Have you ever heard of Daryl Davis?

Davis is a black musician known for seeking out and befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. After finally making a friendship with a black person, dozens of Klansmen decided to hang up their robes. Davis even keeps them in his home as a reminder of his success changing hearts and minds.

(Full disclosure: I’ve met Davis and we served on a board of advisors of a nonprofit together once.)

Davis’s origin story — how he fell into becoming a full-time Klan de-brainwasher — is set in an all-white music venue he performed at in Maryland back in 1983.

Entranced by Davis’s music, a white man approached him and said, “I really like y’all’s music. This is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.”

Davis informed the man that Lewis, a rock ‘n’ roll legend, was in fact inspired by black musicians himself.

Although the white man was unconvinced by Davis’s explanation, he decided to have a drink with him. That’s when he explained that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Imagine that: a Klansman who so enjoyed a black man’s music that he sat down and had a polite outing with him.

I think about this story when I watched the latest culture war erupt over the Super Bowl. Even something as trivial as a Halftime Show turned into a ritual of Red vs. Blue.

Most Americans, and presumably most of the Blue Tribe, watched the official Halftime Show, featuring Puerto Rican performer Bad Bunny. But some members of the Red Tribe rallied behind counterprogramming put on by the right-wing activist group Turning Point USA (their show was called “The ALL-AMERICAN Halftime Show.”)

The counterprogramming was spurred by the perception that having Bad Bunny — a Latino artist who has made no secret of the fact that he isn’t a big fan of Donald Trump’s immigration policies — was somehow diverting from mainstream American culture, which TPUSA sees itself as shepherding.

Some Republican Members of Congress even want there to be a federal investigation into Bad Bunny, while pundit Megyn Kelly protested the fact that so much of the Halftime Show was in Spanish instead of English:

Who gives a damn that we have 40 million Spanish speakers? We have 310 million who don’t speak a lick of Spanish! This is supposed to be a unifying event for the country. Not for the Latinos.

Missing the melting pot in the room

The problem with all these arguments about Bad Bunny vs. Kid Rock or how our entertainment should either be in English or Spanish is how divorced they are from the actual world of music.

Music has always served as one of America’s ultimate forms of melting pots. Kid Rock himself plays a guitar — an instrument whose predecessor was first developed in North Africa and whose modern form was pioneered in Spain.

Yes, Spanish-speaking Spain gifted the modern world the guitar. Everyone from the Beatles to Kid Rock can thank the Spaniards for the musical talents that made them household names. And if you look at the kind of music that Americans have gravitated towards, we have hardly been limited to the Anglosphere.

If you look at today’s Billboard Hot 100, which serves as a repository for the week’s top songs, you’ll find a list as diverse as the United Nations: Bad Bunny is one of the nation’s most listened to artists, but so are Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, and the Korean folks who have been driving every parent in the country crazy with their single from KPop Demon Hunters.

(Kid Rock is nowhere in the top 100, for what it’s worth.)

Mind you, these are the top tracks in the United States, not globally. The kind of music that Americans like to listen to spans a wide range of cultures and languages. While Kelly may have the image in her mind of an America that’s still culturally aligned with Green Acres, that’s just not the kind of country that we live in anymore.

I know that’s scary for a lot of people because when things around you change you often feel like you’ve lost something. Human beings are social creatures, and we grow attached to our environments.

I don’t think rubbing into the faces of old white folks like Kelly and those older than her (basically: Donald Trump’s base) that the future of America will look totally different than what they grew up in is a very savvy move. That’s just kicking someone while they’re down.

The alternative I would suggest is just to draw skeptics into accepting diversity by pointing out that it has a lot of benefits. I mean, go and watch Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show. I don’t speak Spanish, and yet I have to admit that it was a banger.

I play guitar myself, and that means that I owe my own small musical talents to a diverse etymology. I’m playing a Spanish-Moorish instrument and picking up songs from a wide range of cultures.

The tunes I’ve learned come from cultures far removed from my own, and yet I don’t feel like I appreciate them any less. They include:

• Aberdeen, a folk song written by Avi Kaplan, a Jewish American of Ukrainian and Russian family background.

• Last of My Kind, a country song written and performed in part by Shaboozey, an artist whose parents are from Nigeria. (Here’s a joke I made on TikTok after learning it.)

• A whole lot of stuff by First Aid Kit, an indie band that hails from Sweden.

Something you have to remember about human languages is that they’re just an attempt at getting across what we believe and what we feel. Music is another way to do so. And it transcends barriers like parochial languages, national borders, and political beliefs.

Music is the ultimate American melting pot, and this is a country more than big enough for both Bad Bunny and Kid Rock.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is remaking the government’s approach to autism, the neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts as many of 3 percent of American children.

In a sweeping move announced earlier this week, the HHS announced the appointment of 19 new members to what’s called the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, or IACC.

“The intention of this committee to advise the [National Institutes of Health] on how to spend autism research dollars — set priorities for research funding,” explained Amy Lutz, an historian of disability at the University of Pennsylvania who has written multiple books about autism and disabilities and has a minimally speaking autistic son herself.

The IACC has been around for two decades and has played a key role in helping guide autism research policy for the United States. If someone wanted to completely change the federal government’s approach to autism, there would be few places worse to start than the IACC.

And if the members named to the committee this week are any indication, RFK Jr.’s approach will radically differ from the mainstream. For one, it seems to offer a wholehearted embrace of controversial pseudoscientific communications method that advocates claim has transformed the lives of profoundly autistic people but which has also been tied to some of the most abusive cases in autistic treatment history.

A miracle technology that lets profoundly autistic people learn calculus in a day

Last year, RFK Jr. came under fire from some autism advocates for describing some autistic individuals as suffering so profoundly that they “will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

While Kennedy’s statement may have been hyperbolic, it is true that some people on the severe end of the autism spectrum — who typically cannot speak on their own or only repeat a few words at best — are so profoundly intellectually disabled that they cannot do these tasks.

These nonverbal autistic people usually require lifelong assistance of some kind.

You can hardly blame Kennedy, then, for aggressively searching not only for a cure for autism but also a way to help these nonverbal autistic people communicate.

Kennedy and his foundation, the Children’s Defense Fund, believed they had happened upon such a miracle cure a few years ago.

They helped promote a documentary called Spellers, a high production value film that can now be viewed on YouTube for free.

The premise of Spellers is simple. For years, the world has written off nonverbal autistic people as intellectually disabled. But maybe they are not suffering from an intellectual disability at all — maybe the thoughts inside their heads are no different than anyone else’s.

The key to unlocking those thoughts is handing these nonverbal individuals letter boards where they can slowly spell out their thoughts. Through techniques called , Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) or Spelling 2 Communicate (S2C) facilitators help these individuals, usually referred to as spellers, spell out their thoughts.

In RFK Jr.’s mind, these facilitated messages are nothing short of miraculous.

JB Handley, a former private executive and one of the co-producers and stars of Spellers, joined RFK Jr. for a virtual book event back in 2021.

Handley, whose son is nonverbal and uses S2C, regaled RFK Jr. with the story of how his son, who was written off as intellectually disabled, was actually brilliant once taught how to spell out his thoughts.

“He learned to do calculus and essentially a day and his calculus teacher said I can’t teach him anymore,” Handley told Kennedy. You need a college level teacher because he’s too fast.”

He also told the Kennedy scion that his son picked up foreign languages through osmosis. Kennedy sat transfixed, not questioning a word of it.

In the world of spelling, such stories are not uncommon. The image above comes from the Instagram of Marie Myung-Ok Lee, a novelist and Columbia who along with her fellow Ivy League husband picked up spelling as a way to help their son Jason communicate.

Things went from doctors telling her that her son had an IQ of just 40 to him writing complex essays and even auditing college classes. All thanks to a letterboard.

(If you want to see what spelling with Jason looked like, watch this video his mother posted on Instagram.)

Thanks to RFK Jr., advocates for spelling now populate the IACC and will have a deep influence on how the government supports this method with taxpayer dollars.

The committee includes several prominent spelling advocates and practitioners like Katie Sweeney and Krystal Higgins. It also includes several nonspeaking adults like Caden Larson and Elizabeth Bonker, who were featured in Spellers. (A previous iteration of the IACC did include one speller as well.)

To advocates for spelling, this is a breakthrough moment. The federal government is finally putting its weight behind communications methods that they believe can unlock an entire world for nonverbal autistic people — prove to Americans that they are just as intelligent as anyone else.

But these methods have long alarmed autism researchers and advocates, who point to an obscure but important history.

(Although this is not the focus of this article, it should be noted that RFK Jr. also elevated vaccine skeptics to serve on the IACC.)

Does spelling unlock the mind of the autistic person or the facilitator?

The letterboards that the spellers use find their origin in a technique called facilitated communication (FC).

In the latter half of the 20th century, a group of educators and therapists who worked with nonverbal children decided to help them type out their thoughts instead. The practice was popularized in Australia and soon made its way across the Pacific Ocean to the United States.

One of the FC practitioners who leapt head-first into the practice was named Janyce Boynton.

One day she was working with a student named Betsy Wheaton, whose story was later captured in the Frontline documentary “Prisoners of Silence.”

As she helped Wheaton type out her thoughts, she was horrified. She noticed that Betsy was acting out more and more, including with physical violence.

Boynton began to worry that Wheaton was being abused at home. And sure enough, she began to type out messages confirming those fears — accusing her entire family of sexually abusing her.

Betsy and her brother were removed from the family by the local authorities while they investigated.

But her parents denied the allegations and hired an expert, Dr. Howard Shane of Boston Children’s Hospital, to try to debunk the messages Betsy had been writing.

He came up with what’s called a “double-blind” exam to test the authenticity of the messages.

The test was simple: Betsy and her facilitator would be shown a series of objects. When they were shown different objects, we could see if Betsy, with the aid of her facilitator, would type out the picture she saw or the one her facilitator saw.

When Boynton participated in the test, she realized she couldn’t get the answers right when she didn’t see the object that the evaluator showed only to Betsy. It was that day that her faith in the process crumbled, as she wrote in her journal article years later:

I felt such devastation, panic, pain, loneliness—a myriad of emotions difficult to put into words. The whole FC thing unraveled for me that day, and I did not have an explanation for any of it. Almost immediately, I started rationalizing away the truth. Though it was not true, I went away from the testing telling myself that the situation had been hostile, the evaluator had been hostile, everyone had turned against me. Incredibly, I even tried facilitating with the child in the week or two after the testing, resulting in more outrageous and false allegations. The parents, understandably, asked that I no longer work with the child. I felt tremendous loss.

