Losing is hard, especially when the divide between the candidates is this stark, and especially when the results were so close.

We live in a time of unprecedented and unjustifiable mass denial of unwanted election results by one of our major parties, which in January 2021 led to the first violent transfer of presidential power in American history.

Every time a candidate who loses a bitterly-fought contest can show grace and dignity toward her opponent, it helps our republic. And at the end of the day, we have to figure out a way that makes it possible for us all to live together without hating each other.

I wasn’t expecting Stevens to endorse El-Sayed so quickly. She would have found plenty of apologists if she declined to endorse. Some might scoff at her or question her sincerity, but I happen to like being pleasantly surprised like this, and the reality is that El-Sayed can’t win in November without the votes of people like Stevens, and her supporters.

So I think the right response, uneasy as it might make us feel inside right now, is to say: welcome on board.

He won statewide in a large, diverse purple state. His victory cannot be written off by the professional losers as the result of isolated-case demographic quirks of certain districts, nor can they claim it’s a luxury of people only in safely blue districts to feel comfortable running a progressive.

He won against a united front from the old guard, from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to Rep. Jim Clyburn. And of course, there was that $30,000,000 AIPAC expenditure.

I think it’s worth noting too that he is of Arab descent, and has a name that does not allow him to obscure his heritage. He would not be the first elected senator of Arab descent, but he would be the first Arab of non-Lebanese descent as well as the first Muslim senator. I find it peculiar that this party, usually so celebratory of diversity, doesn’t appear to care about this -- and was happy to boost his white Christian opponent by reinforcing negative stereotypes about Americans of Arab descent.

Best of all: we will have a chance to actually see what happens when we run a progressive in a swing state in a good Democratic year. Every time someone has said to me this decade that progressives can’t win competitive races, I have asked: How can we know that unless we actually nominate one in a competitive race? Soon we will have real evidence. The receding centrist mystique of electability still has enough strength to have nearly carried Stevens to victory. If El-Sayed wins in November, no one will believe in it ever again.

I know some of us went to bed disappointed, having expected a decisive win. And yeah: it would have been a nice cherry on top. It is always disappointing when public pollsters get their turnout models wrong, because they can mess with your expectations. But don’t let that distract you from the thrill of victory! There’s no penalty for winning by 2 instead of by 20. Abdul El-Sayed is our Senate nominee in swing-state Michigan. Now, let’s go enjoy some centrist crash out content...

Most nationally-known Democratic politicians, upon being tacitly accused of any form of bigotry, would instinctively utter a few platitudes about diversity and equality, then point to individuals from among the relevant identity group who have endorsed them. It would have been easy for Abdul El-Sayed to just generically condemn antisemitism and point to Bernie Sanders’s support.

But El-Sayed understands that no response along those lines will ever convince people who have already made up their minds that he hates Jews — nor rally anyone offended by the question itself. It would be an evasive, robotic, generic answer.

Instead, he does something surprisingly few politicians do: he aggressively flips the script. He doesn’t merely defend himself: his answer cleverly scrambles the roles of Good Guy and Bad Guy.

The best answer to charges of antisemitism over intense criticism of the state of Israel is to point out what El-Sayed did here: that conflating criticism of Israel with criticism of Jews is *itself antisemitic, and actively harmful to American Jews, senselessly chaining their reputations to the choices of a foreign government. Disputing the premise is always the best way to shatter a fossilized narrative.

El-Sayed follows up by pointing out the manufactured nature of the hit against him, which to take at face value requires the viewer to not know certain things: first, the network refuses to cover what he says about our unholy alliances with the titanically corrupt Gulf states and others — then, its reporters act bewildered that people haven’t heard him say anything about a country like Egypt like what he says about Israel.

I’ve been saying since Trump won a second term that the Democratic Party is in desperate need of competent verbal fighters. Answers like these are what I had in mind. I look forward to seeing this approach wielded against Mike Rogers.

Shared mythology — including self-mythology on the part of consultants desperate to believe that what they do matters — causes each new cycle of candidates to scramble to play the game. But the scale and persistence of masochistic fundraising rituals are akin to a civilization continuing to make human sacrifices to the sun gods every night, on the basis that nobody can prove the sacrifices *aren’t what’s causing the sun to rise every morning, and hence one might as well not risk it.

