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!

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

PBS Steel Cage Death Match...

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

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

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

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

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

From The PBS News Hour, June 12...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something happens in the real world

It is immediately translated into a meditation on perception

The meditation conveniently avoids any judgment about the thing that happened

And the absence of judgment is reframed as wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could There Be a Third Party for Moderates?

It turns out, Americans agree on an awful lot.

Burn The Lifeboats

Old School/New School

Today we're making a quick stop at the Before Time to visit the early days of the Liberal blogosphere.

 In and out, nobody gets hurt, OK? 

To begin, it's critical to understand that, as cutting and as harsh as our prose might have been, all in all, the Liberal blogosphere was and is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise.  A belief that we were not doomed.  That the future could be better, and that it was worth fighting for.

First and foremost, it was about creating community with a "You're not crazy, I see it too" ethos.  Back in the depths of the Bush regime, it felt as if a political apocalypse had happened right in our back yard:  something so bad and so surreal that words frequently failed.  And we were the ones slowly scanning the short wave radio bands in search of other survivors.  At the time this was only possible through the blogs because, then as now, the Beltway media was dedicated to the proposition that we were crazy, that there was nothing to see here, so let's move along shall we.   

But the hoped-for secondary effect of the blogs was a stubborn, Quixotic faith in something fundamental about the American people.  

Or at least most of the American people.  

Or at least a bare  majority of the American people.  Something that would be enough to beat the howling, brain-rotted Fox News zombie horde, if...

If people were presented with the facts of the case.  If they could be shown, unequivocally, that  Republican policies had fucked them over but good.  That whatever opinion they had of the Democrats, Dems were, by every metric, vastly better for the public than the GOP.  

It was towards those complacent, habitually fence-straddling Mopes in the Middle that much of our energies were directed.  And there was a moment as the Bush regime was collapsing when we had the momentum of events and history at our backs.  The Liberal blogosphere of the Before Time felt a little like the energy Hunter Thompson describe in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. 

This, but angrier.  

The feeling that, just maybe, together, we could outshout the narcotizing effect of the "Both Sides Do It" Beltway press and Sunday Shows had on the Mopes in the Middle.   If we could pry their eyes open for just a moment -- force them to see what was really happening to their country in their name...

But it was a vain hope.  

Perhaps, with 1000 times the media reach and firepower that the Liberal blogosphere had at its peak, we might have been able to pull it off.  But by then the Republican base was hopelessly addicted to its own rage and racism and the lies Fox News and Hate Radio fed them every day.

And the Mopes in the Middle vastly preferred lolling in a tepid pool of Both Sides Do It goo to a cold shower of facts.  Then as now, they don't know.  They don't wanna know.  And they get very angry if you try to make them know.    

All available evidence shows that the only force that can pry them out of their False Equivalence Goo Spa and spur them in the general direction of productive (if fleeting) civic engagement is having the metaphorical red-hot poker of Republican corruption and catastrophe shoved straight up their metaphorical collective asses.  

Or, to put it a little less graphically,  the only time they can be moved to action is when economic and social pain affects them personally and profoundly.  Then and only then can they be moved to lumber out of their comforting goo bath to go stumbling into the world looking for scapegoats.  

Which, in itself, can be either good news for democracy, or bad news.  Because once they are roused to action, the Mopes in the Middle are none too picky about who they blame for what has happened to them: they're as likely to hold trans people, Mexicans and Democrats responsible for their reduced circumstances as they are fascists, Republican looters and degenerates, and evil billionaires.    

And any grifter running against "the system" or "the duopoly" or "politicians in Washington" will always have the inside track with these idiots.

We of what is left of the Liberal blogosphere will go right on writing.  Some of us also podcast now or are frequent podcast/radio guests, so we'll go on with that as well because trying to make sense of the world and sharing it with others is why we do what we do.  And there is intrinsic value in that.  Every "I never thought of it from that perspective" or "Once you put it that way it started to make sense" or "I thought I was the only one" we get from readers or listeners is worth its weight in gold.  

Of course, we'll gratefully take the gold too, but you get what I'm saying.  

However, for the time being, I think many of us have lost much of our faith in both the utility of persuasion and in most of the American people.  It is a loss that many of us are grieving.  

