The Liberal Media

As Long As Never Trumpers Keep Banging On About Their Unappreciated Heroics ...

...for warning Murrica about the dangers of Donald Trump in 2016, and how they were told they were nuts...

Nichols:  The second thing that occurs to me, Charlie, as you were talking about truths in the streets and the elections, you know, when ... when you and I and many other people became never Trumpers back in 2016 we ... we were warning people about scenarios that weren't even close to this bad and we were told that we were nuts. 

Sykes:  I know.

Nichols:  So, I think it is time to say this stuff now more than ever and to remind people when they say, "Well, you're just being alarmist." Hey, a lot of you said we were being alarmist in 2016, and we weren't even we weren't saying things that were even close to what's happening now.

...I will keep banging on about how, long before 2016, when Liberals were warning people about the dangerous trajectory the GOP was on -- the trajectory that led directly to the rise of Trump -- men like Charlie Sykes and Tom Nichols routinely mocked us, dismissed us and said we were nuts.

And the thing is, they not only still do, they block anyone who brings the subject up.  

So -- for all my "All hands on deck... / The enemy of my enemy... / We're all on the same side now" readers -- let me ask, a simple question.

Why?

If being an early warner about the direction the GOP was headed is an act of derring-do worthy of mention and merit, why are men like Nichols and Sykes so grimly dug in on pretending we never existed?  That we who have been right about the Right all along, must still dismissed through gritted teeth as flaky, soft-headed children who not only don't deserve a spot at the adult's table, but maybe, sorta, kinda, if you squint real hard... are somehow complicit in the rise of the Donald Trump?

Why?

And the only answer I can come up with that fits the facts are commerce and arrogance.  

Commerce

The story of Trump which the legacy media wants to tell is one of a sudden, inexplicable phenomenon which no one could have seen coming.  Because the alternative -- that trajectory of the Republican Party was right there for anyone to see, and that the legacy media was not merely blind to what was happening inside the Republican Party, but pathologically wedded to the Both Sides Do It lie that enabled Trump’s rise -- is thoroughly damning and therefore completely unacceptable. 

Never Trumpers stick to the former story.  We disreputable hippies tell the latter.  Guess which one gets rewarded and sold and resold by the legacy media?

Arrogance

It is completely incomprehensible to the Conservative brain -- whether they fly the Never Trump banner now, or the Trump flag -- that we dirty fucking hippies could ever be right about anything.  Much less right about the Right.  And much, much less right about the Right during all the decades when they were arrogantly wrong about what was going on, in public, right in front of them, in their own party, every fucking day.  That cannot conceive of a universe in which every caricature of the Left they casually threw around -- fatally foolish, alarmist, blind, parochial, living in a dream world, obdurately head-in-the-sand, crackpot -- actually applies to them.  

They cannot conceive of a universe where the movement they devoted their adult lives to was directly responsible for Trump.

They cannot conceive it. They cannot admit it. And they cannot forgive anyone who points it out.

And once they successfully colonized the media (see "Commerce" above) they could use their very large megaphone to drown out the very inconvenient past.  I wrote a whole long thing about this in 2019.  In fact I wrote a whole lots of long things about it, and eventually got bored with being lectured about "All hands on deck... / The enemy of my enemy... / We're all on the same side now".   This is one small piece from "The Aristocrats":

...
By the time Donald Trump came slithering down the escalator to declare himself for office, the lords and ladies of the Beltway media had already become institutionally addicted to the depraved luxury of never being answerable for being horribly wrong all the time.  They came to believe that it was somehow in the natural order of things that they be paid to appear on national teevee or in national news publications to haughtily spout their insipid opinions about imaginary Responsible Conservatives, Noble Republicans, Sensible Centrists and those naughty Extremes on Both Sides who inhabited the fictional "Center/Right" country they had conjured into being.

And once it all blew up in their faces -- once it became obvious (yet again) that they never had the slightest idea what was really going on in their own country and that the Left had been right about the Right all along and -- the Never Trumpers reacted exactly you would expect entitled royalty to react.