To extend the metaphor: a candidate relying solely on sacrifices to the sun gods will not do very well if the people stop believing the sacrifices mean anything. And when the people feel anger rather than awe in response to an aggressive display of financial dominance, the candidate may end up sacrificing only herself.

Now, money can do a couple of important things for a candidate, depending on the situation. Let’s restrict the analysis to primaries for the sake of precision.

First and foremost: money is excellent for driving up name ID for lesser-known candidates. If I’m a Senate candidate, the first thing I want is for every man, woman, and child in my state to know the name ‘Alex Knepper’, and money is excellent for spamming one’s name everywhere. It’s the equivalent of simply getting your foot in the door.

The cumulative effect of advertising and messaging can also create a general impression about a candidate’s ‘lane’: ‘the lefty reformer’, ‘the steady establishment hand’, ‘the outsider’, etc. These impressions are important: they provide context for voters to interpret your words. Each lane has its advantages and disadvantages.

But this can only carry a candidate so far. When you already have 100% name ID and people already have a general impression of who you are — especially in a competitive and scrutinized race — it is madness to keep relying on spamming and generalities. In economic terms, we’d say that candidates making such an investment quickly reach a point of diminishing returns.

Once voters have a general impression locked in, they look for a rationale for someone’s candidacy: why this person, at this time? Candidates lavished with mega-millions routinely fizzle out because, when they win the spotlight they coveted, they end up having nothing to say. 

Haley Stevens has had nothing to say throughout this campaign. I have to suspect that the blizzard of outside money supporting her candidacy backfired. Voters can be crazy sometimes, but they notice when insiders are trying to force a candidacy down their throats.

The way to ‘get out the vote’ isn’t with tens of millions of dollars. Dollars don’t vote. Abdul El-Sayed is going to win [did win] tonight’s primary because he had something much more valuable than cash, something Stevens never had: a rationale for his candidacy.

I don’t think El-Sayed is quite right about this. Stevens is certainly a shameless shill, and the deluge of cash spent on her behalf has been heavy-handed even by AIPAC standards. But I think the popular notion that politicians are routinely bribed to represent special interests inverts what usually happens.

I was a Republican for a decade. When I turned against the party — I registered as an independent in 2013, and then as a Democrat in 2015 — I was stunned by how many Democrats would talk about looney-tunes right-wing pundits and Congressmen as if they were putting on a show for a gullible base. I found it alarming that they seemed to be working from the assumption that the Republicans, at the end of the day, didn’t truly believe the things they are saying; that the profiteers and the demagogues, deep in their hearts, knew better.

The truth was (and is) even worse: people like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Ann Coulter believe close to every word they say, and their devotees are happy to consciously part with their money: what nobler way for an individual to get rich than by crusading for truth and justice against the forces of darkness, after all?

Organizations like AIPAC therefore don’t bribe random politicians and transform them into reliable robots for the cause, Eliza Doolittle-style. Rather, they actively seek out people who are already sincerely in ideological agreement with the cause, then load up the chosen ones with money, connections, and resources.

Bribery is actually unreliable and unstable from a strategic standpoint; there is no substitute for sincere belief, especially when it comes to delivering the message like you mean it. When Stevens says she sees Israel in her dreams, you do get the sense that she’s not kidding.

Back in my Republican days, I volunteered for AIPAC’s student lobbying day event. I am not Jewish, and nobody paid me a cent to be there. Like Stevens, I simply genuinely believed in the cause and wanted to help out.

Another illustrative example is the oil and gas industry’s long-running campaign to cast climate change as a hoax: the politicians who have received industry largesse, by and large, weren’t formerly reasonable people corrupted by cash. Rather, they were fanatical ideologues to begin with, and the money followed the fanaticism, since special interest groups have no better rock to rely on than sincerely-held belief on the part of their missionaries.

Stevens is a terrible candidate, and she is going to lose to Abdul El-Sayed. But she isn’t bought off. She, in fact, actually believes all that stuff.

The suggestion that strong or persistent criticism of AIPAC is antisemitic is itself antisemitic: it implies that dual national loyalty is fundamental or intrinsic to being Jewish.

AIPAC is not even a Jewish organization. It is a non-sectarian, non-partisan, secular organization lobbying on behalf of the interests of a secular foreign state. Although AIPAC leadership is staffed heavily with fanatical Jews, it almost certainly draws more power and money from fanatical evangelical Christians than from fanatical Jews, and those fanatical evangelicals are almost certainly the majority of its 6.5 million members. A niche of fanatical modernists like John Fetterman also exists.

