Here Come The "Independents". Again.

I don't know how many times I've inflicted Kurt Vonnegut's word, "granfalloon" on you --

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

-- since 2009, when I first used it to convey my observations about so-called "independent" voters.

That first time, 17 years ago, was triggered by the sudden appearance of a bumper crop of newly minted "independents" -- a singular event that just so happened to coincide with the first year of Barack Obama's first term as president.  

Quelle surprise!

The savviest pundits in the land squinted real hard and pretended that these "independents" -- most of whom just so happened to skew Right and line up with Republican values (Quelle surprise again!) -- had just hatched out of the ground and since they constituted a huge block of concerned citizens, it behooved the new president to take heed and veer to the Right to appease these fresh off the vine "independent" voters.

However, I, being low and perverse and forever unwelcome among the ivory towers of the Punditocracy, saw things very differently.  Back then, I concluded as follows:

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want to believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

And since the intervening years have shown me and my Liberal compatriots to have been right, and the savviest pundits in all the land to have been unequivocally wrong, you can see why we are even more mocked, ignored, and despised by Punditocracy than we were before.  So be it.  

However, you will understand how hilariously predictable it is that, once again, so many Republicans running for office during these midterms are tarting themselves up in "independent" togs to distance themselves from their democracy-killing clusterfuck of a party.  

Like Claudette Colbert hiking up her skirt to hitch a ride by showing a lot of leg in "It Happened One Night"-- 

-- these candidates are hoping to catch a free ride with the legacy media by incanting the legacy media's favorite magic words.  "Tribalism".  "Polarization".  "Divisiveness".  Non-specific reference to "Congress", "politicians", and "Washington, D.C.".  The "Duopoly". And, of course, the biggie -- some variation on "The Extremes on Both Sides".

And while they come in three different flavors -- the ones virtue signaling by using “independent” as a campaign identity while remaining a Republican, the ones who change ballot affiliation to escape the party label, and the ones leaving the Republican Party and running as an independent or third-party candidate -- all of them -- the label-hiders, the party-leavers, and the ballot-switchers -- are making the same pitch in varying degrees of explicitness.  

Let's begin small, with Todd Novak, running for Wisconsin's 51st Assembly district.  Todd is a Republican, but you could sift his campaign website from here 'til Tuesday and never find a mention of it.  Todd's campaign slogan is, "An Independent Voice for Southwest Wisconsin".

From WisPolitics, September 30, 2026:

In case you missed it: Republicans in the Legislature try to hide from their party’s failed economic policies while Democrats compete to flip their seats.

And ol' Todd is definitely one of them.

Next, we move on to New Hampshire, and this pre-primary headline from New Hampshire Public Radio from July 27th:

This year’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate features two candidates — John E. Sununu and Scott Brown — who’ve held the job before. Each brings a distinct political profile and record to the race, but both are pitching themselves to voters as “independent” and solely focused on delivering for New Hampshire.

Yes, it was that Scott Brown: the former Massachusetts senator whose modeling career once earned him Cosmopolitan's “Sexiest Man in America” title, before he became a national Republican political celebrity.

Back here where I live in Illinois we find Collin Corbett decking himself out in full Independent regalia.   This is from NPR Illinois, September 21, 2026 and it almost achieves Independent Bingo by cramming nearly every cliche into one interview.

Republican-turned-independent Collin Corbett hopes to provide voters an alternative for governor

Collin Corbett has spent enough time in politics to know he’s a longshot to pull off a victory as an independent candidate for governor.

“I'm going to push as hard as I can before Nov. 3,” Corbett said in an interview with Capitol News Illinois. “But I'm a political strategist. I can do math. I'm aware of how this will likely turn out at the end of this election.”

But the former Republican strategist said it’s more of a long game.

“I'm 40 years old. I got a long runway ahead, and there's a ton of people who've been coming up to me saying, 'I don't know if I can vote for you in this election, but I'm all in for your larger goal of building an independent majority,’” he said. “’So Nov. 4, I'm in, let's go.’”...

Corbett said his campaign is about proving there is an appetite for independent, centrist candidates in Illinois as voters weigh their options between staunch Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker and Trump-endorsed Republican Darren Bailey.

Corbett last worked for Republicans in the March primary season, including for Don Tracy, the party’s former chair and current nominee for U.S. Senate.

“We've got to start changing things now because the path we're on — with these two parties that only seem to offer extremes, and they just want to snipe at each other and attack each other instead of actually getting things done — it's not working for me,” Corbett said.