Exactly like exiled Russian aristocracy after the revolution.

Aristocrats who had been run out of their country by the serfs they had exploited.

Aristocrats who suddenly found themselves financially dependent on the largess of people they detested.

Aristocrats who, with that special, asshole-arrogance that comes with an inbred sense of entitlement,  become indignant when their hosts don't snap to and do as they're told.

Aristocrats who still believe in their God-given right to command a national spotlight and who go right on airily insisting they know what the serfs really want...

And, OK, one more bit from years gone by.  From "Her Serene Highness,The Most Indignant Princess Mona Charen, Is Deeply Disappointed with the Liberal Servants Who Were Supposed to Attend to Her Every Wish and Whim": 

Spare a (very) little pity for Her Serene Highness, The Most Indignant Princess Mona Charen (from Politico):

How a Democrat Can Win Over a Never-Trumper  

And if you don’t think you need us, you should think twice. 

By Mona Charen July 09, 2019

Having built an entire career taking the lash to us stoopid Liberals over --

Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)  

-- and over --

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First 

-- again, you would think by now we stoopid Liberals would know our place in the Great Conservative Hierarchy of All Things.

From Politico:

Democrats would be wise to embrace that sensibility, in the person of Biden or another, not just because it could win, but because it’s important for all of us, right and left, to turn our faces away from Caesarism—of the right or the left.

Because according Conservative aristocratic theology, in the same way God created the GOP base of infinitely reprogrammable bigots and imbeciles as a mighty instrument of Deregulation and Tax Cuts to be wielded by Republican nobility like Mona Charen, so too did God create Liberals in order to give Republican nobles like Mona Charen an easy way to make an excellent living.

You see, according to their faith, you and I exist solely to provide her and the rest of her caste with hippies to punch.  With scapegoats to blame.

And yet now that the reprogrammable meathead GOP base that she and the rest of Conservative nobility spent the 40 years cultivating have run the Conservative nobles out of their own party -- now that every Republican nightmare we stoopid Liberals have been warning against for decades has come to pass with a vengeance -- Princess Mona is stunned to find that we stoopid Liberals have gotten all uppity...

It is true dangers our nation now faces have grown exponentially worse.

But it is also true that, in the face of this grave and growing danger from the Right, to keep dismissing those on the Left who saw it coming before anyone else is madness.

I Am The Liberal Media

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 George Will Homunculi That Lives in Their Heads

I was not going to write about old friend Tom Nicols today.  This was not the plan.

After all, these last few days have been so overstuffed with serious breaking news -- one story piling atop another, each trying to elbow the others aside -- why bother with some cranky old fart that our Never Trump friends crank out whenever us naughtybad Liberals need to be reminded that they're running the show now and we need to sit down, shut up and mind our manners.

I was going about my chores and errands business, listening to a selection of podcasts in the background much as  local reporter (back when we had such things) might listen to a police scanner, when suddenly I heard ol' Tom say this to Mr. Tim Miller on a recent podcast.

...but it does it really shows you the that this is... that the modern Republican party, whatever it's become now, not the thing that you [Tim Miller] and I knew 20 years ago...but it's become about power.  Just the raw exercise of power not about principle not about ideology not about conservatism...

Oh great.  Now I am contractually obliged to spend a few words on ol' Tom and the Misremembrance of Things Past forcefield that Never Trumpers have erected to keep themselves safe from the past, because, as it happens, I began this little blog of mine 20 years ago.

Wheeee!  

What's more, I've spent most of the past 20 years remembering and writing about all those terribly inconvenient things that Never Trumpers are so desperate to keep safely buried deep inside the memory hole.  

This Misremembering forcefield is not a physical thing.  It's more like a George Will homunculi that lives in their heads.  A homunculi conjured at the intersection of the past tense and a past perfect infinitive.  To wit:  Never Trumpers need the past to have been very different than it was.

It is no exaggeration to say that everything depends on this.  

They need their former party to have been a Disneyland of morally superior, Burke-quoting Conservatives.  