It is truly strange that people flinging this epithet around so carelessly so often forget that Bernie Sanders, the undisputed leader of the American left, is Jewish — rather stereotypically Jewish, frankly! — and probably the most vocal opponent of AIPAC in the Senate. American Jews as a whole disapprove of Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel-firster behavior, because most Jews, like most Americans, are loyal first of all to their fellow American citizens. What’s antisemitic isn’t criticizing what AIPAC openly brags about doing on behalf of a foreign government — it’s using the Jewish people as human shields against that criticism.

I have deep admiration for the Jews: their culture has given American life so many outstanding philosophers, scientists, and artists, and many of my mentors over the years have been Jews. Jew-haters are pathetic, and genuine antisemitism is obviously on the rise: most Facebook groups nowadays have members who will use the ‘echoes’ parentheses or make allusions to ‘the Austrian painter’ with no social or moderation-based consequences.

So I don’t see how it helps the Jews to baselessly throw around accusations of antisemitism over the lobbying of a foreign government. The state of Israel isn’t the Jewish people, and certainly not the 51st U.S. state. It’s long past time to retire this absurd inverted dual-loyalty trope.

II.

Why is Rep. Haley Stevens invoking the antisemitic trope that dual national loyalty is intrinsic to Judaism? AIPAC is not “Jewish Americans”, and it is incredibly bizarre that the Israel-firsters seem to have no self-awareness about this. It must go back to what I wrote the other day about how panic leads people to make very foolish, short-sighted decisions. This is obviously not what she *intends to say, but it’s the implication propping up the notion that criticism of AIPAC is tantamount to criticism of Jews.

Abdul El-Sayed, moreover, is *clearly not the one with problems in this race, if the latest round of polling is to be believed.

The only way Schumer Democrats like Haley Stevens know how to win campaigns is to accuse their opponents of various bigotries. It was the entirety of their failed decade-long strategy to stop the criminal conman clown in chief. It’s what they do to each other when they want to make the life of a like-minded rival difficult. And it’s *especially what they do during primaries to progressives.

The Stevens network first tried to depict Abdul El-Sayed as a misogynist, dispatching Rep. Hillary Scholten to claim that he’d made “deeply sexist attacks” on Stevens and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, with ‘sexist’ apparently defined as: having the audacity to run against them. A bogus smear was sent to the reliably-tabloid Politico in an attempt to trick people into thinking a remark about John Fetterman was a call to violence against women.

*That didn’t work, so Rep. Jim Clyburn was then summoned away from preparing his coffin to remark that “all he needed to know” about Abdul El-Sayed is that he didn’t see anyone who “looked like him” at his rallies. (I think he meant people who are well past the age of needing to retire!) Left unasked was how many people who look like Abdul are found at Haley Stevens rallies. This attempt to brand him a racist didn’t work, either.

At this point, a normal, capable human being would ask herself if she might want to consider offering some kind of rationale for her own candidacy beyond vacuous platitudes — and having worked with Obama on the auto bailout almost two decades ago. I know the woman’s creativity is constrained at whatever level of thought causes her to see black people and blurt out “I love Obama!”, but surely she can use some of that AIPAC money to hire someone to cook up a few policies for her to run on, right?

Apparently not. So here we are: time to see the logic of this good, old-fashioned character assassination tour through, and call El-Sayed an antisemite — somehow while using an antisemitic trope conflating Jews with lobbyists for a foreign government. It’s not what she *meant to say. But it’s what everyone using this pathetic response to criticisms of AIPAC is actually implying.

If you need any further proof that Haley Stevens is on track to lose, consider how terrified she must be by her internal data that she feels the need to resort to such a desperate, despicable trifecta. All the money in the world can’t buy her a rationale for her candidacy.

Jeffries is a smart, shrewd man. He knows the scale of those electoral victories has nothing to do with Ken Martin, but rather is about intense disgust toward the criminal conman clown in chief. He knows that the United States has a two-party system, that one of the two major parties is going to win in a given election, that the Democrats are the only game in town to register rejection of Trump — and hence that we could appoint Jake Paul head of the DNC and still have won those elections. The speaker is, unfortunately, just hoping to say the magic words to make people shut up about this topic.