The Wheatons were reunited and Boynton turned against the practice of FC. The double-blind tests that Shane had used in her case became commonplace in studies of FC. To this day, there is not one scientific study that has validated its use. In every study, facilitators and their clients failed the double-blind testing — with researchers coming to the conclusion that it was the facilitators who were actually authoring the messages.

Researchers by and large did not come to the conclusion that the facilitators were acting in bad faith. Instead, they pointed to something called the ideomotor effect, a psychological process where people involuntarily move their bodies in response to their thoughts. The effect could explain not only why facilitators were unwittingly authoring these messages but also how people operate devices like Ouija boards.

In the years since the wave of debunking studies in the 1990s, FC has largely fallen out of favor. But new variations of a facilitator using a letterboard, like RPM and S2C, continue to proliferate.

There are differences between these newer methods and FC; FC practitioners generally touched the client and guided their hands or shoulders. Under RPM and S2C, practitioners typically hold up a letterboard instead.

But the danger of prompting and guiding students to type is still there, which is why American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and every mainstream autism organization opposes the use of spelling. Instead, they encourage the use of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices.

There are a range of AAC techniques and devices that nonverbal people have used to communicate. These can include writing, drawing, using gestures or facial expressions, pointing to pictures, or using apps on a tablet.

But advocates for spelling find these methods to be frustrating. They do not produce complex essays or treatises like what we’ve seen from spellers. Yet to this day, RPM and S2C techniques have never passed the simple test that Shane devised.

The dangers of government-backed spelling

But isn’t spelling worth investing in, even if it hasn’t been scientifically proven to work?

The problem, argues the mainstream autism community, is that if we can’t verify that spellers’ words are their own, we open up the possibility of abuse.

These include the case of a professor who molested a young man who she believed was spelling out his consent and a mother who murdered her child after she believed that he wanted to commit suicide.

The possibility of falsely gaining someone’s consent also raises a gamut of deep moral and ethical questions: Should someone be allowed to vote through the use of a facilitator who is helping them type out their thoughts? Should they be able to give consent for marriage? Can they write their own wills?

“These appointments contribute to the normalizing non-speaking autistics as having intact language and literacy skills—which not only conflicts with the evidence but negates the best practices and therapies that this extremely vulnerable group depends on,” Katharine Beals, an autism researcher at Drexel University and the mother of an autistic child herself, told me.

The worry for much of the mainstream autism community is that these appointments will steer the federal government towards supporting unproven communications techniques while starving legitimate research of funding.

"The concern is that we’ll be taking hundreds of millions of dollars and basically incinerating it in pursuit of completely unscientific alternative therapies and already debunked theories of autism causation,” Lutz said.

Lutz is the mother of a nonverbal child herself. The issue is deeply personal for her.

“At the profound end of the spectrum where my family is, our kids are in desperate need of better interventions, long term supports and services,” she said.

In 2011, Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared on CNBC, where he was asked about a then-obscure Chinese company called BYD (which is an acronym for Build Your Dreams).

“They’re ramping up production of their electric vehicles,” the host told Musk.

The South African-born entrepreneur laughed.

“Why do you laugh?” she responded.

“Have you seen their car?” he carried on, grinning from ear to ear.

“You don’t see them at all as a competitor?” she asked.

“I don’t think they have a great product…I don’t think it’s particularly attractive. The technology is not very strong,” he told her with an arrogant tone.

In 2024, BYD surpassed Tesla in total revenue.

Last year, they surpassed Tesla in total electric vehicles sold globally.

And that’s not the end of the bad news for Tesla and Musk.

The Canadians just announced that they’d be reducing their 100% tariff on Chinese cars to single digits, all but guaranteeing that the country will be flooded with Chinese automobiles. And there’s a lot of reason to think the Canadians will bite.

Tesla’s sales have been plummeting across the world, with a particularly sharp dive in Europe — registrations were down 71% in Sweden and 66% in France year over year.

The company is laying off more than 1,000 workers in Germany, a fact disclosed by the local workers’ council.

The reason for these sales declines can be debated, but they are occurring as Chinese EV sales are seeing massive growth, especially in Europe. We aren’t seeing a broader decline in EV registrations at the same level as what is happening to Tesla, and it’s obvious why.

Musk has become one of the world’s most polarizing billionaires by attaching himself to far-right politics from the United States to Germany. The days where Musk cozied up to presidents Democratic and Republican alike (like most CEOs) are over. Today, he spends his days telling us that white people are so persecuted they are on the verge of being slaughtered en masse if they become a minority in the United States (Elon apparently never goes outside in Texas, where he lives, where white people are already a minority.)

It would be easy, however, to blame Musk’s increasing embrace of extremist politics as the sole reason for the company’s sudden failures.

There’s also the greed.

Earlier this year, Musk announced that Tesla would no longer be offering their Full Self-Driving (Supervised) [FSD] service as a one-time purchase. Instead, the company will require you to subscribe month to month if you want to use the autonomous technology.

Uptake of these subscriptions has been very low, despite all of the hype Musk has put out there into the world about how amazing FSD is.

(If you want a laugh, read this Wikipedia article about all the false claims Musk has made about when FSD will finally be finished and what it is capable of.)

So the company just announced that they would be removing Autopilot from cars that are newly sold. Autopilot has long been a free feature in Tesla cars. It combines basic lane centering with traffic-aware cruise control. It is not only a basic feature on Tesla cars, it’s a basic feature on each of Tesla’s competitors. It lets you let the car drive itself, within the confines of one lane, safely on the highway. When I owned a Tesla, I probably used Autopilot for dozens of hours. I use the equivalent technology on the competitor EV I use today. It doesn’t cost me a dime.

By removing Autopilot, Musk is essentially making his smart car dumber than a Toyota Corolla you could buy ten years ago. He’s also making it more unsafe. These sorts of highway driving systems reduce fatigue and help avoid deadly driver errors. Now, you will only be able to get any self-driving aides by paying Musk $99 a month for an FSD subscription.

Rather than improving the service or lowering the price, Musk is simply using his market power to coerce his consumers to give him more money. One reason why he might want to boost FSD subscriptions is that his trillion dollar pay package is tied to the goal of achieving a certain number of subscriptions. We now know that safety and value matter far less to him than getting even more obscenely rich.

All across social media, EV enthusiasts are swearing to never buy another Tesla. And if the West continues to go in the direction of Canada, they may make good on their promise. The EVs coming out of China have been wowing consumers who have access to them for years. Even Ford’s American CEO decided to daily drive a Chinese EV.

It now looks like China is poised to take over the automotive industry in the same way the Japanese did with the rise of giants Honda and Toyota. The U.S. auto industry will continue to shrink, and Tesla will become a niche brand rather than a market leader.

It didn’t have to be this way, but it seems like we here in America put all our eggs in the Tesla basket; other American automakers did not have Musk’s wisdom of investing early and big in electric vehicles.

But now that Musk’s wisdom has given way to insanity, prepare to live in an automotive world where Beijing calls the shots.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day brings with it spirited debates about what the late civil rights leader believed. King is for many Americans a sort of prophetic figure; people across the political spectrum invoke his name to argue for sometimes diametrically opposed ideas. That’s because respect for the man is so wide and deep in American society that arguing he was actually on your side of a contentious argument could be a debate winner.

With that being said, I have to admit that I do think that King was on my side of a very thorny debate: like me, he believed that race as a social category should eventually fade away.

In a little-known 1961 document preserved at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, King explained what he believed the future would look like if the civil rights movement succeeded.

The text, titled “After Desegregation—What,” serves as a window into King’s mind. He argued that the goal wasn’t so much desegregation — tearing down barriers between white and black residents — but integration.

What did integration look like, in King’s view?

He wrote that once “the laws between them have been struck down, both Negroes and Whites will need to win friends across the invisible, though nonetheless real, psychological color line.”

Achieving that meant not only ending the practices of whites-only establishments but approaching minority spaces in the same way.

“The question remains," he wrote, "will Negroes generally find it as easy to give up their own prejudices as it is now to demand their rights of others? Will the same forthrightness be shown in admitting whites to Negro clubs, fraternities and other voluntary associations that is now being shown in pressing for admittance to restaurants and theaters.”

He hoped that integration would not only remove the barriers that held African Americans back but also eliminate racial thinking altogether.

“As the color differential fades,” he wrote, “so will the racial point of view. Less and less will it be possible to speak with accuracy of Negro newspapers, Negro churches or the Negro vote. More and more, economic, social, and professional status will be more decisive in determining a man’s orientation than the color of his skin.”

It’s important to note that King did not believe that America could go from slave state to apartheid state to colorblind overnight. Importantly, he saw integration and the elimination of the “racial point of view” as the outcome of the “color differential” in society fading away. There’s still tremendous work to do to make sure we reach that point in American society — expanding opportunity to every community in America and continuing to reduce prejudice are ongoing projects.

But I think it’s important to remember what MLK viewed as his North Star and make sure that the cultural and political elites who invoke his name so frequently make it theirs as well. Achieving King’s dream means eventually transcending race, not reifying it.

During the summer of 2024, Somali American businessman Salman Fiqy stood behind a presidential candidate as that candidate laid out their vision for America before an enormous rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

That candidate was not former Vice President Kamala Harris, who led the party’s presidential ticket last year. Instead, Fiqy had decided to throw his support behind former President Donald Trump.

Fiqy told me in an interview that some he found himself aligned with GOP values that year.

“We tend to be conservative in our way of thinking,” Fiqy told me in an interview. “And some of those conservative values are aligned with the Republican Party.”

He was also heartened by the possibility of changing the GOP from the inside.

“There was no representation within the Republican Party from the Somali community, specifically,” he said, arguing that they needed a seat at the table.

But a few weeks ago, as the news of the prosecution of a group of Somali Americans for welfare fraud went nationwide, Fiqy and other Somalis who had voted for Trump found themselves all being painted with a broad brush by the very man they had supported.

Trump called Somalis writ large “garbage,” arguing that they should be removed from the United States.

The turn of events was demoralizing for Fiqy, who was quick to condemn the fraud — he, of course, is a taxpayer himself.