Corbett said he’s skipped the presidential question on the ballot in the last three general elections and supported John Kasich and Nikki Haley in the 2016 and 2024 primaries respectively — two Republicans who are more often identified as traditional members of the party, separate from Trump’s wing.

Among Illinois political role models, Corbett views himself as “a blending” of late former Gov. Jim Edgar and former Sen. Mark Kirk, who were among the socially moderate, fiscally conservative Republicans who once dominated the state party.

“There are really good people on both sides,” Corbett said. “It’s just this tribalism where my side is good and your side is evil. That’s the thing that’s ruined our politics.”

Moving on to Illinois' next-door neighbor.  From the Indiana Capital Chronicle, October 8, 2026:

Lincoln Party candidate Ballard starting TV ads in Indiana secretary of state race

Lincoln Party candidate Greg Ballard will soon make it three campaigns with television ads on the air in the Indiana secretary of state’s race.

Ballard’s campaign on Thursday released its first broadcast ad that it said would start airing Monday around the state.

The 30-second ad highlights Ballard’s 23-year career in the Marine Corps, along with his eight years as the Republican mayor of Indianapolis. He touts running as an “independent” in order to “restore professionalism and open a path for more independent-minded Hoosiers to run for office.”

Ballard has left the Republican label behind, but he is still selling the same product: independence from the political establishment and a promise of more professional, less partisan government.

Now on to California.  From Axios, March 6, 2026:

Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley files to run as independent

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) said Friday he is registering as "no party preference," rather than as a Republican, as he seeks reelection to Congress.

Why it matters: 

• The move comes after Kiley's Republican-leaning district was broken apart in mid-decade redistricting, forcing him to run in far more Democratic-leaning territory.
• 
  
• Kiley's announcement sparked considerable confusion among his colleagues, with several lawmakers asking GOP leadership for clarity on whether he will continue to contribute to their slim House majority.
• 
  
• One House Republican, asked if Kiley is staying in the GOP conference, told Axios: "I hope to God he is."
• A Kiley spokesperson told Axios it is "not official yet" whether he will leave the party or the conference now, adding: "For now, he's just filing as an independent for his reelection campaign."

"It's no secret that I've been frustrated, at times disgusted, with the hyper-partisanship in Congress," he added.

Sure, OK, but what about Boston?  

Glad you asked.  From The Boston Globe, September 29, 2026:

John Deaton knows he faces a narrow path to beat Ed Markey. The Republican is trying again, anyway.

He lost two years ago to Elizabeth Warren — and it wasn’t close. The Republican Party faces tremendous headwinds going into the midterms. Polls suggest voters are unhappy with President Trump — especially in Massachusetts.

So why is John Deaton running again?

The 59-year-old attorney, former Marine, and cryptocurrency booster is in the midst of his second Senate bid in as many election cycles, challenging Senator Ed Markey, the Democratic incumbent, two years after losing to Warren by 20 percentage points.

He’s already loaned his campaign $1 million — after putting at least $1 million of his own money into his race against Warren — and is recycling his argument against Warren, casting Markey as too far left for Massachusetts voters.

Deaton argues Massachusetts would be better off with the independent-minded approach he would bring to Washington, rather than reelecting an 80-year-old incumbent Deaton argues has been in office too long.

As he did two years ago, Deaton is pitching himself as unbeholden to Trump, emphasizing that he never voted for the president. In memorable, and coarse, remarks during a June debate, he said bluntly: “‘F’ the Republican Party.”

“‘F’ the Democrat Party,” he added. “They all suck.”

Heading back West, we find this waiting for us on the "Andy Biggs for Governor "website, last updated September 17, 2026:

Andy Biggs Takes Message to Independent Voters on Podcast Interview

Sit down with former Phoenix mayor and Independent voice Paul Johnson covers a number of major issues facing Arizona

GILBERT, AZ -- Republican nominee for Governor Andy Biggs took his campaign message directly to Independent voters in Arizona in a recent podcast interview with one of the leading Independent voices in the state.

Biggs sat down with Paul Johnson, the former mayor of Phoenix and highly-respected advocate for Independent voters, and Henry Thompson to discuss his vision for the state in a wide-ranging episode that covered plans for water, taxes, education, and how Biggs plans to work together with Arizonans of different backgrounds as Governor.

Biggs has frequently highlighted his work across the aisle...

NPR, of course, has a much longer treatment of the phenomenon, and it manages to give nearly every one of these familiar talking points a fresh coat of paint. See how many squares you can fill on your Independent Bingo card.  