It should be deeply alarming to the Schumer-Jeffries Democrats that despite the sub-first-world-tier leadership we have under Donald Trump, and despite the built-in benefits of being the second party in a two-party system, the Democratic Party still can’t manage to out-poll the president on favorability, can’t even raise enough money to keep the DNC out of debt, and is one of the top antagonists of this year’s primaries among, um, Democratic voters.

But no: the speaker apparently has decided to act out that meme about the dog whose house is on fire. “This is fine.” And some people still insist it’s unfair that I call the Schumer-Jeffries Democrats professional losers! How *can you be one of the most important leaders of a major political party — and have standards like *this? If we *had a functioning Democratic Party and imagined a hypothetical scenario like this, we would all easily perceive how dismal it is.

Everything these people warn us will happen if we nominate progressives -- we’ll get routinely beaten at the ballot box by the lunatic right, major donors will flee or freeze, we’ll become historically unpopular in the polls, we’ll be unable to pass any major legislation in Congress, Republicans will successfully depict them as treacherous communist terrorists — is already happening right now, under their leadership.

The Jerusalem Post today, unusually, published two op-eds making identical arguments about the same topic, slamming NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani for his apparent obsession with Israel when, as the Post’s writers explain, it isn’t even the job of the mayor of New York to think about Israel in the first place.

Gil Troy writes of how Mamdani “keeps finding time to bash Israel” despite having a $125 billion budget and over 300,000 city workers to manage. “Last week’s...[Mamdani NYT] interview devoted a surprising amount of discussion to a tiny country 5,710 miles away,” writes Troy, who eventually concludes that Mamdani has “declared open season on the Jews.” Shmuel Legesse adds: “New Yorkers did not elect a mayor to conduct foreign policy. They elected a mayor to govern New York.”

Interesting.

On November 18th of last year, the Post published an article about a visit to Israel by outgoing mayor Eric Adams. Declining to characterize the trip as irrelevant or peripheral to his mayoral duties, the first paragraph of the article laments the ‘soon-to-be-antiquated’ warmth toward Israel shown by the office. Not a word in the article suggests that meetings like this are anything but universally accepted as commonplace and unobjectionable.

The next day, a follow-up article was published, positively depicting Adams’s “special bond” and “steadfast commitment” to the state of Israel. Israeli think tank leaders highlighted the ways Adams kept finding time to help Israel -- you know, between managing a $125 billion budget and 300,000+ city workers.

I’m sure it was just an oversight, but no op-eds were published by the Post decrying the inappropriateness of the mayor of New York City devoting several days to a tiny foreign country 5,710 miles away.

Has anyone at the Post considered that, although their argument may sound convincing against Mamdani today in a vacuum, people *will be able to check the archives? Have they even considered that they will not want a future, friendlier mayor to be bound by such an argument?

The real breaking point comes when people stop believing that anything you say can be taken at face value — when they figure out that all of your ‘principles’ are just smokescreens for a preordained conclusion and will undergo a 180° inversion if they no longer seem useful.

Take someone like David Frum, who published article after article at the Atlantic about how the accusations against Graham Platner represented a non-negotiable test of character for Democrats. For some strange reason, he felt very differently about the Cuomo-Mamdani race, during which he was silent about Cuomo’s history of sexual harassment but published article after article attacking Mamdani. Only anti-Israel candidates are subject to his character test.

Second-order thinking vanishes: it hasn’t even been a year since the Cuomo-Mamdani race, but he’s too panicked about the future of the U.S.-Israeli special relationship to realize how he’s set a trap for himself.

I have to assume this pattern of behavior will only get worse.

In Oct. 2016, after the infamous Access Hollywood tape came to light, then-RNC head Reince Preibus told Donald Trump that he had two choices: drop out, or else lose to Hillary Clinton in a landslide. Sen. John Thune called for him to step down as the presidential nominee. Then-Speaker Paul Ryan announced he would no longer publicly defend him.

Trump didn’t budge, because almost nobody prophesying his doom believed a year prior that he’d even win a single delegate in the primary race. He calculated that nobody had the authority to take away a nomination he won democratically, and that once everyone calmed down, they’d realize there was no alternative against Hillary Clinton. He also observed that the ones most sternly advocating that he resign as the nominee wanted him to do that long before they knew of the tape.