“Whoever did the fraud…he deserves to be prosecuted and serve time for his crime,” he told me.

But he objected to negatively characterizing an entire ethnic community by the acts of a few. Trump’s comments depressed him.

(To add insult to injury, Trump pardoned a convicted mega-fraudster at around the same time he was insulting all Somalis.)

Fiqy told me that he still sees himself as conservative, despite Trump’s attacks.

“I continue to see things through a conservative lens. There’s many Somalis or Muslims that actually share that mindset as well,” he admitted.

But it would be hard for him to continue to support a party that demonizes him based off his ethnic origin.

“[The Republicans] actually succeeded in the 2024 campaign to attract many Muslims into their ranks as base voters, voter blocs. And I think gradually they’re losing that crowd and I think within the coming cycle…they cannot count on those voters,” he concluded.

Fiqy’s case is not an isolated one.

Recall that Trump assembled a diverse coalition in 2024, powering the GOP to decades-high support from Latinos and African Americans, as well as other minority groups. Without this minority support, Trump would never have returned to the White House.

Many liberal commentators were confused about why a man who started his presidential aspirations by accusing Mexicans of conspiring to send rapists into the United States was able to assemble such a broad coalition. But you have to remember that we live in a country with two major parties; if one screws up badly enough and alienates you, the only option is to really vote for the other one.

Minorities are Americans like everyone else, and when inflation eats into their pocketbooks, the border is out of control, and wars seem to go on without end, their votes are up for grabs; even a jerk like Trump can win them over.

It reminds me of a quote from the documentary The Square, about the Egyptian uprisings during the Arab Spring. A woman is quoted as saying she’d vote for anyone to fix the mess they were in, “even a Jew” (antisemitism is widespread in Egypt). Prejudices come secondary to putting food on the table.

Yet a year later, Trump’s minority support is now “drifting away,” in the words of one major newspaper. His approval ratings with African Americans and Latinos are in the dumps. A big part of the reason for that is that Trump has not meaningfully improved the lives of Americans. Life continues to be unaffordable for many.

Trump’s poor character and liberal use of prejudice as a political weapon could be excusable if he was accomplishing great things for Americans; but it increasingly looks as if his presidency is about accomplishing little to nothing for most of the country.

It’s like telling an offensive joke. If the joke is funny, people can commit the offense. But if you’re not funny, you’re just offensive. To many of the voters who backed him last year, Trump is now just offensive, nothing more, nothing less.

For a while there, it seemed like virtually everything was racist.

National parks, the term “Master Bedroom,” even your pet dog might be racist.

It would be convenient to blame this fixation on the fringes of American society — Tumblr pages and X Studies professors at liberal arts colleges — but the truth is that ludicrous accusations of racism and sexism were mainstreamed by some of the most powerful people in the country.

It was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of all people, who campaigned on “intersectionality,” warning that the legion of Bernie Sanders supporters — who her clique derided as “Bernie Bros” — failed to understand that breaking up big banks wouldn’t “end racism” (what policy would end racism, what are we even talking about?).

The constant use of race and gender to deflect from political disagreements by the Democratic elite became a mainstay of the party sometime in the 2010s, but following Trump’s re-election in 2024, there was a brief window where many of us had hoped that we could return to political sanity.

Yes, there’s plenty of prejudice in American politics. But that doesn’t mean that anyone who criticizes a politician who happens to be a woman or ethnic minority is motivated by prejudice; and those politicians should not be above criticism.

What I just said is common sense to most Americans. But among Democratic primary voters — who happen to be a small subset of Americans — there is still an active debate about whether you should be willing to openly discuss a minority or female candidate for office’s flaws lest you unwittingly hand ammunition to bigots on the right.

We’re witnessing that debate play out after Texas Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett threw her hat into the ring, joining the party’s Senate primary in that state ahead of the 2026 race.

Crockett decided to open her bid in a characteristically Crockett way. The video featured Crockett standing there as audio of Trump insulting her is played. Not once does the video talk about any public policy issue or even the state where she is running: Texas.

This is characteristic for Crockett because her short tenure in Congress has largely been about self-promotion. She’s a phenom on Tiktok and Instagram, known for her clapbacks and sassy interviews. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that her phone lock screen is just a headshot of herself.

What you won’t find much of from her, however, is substance. She barely talks about her own state, and she has a razor-thin interest in actual lawmaking. The University of Virginia’s Center for Effective Lawmaking ranks her at 155 out of 220 House Democrats in terms of how legislatively effective she is.

She pairs this lack of substance with a type of grating attitude towards her political opponents that is likely to be an anchor around her neck in a general election. When Latinos shifted to the right during the 2024 election, Crockett chose not to empathize with them about issues like cost of living or chaos at the border. Instead, she said they exhibited a “slave mentality.” Acerbic comments about race have become her bread and butter, pleasing to Internet liberals but making her look quite eccentric to everyone else.

But she doesn’t seem very worried about that. In an interview with CNN the day she announced her bid, Crockett was dismissive of the need to win over Trump voters. This is in a state that voted for Trump in 2024 by 14 points.

It’s no surprise, then, that Crockett’s numbers in Texas have been consistently awful. Whether she’s up against the incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn — or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who seeks to remove him in a primary — she will almost certainly lose the race. That doesn’t mean that state lawmaker James Talarico would win — it’s an uphill battle either way.

But losing in an absolute landslide would have devastating effects on the party downballot. Democrats across Texas are trying to build power in state and local government; putting a toxic candidate at the top of the ticket would demolish their efforts.

It’s hard to argue against any of this based on the merits of the candidate alone. Which is why you’re already seeing her supporters on social media lecture us that raising any of these points is “racist.” We’re treating her with a double standard because she’s unapologetically a black woman, right?

I’m wondering if people who are starting to put forward this argument — which I suspect will only escalate in the days to come — are even familiar with Alicia Johnson here in Georgia.

Alicia Johnson was just elected to the Public Service Commission in a landslide election that took place last month. She is the first black woman I can remember to ever win a statewide race in Georgia for a state office in Georgia (Kamala Harris won as Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020).

Unlike Crockett, Johnson barely engaged in any self-promotion. She didn’t make racial attacks a cornerstone of her identity, and she never attacked Georgia voters the same way Crockett has attacked Latinos who voted for Trump (this is a massive group in Texas).

Her message was very simple. Is your electric bill too high? Then vote for me. And Georgians did.

Criticizing a bad candidate who happens to also be black is not racist. Yes, there is all kinds of racist invective that will likely come her way because politics is a bit of a cesspool right now, particularly on the GOP side. I would not be surprised if Trump shoots himself in the foot many times during this race.

But that doesn’t change the fundamental fact that Crockett is a weak candidate for this seat and will likely cost the Democratic Party dearly. And I don’t see any reason why Democrats should be afraid to say that.

Not wanting to lose an election is not racist.

Earlier this month, a group of Democratic elected officials, all of them military or intelligence veterans, recorded a video urging members of the military to disobey illegal orders. They were referring largely to the deployment of the military in U.S. cities, but one of the electeds, Colorado’s Jason Crow, has been adamantly against strikes against suspected drug smugglers.

What the lawmakers said shouldn’t be controversial. The U.S. military has a robust set of laws it operates under; you have no obligation to follow an illegal order.

But the backlash from the Trump administration has been severe. President Trump took to social media to imply that the lawmakers were committing sedition or treason; there are now burgeoning efforts to have the FBI interview the lawmakers ahead of possible prosecution.

All of this is legally ridiculous, of course. Simply restating the law isn’t treason and it isn’t sedition.

This came days before the Washington Post reported that the Secretary of Defense (I’m sorry, the Secretary of War) ordered Navy SEALs to finish killing off a group of sailors who the government suspected were carrying drugs; the initial aerial strike did not kill the group and Hegseth wanted them eliminated.

If you ask any group of military lawyers about this, they’d say at the very least it was legally suspect; at the most, it means Hegseth was ordering those men to commit a crime. Given that there is no actual declared war between suspected drug smugglers and the U.S. military, it wouldn’t even be a war crime — it might just be murder.

Democratic officials can certainly continue to make videos about why this is all problematic. But there’s a better and easier way to put an end to all of the summary executions happening in the oceans and any other abuses at every level of the Trump administration.

The Democratic Party can simply make clear that it believes in the rule of law. And there is no rule of law without accountability. Democrats in Congress can promise to fully investigate any possible violations of the law; presidential contenders can promise to appoint people to the Department of Justice who believe that nobody is above the law.

This could mean that Hegseth or even Trump will one day be prosecuted for ordering these crimes. It’s rare that anyone other than ground-level grunts — think, the soldiers at Abu Ghraib — are ever prosecuted for war crimes. Trump himself seems to have completely dodged most of his criminal cases.

But fundamentally these Trump officials are self-interested. If they think there’s a serious chance that they will be in legal trouble or end up behind bars, I imagine you’ll start seeing much more cautious use of the U.S. military, a tool that should be used as a last resort against lethal enemies, not as a first resort to soothe the ego of a nihilistic cabinet secretary.

Georgia Democrats got a bit of a second wind earlier this month as the two candidates they backed for Public Service Commission (PSC) — which regulates the state’s powerful utilities — coasted to victory.

It was the first statewide win for state offices in around 20 years, allowing the party to spring back after a disappointing 2024 election.

But the PSC candidates had something that many recent Georgia Democratic campaigns did not have.

Here’s an example of one of the signs the Democrats in the state used as part of their campaign:

What Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard, the progressive candidates in this race, had was a simple policy message — vote for us because your power bill is too high.

For years, the state party was dominated by former House Democratic leader Stacey Abrams, who was not shy about predicting that one day she would be the President of the United States. Abrams’s campaigns were largely focused on her own biography and personage; if you liked her, great; but if you didn’t, you didn’t.

Ask five Georgians what she actually proposed or stood for, and you’ll get five wildly different answers because her campaigns were so light on policy.

It’s long been conventional wisdom in politics that voters don’t care about public policy, but I’d have to disagree. Sure, your average voter is not thumbing through policy white papers like Elizabeth Warren’s doomed 2020 presidential campaign.

People are too busy to do that, and most folks are not policy experts.

Yet, they still want to make sure the people they’re voting for will do something for them. Abrams’s problem was that she came to be known (with some justification) as using the state of Georgia as a steppingstone to her greater ambitions.