The article is from October 13, 2026 and is entitled "Win or lose, independent candidates want to meet voters in the middle".  It begins with the story of Seth Haskins, who can frequently be seen around his town costumed as an 18th man to signal how much the 26-year-old loves the Founding Fathers and limited government.  

The article does not mention if he also favors Typhoid Fever and Dysentery, shitting in an outhouse in the dead of winter, or an average 38-year life expectancy.

From NPR, 

Win or lose, independent candidates want to meet voters in the middle

..."Getting their [people's] attention is the biggest battle that most candidates have," Haskin said. "But especially independent or no party candidates."

Some could dismiss Haskin's attire as a stunt, and they may write off other independent candidates the same way. Sarah Zabel, 61, an independent candidate for Idaho's western district, said that view is outdated.

"Independents used to be a curiosity or a protest or a single issue," said Zabel. "Now, with the parties having gone to such extremes, independents are the necessary relief for the American voter."

At a time when 45 percent of adults identify as political independents — a record high — and just a handful of tight races will decide control of Congress, the 173 independents running for the House this fall will test how big the political middle really is, and whether people who identify as independents will vote for one.

Zabel, who is running in a deep-red district in Idaho, describes herself as a "heritage Republican," or someone who used to be a Republican and adheres to conservative values. But since 2018, during the first Trump administration, she stopped feeling in line with the Republican party and the "MAGA program."

The retired Air Force major general said she didn't feel represented by either party, and she soon learned that many of her neighbors felt the same way.

Seth Haskin from Florida is also running in a district where one party has dominated for years. Trump won at least 60 percent of the vote in the past two presidential elections in Haskin's district, and local media mogul Jim Schwartzel won a tight and crowded Republican primary in August with almost 30 percent of the vote.

A "strict constitutionalist," Haskin, who previously also ran for governor of Wisconsin as a write-in candidate, said he could've seen himself in either party before the Covid-19 pandemic, before he believed that both parties had been "captured by the same industry leaders and PAC money and foreign lobbies and everything else."

"Even if I don't win, if I can get double-digit percentage points as an independent candidate, I will get a lot of phone calls from both parties," he said. "It's going to threaten the duopoly that they have, right?"

Businessman Michael Bridgford is running as an independent against Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Christina Bohannan, the Democratic nominee and former state representative.

The Cook Political Report, which long had the race as a toss-up, recently rated the district as lean Democratic.

Bridgford said people are tired of the "dysfunction" from both parties and by watching Miller-Meeks and Bohannan compete, and they believe that independents can provide the stable center that will let the government solve problems...

And just to show that I'm not a completely heartless cynic, let's take a look at an "Independent" who's doing everything right.  

Meet Arch “Pond” Naramore, about whom 99 percent of you have probably never heard. Naramore ran a long-shot campaign against Roger Marshall in the Kansas Republican Senate primary, promising an “independent voice.” Marshall won comfortably, but Naramore earned more than 20 percent of the vote. Then he did something that makes him worth talking about: he unreservedly endorsed the Democratic nominee, Adam Hamilton.

The video is here, but I didn't embed it because it's one of those TikTok vertical shorts that have no embed option when imported into YouTube.  But go watch it anyway.  You'll be glad you did.   And way to go, Mr. Naramore!

Finally, let's go all the way back to the French Revolution. On a recent episode of "The Rest Is History" podcast, the hosts discussed what happened after Robespierre was guillotined: people who had recently counted themselves among his loyalists suddenly began insisting that they'd opposed him all along.  They include this quote from a Captain Watkin Tench, who was taken and held as prisoner of war.  During his imprisonment, Tench listened to people talking, and he said:

"Those who prostrated themselves like reptiles before Robespierre are now blaming him for all the assassinations and misery, to screen themselves from odium.  Or the subordinate tyrants fix upon him and attribute to his orders the innumerable butcheries and acts of oppression which they have perpetuated."

So, during all the weeks and months and years to come, when you see Republican scum trying to wash the blood from their hands by cosplaying as "Independents" or getting their reputations rehabilitated by their friends in the legacy media, you know your assignment:

 

Burn The Lifeboats

The Midterms...Now and 20 Years Ago

If you don't know what "Harold...call me" signified in 2006, ask your older sibling.

20 years ago, the Republican party was every bit as racist as they are today.  Leadership just hid it better and, with the assistance of the legacy media, managed to get away with it.  Along with all the other poisonous tools in the GOP toolbox -- Conservative fundamentalism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-choice, anti-civil rights and so on -- racism won elections for terrible people with terrible ideas.  Or, to put it more clearly, without all the hate and paranoia that Conservative media kept whipping up on the Right, not only could Republicans never win another election, there was a decent chance in some places they'd fall to third place behind a Green candidate, or a Libertarian candidate, or an out-and-proud racist.