Trump reframed the story for his supporters, giving them a way to fight back. He was insistent on his innocent history with women (I know, I know: I’m merely reporting what happened), used a verbal branding iron to sear the phrase ‘Locker Room Talk’ into everyone’s heads, and turned the narrative around on Hillary Clinton by inviting some of Bill’s accusers to be his guests at the second debate. Obviously, he survived the scandal.

If Platner has truly been falsely accused, then he shouldn’t have budged. He should have noticed that almost nobody prophesying his doom believed a year prior that he would win more primary votes than any Democrat in Maine’s history. He should have calculated that nobody had the authority to take away the nomination he won democratically, and that once everyone calmed down, they’d realize there would be no alternative against Susan Collins. He should have observed that the ones most sternly advocating that he resign as the nominee wanted him to do that long before they knew of the Politico article.

A PPP poll taken two days after the final accusation showed Platner down by only 5 against Collins — still within the margin of error — with Gov. Janet Mills still behind by 11.

Platner should have reframed the story for his supporters, giving them a way to fight back. He should have condemned the coordinated nuclear-apocalyptic-level campaign to destroy an outsider nobody. He should have demanded to know why a woman comfortable talking about her rape on CNN isn’t comfortable talking about it in a police report. He should have brutally mocked Republicans for turning into #BelieveAllWomen feminists. He should have demanded to know why Gov. Josh Shapiro hasn’t faced calls to resign after his administration had to pay out a $300,000 settlement after he covered up for an aide who was Credibly Accused ™️ of sexual harassment.

By the time the general election came around, I’m sure he’d have ended up accused of everything from torturing a child to being the reason we’ve been waiting over a decade for a new Rihanna album. But I think he could have won.

Conversely, if he is guilty, his punishment should be incarceration, not the loss of a Senate nomination. Not one reporter in the US seems concerned that this apparent monstrous rapist is going about his business, free to rape again. I guess the lesson here is that if you want to rape someone, it will behoove you to win a Senate nomination you can cash in for one free rape. (I don’t make the rules.)

I have a hunch about the *genuine reason South Carolina is the DNC’s choice to vote first, despite the fact that selecting it is akin to the Republicans choosing Oregon to go first. Look at the results from the last two competitive presidential primaries:

2020: Biden 48.4% • Sanders 19.8%

2016: Clinton 73.4% • Sanders 26.0%

We can argue all day about why these outcomes took place. What’s of decisive importance is that South Carolina, which has not voted Democratic at the presidential level since 1976 (tied for last place in how recently it did so), indisputably rallied around the ‘establishment candidate’ against Bernie Sanders twice in a row at a time when he had his opponent on the ropes.

I’m guessing the DNC has divined from this summer’s primary results that a lot of voters are desperate for candidates who have as little to do with party officialdom as possible. Call it a Tea Party with a conscience.

Millions of us are disturbed and enraged knowing that Donald Trump was beatable, and that the people whose calling-card was that even if we couldn’t hope for courage from them on policy, at least we could count on them to keep a criminal con man clown like Donald Trump away from power, failed us.

If the DNC were not afraid of facing the wrath of those voters, why would it go out of its way to give so much power to South Carolina, this reddest of states? Why not my home state of Maryland, a party stronghold, if black representation is so important? But South Carolina is not only tested and proven, it is also, by pure coincidence, too large and populous for an insurgent candidate to effectively mount a successful ‘retail’ campaign and take the establishment by surprise.

The DNC and the Schumer-Jeffries Democrats are shrewd when they really want to be. It would just be nice if they could channel all that energy into exposing Trump’s con job against the American public, or advocating for policies that directly help people, instead of scheming against their own voters.

I’d offer an alternative reason for my own sharp turn against the Israeli alliance, which I supported for a very long time (and I don’t even need to use the word ‘Gaza’): allies do not treat allies like Israel treats the United States.

I used to scoff at those who claimed Israel is always trying to drag the U.S. into war. But on April 21st, then-White House Legal Advisor Reed D. Rubinstein released a memo through the State Department. It read, in part: “As the United States has explained in multiple letters to the U.N. Security Council...the United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense.”

That’s right: the State Department claimed that the U.S. is in Iran “at the request of” Israel (”as well as” reasons that benefit this country: amazing wording).

This February, Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Oval Office and presented Trump, fresh off of capturing Nicolas Maduro, with a case for further intervention in Iran. This presentation included several unhinged claims, like that by the time the Iranians figure out they should use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage, Trump will have already degraded their military so badly that they wouldn’t be able to do it. Not one person in Trump’s inner circle found that claim credible, but Trump, convinced of his unique insight, did.