What Georgia Democrats showed in the PSC race is that they can win if they can prove that they’re putting Georgia First with tangible solutions to the problems created by the GOP incumbents.

That brings me to Jason Esteves. Esteves, a former state senator who is one of many candidates running for the Democratic nomination for Governor, today put out a proposal for universal childcare for all Georgian kids.

The plan would use current Georgia Lottery reserves to offer universal pre-k to all three- and four-year olds; the goal would be to get to universal child care access for all kids in Georgia by 2035 (if elected, Esteves would take office in 2027).

“As the son of two hardworking parents, the father of two young children, and a former educator, I’ve seen how access to quality, affordable early learning programs can be life-changing for kids and their families,” Esteves said in a statement. “My universal child care plan will tackle the affordability crisis here in Georgia while ensuring every child — no matter who they are or where they live — gets a fair shot.”

Georgia history buffs may see echoes in former Democratic governor Zell Miller’s tenure as the chief executive in Atlanta. Miller made rejuvenating the state’s education system a cornerstone of his tenure; expansive access to pre-K and the tuition-free HOPE Scholarship helped make Miller among the most popular governors in Georgia’s history.

Can Esteves ride this issue to success? There’s some evidence that we’re going through a sort of childcare policy renaissance. From New Mexico to New York City, Democratic officials are pushing hard to get all parents access to childcare. And Georgia has seen its share of rising childcare costs.

But to make this policy pitch land, we’ll have to see a lot more unity in messaging and campaigning; the leading Democratic candidates in the race like former Lt. Gov Geoff Duncan and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms have yet to spell out such a vision.

In the next few days, the U.S. House of Representatives will finally vote to disclose the contents of the federal government’s investigation into the late billionaire and alleged child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

It was hard to believe this day would ever come. President Donald Trump, whose name allegedly appears in the investigation in some capacity, has lobbied his party hard against supporting any such release.

He has blocked his administration from unilaterally disclosing the files, and he has put pressure on Congressional Republicans to prevent the passage of bills that would mandate their release.

That’s when California Democrat Ro Khanna, a stalwart progressive from the coast, had the idea of pushing forward a discharge resolution. The way a discharge resolution works is if you get the signatures of the majority of the U.S. House, you can force a vote on pretty much anything.

But you might be wondering how Khanna found success when Democrats don’t control either chamber of Congress. He did so by teaming up with Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, a known libertarian-leaning lawmaker who probably agrees with Khanna on next to nothing.

Yet together, the duo managed to convince every House Democrat and four House Republicans to support the discharge petition. When a newly-elected Democrat was just sworn in, that gave them enough signatures to push forward the petition and force a vote.

The four Republicans who broke with Trump on the Epstein issue all have something in common. Reps. Thomas Massie (KY), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), Nancy Mace (SC), and Lauren Boebert (CO), are all known to march to the beat of their own drums.

They’re considered among the most eccentric members of the House Republican caucus, frequently finding themselves in controversy for their odd duck behavior or beliefs.

In Official Washington — the place I spent a decade of my life working — these kinds of black sheep lawmakers are often looked down upon. They don’t play well with their colleagues, they are obsessed with social media stardom, and they have all kinds of kooky beliefs.

I’ve always been the kind of person willing to stick his neck out and say that in a representative democracy we need at least a few people in office who are willing to march to the beat of their own drum.

I was raked over the coals earlier this year when I wrote in the Washington Post that MTG was earning my respect for being willing to break with Trump on key issues. Thousands of horrified Democrats all but accused me of losing my mind.

And yet without her vote, the petition mandating a vote on Epstein disclosure would never have gotten the necessary support in the House. And really, it takes someone like MTG to be able to defy Trump — your ordinary, by the book Republican thinks the safest thing to do is to keep their head down and bow down before Dear Leader. And they’re probably right!

It’s always fun to look down on outcasts. But every now and then, you need them around.

As George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

In my state of Georgia, the local Democratic Party has been taking losses for 20 years. That’s the last time the party was able to win a statewide, non-federal race (our Senators and former President Biden were the exception, running in nationalized and federal races).

For many Democrats, living in Georgia felt kind of like being a Mariners fan, you were set for perpetual disappointment.

But tonight, that changed. Democrats won both races they competed in for the Public Service Commission, the body that regulates public utilities in Georgia. They even picked up a county or two that went for Trump by double digits during the 2024 election. It was a real race even in my county, which is so deeply red it looks like the Soviet Union’s flag on every electoral map (it is weird that red means communist everywhere in the world except here, right?).

The reason why Democrats were able to break through is because voters in Georgia were outraged about a series of price hikes that it seemed like the Republican incumbents were simply rubber stamping; this was happening as long-delayed projects like Vogle (a local nuclear plant) cost the state more and more money.

And Georgia voters weren’t alone. In pretty much all of tonight’s elections, voters spoke with one voice: they don’t feel like they can afford the good life. And the reason Democrats were able to capitalize on that message is because they ran campaigns about it — emphasizing things like power bill hikes in Georgia and health care and housing costs in places like New York City and Virginia.

The Republicans, on the other hand, were stuck with the unenviable task of defending the Trump administration, which has presided over a decidedly mediocre economy. But some Republicans tried to deflect from the issue altogether.

Virginia Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, a Lt. Gov. who was seeking a promotion to the Governor’s mansion, blanketed the airwaves with ads about transgender sports issues. By one estimate, she spent $30 million attacking the Democrats over transgender issues.

Yet in the end it was a massive flop. Earle-Sears lost the election by double digits.

We’ve heard for years that we are entering an era of post-economic voting. The culture war is all that matters now. People are voting expressively to affirm their identities or put down someone else’s.

While you can’t deny that this is a real factor in politics, it’s simply not true that people don’t care about whether they can put food on the table or afford a roof over their head. In the end, it’s still the economy, stupid.

CORRECTION: The first sentence in this article has been corrected to note the actual number of years since Georgia Democrats won a statewide office in state government. It’s been a long time.

Biden’s former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is out with a new book detailing her time serving the former president.

Although it doesn’t appear to be moving a lot of copies (it sits at #2,428 in Amazon’s Top Sellers list), Jean-Pierre has been doing the media circuit describing her time in the Biden White House, with her major theme being that the country wronged her previous boss.

That might be confusing, given that the title of her book is Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines; she announced earlier this year that she was leaving the Democratic Party. But it has become apparent that the reason she chose to do so is because she felt that the party abandoned Biden, who she does not hold accountable in any way, shape, or form for the election of Donald Trump last year.

Jean-Pierre’s media tour, however, has demonstrated how hard it is to make the case for the thesis that it was Biden — who hid his feeble condition from the world until it was blindingly obvious — who was wronged by the country, rather than the other way around.

Take this exchange with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, who is known to be a quick-witted interviewer.

CHOTINER: I’m just still trying to understand. You argue that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. A lot of people thought that Biden was not the best person to go up against Trump in the summer of 2024—after his debate, with his approval ratings in the basement. Shouldn’t those people have tried to give Democrats the best chance to replace Trump? You’re talking about Biden like loyalty was owed to him. Isn’t loyalty owed to the country?

JEAN-PIERRE: No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not talking about that. I’m saying that this is not how you treat somebody.

Is this a matter of how you treat someone, or a matter of putting the country first?

JEAN-PIERRE: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Treating somebody with dignity is not the same as loyalty. I mean, the way he was treated, I had never . . . if you had seen something like that in the Democratic Party, please, please, point that out.

CHOTINER: So what was an example of the way he was treated?

JEAN-PIERRE: I mean, it was nasty articles that were coming out daily. You should go back and see for yourself. You’re writing the articles, right? You should go back and see for yourself. It was a campaign. It was even reported that it was a campaign.

CHOTINER: So you think asking him to step aside was O.K., but there shouldn’t have been nasty articles?

CHOTINER: Look, what I am saying is it shouldn’t have happened that way.

But it should have happened, or shouldn’t have happened?

JEAN-PIERRE: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I don’t think it should have happened. I believe that we should have done everything that we could, regardless of who was at the top of the ticket, and fought extremely hard. He was the one at the top of the ticket, and so, therefore, I believe we should have fought to make sure that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won. That’s what I believed.

Can you infer any train of logic in this?

Yet none of this is surprising. If you spent any time watching Jean-Pierre at the podium during Biden’s four years, you wouldn’t be surprised at how incoherent and uninformed she could be.

But until recently, basically nobody outside the political right would even acknowledge this. Why is that?

We get one possible answer from another stop during Jean-Pierre’s press tour. In a back-and-forth with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin about Biden’s conduct during the Gaza war, she emphasized her demographic background to filibuster when he asked her about things she said defending Biden’s policies.

MOHYELDIN: Do you have any regrets at all for anything you said while you were speaking on behalf of this administration?

JEAN-PIERRE: I — look, I —

MOHYELDIN: It’s just that, it’s a simple yes or no.

JEAN-PIERRE: No no no, you’re asking for a yes or no question. I want to put some context to it too.

MOHYELDIN: Sure.

JEAN-PIERRE: I woke up every day, very proud to be the White House Press Secretary. I woke up every day, as a black woman who is queer, who — no one had ever seen someone like me at that podium standing behind that lectern. It was an honor and a privilege to have that job. And I did it to the best of my abilities.

Did you guys catch an actual answer there? She didn’t name a single issue where she felt the administration was in the wrong or she herself may have been in the wrong. We did, however, get a statement of pride about being a black queer woman who served as press secretary.

Indeed, many of Jean-Pierre’s defenders point not to her conduct or achievements in that role but the very fact that she exists. Jean-Pierre herself says the word “black” four times in response to one of Chotiner’s questions, repeatedly referencing her ethnicity as a sort of trump card for her debate with him.

This repeated use of race, gender, and sexual orientation to justify an incompetent hire by Biden has given the political right an easy target. In a CNN appearance on Tuesday, Katie Miller (wife of top White House adviser Stephen Miller) cited Jean-Pierre as an example of why “DEI doesn’t work.”

“You want to hire the best for the role, not just best on skin color,” Miller told the panel.

It would be easy for Democrats to argue back: she wasn’t hired or retained due to her skin color, gender, or sexuality. But then you have Jean-Pierre repeatedly citing those things over and over during her press tour, putting them up as an accomplishment in and of themselves, as if it was completely irrelevant whether she was actually good at her job.