See, the Republican party was and is every bit a coalition party -- a "Big Tent" party -- as the Democrats, but the Republican coalition is made up of the worst people in America, held together by a common, generalized hatred of the government (except when they run it), a whole assload of whiny grievances, and anything that smacks of "the Left".  And "the Left" is anyone Hate Radio and Fox News tells them is "the Left" on any given day.

That mob of bigots and imbeciles is what Republicans seeking higher office have to work with, which is why they spent huge amounts of cash hiring scumbags like Rick Wilson.  To do the filthy job of appealing to the mob by proxy so as not to get their hands dirty.  And the key to this shell game was to keep the bigots and imbeciles corralled within the Fox News/Hate Radio ecosystem (and never let them within a mile of the legacy media) while trotting the candidate out on safe spaces like Meet the Press or Face the Nation where they could mouth all the usual platitudes and never get any push-back.  

In 2006, the problems began when the streams got crossed, because back then it was still possible for Democrats to run on calling out Republican racism and corruption when it broke into the open --

-- and have that put the Republican candidate on the back foot for the rest of the campaign.

That, and this... (VoteVets ad):

Democrats could run on being unabashedly in favor of medical science:

And the premier Hate Radio scumbag (and de facto leader of the Republican Party) reacted exactly as you would expect:

In Purple-but-trending-Red-fast Montana, Democrat Jon Tester could squeak out a narrow victory over incumbent Republican Senator Conrad Burns by a margin of 0.87%, or 3,562 votes out of 406,505 cast.  Tester ran as "that neighbor you trust even if your politics are different" and was aided by the wider "Blue Wave" trend across the country.  

Then along came Barack Obama, and the bigots and imbeciles were no longer content to sit in the cheap seats, hoping that whatever mug the party bosses offered them would make good on all the promises that Hate Radio was making.  

They kicked down the doors and came storming out into the public square, and the reaction from the legacy media was to squeeze their eyes shut even harder and pretend that none of this was what it very much was.

First, they rolled out their oldest and most reliable deflection tactic: Both Sides Do It.  What follows are from the July 25, 2010 Meet the Press transcript, interspersed with some remarks of my own made at the time.

DAVID BROOKS: So we were trained in a certain way. A different sort of media, squabble culture, has come up on the left and the right, which, which decides their--they build audience by destroying other people. They don't know anything about policy, they don't care about government, they just want that squabble.

See! See! The Right AND the Left do it! 

The Right AND the Left “don't know anything about policy". The Right AND the Left 

“don't care about government”.

Not one statistic.

Not one correlation.

Not one fact.

Not one blurry security camera video of what might have been the shadow cast by a fact.

Not one artist's sketch of what some witnesses believe a fact might look like.

Not one of fact's neighbors telling the evening news that "Fact was kind of a loner who kept pretty much to himself."

Nothing.

To his credit, E.J. Dionne tried hard to push back:

DIONNE: Look, there is a concerted conservative campaign on part of the movement, a minority of the movement…to use race to split people. Glenn Beck says Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." J. Christian Adams, a Republican activist pushing this new Black Panthers story, says the Obama Justice Department is motivated by a "lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." Now, there are people playing with this racial politics out there. I am not saying, the NAACP certainly isn't saying that this is the whole conservative movement…or most of the conservative movement or most of the tea party. But it's a part of this strategy, and people should condemn it.

Got that? Dionne shows up with actual, representative quotes from real Conservative leaders with real media and electoral power.

So how will that clear, well-documented and devastating argument be rebutted by America's Most Reasonable of Conservatives? He who took the trouble to enunciate “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check it Out” as his Golden Journalistic Rule just moments ago?

Exactly how you'd think:

BROOKS: There are liberals who call conservatives racist as a matter of tactics, too.

Really? Who? Name some. Quote some.

Nothing.  Just...both sides.

Then comes deflector tactic number two:  the anecdotal and highly-suspect "eyewitness account".

BROOKS: Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a warm Sunday afternoon.

Got that? David Fucking Brooks -- easily the most ubiquitous "Reasonable" Conservative spokesman in America -- absolutely will not touch that question [of racism in Republican politics] with a 10-foot Gallup Poll. Instead, he airily asserts that, somehow, Glenn Beck and J. Christian Adams don’t methodically play on the fear, racism and paranoia of millions of Pig People for personal and partisan gain...because he saw some people getting along on the Mall in D.C. once.