From the Stay Human - Shape Tomorrow Substack

There’s a grief I don’t see named anywhere. It belongs specifically to people who are older, who have fought long and hard, who still care deeply — and who are now watching the possibility of a better future slip away at the exact moment their own capacity is slowing down. And not just a better future for themselves, but for the younger generations they love so dearly. Mad and sad at the same time. Carrying decades of investment in institutions and movements and people, and watching all of it under threat and being torn down.

No Half Measures

Alt History

All the way back during the closing days of the Before Time, as the GOP was loping eagerly at speed towards the monstrous abyss into which they have now dragged us, I began documenting a rapidly spreading Republican condition, which I called Republican Detachment Disorder.  

From me in January of 2016:

Now that Donald Barnum Trump, Failgunner Ted Cruz and the caravan of benighted shoutycracker GOP candidate wannabes that follow them around have removed any lingering doubt that nothing short of the Bến Tre Option --

'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'

-- will ever "fix" what is actually wrong with the GOP, the Republican establishment's most obedient and reliable public avatars have all suddenly come down with the same, tragic affliction: Republican Detachment Disorder.

Symptoms include adopting the basic Liberal critique of the Right chapter-and-verse while forgetting to acknowledge that "Liberals" as such even exist, and pretending that "the Republican establishment" is some mysterious directorate that you barely know which meets in a secret lair far, far away instead of a club which you have been a card-carrying member of for your entire adult life.

Today's spotlight Republican Detachment Disorder sufferer: David Frum.

Maybe the Republican Establishment Can’t Have It All

Given their failure to take down Donald Trump, is it time for GOP elites to let go of some cherished inward-facing policy priorities? 

...

Maybe it’s time for the party’s elites to let go of some of their cherished inward-facing policy priorities.

Notice how RDD particularly affects the speech centers of the brain. "[T]he Republican Establishment" instead of "we". "Given their failure" instead of "Given our failure." "[T]he party's elite" instead of "Me and David Brooks and Michael Gerson and Ross Douthat and the rich fuckers we work for".

Sad, really.

But there is hope!

With your generous support, blogs like this can continue working tirelessly towards the goal of eliminating RDD in our lifetime...

 Which I simplified to this in March of 2016:

It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite.

Then I spent more time than I should have documenting one prominent Republican/Conservative after another deploying the same lies in the same order.  That the GOP had gone spontaneously mad.  That they had nothing to do with it.  That once they caught wind of it they'd righteously rebuked everyone involved, but before that moment there was nothing detectably wrong with the GOP. 

Every one of these lies was and is ludicrous on its face, and yet the promulgators of these lies were invited to spout them on the largest legacy media outlets in the country, while those on the Left who had been warning for decades about the dangerous trajectory of the GOP were given the stiff arm and the stink-eye by those same legacy media outlets.

Which led me to ask why?  

And the answer is pretty simple and twofold.

First, the creators of this new mythology already had deep, fraternal ties to major legacy media outlets.  They all knew each other professionally and socially, so once places like MSNBC went full-time into the Republican reputation rehab business, GOP spin doctors and comms people and ad merchants who had bet wrong on the rise of Trump and fallen from grace from the party were lining up three deep to get the Nicole Wallace treatment.  

And second, the gauzy, heroic bunkum these Never Trumpers were selling was much more congenial to the legacy media's self-image than the hard truths Lefty writers and podcasts were offering.  In the actual history of the era that Liberals were documenting, the legacy media was deeply complicit in the rise of a monster like Trump, spending decades ostentatiously ignoring what was really going on on the Right, or, when the stench of racism and crazy leaking out of GOP containment got too knock-the-flies-off-a-shitwagon strong to ignore, they'd "Both Sides Do It" handwave any concerns.

Obviously this is a story the legacy media wants no part of.  

But the fiction the Never Trumpers were selling?  That the entire Republican base just suddenly went nuts one day and no one coulda seen it coming?  That maybe a lot of it was actually justifiable backlash to all those terrible, imaginary excesses of the Left?  That was a story the Beltway was only too happy to metabolize, to repeat endlessly, and to promote to the front of the line any recently-former Republican who was willing to help them sell it.  