Netanyahu’s plan was obviously the inverse: he hoped that by the time Trump figured out that the Iranians could use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage, he’d be in so deep that he’d have no choice but to destroy the regime to avoid looking like a loser.

The return to power of the criminal conman clown in chief has alarmed our liberal-democratic allies. Most of them treat Trump’s presidency like an emergency situation to be managed delicately. Israel is the only one that has instead treated it like an opportunity to exploit, regardless of the cost to the United States: “Our closest ally elected an idiot clown as leader. Perfect!”

When another country that claims to be our greatest ally treats us like that, I’ll focus on our alliance with that country. In the meantime, I will take the State Department’s word for it that there’s only one country for whom we are at war by “request.”

Here are some realities about the center-left’s record over the last decade. Try to imagine how it would be portrayed by the legacy press, pundits, and consultants if the following were true of the progressive wing of the party:

Under Barack Obama, the Democratic Party lost a larger combined number of state legislators, governors, House members, and senators than any sitting president’s party has ever lost.

The high priests of ‘safe, electable’ nominees preferred as Trump’s three opponents: someone under investigation by the FBI, someone suffering cognitive decline, and someone selected by party insiders. Between them, they managed to lose to this transparent criminal conman clown twice, and managed to beat him by a mere 40,000 votes once, even as he was fatally bungling his oversight of a once-in-a-century public health emergency.

The Supreme Court currently has the strongest Republican majority it has had in a century. Republicans recently achieved their 50-year dream of overturning Roe v. Wade, and they’re coming for Obergefell v Hodges.

I am 36. Only one piece of ‘pocketbook’ legislation has been passed in my lifetime that unambiguously permanently improved the everyday lives of millions of ordinary Americans with no significant downside to other Americans: the ACA/Obamacare.

Even as we suffer from sub-first-world-tier leadership under a Republican Party captive to a personality cult centered around a Very Stable Genius who’d be Idi Amin if he were allowed to be, the Democratic Party still can’t out-poll their favorability ratings.

Moreover, Haley Stevens doesn’t even outperform Abdul El-Sayed in general election polling — proving once again that there is a total aversion to evidence among these types.

A time traveler determined to discern the nature of the parties would have to conclude, as something approaching a scientific fact, that the self-destructive wing of the party is clearly the one putting its trust in the same group of people who led us to this dismal place.

Did he mean he didn’t see a single person who looked like he is nearly 90 years old, like Clyburn as he runs for his 18th term?

Did he mean he didn’t see a single person who looked like he routinely receives money from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the American Bankers Association PAC, like Clyburn does?

Did he mean he didn’t see a single person who looked like he’d rather baselessly accuse decent men of bigotry than talk about economic solutions for the American people, like Clyburn would?

Maybe he didn’t see a single person who looked like she sees Israel in their dreams, like Clyburn’s candidate Rep. Haley Stevens does.

He didn’t clarify, so I guess we’ll never know.

Bonus question: How many people who look like Abdul El-Sayed, about 350,000 of whom live in Michigan, do you think Rep. Clyburn would see at a Haley Stevens rally?

I know of a couple in which the husband routinely neglected his duties as a parent and homeowner. He spent all of his free time on his computer instead.

The wife sometimes lost her temper over this, but he’d refuse to argue back, instead saying, every time: ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’ He’d insist that he did care about being a father and homeowner, that he knew he’d have to change.

And then... he’d just never do it. It would be right back to the computer games the second he got her to shut up.

An outside observer of one of their arguments might have been forgiven for thinking she was aggressively nasty to him, while he remained reasonable and cool-headed. It’s what it looked like on the surface. But it was nothing more than him saying the magic words to make her go away. She was ultimately in the right.

Susan Collins is like that husband. She gives fine-sounding speeches about bipartisanship, and she’s notoriously always insisting on her genuine ‘concern’ about Trump’s tyrannies.

And then... she just never does anything about it. Whenever her vote is decisive, she always sides with Republicans. When she casts a vote against her party, it’s always when she knows it already has enough votes. Her ‘concern’ is always empty theater to get critics to just shut up.

I’ll take someone who gets angry on behalf of working Americans over someone who remains Zen-like on behalf of her donors when confronted by ordinary people about *their concerns.