They need themselves to have been the only people wise enough and brave enough to sound the alarm about what was going on with the GOP... in 2016 or 2017 or as late as 2018. 

They need the rise of Trump to have been a Black Swan event which no one could have predicted and for which none of them are to blame.  

They need Liberals to have always been clueless idiots and political naïfs who are always wrong about everything.

And they need Democrats to have been so darn far to the Left and so besotted with snooty big words that, mayhap, they were actually responsible for the rise of Trump.    

Because if this pack of lies is not, once and for all, adopted as --

-- the whole thing risks falling apart.

Because if even a hint that the Left was right about the Right all along breaches the force field, the implications are catastrophic.  

It means that all of your favorite Never Trump celebrities were actually wrong all along.  

Wrong about the one subject about which they were being paid a whole lotta money for their supposed expertise.

So if it is true that they were not only wrong all along,  but that they mocked and ignored the people who were right all along...?  Well, you can see where this is going. 

If they truly failed to see what we Liberals clearly saw (and wrote about every fucking day) unfolding in plain sight, they why in the name of Jesus, Mary and Joe Scarborough are they still being paid a whole lotta money for their opinion?  Why are these people, whose resume top line reads "Never Saw Any Of This Coming",  being paid to consult on how the Democratic party -- my party -- should conduct its politics?

And that is the most charitable explanation.  The alternative is that they knew damn well what was going on inside their own party but were willing to ignore it and lie about it, because they also knew that pandering to their increasingly deranged base was their only hope of winning elections.  Which mean feeding them more and crazier lies to keep them spun up and watching Fox and voting the right way.  

And putting all of that in a box and sealing it behind a forcefield is what keeps the Never Trump movement propped up and us mouthy Liberals shut out.

So. allow me to interpret the Never Trumper's internal lament, with the help of The Shangri-Las from 1964, Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand):

Whatever happened to the boy that I once knew?
The boy who said he'd be true?
Oh, what will happen to the life I gave to you?
What will I do with it now?

What they are doing with it now is... pretty much the same shit they were up to before the monster they made drove them out into the cold, cruel world:  pretending to knowledge they do not have, shitting on Liberals, and dropping in a "Both Sides Do It" wherever they can.

TOM NICHOLS:  I suppose this is why I still bristle every time people say "Well they're conservatives and you're conservative." There is nothing conservative about this situation.  This right-wing... far right-wing radicalism is indistinguishable from... from the kind of left-wing radicalism that if, y'know, a bunch of y'know... like the president of my old school used to call them,  y'know a bunch of short pants communists, took over the government, they'd be doing the same thing. 

Except this "far right-wing radicalism" is something your party welcomed and pandered to and cultivated for fucking decades you colossal ass.  All right under your fucking nose.  There is absolutely no equivalent whatsoever in the Democratic party for any of this.  

Hell, it was so obvious that even Aaron Sorkin -- the guy who conjured imaginary "reasonable Republicans" out of thin are because The West Wing plot required them -- could see it coming back in 2012.

But Tom didn't see any of this coming, so why is he running his mouth now?  Because Never Trumpers are incapable of talking for more than eleven minutes without swearing that the Republican party somehow isn't the Republican party, that their Republicans party was so awesome that words fail.  Then they lob in a "But just look at those crazy Lefties!" because they have no other frame of reference, and obviously cannot admit that they were just loudly and wildly wrong for their entire adult lives.  

Ever the genial host, Tim Miller flails around looking for some scenario that would make Nichols' ludicrously false sound less stupid...but eventually trails off and changes the subject because it's all ridiculous.

TIM MILLER: Like, there's no apt comparison but just, like, just... just work with me here.  Let's say there's a red state somewhere that was you know uh discriminating against trans folks in a way where trans folks felt like they were, um, unsafe and President Kamala Harris had decided "I'm going to actually I'm going to actually nationalize the Arkansas National Guard and we're going to put troops on the streets of Little Rock to protect the trans kids at the high school ... at the local high school.  I mean it's a kind of a silly metaphor because it doesn't quite work in the reverse but...