And over the course of the last decade you can actually track as this bullshit hardened into the foundation of Beltway-approved agreed-upon history of the era.  Then, once the foundation was laid, came all of the refinements and embellishments.  

So what we're going to do now is step back in time to 2016 and watch as Republican Detachment Disorder became the go-to alibi for Conservatives trying to run away from what they had helped do to their own party.  Then we're going to jump back to present day for a small taste of how that fiction has evolved.  For the stroll down Cursed Memory Lane, I'll mostly provide links only to Conservatives as they floated their own variation of RDD.  If you want to dive deeper, have at it.

January, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Tucker Carlson, Super Class Warrior Hero Guy.

January, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Boss Limbaugh.

In his article in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan's former protege -- Young Conor Friedersdorf -- makes the following case:

Rush Limbaugh Doesn't Know He's Part of the Establishment

A portrait of a man who is unaware of his role in the system that he savages...

February, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Frank Luntz.

February, 2016:  David Brooks' Life When It Is Written Will Read Better Than It Lived

David Brooks -- the world's most ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual, globe-trotting lecturer on character and humility and Patient Zero of Republican Detachment Disorder -- managed to write an entire fucking column about the madness which has killed his Republican Party...
...without mentioning the word "Republican" at all.
Instead...
They want “outsiders"
They delegitimize...
They’re willing to trample...
they don’t recognize other people...
They suffer from a form of political narcissism...
they don’t accept the legitimacy of...
They don’t recognize restraints.
They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.
The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience...
The antipolitics people don’t accept...
They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations...
The antipolitics people refuse compromise...

February, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ron Fournier, The Sad Clown of Centrism

March, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Gerson

Themselves. Them. Not "me". Them. Thus begins the tsk-tsking cavil lecture of yet another Republican who stood proudly with a party that has been coasting along on the momentum of the Southern Strategy for his entire adult life.  Yet another Republican who stood proudly by an Administration which resorted without hesitation to the tried-and-true Republican electoral strategy of Fox News, Hate Radio, mass-slander and demonization to win re-election in 2004...

April, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Joe Scarborough

May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Peggy Noonan Finds Her Magic Cab Driver

May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Jennifer Rubin

Key Date.  From NPR, May 26, 2016: Donald Trump Clinches GOP Nomination

June, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ramesh Ponnuru

By June of 2016, Suddenly There Is No "I" In "Republican"  Note the time.  Almost exactly  decade ago, when all of these Conservative heavy-hitters and dozens of others had begun to change their political pronouns.

Key Date.  From CNN, July 19, 2016: It’s official: Trump is Republican nominee

July, 2016: Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero

September, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: George Will

October 20, 2016:  Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol -- Cannibals Fighting Over The Place Settings -- in which they traded "This wasn't my fault, this was your fault" finger-pointing.  

December, 2017:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder [Bret Stephens]

 December, 2017: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Charlie Sykes

They're all in on it.  All of them.  And 18 months to two years is officially the new, Beltway Approved Absolution Lifeboat.  And all of the Republican scumbags who reaped enormous rewards for decades paving the road down which Donald Trump shambled to the White House -- who are now frantically  rebranding themselves as "independent" 30 years too late once -- are scrambling on board.  From Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough yesterday:  "Republicans across the United States will now pay a heavy price for two years of moral indifference."

There are dozens more, and a lot of repeat customers:  the same elite Republican pundits and opinion-havers using the commanding media heights of the multiple platforms on which they are welcome, all hard-selling the same lie over and over and over again.

Now buckle up as we quantum leap from a decade ago to five days ago to observe how deeply rooted in the everyday political language of Never Trumpers this detachment disorder has become, and how every other political event has been warped to fit that narrative.

The occasion was The Bulwark's live thing in Los Angeles.  Big crowds.  Much merch.  Much call-and-response.  A delegation from the Pod Save Lads showed up.  And during the event, Bulwark owner and publisher, Sarah Longwell, regaled the audience with her version of history...

Sam Stein: What is the Bush line? Like what actually number is the Bush line? 