Really, now? I happen to recall that none of the Schumer-Jeffries Democrats objected to the ‘meddling’ of outsiders when AIPAC launched an unprecedented $14,000,000 campaign to annihilate CBC member Jamaal Bowman in 2024 for his outspoken stance on Gaza. Nobody condemned Hillary Clinton, a decade removed from office, for ‘meddling’ by endorsing his white opponent George Latimer.

Jeffries, in fact, was dismissive of criticism of AIPAC’s blitz to destroy an incumbent, shrugging his shoulders to a reporter about the outside spending, quipping that of course pro-Israel groups will support pro-Israel candidates. For some reason, Jeffries and his allies don’t think this logic applies to progressive groups and progressive candidates.

The Schumer-Jeffries Democrats were similarly unconcerned with the need to avoid ‘meddling’ in Maine. In Oct. 2025, when Graham Platner was routinely polling majority-support among Maine voters, Schumer imperiously recruited nearly-80-year-old two-term establishment-friendly Gov. Janet Mills to enter the race. Despite the polls showing essentially no interest in her candidacy, Schumer’s network pumped millions of dollars into the state to try to force-feed it, against the obvious will of the electorate. And the cherry on top: Mills consistently performed worse against Collins in the polls, despite having 100% name ID. (She still did, even after the terminal allegation this month, according to a PPP poll; she was losing by 11, and even the SA-accused Platner lost by only 5.)

Try to imagine what the Schumer-Jeffries Democrats would have said if the situation were reversed: if Janet Mills were the competition-free frontrunner, consistently polling with strong majority support...and Bernie Sanders decided to try to elevate a progressive — one who performed worse in the polls — out of nowhere.

There is a consistent thread running through the New York, Maine, and North Carolina, but it’s not about ‘meddling.’ It’s about shutting down progressives.

That figure is reached by projecting current market prices — to the extent they can be discerned — onto single-payer policies. But this methodology is absurd: current prices are the result of the incomprehensibly vast market distortions of our healthcare non-system. In fact, we have many reasons to believe Medicare For All would be significantly less expensive — and vastly more humane.

We know that we are the only country where the moral obscenity known as ‘medical debt’ exists, routinely wiping out life savings. That we are the only country where badly injured people will sometimes beg people who come to their aid to not call an ambulance — because they can’t afford one. We know that we are the only country where major healthcare institutions, being nominally ‘insurance’ companies, are purposely structured to deny as much service as they can get away with so the money can go in their pockets instead of toward a medically necessary surgery. We can be sure that the actions of a soulless cartoon villains like Martin Skhreli are merely a less-artful execution of routine behaviors.

We know that our disastrous healthcare non-system is the world’s most expensive by far, and that it’s not a close call. How can such problems persist? It is easier to understand when we consider that prices of particular drugs, devices, and services can vary dramatically just within one town. Even the most common drugs and even the simplest procedures are subjected to the rent-seeking claims of a phalanx of middlemen. Nobody really knows what anything is ‘supposed’ to cost, to the extent that it’s sometimes difficult to even cook the books because nobody is sure what fraud even looks like in such a bizarrely incoherent context. In a situation like this, obscene sums of money end up where they don’t belong.

If we had a functioning universal healthcare system and China had our non-system, all of our politicians would point to it as proof that China’s backward way of life promotes unfathomably byzantine bureaucracy (and everything that goes with it) over the needs of the people and therefore leads to misery.

Centrists like our friend here, Bill Maher, love to pay the toll to these bad-faith ideological brawlers, because it makes them feel mature, reasonable, and dispassionate. ‘See? I’m not one of those Democrats — the ones who say Trump is literally Hitler! We can have a conversation!’

Trump is as corrupt, cruel, and catastrophic as any president has ever been — but caring about any of that is apparently worthy of mockery. We can only legitimately be angry about what our elected officials and their hangers-on do if they’ve physiologically transformed into Hitler; nothing short of actual Nazism even raises an eyebrow!

Trump is responsible for the only violent transfer of presidential power in American history. The scale and breath of his financial corruption are beyond comprehension. His bizarre, manic behavior has brought many of our historic alliances to the breaking point. The talent of his cabinet is sub-first-world tier (RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary belongs in comedy). He has declared that his interpretation of the Constitution is that it allows him “to do anything he wants.” He used the occasion of a memorial service to declare that he hates his enemies and wants bad things to happen to them.