Thus ends our brief excursion to 2010 and the wild lengths the legacy media was willing to go to to pretend the GOP was something which it very much was not.

So what changed? Meet the Press is still garbage. Brooks and his dozens of imitators are still overpaid hacks peddling Both Sides claptrap.  Hate Radio and Fox News are still what they always were.  So what changed?

What changed was the Republican party's approach to the concept of "shame".  

Conservatism was built on an ethos of never, ever apologizing for anything.   As I've mentioned many times on this blog, on the Right, the only acceptable way to admit you were wrong is to cop to not being conservative enough.  Republican policies that go horrendously awry are never the problem -- the  problem is always that they weren't implemented aggressively enough.  Remember, Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.  

And inevitably, this Conservative culture of ignorant, belligerent certitude ran smack into Republican policies and rhetoric for which any decent human being should feel ashamed.  So, faced with a choice between chucking the policies and the hateful, racist rhetoric, or cauterizing their conscience and killing any sense of shame...the base, in their millions, chose the latter.

They had already been thoroughly humiliated when their fanatical allegiance to George W. Bush very publicly blew up in their faces.  Pile on top of that the intolerable existence of a Black Democrat in the White House and they were ready to follow any demagogue, no matter how shitty and corrupt he may be, to the ends of the Earth as long as he promised them they would not only never again have to be ashamed of the cowardly racist morons that they were, but under his regime, their bigotry and stupidity would be celebrated so hard that the Liberal tears would never end.  

And that is how +70 million Americans came to finally, happily divest themselves of the virtues that make for a decent human being.

And since that was their choice -- and we believe in personal choice -- in doing so they have relieved us of any obligation to treat them as decent human beings.  

They have worked hard over the course of many decades to make themselves contemptible.  

The least we can do is honor their decision by treating them with contempt.  

Burn The Lifeboats

Can't Stop Won't Stop

This was a lead story in The New York Times today.

The short answer, which is actually rather long, is "No".

This is roughly the 12,258th "think piece" on progressive outsiders winning a few Democratic primaries.  It's nearing the "But Her Emails" saturation point. And these articles tend to come either in one of two flavors.  

First, Dire!Warnings! cursing Democrats for risking dooming us all by not becoming GOP Lite in order to chase the votes of disaffected Republicans.  These articles tend to come from (small wonder) recently-former Republicans whose "advice" to Democrats has always been -- rain or shine -- to keep moving rightward, ever-rightward -- in pursuit of an imaginary Center which is always, somehow, slipping over the horizon.  

Second, there are the breathless articles touting how a few members of the Democratic majority (do the math) are fighting back hard against a small number of progressives with whom they have no intention of sharing even a small corner of the Democrat's Big Tent.  Mind you, they had no fucking problem when it came to sharing our Big Tent with ghouls like Liz Cheney who spent their entire career slandering Democrats in the most monstrous language imaginable...but us New Deal Democrats get nothing but the stink-eye and a boot in the ass from the gatekeepers who own the velvet ropes. 

From The New York  Times, August 6, 2026:

Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.

Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism. 

It will not shock you to learn that Third Way gets its money from Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech as well as outfits such as ExxonMobil and various health insurance companies.  All the usual suspects who would rather see a MAGA flag flying over this country forever than share the Democratic Party with actual progressives.

Now, it is rumored that this “Better Dead than Al-Sayed” gang of Regressives is led by a shadowy figure known only as “David Fucking Brooks”.  And two Fridays ago Mr. Brooks left his Bethesda Maryland compound just long enough to appear on the PBS News Hour where, practically in tears, he said this.

Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.

That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore…

At which point, Brooks co-panelist, Jonathan Capehart, reached his limit of politely tolerating this old fraud's endless bullshit and interrupted him with:

I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left. 

That was the signal for the host – Amna Nawaz – to do the PBS thing of quickly moving on to the next topic at the slightest sign of conflict.

However, since I do not abide by PBS rules, I will just add that it is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".  

It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.

And of course Third Way is not a solo act. They have plenty of fellow travelers who are horrified that a few Democratic candidates have won their primaries in ways that Third Way, LLC does not approve of.  

From The Washington Post, June 3rd, 2026:

Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not socialist’

Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said they will unveil the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the ballot to join them in signing it. 

From Common Dreams, February 9th, 2026:

‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist

In fact, establishment panic over even mildly social-democratic ideas predates the current cycle by years.

From In These Times, seven years ago,  February 7, 2019:

Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal?