Sarah Longwell:  Uh this is a great question... It's 32%.  But that is that is the number that George W. Bush was at when he left office. Okay? And the reason again that this is important is if you think about the historical precedent when Bush left office, the Republican party never recovered from his unpopularity. 

This is so ridiculous I almost don't know where to begin.  In 2010, Longwell was working for conservative PR outfit in Washington D.C. and was recruited into the Log Cabin Republicans, where she eventually became chair  From that vantage point, surely she could not have missed the Giant Red Wave that deluged Washington in 2010 and completely reversed the political fortunes of Ms. Longwell's party.

I mean, I don't know exactly how Ms. Longwell would measure "recovered popularity", but it seems to me that taking back the House in 2010 with a net gain of 63 seats -- the largest turnover of seats by either party since 1948 -- constitutes a pretty good metric of resurgent popularity.  As does the net seven seat Republican pickup in the Senate, picking up six governorships, 680 state legislative seats, flipping control of 20 legislative chambers across the country, and having "independent" voters, who had largely voted for Democrats in 2006 and 2008, swinging overwhelmingly to the right.

And how did Sarah Longwell's party achieve this amazing feat?  They did it by throwing everything they had into the largest coordinated campaign of often openly racist slander, obstruction, sabotage, and fear-mongering in modern political history, all aimed at destroying Obama before he even got started.  If you're interested in the gory details, we did a whole podcast about that very subject last week:

Add to that the massive Republican "Tea Party" branding scam in which the legacy media abetted the lie that somehow the base of the party had just up and disappeared one day and had been replaced by a brand new "movement" -- heavily financed by the Kochs and promoted around the clock by Fox News.  These Teabaggers had two things in common: they swore they'd never heard of George W. Bush and they despised the black guy in the White House and eagerly rallied behind every racist lie about Death Panels and "government takeovers" and birth certificates and on and on.  They flooded town hall meetings, shrieking about Communists.  They suddenly cared about deficits.  

In Congress, Republicans did everything they could do to drag the Great Recession out as long as possible -- ferociously opposing the Obama plan for saving the economy, extorting concessions so that the final package was only half the size it should have been (and a third of that was tax cuts) and then voting against everything along party lines.  So by 2010, with the Republican base rage-drunk on Fox News racist propaganda, and hapless "independents" terrified by the legacy media repeating Conservative lies unchallenged, the GOP was able to grab hold of real levers of power at the national and state level and use them to further hobble Obama administration initiatives.  

Ms. Longwell resumes.  

Longwell:   He had a bad war and he had a bad economy.  That sounds familiar, right? And so when you have those things, what happened is then the Republicans went into the wilderness. They lost two national elections. They struggled with their political identity only to have Trump then come in and completely revamp the party. 

First, notice the pronouns?  The same sleight of hand as a decade earlier.  "the Republicans went...", "They lost...", "They struggled...", not "We lost..." or "We struggled..."  

Second, in the Republican voter's berserk reaction to Barack Obama -- their eight-year-long racist primal scream -- it's painfully obvious that their "political identity" was right there in plain sight for anyone to see who cared to.  Once a reality show douchebag and skeevy real-estate slimeball named Donald Trump latched onto the biggest and most overtly racist lie of that era and ran with it (from Politico, August 4, 2010) --

41% of GOP: Obama foreign-born

On President Barack Obama’s birthday, a new CNN/Opinion Research released Wednesday shows 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country.

 -- it's very clear that a plurality of the party had no "political identity" problem at all.

Now, stack that Big Stupid Lie on top of all the other Big Stupid Lies Republicans believed.  For example:

From Politifact, December 18, 2009:

PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'Death panels'

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.

"Death panels."

From KUNC Colorado, June 18, 2012:

As the Supreme Court is about to rule on the constitutionality of the health care law, one-third of Americans are worrying about a part of the legislation that isn’t there.

A Kaiser Family Foundation’s tracking poll [.pdf] found in March that 36 percent of respondents erroneously believe that the law “would allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.” Another 20 percent said they are not sure whether it does.

The foundation, a nonpartisan organization that provides health policy analysis, reports the “prevalence of these misconceptions is essentially the same it was at the end of 2010.”

From PolitiFact, December 17, 2010:

PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'A government takeover of health care'

In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul America's health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a "government takeover."