And he has a sublime talent for making Americans hate each other. In 2015, Trump found before his eyes a civic dumpster fire — and he proceeded to pour gasoline all over it. The perpetual avalanche of propaganda over the last decade, originating straight from the criminal conman clown himself, has resulted in tens of millions of Americans captive to Trump’s personally-customized alternative reality. The beliefs he commands his apologists to adopt amount to brainwashing, not mere bad ideology.

A reasonable person from 2014 would hear a description of American politics in 2026 and surely conclude that the apocalypse had arrived. And we got here thanks to Trump.

But sure, at least he’s not “literally Hitler.”

Harris spent the last two weeks of the presidential campaign making appearances with George W. Bush’s vice-president’s daughter and denouncing Trump as an anti-Latino racist for the 847,824,629th time, over an off-color joke made by one of his associates. She did meet with Arab activists in Michigan, contrary to popular belief...but they were infrequent, brief, private meetings that resulted in only lip service. She might as well not have bothered.

This is objectively political malpractice. I don’t know where the center-left got the idea that the electorate is overflowing with #NeverTrump Republicans, but anyone who cared what Liz Cheney had to say was already voting for Harris! Leaving up to 100,000 votes on the table that came from people who bothered to show up to your party’s uncontested primary specifically to not vote for anyone, for the purpose of signaling that they needed more from the nominee — this comes perilously close to willful, conscious self-sabotage.

More to the point: she lost. She chased an increasingly imaginary ‘independent center’ in a winnable race and — it didn’t work. If she *did appeal to Uncommitted in 2024 and went on to lose, you can be sure that the center-left would have pointed to that failure as proof that criticizing Israel is anathema to winning a general election. All I’m asking is that the same standard be held to the center-left!

Their exhortations about the radioactivity of the word ‘socialism’ are out-of-date. I’m not saying that because I would like it to be true or untrue, but because the evidence supports it:

• 44% of respondents said, in a binary choice, that socialism would be bad for the country ... but 40% said it would be good. That’s not radioactive: that’s within the margin of error

• Although both fare poorly, socialists edge out Trump/MAGA on both sides of at least one electability measure: 32% say they’d be more likely to vote for a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, with only 29% saying the same of a Trump-endorsed candidate. As well, 50% say the socialist label would make them less likely to vote for a candidate, but 52% say the same of a Trump-endorsed candidate. That looks like a competition, not a blowout against the socialists

‘Socialism’ is a peculiar word in an American context, since no socialist movement ever really took off in the United States that allows us to think about it in concrete historical terms (psst...blame/credit John Locke!). Ask 100 different Americans what ‘socialism’ is and you’ll get 100 different answers. I’m a social democrat, not a democratic socialist, but I’d answer Yes to the poll question to send a signal against the propaganda campaign against people like Mamdani, who are ultimately liberal reformers who want to make capitalism work for the many.

People are disgusted with politics right now. No party or faction is very popular with the general public, actually. But at least for now, the self-proclaimed democratic socialists aren’t faring any worse than anyone else. At least that’s what the CNBC poll says.

Contrary to the article though, no, it will not calm the nerves of the Schumer-Jeffries-Stevens Democrats. They aren’t afraid of progressives losing: they’re afraid of them winning.

Harris spent the last two weeks of the presidential campaign making appearances with George W. Bush’s vice-president’s daughter and denouncing Trump as an anti-Latino racist for the 847,824,629th time, over an off-color joke made by one of his associates. She did meet with Arab activists in Michigan, contrary to popular belief...but they were infrequent, brief, private meetings that resulted in only lip service. She might as well not have bothered.

This is objectively political malpractice. I don’t know where the center-left got the idea that the electorate is overflowing with #NeverTrump Republicans, but anyone who cared what Liz Cheney had to say was already voting for Harris! Leaving 100,000 votes on the table that came from people who bothered to show up to your party’s uncontested primary specifically to not vote for anyone, for the purpose of signaling that they needed more from the nominee — this comes perilously close to willful, conscious self-sabotage.

More to the point: she lost. She chased an increasingly imaginary ‘independent center’ in a winnable race and — it didn’t work. If she did appeal to Uncommitted in 2024 and went on to lose, you can be sure that the center-left would have pointed to that failure as proof that criticizing Israel is anathema to winning a general election. All I’m asking is that the same standard be held to the center-left.