So, the short answer is "No".

The longer answer -- the reason why the answer is "No" -- is uglier and deeply embarrassing to the legacy media, which is why you will never hear them speak of it.  Because it has to do with what the "Tea Party" actually was.

For several years I bored you all silly with post after post after post about how the Tea Party was not some new, insurgent outsider group who were storming the barricades of the moribund Republican party.  That they were the Republican party: the same ignorant, racist, shoutycrackers Republican base they'd always been, but now that the Bush administration had shit the bed hard enough to crack the Earth's mantle, they needed their own, incredibly inconvenient past to go away so they could get on with the important work of having a full-on, eight-year-long, screaming mental breakdown over the election of a Black man as president.

And they accomplished this by A) Putting on stupid hats, waving Gadsden flags, and swearing that they'd never even heard of George W. Bush and, B) Getting the legacy media to go along with this massive fraud, which the legacy media was only too eager to do, given their own despicable complicity with the various crimes and treasons of the Bush administration.

And it worked.  And, as is our eternal fate, the only people willing to straight-up call bullshit on the whole scam were us dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically not a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

No, no, no!  Definitely could not say that because that would violate the post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a "vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who had been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

And to this very day, that lie continues to be one of those "Zombie lies", which everyone sorta knows is nonsense -- like Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves -- but has so completely passed into the realm of myth that the legacy media keeps right on pretending that it was actually true.  

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth was so secure that by 2016 Joe Scarborough could finally come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it  and know with perfect certainty that there would be consequences (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

And that's the longer answer.  The Democrats are not facing their own "Tea Party" moment because There. Was. No. Tea. Party.  There was just the Bush-Off Machine goin' like 60 to rebrand the Republican base.  

What corporate Democrats are facing are ... New Deal Democrats.  People who revere FDR as the man who crushed fascism, and whose programs built the Middle Class, strengthened the union movement and helped insure that old age and poverty weren't a death sentence.   

People who remember that FDR was called a commie by the Republican party and the Republican media every inch of the way.

People who look at the mess the establishment has made of this country and think the Middle Class could used some help, the aged, infirm and poor could use some help, that good health care should be affordable, that unions are a good thing, that robber barons and Republican looters are bleeding us dry and, most importantly, for any of that to happen, fascism in America must be discredited and destroyed, root and branch.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

They're The Same Picture

Burn The Lifeboats

Garbage In...

...Garbage Out.

It's not that hard to figure out.  

However, what remains a taboo subject everywhere except out here in disreputable wilds of whatever is left of the Liberal blogosphere is how exactly the Republican base came to be such a aggregation of unsalvageable garbage people that they would nominate this degenerate monster for president three times and elect him twice.  

How is it that no one but us dirty hippies noticed or cared about the monstrous cancer that was growing in plain sight at the heart of the GOP until it was far too late to stop it?

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 892: She Told Us So

"History is a vast early warning system."  -- Norman Cousins

Links:  

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

The Tea Party at 12: No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying

You probably didn't notice, but last week was the 12th anniversary of the creation of the Fake Tea Party. And the reason you may not have noticed is because almost no one did. There was no wall-to-wall coverage on Fox like that which attended its birth. No news reports. No breathless retrospectives. No "Where are they now?" docudramas. Beyond Bill Scher doing yeoman's work to warn that the forces that powered the Fake Tea Party were are still very much with us --

The Tea Party Began 12 Years Ago. What’s Changed—and What Hasn’t.

CNBC’s Rick Santelli started it all by attacking Obama and a rescue plan that he called a subsidy for “losers.” Biden should be ready for the next Santelli.

-- the Fake Tea Party is just another weed-choked political grave in the Potter's Field of forgotten Republican scams.

Well, mostly.

Over at the Never Trump Revisionism Factory we find Matt Lewis using the corpse of the Fake Tea Party to retcon himself into the now-lucrative pantheon of Republicans who "have long argued" yadda yadda and something something warned years ago...

It’s the Tea Party Anniversary. Here’s Why I’m Not Celebrating.

The famous “Santelli rant” happened 12 years ago last week. I mark it out of sadness. It led us straight to MAGA-land.

...

While many of my Never Trump conservative brethren still see this movement as a largely positive phenomenon, I have long argued that there was a straight line from the Tea Party to MAGA. For sane conservatives, this was the beginning of the end...

Which may have been the impetus for Charlie Sykes to inviting him onto The Bulwark podcast where they could commiserate over various things.  

Like how there was a time, as recently as 2016, when CPAC might have been a little goofy, but was still a place where decent, God-fearin' folk could walk unmolested in the streets.  