While the Millers believe in banning entire nationalities of human beings from the United States — which is its own form of racial preferences — it’s pretty hard for Democrats to argue back against them when they can’t let race as the measure of a human being go themselves.

I spent the better of my life in progressive infrastructure, and I can tell you that diversity is one of the Democratic Party’s core beliefs.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with diversity — teams, for instance, often work better together when there’s a diversity of thought or cultures which helps members see each other’s blind spots.

But Democratic progressives are quick to suggest that factors like race, gender, or sexual orientation should be used to boost candidates for important positions. While racial preferences in things like college admissions and jobs are deeply unpopular among most Americans, they are considered noncontroversial by many progressive elites.

Progressives are quick to say that considering race or gender for hiring or promoting someone does not mean you will get a less qualified candidate. And yet how many progressives did you see over the four years of Biden’s tenure who could just bluntly say that Jean-Pierre was bad at her job?

I would argue that they felt they had to defend her because of exactly what she told Moyheldin: she’s a black queer woman, in fact the very first one to ever take the position. We need to go easy on her because that’s such a monumental task and she broke through a glass ceiling. Joining in the pile on would simply offer ammunition to right-wing racists and sexists who think minorities lack the same competence as white men.

The problem is deploying this argument in defense of a person who is actually incompetent. Jean-Pierre is so obviously a terrible communicator that she should have a hard time getting a job as a communications director for a state legislative campaign, let alone being tasked with defending the President of the United States against the national and international press corps. This isn’t to denigrate her as a person — she seems nice enough, and I’m sure she has genuine skills in some areas. But political communications is not one of them, because she doesn’t understand basic issues nor does she have the skill to navigate difficult questions.

And while progressives think they are fighting back against racism, sexism, and homophobia by circling the wagons around appointees like Jean-Pierre, they’re actually doing the opposite.

The “first” of any group eventually ends up being held up a representative of that group. It is very important that people who are achieving these milestones are competent.

Jackie Robinson, for instance, was both the first black man in the 20th century to become a baseball player in Major League Baseball, and he also happened to be a fantastic baseball player. Imagine what mid-20th century America — deeply racist and deeply suspicious of anyone black — would think about black people if Robinson was held up as an example and he actually…sucked at baseball. If anything, it would’ve been the opposite of the civil rights milestone that Robinson achieved. It would’ve set black people and other minorities back years.

The same goes for Barack Obama. As the first black biracial president, he achieved an incredible milestone for black people and proved the depths of American tolerance. But imagine if he was as poor of a communicator as Jean-Pierre is. He probably wouldn’t be sitting on a nearly 60 percent approval rating. Heck, he wouldn’t have made it out of Iowa, let alone into the White House (we can look to Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign for a counterfactual).

Progressives think they’re helping us by excusing the incompetence of certain minority staffers and politicians who have been tokenized by the Democratic Party.

But they’re actually doing the opposite. They’re handing the racist and nativist elements of the right ammunition to claim that minorities simply lack the competence to compete with white people. If Democrats really want to help minorities, they have to prioritize competence above all else.

Oysterman and Marine veteran Graham Platner launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination in Senate in Maine two short months ago, raising a hefty raising a hefty $3.2 million in the first quarter of his race and scoring endorsements from leading Democratic-aligned populists like Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders and California Congressman Ro Khanna.

“People know that the system is screwing them. They know it in their bones. Nobody I know around here can afford a house. Health care is a disaster, hospitals are closing. We have watched all of that ripped away from us,” he said in a launch video that helped him develop a national following.

For a while it seemed like his campaign was going almost too well. Here was a guy who spoke about taking on the oligarchy and ending overseas wars, making sure everyone has health care and a good job. Maybe he’s finally the outsider who can finally unseat Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins, who has served as the grim reaper for five different unsuccessful Democrats who went up against her in the past.

But in the past week, Platner has been hit with a spree of scandals in recent days that leave many wondering if he is better off just bowing out.

First came a wave of articles about a now-defunct Reddit account he operated where he some years ago he made a series of impolitic comments – from asking why black people don’t tip to suggesting that women should do more to drink responsibly to avoid sexual assault to referring to police as bastards to describing himself as a communist.

That was bad enough. His political director, a former state lawmaker, resigned. Axios reporters began editorializing about how his campaign was melting down.

But then came a bigger crisis. The Platner campaign did an interview with the popular liberal podcast Pod Save America where he claimed that when he was in the armed forces he drunkenly obtained a skull and crossbones tattoo at a Croatian shop.

That’s not so bad, right? A little gauche, maybe, but talk to your local veteran if you think it’s unusual for a Marine to snatch up a tattoo one night because he thought it looked badass.

Well, it turned out the particular skull and crossbones he obtained was one that was associated with the Nazis – one of the SS units even used it.

That’s right, the populist left-wing candidate endorsed by the most popular Jewish politician in America was going around with an actual Nazi tattoo.

Before I write anything further, I should acknowledge that it’s not stupid to think that Platner’s campaign is over. If you ask the average American what they’re looking for in their political candidates, tattoos featuring symbology from the most hated political movement in human history are not at the top of the list.

Even if Platner’s story is true – that the tattoo was an accident because he didn’t recognize what it represents – it’s no doubt a headache for the candidate and his campaign. Combined with his past online comments, he comes across more like a Key and Peele sketch than a savvy politician. In the eyes of critics, he is at best a buffoon and at worst a man who has a hidden sympathy for Naziism.

At the very least, Platner seems to be getting barraged with blows from a competent Democratic opposition research campaigned helmed either by staffers from Democratic Gov. Janet Mill’s campaign – she entered the Senate nomination race just days ago – or the Democratic party’s leadership, which encouraged her to jump into the race. It’s unlikely that these stories are the last we’ve heard about Platner’s past.

And yet despite all this, what Platner needs to realize is that not only is he not finished, it’s possible he can still win the Democratic nomination, unseat Collins, and help rejuvenate the Democratic Party. Here’s why.

The Democratic Party’s major political problem in the United States today is that it has been shedding the votes of working class voters – including, increasingly, working class voters from ethnic and religious minority communities.

Class in the political context is increasingly defined not just by income but by the diploma divide – with college-educated voters and non-college educated voters often living in entirely different social and political environments and voting accordingly.

For instance, it’s well-known that Trump made large gains among Latino voters in 2024, but looking at the class divide is more revealing.

Trump won the votes of 55% of Latino men with no college degree, while making large gains with Latino women without a college degree (winning 40% in 2024 versus just 28% in 2020). As the Brookings Institute later noted, “Among Latinos, the only subgroup that did not bolt from the Democratic fold was college-educated Latino women, who favored Harris 63% to 33%, a 30-point margin identical to the one they gave Biden in 2020.”

While Maine is one of the country’s whitest states, it’s also the only rural-majority state currently run by a Democratic governor. But that doesn’t mean that the class divides seen elsewhere are not starting to take root there.

“Over the last 20+ years, Maine politics has become more like politics in the rest of the state,” explained Mark Brewer, the chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Maine and a long-time politics watcher in the state. “And part of that is involved with Democrats losing ground among these traditional blue collar working class white voters.”

Brewer pointed to Aroostook, the state’s northernmost county.

“It’s heavily white, it’s heavily rural. It’s got a lot of veterans. It’s got a lot of working class voters. Including people who used to hold unionized jobs…those used to be Democratic strongholds not all that long ago,” he said. “Today, that’s Trump country.”

The shedding of working class voters has provoked understandable debate among Democrats. Without a sizable majority in both houses of Congress like former President Barack Obama had, Democrats can’t pass transformational legislation like the Affordable Care Act ever again.

This debate has often focused on public policy – whether Democrats should become more economically populist or whether they should cede more ground on social and cultural issues like guns, abortion, transgenderism, or immigration.

But I would argue that what is just as important as policy is persona.

It has long flummoxed Democrats that Trump, a billionaire who once helmed a television program where he publicly fired people, has developed such a strong connection with America’s working class, to where he trounced them among non-college degree holders in last year’s election without too much of a sweat.

After all, his greatest legislative achievement in both terms was cutting taxes for the richest Americans. His cabinets are a who’s-who of billionaires. And he flies around in a private jet.

But perhaps more than any president we’ve had in a century, Trump talks like a working person. And this can be proven scientifically.

For the past five years, I’ve worked part-time as an educator. One of the tools that educators use to see if a text is appropriate for a student of a certain grade level is called a readability formula. Online readability formulas quickly let you slap a text in and see the readability level.

It also happens to be a fantastic tool to demonstrate how accessible of a communicator Donald Trump is. Using a popular online readability tool, I plugged in Trump’s address to Congress this year. It suggested that he spoke at about an 8^th grade level to the audience. That’s not far from where the average American is.

Let’s compare that to the esoteric language we often hear from progressive Democrats. Take, for instance, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2020 speech to the Democratic National Convention, which denounced “racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia.”

The readability formulas say that this address was appropriate for college graduates.

Whatever you want to say about Trump’s policies, at least he is speaking a language that working class people can understand and relate to.

This brings me back to Platner. Some have pointed out that despite working in a series of blue collar jobs, he’s also the son of a lawyer and he briefly studied at George Washington University. He’s not exactly Tom Joad. But Donald Trump isn’t Cesar Chavez. What helps Trump connect with working people is the way he talks. Platner has the same advantage.

I put the text of Platner’s launch video into the readability formulas and found that his language was aimed at 7^th grade readability – meaning that the broad majority of Americans could understand it, much like Trump’s televised address to Congress and unlike AOC’s maiden DNC address.

But Trump’s strength with working class voters isn’t just that his language is accessible and easily understood. It’s also that he can ignore the mores of a typical politician and speak directly to people in an authentic and unvarnished way, a quality that his broader Make America Great Again movement has championed.

Many Democrats convinced themselves that a joke that a comedian told at a pre-election rally in 2024 was going to swing a massive number of Latino voters their way. When the comic Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to a garbage dump, Kamala Harris’s campaign decided to launch an ad exclusively about the joke, aiming to motivate Latino voters to shift to their side.

But as we know now, the event had little to no impact on the election.

Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira, a longtime analyst of the Latino vote, told me shortly after the race that the party misunderstood the Latino response.

“When Puerto Ricans hear about this joke, they don’t necessarily say, ‘Oh my God, I was gonna vote for Trump, now I gotta vote for Kamala Harris,’ it’s like haha, I can’t believe he said that,” he said.