But the heart of the matter is Nichols' deep worry about "the split screen".  You see, since we Liberals are such hapless idiots...

TOM NICHOLS:  When I when I used to teach strategy to military guys we had an expression that we used, um, for lucking out and getting a kind of a dumb enemy... um which is that he he chose LA because it also has a cooperative adversary in it. He has an adversary that that doesn't just take his bait but rushes into the traps that he sets um you know with open arms.

.... our "ally" Tom Nichols, was deeply concerned about how "Americans" would react to the No Kings protest.  

Except he couldn't quite quite explain who these "Americans" are.  Where they live.  What their mores and folkways are, or what influence they have over anything.

But even though Tom couldn't pinpoint exactly who these "Americans" are, he is apparently an expert in who these "Americans" are not, and what moves them to action.  And his most dire directive is that you and I need to sit down, shut our mouths and mind our manners lest these "Americans" will turn on us.  And yet, strangely, these same "Americans" never seem to give the tiniest shit about what the MAGA filth are up to.  From the White House to the trailer park, MAGA filth are free spew any insane, racist thing they please, and wipe their collective asses with the constitution, and the "Americans" simply do not notice or care.

But let a couple of anarchists throw some rocks or wave the wrong flag, and, according to Tom, these same Americans will do ... something?  He can never quite explain what it is these "Americans" will do or why we should give a shit, but by his scolding tone, it's clear that it would be bad!  So bad!

TOM NICHOLS:  His opponents have to take him seriously about this.  He does it because it works with a certain number of people and not just the MAGA base this is a war for public opinion it's a war of images.  You were a political consultant you know this better than anybody that that people don't parse words and spend you know read 1500  words to get through this.  They see those images and for most Americans the ... the image, y'know Marshall McLuhan was right the medium is the message...

Just look at all the filters that thought had to pass through to arrive in spoken form.

Nichols is not worried about the effect of the "split screen" on the MAGA base because they're already lost.  And he's obviously not worried about any such effect on us, because we're the sorts of snobs who "read 1500  words to get through this".

So having eliminated most of the active voting public from the picture, I am moved to ask who the fuck are these "most Americans" that all of us are supposed to be so terrified of that we all need to walk on eggshells at all times?

The exchange is littered with this stuff.  How Liberals will see events one way, but "America" will see them very differently, because, it doesn't occur to Nichols that Liberals are part of America.  

Also doesn't it seem kinda strange these "Americans" only seem to watch split screens where a few anarchists look bad, and not when, say, Republicans are storming the capitol and threating to hang Mike Pence.  By process of elimination, Nichols must be talking about the mopes who pay no attention whatsoever to anything.  Who'd resent having "Below Decks" interrupted by a special announcement that World War Three had begun, and who get their "news" by glancing away from "Love Island" once a week to catch whatever is flying by on the teevee between dick pill commercials.

Hey, it just now this minute occurs to me that, golly, this might not be a "Liberal" problem at all!

Maybe the problem with some assholes throwing bottles at cops running on an endless loop while millions of peaceful protestors go unacknowledged...isn't the handful of assholes or the millions of peaceful protestors.  Maybe the fucking problem is a media that will run endless loops of trivial side issues.  Tom is very big on telling his audience how foolish Liberals are for thinking thus and so and what Liberals will probably say... when, in fact, Tom knows fuck all about what Liberals are thinking, or what Liberals will say.  Wouldn't it be delightful if he could direct a fraction of his bile at the media that invents these bullshit juxtapositions instead of constantly berating imaginary Liberals on the basis of what they might say or do.

But of course he can't.  Because like most Never Trumpers, Nichols has that George Will homunculus that lives in his head, reminding him over and over again that the forcefield that keeps the inconvenient past at bay cannot be allowed to fail even a little. 

On a lighter note, these days every time Tom opens his mouth to lecture Liberals on our bad manners, this is what I hear.  And it cracks me right up.

Finally, Pro Tip for Tim Miller:  If you want to know what Liberals think or say about stuff, put an actual Liberal behind a microphone and ask them.

I Am The Liberal Media.