And how there was a time when Matt Schlapp was a mensch.  

And how there was a time when Rush Limbaugh was fun and irreverent and a Man of Ideas.

And how they were both got hip to the fact that something hinky was going on with the Fake Tea Party before it was cool.

Charlie Sykes:  The other thing that happened was the way the grifters settled in.  And this is something else on the Right, uh, because...

Because you and every other Conservative Hate Radio goober spent decades corralling and hand-feeding claptrap to millions of Republican bigots and imbeciles?  Building an army of chumps who would be easy pickings for every thimble-rigger, flim-flammer and Trump on the Right?

Nope.

Sykes:  ...because I remember very early on um, when, y'know, pre-Trump I kept asking the question, "Who exactly is the Tea Party? Who's speaking for the Tea Party?"  Because I have all these groups popping up the claim that "We are the Tea Party" or "We are the Tea Party" and, um, y'know who... who basically gave you the the franchise and many of them were extremely strange.  And then of course you just had the people who were just raising money off of it -- using the outrage machine to raise as much money as possible.  So there's, y'know part of the story of... of the Right has just been the way that so much of these things have been taken over by... by the grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions.

It either never dawns on Charlie or he is sunk too deeply in denial to admit that the reason the Right is riddled with "grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions" is because manufacturing malleable chumps is what the entire Conservative enterprise has been all about all along -- one very long, very well-funded project aimed at dumbing down and angrying up the Republican base enough so that they would consistently vote against their own interests and instead make common cause with the plutocrats who bankrolled the whole thing and the carnival barkers they hire to lure the rubes into the tent.  

And once men like Charlie had labored long and hard to build a machine designed to crank out credulous idiots, as sure flies find shit and rotten meat, grifters followed their nose straight to it.

Of course, some of us on the Left would have been only too happy to explain to Mr. Sykes that the Tea Party was a fraud -- a rebranding scam to get Republicans off the hook for all the heinous shit they said and did during the Bush administration.  Some of us we're, in fact, using our tiny blogs and podasts to get the word out about the Fake Tea Party since the earliest days when Republicans began disappearing into the weeds and then and popped back onto the mainstream media's radar as "Independents"  From me in 2009:

The "Independent" Granfalloon 

...

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

But men like Charlie Sykes were much too busy tone policing Liberal Hate Talker to notice our warnings.  

And well before Matt Lewis found himself basking in the glowing blurbs from the likes of Rick Perry, Ken Blackwell, S.E. Cupp, Andrew Breitbart, Erick Erickson and Tucker Carlson -- 

If you learned everything you knew about American politics from Matt Lewis, you'd be in pretty good shape. I should know, since I practically do. -- Tucker Carlson

for his paean to Sarah Palin and all that she stood for, "The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words",  we Liberal Hate Talkers busied ourselves writing post after post after post about the Fake Tea Party which were dutifully ignored by everyone.  

For example, here is one of my own hundreds of contributions to the genre from 2010 with which some of you may already be familiar :-)

Now, The Bush-Belly Sneetches

But two years later, Conservatives with huge media platforms were still swearing that the Fake Tea Party was the salvation of the GOP

"The tea party helped save the Republican Party..." - @JoeNBC on MoJoe

— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) October 22, 2012

And Charlie Sykes? Well, for Charlie the trials and tribulations of the Fake Tea Party were just one more excuse to bitch about the Left:

Happy 5th Birthday, Tea Party! The epic rant that began it all. http://t.co/5LmF1H8BlY

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) February 28, 2014

Left to Portray Tea Party as Bloodthirsty Zombies - Literally - Right Wisconsin http://t.co/WODyX6fO0I

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) March 27, 2014

Obama praises abortion advocate who called tea party ‘racist,’ suggested Romney wants to heave rape victims into water http://t.co/dB4RIbPH

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) February 7, 2013

@Murphyms73 Nio. the Tea party and NOT crackpots. Read what I wrote. People who support secession... are.

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) April 15, 2014

And this last grievance, the abuse of the noble Teabaggers at the hands of Barack Obama's IRS goons --

10 crazy things the IRS asked Tea Party groups « Hot Air http://t.co/D64zDUy9mo via @hotairblog

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) May 11, 2013

-- was something that Sykes went on and on and on about.

Who knows, Charlie?  Maybe one big reason the IRS took an interest in the Fake Tea Party was because, as one high-profile MSNBC contributor put it, it was fraught with "grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions."