That’s because the lion’s share of the Latino votes who Trump won are working class voters. They’re not socialized into environments where they’re constantly walking on eggshells to avoid offending people.

They work in construction, agriculture, hospitality, service industries and other workplaces where the only thing you want from HR is a paycheck, not a diversity training.

There is no doubt that Platner’s past remarks were uncouth and off-color. It would be unwise for a Senate candidate to engage in an open ethnic stereotyping about tipping. And he probably waited way too long to cover up that tattoo (he did so the week of his Pod Save confession) even though there were risks with doing it in the past and being accused of being a secret Nazi who tried to hide his tracks.

But the reality is that populists have always said they want to put ordinary people in charge of the country. Ordinary people are not an army of overchievers organizing their entire lives around dotting every i and crossing every t so as to avoid a scandal that might derail a future political career. Those people are sociopaths, and the greatest blessing of my life is that I no longer live in the Metro D.C. area and have to deal with those people on a daily basis.

Ordinary people, in contrast to political sociopaths, are weird and flawed up because life is weird and flawed. My first roommate at the University of Georgia had a giant Confederate flag, a poster of Che Guevera, and he was a Japanese immigrant whose family moved from overseas to a small town in Georgia. Normies can be really freaking strange.

I know what a skeptical reader is thinking. OK everybody has a few skeletons in their closet. But an accidental Nazi tattoo? I don’t know anyone with an accidental Nazi tattoo. He’s not just some ordinary guy. He must be a freak!

But obsessing with the details of Platner’s skeletons is missing the point. If it’s not a Nazi tattoo maybe it’s that you took a picture with a Confederate flag (or your Japanese roommate confusingly hung it over your dorm room window). Maybe when you were younger you called someone gay or retarded. Perhaps you even said something racist one time in an obscure internet comment – millennials and Gen Z are having our every thought recorded for decades out into the future, so welcome to the world of political mass surveillance.

All of this can and will be turned into scandals, particularly if you’re a populist. Democratic and Republican Party leadership don’t sincerely care about any of these things. These people walk into the chamber every day and vote to send bombs to countries that incinerate kids with them. You think they’re sincerely worried about tattoos and naughty questions on Reddit? Let’s not be naïve.

Nobody actually thinks Platner is a Neo Nazi. What they want to do is destroy him because they don’t control him.

He’s a guy who could’ve walked the white collar path like his dad and gotten cozy with the elite in Washington. Instead he went off and joined the armed services and ended up as an oyster farmer running not only against Collins but to kick Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer out of his position. He’s coming for their power. Of course they will do anything they can to crush him, including the expertly-rolled out oppo campaign that began this month and is likely to continue in the coming weeks.

Maybe you’re reading all this and thinking, OK. Maybe his Reddit comments are just the sort of thing you can expect from an authentic unvarnished normie. Maybe Platner’s tattoo was an accident, and we all have crazy accidents even if this one was particularly shocking. And maybe Platner really does have the potential to be an independent-minded populist Senator who will take on the elite in Washington in a way that Collins or Mills never would. But how can he possibly win? He’s spending every day apologizing. Is that really a winning campaign? Is he really cut out for politics?

These are all fair thoughts to have. I have them myself. But if Platner really is the generational talent many of his fans hoped he was, there is a way for him to thread the needle and win this contest.

To do so, he has to look across the aisle.

There is no politician that Democrats loathe more than Donald Trump. When I worked in D.C. during the first Trump term, I think many educated Democrats would’ve rather committed bank robbery than cast a vote for the former Apprentice host.

But something that Trump proved is that a scandal doesn’t have to destroy you if you don’t let it destroy you. The Trump approach to these things is to simply barrel right through them. He has throughout his life said or done dozens of things that would’ve completely destroyed a lesser politician.

And yet instead of jumping in front of the cameras and apologizing for those things over and over, he turned around and said: “They’re not after me. They’re after you, and I just happen to be standing in the way.”

Trump made millions of people fall in love with him because he convinced them that for all his personal flaws, he was the only person who was capable of defeating the Democratic progressive hegemon. And to his credit, he did win two presidential elections and make some of the biggest gains in minority votes the party has seen in decades.

How can Democrats really look at a country that elected Trump and think to themselves, what Americans really want are better-mannered politicians?

What they want are politicians who can channel their anger. In 2016 and 2024, Trump was able to channel the populist energy of a country infuriated at the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, inflation, endless wars, and, yes, hegemonic political correctness and human resources culture that dominated so many liberal institutions from Hollywood and universities to the Fortune 500 and

In order to win, Platner has to do what Trump did. He has to make people fall in love with him because he’s fighting the same people they want to fight: Feckless and compromised Democratic leaders like Schumer, Wall Street, AIPAC, the pharmaceutical companies, and every moneyed interest group that has made the lives of people in rural Maine so difficult for so long.

Unlike the liberal commentariat who has been so quick to turn on Platner, I was born and raised in a conservative corner of the country and after a stint in D.C. returned to that same corner. One of the most common refrains I hear about Trump from people who voted for him is that they think he’s a horrible person but that he’s doing the right thing, he’s fighting the right people, so they will continue to support him.

(He’s not the only politician who’s managed to survive these sorts of scandals – my congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene went from being kicked off the committees in Congress for being so conspiratorial to being praised by Wolf Blitzer.)

Platner isn’t even a horrible person. He’s just led a messy life. But if he stops apologizing and goes on offense, he can win the same loyalty because what he’s saying about America’s elite is fundamentally true.

“Yes I have a flawed and sometimes downright weird past. I served overseas in wars based on lies and came back fucked up and disoriented,” he could tell people. “It took me years to figure myself out. I’m not perfect, but I promise you that every day I will wake up and fight the bastards who are trying to take me down because the reason they want to take me down is they want to take you down. We’re coming for their power and they’re scared as hell.”

Left-wing populists have had nowhere near as much as success as their counterparts on the right because they’re too genteel and afraid to offend. If Platner wants to prove he’s any different, he’s running out of time to show it.

CORRECTION: The original version of this article misspelled the name of Aroostook County in Maine.

Six months ago, it looked like former New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo was finally coming in from the cold.

After being pressured to resign following a series of allegations of sexual harassment, the son of famed Empire State Governor Mario Cuomo sought to return to political acceptability by seeking the mayoralty of New York City.

And as late as last spring, it looked like his scheme was going to work, as he was sitting on a massive polling lead that put him ahead of other Democratic candidates.

But then an immigrant with hard-to-pronounce name who moved to New York City as a child ended up demolishing the scion of the state’s most famous political family.

Zohran Mamdani’s unlikely rise frustrated Cuomo enough that he decided to launch an independent bid against the new Democratic nominee. The political press took Cuomo seriously, and billionaires lined up to support the campaign against Mamdani. But as of this writing, not a single poll puts Cuomo anywhere near Mamdani’s commanding lead.

Perhaps that’s why Cuomo’s campaign has gotten so desperate lately. His campaign posted a cringeworthy video including supporters who accused Mamdani (who is Muslim) of being a secret Hindu. Cuomo channeled his inner Taliban preacher to tell a debate audience that Mamdani (who is a Shia Muslim) is opposed by “Sunni Muslims” and that he supports “haram” activity (in this case, decriminalization of prostitution). And the Cuomo team posted and quickly deleted a bizarre video featuring AI-generated black pimps, keffiyeh-clad protesters, and an assortment of criminals supporting a rice-eating Mamdani.

(OK, yes, Indians sometimes eat rice and especially biryani, which contains things like drumsticks, with their hands. Wow, who knew other food cultures existed?)

But the low point came on Thursday morning, when Cuomo appeared on a friendly radio program and started bantering with the host Sid Rosenberg about Mamdani.

Here’s a rough transcript:

CUOMO: God forbid, another 9/11—can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?

ROSENBERG: He’d be cheering.

CUOMO: (Laughs) That’s another problem.

The suggestion that Mamdani, who was approximately 9 years old when the 9/11 attacks happened, would have cheered the massacre set off condemnation even from elected Democrats who are not supporting his campaign.

Daniel Goldman, a relatively moderate Democratic congressman from New York, excoriated Cuomo, saying that “there’s no room for hate and bigotry in our politics or in our country, and that includes naked Islamophobia suggesting a Muslim candidate for Mayor would cheer for a terrorist attack against the city he’s running to lead.”

But the quite frankly dull xenophobia from Cuomo was, believe it or not, not the first time the man has bombed a political race with a boneheaded comment about 9/11 (a fact first pointed out by whipsmart New York City politics writer Michael Lange).

Back in 2002, Cuomo was running for Governor against incumbent Republican George Pataki. Pataki had, like New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, served as a steady captain for the region following the tragic 9/11 attacks, helping coordinate the massive emergency response that was mobilized to save lives.

To Cuomo, however, he deserved no credit whatsoever.

“There was one leader for 9/11: it was Rudy Giuliani,” Cuomo said to reporters who were on a campaign bus with him. “If it defined George Pataki, it defined George Pataki as not being the leader.”

He went on to denigrate Pataki’s role in helping the state heal.

“He stood behind the leader,” he said. ‘’He held the leader’s coat. He was a great assistant to the leader. But he was not a leader.”

The remarks set off a firestorm among New Yorkers who were loyal to Pataki. Giuliani himself came out and rebutted Cuomo’s caustic remarks.

‘’I held his coat as often as he held mine,” he said. “We were inseparable.”

Later that year, Cuomo ended up pulling out of the Democratic race for the nomination, conceding it to Comptroller Carl McCall (who lost to Pataki in the end).

Nobody should be shocked by Cuomo’s decidedly bigoted turn in the mayoral race. If there is one thing that typifies his political style, it’s naked ambition and endless cynicism. His term as governor was marked by an authoritarian style; people were afraid to oppose him because of what he could do to their careers.

He rode his nepo baby status as long as he could, even to the point of assuming that New York City voters would hand him the Democratic nomination in the mayor’s race when he barely campaigned or set foot in the city. It turns out that while the Cuomo name is strong, it’s not so strong that voters will simply serve as the vehicle for your political redemption when you have next to nothing to offer them.

It’s poetic that Cuomo made a variation of the same mistake twice. His style of politics is based on aristocratic autopilot: he never carved out a unique vision or strong set of values. He’s a Cuomo. Why wouldn’t you want him to run Camelo- I mean the Empire State?