"Takeovers are like coups," Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. "They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom."

The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the "public option" concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.

But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn't let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.

From Pew, November 2, 2010:

Majority of Republicans No Longer See Evidence of Global Warming

A 53%-majority of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, fully 70% say there is no evidence. 

Add to these Big Stupid Lies all the dozens of Smaller Stupid Lies that were firehosing out of the Conservative media puke-funnel, hyped by Republican party leaders, and passed along uncritically by the legacy media, and even a low-born, nobody blogger from the middle of Middle America like me could see that this was not a party lost in "the political wilderness" in any way.

In fact, the "political identity" of the Republican party was never in question at all.  

They were and are the same mob of bigots and imbeciles we Liberals have been warning about for decades.  The "reprogrammable meatbags" which the GOP has spent decades and billions of dollars cultivating, and about which I've been writing on this here blog for +21 years.  

And yet back in the Before Time when it might have mattered, not a single Never Trump you can name had a problem with any of it.   They were perfectly willing to ride this rage-and-racism fueled rocket as long as it took them where they wanted to go.  As long as it got their guys elected.  Which is why Longwell's notion that "Trump [came] in and completely revamp[ed] the party" is not just laughable, but exactly backwards:  Trump didn't change the party, he revealed it.  The base wasn't bamboozled by Trump, the base manifested Trump as the avatar of their truest selves.   

And that's the shame Never Trumpers refuse to face.  That they built the Republican electoral meth lab, supplied the chemicals and created the distribution network.  All Trump ever did was use their own lab and their own chemicals to cook their own product better and purer than they did.  

Back to Ms. Longwell for her solution:  

Longwell:  But like the one way that [the Republican party might become something that is not a criminal enterprise, that is not like an authoritarian fascist enterprise] ... the one way that it would happen is for Donald Trump to leave office with America going that fucking sucked. Like we don't want to do that again. We want to discredit Trump and everybody in his administration, right? You want Rubio and JD Vance to wear Trump like an albatross around their necks.

Well best of luck with that.  I hope it works.  However, since I've been to this rodeo more than once already, I feel it is my duty to mention that, prior to Trump, the previous Worst President in Modern American History was George W. Bush.  After whom her "Bush line" is named.  And after he left office, there was a broad consensus that, god damn, that was awful.  And golly, we sure don't want to do that again!

And yet, in the blink of an eye, the Republican base had scuttled through the Bush-Off Machine and was reborn as blameless, patriotic Tea Baggers.  

Conservative hacks and henchmen in the media all kept their jobs or got promotions, and many of the Bush administration's loudest cheerleaders were rewarded with positions at The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The New York Times.  

Overnight, the entire Conservative media machine became the very loud, very racist, and very profitable Voice of the Resistance.  

Ann Coulter went right on making scads of cash writing garbage.   

Just before Obama took office 2008, Rush Limbaugh signed a $400 million, 8-year deal.

Bush's go-to torture apologist, John Yoo, was appointed the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law.

Paul "Spitcomb" Wolfowitz was gifted the presidency of the World Bank.

Dick Cheney's mini-me spawn, Liz, was elected to the House and quickly rose to a leadership position by telling monstrous, toxic lies just like dear old dad.

And as far as I can tell, most of the rest of them ended up being re-elected to congress, as regular MSNBC contributors, or with their own shows on MSNBC.  

And I see no reason why the people with the megaphones wouldn't rerun the process of mass strategic forgettery and ouchless absolution post-Trump just as they did post-George W.    Because RDD is still as contagious as the flu and more persistent than herpes.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

Professional Left Podcast Episode 992: Both Sides Don't Have A Budget Surplus

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him"  --  Leo Tolstoy.

• 
  

Quantum Entanglement Politics Part 2: An Issue of Scale.

Where were we?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then never leaves.

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

That’s one network.

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

Just Fox.

Now, let's scale that out conservatively.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the statistical universe.

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

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

The actual slogan. The actual Fox chyron.

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

Out of tens of thousands.

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

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

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

Now let’s put the two numbers together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they did.

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

They turned it into a litmus test.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- and an even larger majority Republican voters  -- 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it works.

I Am The Liberal Media