Everywhere they turn these days, Dry Drunk Republicans like Lewis and Sykes find the same, terrible fact staring back at them.  That the Left has been right about the Right all along.

Which is why Dry Drunk Republicans work so hard at erasing us from history and rewriting the past to valorize themselves.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

There. Is. No. Tea. Party: The Epilogue Continues

Funny story.  True story.

Once upon a time, about a fucking decade ago...

...millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done for the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat of 1,000 suns.  In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.

But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.

But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.

No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax.  In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth,  In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were.  Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?

And the only people straight up calling bullshit on the whole scam?

Surprise!  Those dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam... 

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

So here we are, a decade later.

And now that everything we dirty, disreputable Liberals had long since warned about has long since come to pass,  what story do I find running away with social media morning?  (From the WaPo)

“It turns out a lot of them were not in favor of limiting the size of government, they were just opposed to the president at the time,” said [Justin] Amash, who helped found the tea party-aligned House Freedom Caucus. “The tea party is largely gone. It was replaced with nationalism and protectionism and the general philosophy of the party now under Trump.”

Yet another Republican being elevated to the rank of Patriot Hero First Class by bravely noticing that his Republican party was full of Republicans all along.

So my question is, how the hell can I get myself graded on that curve?

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Tea Party II: Dyspeptic Boogaloo

DICK ARMEY (V.O.)

Bartonville.  Shit.  I'm still only in Bartonville.
Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back at FreedomWorks.
I'm here four years now... waiting for a mission... getting softer...

And all the Children

Are insane...

Having learned from the Great Tea Party Hoax of 2009 that the Beltway media will let Conservatives get away with literally anything as long as they get to go along for the ride and take a cut of the spoils, what you are witnessing right now is a vast and poorly orchestrated effort at splunging the hell out of Don the Con by the blame-the-man-not-the-movement and the support-but-not-endorse-through-clenched-teeth-and-clucking-tongues coalitions.

And because we have all been to this shitty movie more than once, I can confidently predict the following.

That right around the time Sidney Blumenthal, Jeremiah Wright and the ghost of Saul Ailinky are gathered around the Yule log this winter helping Hillary Clinton put the finishing touches on Barack Obama's Third Inaugural Address...

...Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan and Frank Luntz and whatever beast-that-walks-like-a-man Rupert Murdoch gets to run his American media properties will be reconvening the Caucus Room Conspiracy to game out how best to sabotage the incoming Clinton Administration, disavow Trump as a Fake Conservative and re-re-re-re-brand their same old wretched hive of Republican scum and villainy as something fresh and grass-roots-y.

Try our New and Improved Conservatism: It's Toasted!

Before then, the best hope for the republic is for every one of these people (and media parasites who enable them) to be metaphorically stripped bare and driven into the sea while their grip on power is still weak and uncertain.

So get on that.

And before you rebuke me for violating the First Jinxing Rule of Electoral Politics, rest assured that just after I wrote "the incoming Clinton Administration" I went outside, turned around three times and spit and cursed.

Because at this stage only a great fool would risk tempting the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.

There. Is. No. Tea. Party: Epilogue

"Conservatism repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."

-- K. Marx (slightly abused)

For this, I have to take you on a trip through time. Just a little jaunt, back almost exactly seven years to April of 2009.  Barack Obama had been sworn in just a few weeks earlier and the Right -- which had cheered on every Bush Administration debacle and laughed off every Bush Administration crime -- suddenly and completely lost their shit and declared the end of civilization as we know it.

It apparently all began with something called, "Potato Day"...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

... but that's not the story.

The story is about those first, early days of the massive Republican Base re-branding scam called the "Tea Party".

You see,  back in 2009, millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done for the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat of 1,000 suns.  In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.

But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.

But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.

No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax.  In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth,  In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were.  Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?

And the only people straight up calling bullshit on the whole scam?

Surprise!  Those dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

No, no, no!  Definitely cannot say that because that would violate the new, post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a"vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who have been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

Which brings us right up to the present time, where this continues to be the only story the Village is interested in hearing and telling.  Those who obediently sing from the approved hymnal are rewarded, those to stray from the Party line are punished, and once again the possibility of finally bringing the Right to book for its open, suppurating lunacy is buried unto another mountain of Beltway fraud and fairy tales.

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth is now so secure that, just yesterday, Joe Scarborough could come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it  and know with perfect certainty that MSNBC management will not dock his pay one dollar or his camera time one minute and that none of his "Liberal" colleagues will so much as breathe a word of it on the air (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

Because there is a Club.
And you will never be in it.