But whatever you think about Mamdani, who almost certainly will be crowned the victor in less than two weeks, he hustled the heck out of the race. A Muslim guy who is known to be strongly opposed to Israeli policies winning control of the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel? That’s a political miracle.

Yet this miracle would never have been possible without Cuomo’s endless arrogance.

He may finally learn that no actually means no.

With a tenuous ceasefire and prisoner exchange set to begin in the Gaza Strip, there is reason to believe that we are finally bringing one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world right now to an end.

Veteran Israeli analysts have largely given the credit to U.S. President Donald Trump, who they say was more serious about striking a deal than either former President Joe Biden or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ever were.

It’s no secret that Trump covets the Nobel Peace Prize, and you could make an argument that if this ceasefire holds he is deserving of one. Standing up to Israeli interests in American politics is always politically fraught, and Trump seemed to bring pressure to bear that his predecessor didn’t.

But this morning the committee decided to instead award that honor to María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader.

This angered some backers of Trump, including White House Communications Director Steven Cheung who accused the committee of putting “politics over peace.”

But there’s a very simple reason Trump did not win the prize this year: he wasn’t eligible. The nomination deadline for the prize was in January 2025. Trump had only been in office a couple weeks when the deadline hit.

When the government of Pakistan nominated Trump for the prize earlier this year — a transparent move aimed at currying favor for him after his intervention into the brief India-Pakistan war — they were nominating him for the 2026 Nobel prize.

So did the prize committee really snub Trump? Obviously not. He just wasn’t eligible yet.

But if the peace in the Middle East expands and holds, there’s always next year.

This past Sunday, a man named Thomas Jacob Sanford rammed his truck into a Mormon church in Michigan. He then proceeded to fire his gun into the building while setting fire to it.

Four people died and an additional eight were injured by his shooting. Many others also suffered from smoke inhalation, a deadly threat that emerges whenever there’s a fire. Sanford was killed shortly after the attack by police officers who responded to the crisis.

Initial investigations point to a number of factors that may have led him to attack the church. He was an Iraq war veteran, and he was struggling with substance abuse. Friends of his suggested that he had animus towards the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once referring to Mormons’ faith as the “Antichrist.”

Anti-Mormon prejudice is not rare in the United States. One Pew survey from 2023 found them to be the only religious group more disliked than Muslims.

(Maybe we should start a club together — no beer, and we’ll have to compromise on the coffee, maybe we can all agree on Spindrift?)

You could hardly blame Mormons for recoiling in horror at the attack. For many, it was the culmination of their fears: widespread anti-Mormon prejudice had finally come to a head in a terrifying act of murder in a hallowed space.

But one Mormon looked at the attack and thought about his obligation to help those who were reeling from its aftermath — specifically, Sanford’s surviving family.

David Butler, who lives in Provo, Utah, is a lapsed lawyer who now spends his days writing novels (his 20th book is coming out shortly). When he heard about the attack, he was shocked. But he was relieved to see some politicians like President Donald Trump describe the attack as anti-Christian at a time when some Christians work so hard to exclude Mormons.

“I was frankly grateful not to be Othered as we so often are by sort of the evangelical part of the conservative right,” he told me in an interview. “So I thought that was nice.”

But he also ran across a Tweet pointing out the condition of Sanford’s family. They had been struggling financially since before the attack in Michigan; they have a son who deals with an insulin condition that is so expensive to treat that they had sought crowdfunding in the past to make ends meet. Without their father and husband, they would suffer even more.

"I took my dogs for a walk, tried to sort of straighten out in my head, kind of what I was thinking about all this stuff,” he explained.

After his walk, he decided to set up a GiveSendGo (a Christian crowdfunding site) fundraiser to help the Sanfords through their trying time.

As you might expect, Butler received some backlash for setting up the fundraising account.

“About half dozen times someone has said now you’re giving people incentive to kill Mormons. Because they think we’ll crowdfund for the family,” he acknowledged.

But to a religious man like Butler, these criticisms left him unphased.

“Look, I’m Mormon, and to the chagrin of the greater Christian community, we share their Bible. The Epistle of James says care for the widows and orphans. Jesus said turn the other cheek and mourn with those who mourn,” he told me.

What heartened him the most was the outpouring of support the fundraiser received. As of this writing, it has raised $226,400. Much of that funding was from fellow Mormons.

“What was done cannot be undone. The only choice we have now is to forgive and lift up—'to mourn with those that mourn… and comfort those that stand in need of comfort,’” wrote one donor who gave $100, quoting from the Book of Mosiah, which is part of the Book of Mormon.

Others wrote directly to the Sanfords along with their donation.

“As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we mourn with you and your family. Please know that we do not hold you responsible for this tragedy. And may God give you the strength to carry on,” wrote one donor who gave $200.

The outpouring of generosity and mercy that Butler’s fundraiser produced helped demonstrate to him that he did the right thing.

“In a sense, it has been put to a vote now. And I think I won that vote overwhelmingly,” he told me.

Does it feel like every time you turn on the news, there’s another horrific high-profile political shooting?

The shooting of Minnesota politicians, attack on the Centers for Disease Control, the Charlie Kirk assassination, and even what appears to be a bizarre anti-Mormon attack in Michigan.

These events are often treated as if they’re unconnected because the ideological motivations of the attackers differ. Is an antivaxxer really motivated in the same way as a liberalish young man who hates conservatives?

But this presupposes that ideology is the most important factor driving someone to embark on an act of political violence. While that’s intuitive and would make sense, you have to ask yourself why millions upon millions of people distrust vaccines but only one young man decided to take the life of an Atlanta police officer when he attacked the CDC over the summer. There are probably other factors at work here.

One of those factors may be media coverage.

In 2019, I reported on a little-noted study performed in part by Jay Walker, an economics professor at Old Dominion University. Walker and a colleague looked at media coverage of mass shootings and then comparing that to the occurrence of mass shootings.

What they discovered was truly disturbing.

“We find a pretty clear empirical relationship between coverage and future acts,” Walker told me at the time.

The more media coverage a mass shooting got, the more it predicted future mass shootings in the near future.

In other words, these acts of mass murder appear to be operating much like suicide clusters — where acts of suicide seemingly become contagious as people are impacted by each others’ behavior.

If shooters really are being inspired by the media attention that other shooters gather, it raises the question of what those of us in the media should do in response. Should we tone down our coverage of mass shootings?

Part of me says that we should, but the other half believes that it’s the media’s responsibility to report these things out no matter what impact it has on society.

But it is true that high-profile shootings like the ones I mentioned above have disproportionate coverage versus the amount of violence they represent in society. Most shootings in America are suicides; murders tend to be about interpersonal beefs, not political ones. Maybe we could alter the tone of the coverage of political shootings to make Americans aware that we’re not actually on the verge of a civil war.

Otherwise we might be in for a death spiral where by hyping up these endless acts of political violence, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Over the next week, some of America’s top comedians — from Dave Chappelle to Bill Burr to Pete Davidson — will be performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

You can’t blame the Saudis for inviting the kings of comedy to their country. This is a very funny lineup.

But the event has sparked controversy, with human rights groups bringing up pesky facts like the reality that Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s most repressive governments.

Foreign comedians who come and go can express themselves how they’d like, but Saudi citizens who would dare to mock the ruling family would quickly find themselves in a dungeon.

Other critics noted that there are still under-explored links between the Saudi government and the 9/11 attacks. Davidson, whose father was killed in those attacks, was unbothered when asked about the event on a recent podcast:

Davidson defended his decision to perform in a Sept. 23 interview on Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast and said that he’s heard of “subreddits of, ‘I think all these people are in bed with (the Saudi royal family).’”

“I just, I get the routing and then I see the number and I go, ‘I’ll go,’” Davidson said as he explained his reasoning for going. “I’ve been getting a little bit of of flack just ’cause my dad died in 9/11. So they’re like, ‘How could you possibly go there?’”

From a purely utilitarian perspective, Davidson’s reply makes sense. His father was killed in the 9/11 attacks. But now the Saudis are paying him a bunch of money to go perform for them. So that’s a net-positive, right?

Look, I’ve always been torn about these kinds of cultural boycotts. The average Saudi citizen has no control over what their government does. Should they really be denied the chance to see some great American performers because their government is full of human rights abusers?

But you can’t deny that the Riyadh Comedy Festival is an opportunity for the government to whitewash its record. Comedy festivals in the United States are usually not sponsored by the government for the purpose of promoting the rulers’ agenda. This one is.

I have a compromise for the comedians who are willing to take Saudi money to go and laugh it up with the government there over the next week. You guys are worldwide superstars. No matter what you say, you probably won’t get the Khashoggi treatment.

So why not take the opportunity to be the very best that comedians can be — irreverent in the face of power?

Here’s some suggested jokes:

• So I’ve always heard Saudi Arabia is kinda homophobic. But then I saw MBS in one of those giant robes he likes to wear. He’s got dozens of ‘em. Don’t tell me a straight man has that kind of wardrobe.

• Y’all spent years bombing Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East. That’s kind of the opposite of walking into prison and hitting the biggest dude you see, isn’t it? I mean, Tel Aviv and Istanbul were right there. You guys kinda walked into the region and punched the special needs midget in the face, didn’t you?

• I’d do a moment of silence for Jamal Khashoggi but I don’t want anyone losing their heads.

• (For black comics) As soon as I walked out of the airport a guy driving a BMW tried to hand me his suitcase. He thought I was a migrant worker! I had to tell him I’m black, not broke. Once he realized who I was, guy put his whip down and took a selfie.

• (For female comics) I heard you guys can have four wives. Is Bin Salman on Tinder? As long as he keeps the paychecks coming I will not say a word about the slaves building our living room.

If you’re going to take a paycheck from some of the world’s most corrupt people, you might as well piss them off while you’re doing it.

A new excerpt from Kamala Harris’s upcoming campaign memoir suggests that she wanted to pick former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her vice president, but she was afraid of a backlash from American voters. She writes:

We were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let's just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk. And I think Pete also knew that -- to our mutual sadness.

This makes me recall a moment I had after Barack Obama’s election in 2008. My friend, a Liberian American, was working for Obama’s youth wing and had put countless hours into getting him over the hurdle of election.

On the day after his victory, I encountered him at our student center at the University of Georgia and told him, “Now you could be president.”

Without missing a beat, he replied in the same fashion. (I remember thinking, hold on now, let’s not get carried away…)

That was a moment of tremendous optimism in American life, even for people who had voted for other candidates that election like the GOP nominee John McCain or the independent Ralph Nader.

There was a feeling that America had overcome its most ultimate prejudice: skin color was no longer an obstacle to winning even the highest office in the land.

But over the next eight years, liberals adopted a much darker tone about America. 400 years of racism had created a hegemonic system of racism that was almost impossible to overcome. And when Hillary Clinton lost the presidency, many liberals added sexism to the mix: Americans simply were unwilling to elect a woman to the White House.

I imagine that the pessimism Harris expressed in this passage is at least partly a result of the time and place where she was born and raised. She is, after all, a Baby Boomer who came of age in America. In the mid-1980s, most American adults didn't even believe it was acceptable for a black person to marry a white person. In 2004, George W. Bush campaigned on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

If those were the formative years of my life instead of the election of Obama, I might’ve been inclined to agree with Harris. But the evidence that a gay man would’ve dragged her ticket down — when combined with her own ethnic background and that of her husband’s — is actually pretty thin.

The percentage of Americans who say they’d be willing to vote for a gay president is much higher than the totals that either Harris or Buttigieg achieved in the election. It’s possible to say that these are just Americans telling pollsters things they don’t believe for social acceptability, but there’s evidence all around us in American society. Even the GOP president, Donald Trump, appointed a gay man named Rich Grenell as a senior staffer. 41% of Republicans say that gay marriage should be in the law.

What was perhaps more confusing to me was Harris zooming in on her husband, Doug Emhoff. How many Americans could even name Emhoff let alone were aware that he was Jewish? Is there some kind of widespread bias against Jewish first husbands? I am not aware of any campaign at any level using anti-Jewish rhetoric as part of their campaigns in 2024.

Ultimately, Buttigieg’s response should help put this issue to bed. When asked about Harris’s memoir, he said:

My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories.

For many years, progressives have insisted that these skin-level categories — race, gender, sexuality — were all-consuming for Americans. Explicit and implicit bias defined our relations with each other. If you were a left-of-center person arguing that voters don’t particularly care about these categories, you were quickly treated like a pariah.

The far-right made progressive paranoia even worse, because although few Americans genuinely care about their president matching their skin color or gender, the extreme chauvinists who do are all over social media these days, giving progressives the boogeymen to justify their pessimistic view of Americans.

The consequence of all this may be progressive elites running to the first straight white Christian man they can find to run for president in 2028. That may explain the enthusiasm for California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who by all accounts is a pretty mediocre candidate given that he governs one of the most dysfunctional states in America and has next to no crossover appeal from independents.

A better idea is to realize what Buttigieg does: that Americans will vote for a Martian if they feel the alien is willing to keep them safe, make sure there’s food on their table, and give them the feeling of respect they deserve.

CORRECTION: This post originally misstated the GOP nominee for 2008.

On Monday, comedian and late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel told a bad joke.

“The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” he said. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”

The joke wasn’t very funny, and it was based on a flawed premise: the idea that the suspect in the Kirk assassination had a right-wing political affiliation. There is no reason to believe this. While jokes don’t have to be literal, they need to at least exist on some kind of factual basis that makes them ironic. So it was a bad joke.

But bad jokes happen. Every late night host has said something that outraged one side of the aisle or another and/or outraged an audience for a day. But people move on. No short-term outrage creates any long-term pain in a situation like this. That is, unless, there is another factor involved.

On Wednesday, Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr — who carries the power to regulate public networks like ABC, where Kimmel’s show airs — weighed in.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

In a few hours, ABC appeared to get the message. They announced that Kimmel would be suspended indefinitely. The station group Nexstar (the parent company of NewsNation, where I worked some years ago) was reportedly key to ABC’s decision. Nexstar is seeking a merger with Tegna. The people who have the power to approve or deny that merger? The Trump administration.

This is hardly the only way Trump and has administration have acted against free speech recently. In the past week:

• The Vice President of the United States encouraged people to snitch on Americans they know who disparaged Charlie Kirk in order to get them fired.

• The Attorney General of the United States warned Americans against using “hate speech” (no such legal category exists, but whatever).

• She also seemingly threatened to have the federal government intervene if print shops refuse to produce photos of Kirk.

• The Lieutenant Governor of Texas stated that miscreant students who dishonor Kirk should literally never hold a job again in their lives.

• The President designated “Antifa” as a “Major Terrorist Organization,” a category that doesn’t exist in any U.S. law, promising to thoroughly investigate anybody who funds this organization (Antifa is a loose ideological moniker used by some left-anarchists and is not an organization at all). We can all guess how this will be used.

• Embiggened by Kimmel’s suspension, he also asked for Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers to be fired. Their corporate employers , too, have a myriad of interests before the government. This gives Trump leverage over them.

• He also filed a $15 billion defamation suit against The New York Times and Penguin Random House, saying that their writings endangered his ability to be elected president in 2024. (He was elected president, and last I checked this isn’t actually a legal grounds for a lawsuit?)

• The President also suggested to an Australian journalist that they were harming Australia’s prospects in the United States by asking an adversarial question — a clear act of intimidation.

• White House Adviser Stephen Miller mocked freedom of speech advocates, saying that the GOP should not “mimic the ACLU of the mid 90’s”; instead, they should take all necessary and rational steps to save Western Civilization. (Who appointed him Western Civilization czar, I wonder.)

• Comedy clubs are telling comedians at open mics to not make jokes about Kirk, fearing the consequences.

I probably missed a bunch of items, as this has been a crazy week. The GOP seems to have returned fully to the censorious posture it had during the Bush years, when it had similar levels of government power and more cultural influence than it does today.

But John Ashcroft could have only dreamt of having this level of hall monitor power over the American people. The advent of social media, combined with an administration that is willing to use the levers of power the government has over major corporations, has given Trump and Vance and Bondi control of a Panopticon that can punish WrongThink from everyone from late night TV hosts to ordinary Americans.

We’re all the Dixie Chicks now.

I’m sorry, aren’t they just The Chicks now?

Which brings me to the left.

Following the events in Ferguson, Missouri, in the mid-2010s, many liberals understandably were outraged by the persistent level of racial and ethnic inequality that remains in the United States.

They backed up this belief with by re-evaluating their beliefs about freedom of speech. Maybe some speech crosses the line. Is it really fair to “punch down” against racial minority groups? Maybe some speech — even if it’s fully legal and constitutionally protected — can even make people feel unsafe.

And yet we are now witnessing the consequences of the left abandoning its longstanding commitment to free speech norms. A particularly authoritarian stream of the GOP, represented by Trump and his cult of personality, have adopted these very same views and is using them to declare a total war on freedom of speech.

This means that we could be entering an environment where free speech has basically no principled advocates on either side of the aisle. This would be apocalyptic for the American experiment of freedom of expression.

But in the face of such grave odds, there’s a real opportunity here.

In the days after Kirk’s killing, we saw from people from all walks of life about how sad they were to see such an act of murder. And this wasn’t the hardcore MAGA people saying this either.

But Trump’s authoritarian overreach in the face of this murder — his attempt to use it as a modern day Reichstag Fire to rewrite speech norms and extend his influence over a chunk of corporate media — will in time create a mighty backlash. Americans don’t like to be bullied or censored.

The Democratic Party can, if it chooses to, be the face of that backlash. It can defend freedom of speech in every arena possible, portraying the GOP as the Trump-flavored hall monitors they’ve become.

The only way to do this, however, is to acknowledge that the progressive arguments about free speech that became vogue in the 2010s were fundamentally wrong, and that the only way out of the abyss right now is to argue that people have a right to speak their mind, even if they’re rude or crude. Shutting up speech and shutting up debate is fundamentally un-American, and you can’t force people to like a podcaster who was often incendiary and offensive. I doubt that’s what even Kirk himself would have wanted.

Over the past week, the left-of-center social media space has been lit up with arguments about how progressives should respond to the slaying of conservative activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk. What’s unanimous among institutional progressives and elected Democrats is, thankfully, that the killing was wrong and that political violence is unacceptable.

But the agreement seemed to stop there. A debate erupted after a series of pieces from left-of-center writers — Ezra Klein at The New York Times, my friend Rachel Cohen at Vox, Ben Burgis and Meagan Day at Jacobin — where they offered their condolences to Kirk and at times praised aspects of his life’s project.

For Klein, Kirk was practicing “politics the right way,” engaging his opponents in civil debate; his murder at the hands of an assassin represented the horrifying alternative to a culture that values discussion rather than coercion as a way to settle political manners.

Cohen wrote a contemplative piece about the “sitting shiva” after Kirk’s death, referring to the Jewish practice of mourning. Her piece served as a sort of rumination on how we can mourn someone whose life we had mixed feelings about — which is going to especially be the case with a controversial political figure.

The Jacobin article was the most critical of the three, acknowledging that one of the authors had debated Kirk in the past and appreciating his civility while still listing off some of the more controversial things he was known to have said.

This trio of articles provoked quite a bit of debate left-of-center, where most of the audience was hostile to Kirk’s worldview. If you read the reader comments on Klein’s article in particular, you’ll find that it seems like virtually everybody hated it.

In the past week, I had a heated argument with a leftist podcaster I know about the pieces above. The podcaster was furious that these, at one point referring to them as “white liberals” who maybe wouldn’t be so laudatory had Kirk taken aim at Jews as much as he had offended other minorities.

One eloquent critic of Klein’s approach was the writer Ta Nahesi Coates, who likened the pundits like Klein who commended Kirk as constructing their own version of the Lost Cause, the post-Civil War mythology that turned Jefferson Davis and the Confederates into heroes in the eyes of many Americans.

Coates’s most effective blow came when he noted that in Klein’s lengthy column he never once quoted “a single word…from Kirk himself.”

But what Klein was praising was largely Kirk’s way of doing politics, not what he was doing politics for — his actual political objectives. As I explained to my podcaster friend, finding something good in someone who you generally disagree with is a principle drawn from ancient philosophical traditions, including the Abrahamic faiths. It’s also a core tenet of Christianity.

Recall that after segregationist politician George Wallace was shot during his 1972 presidential campaign, none other than Shirley Chisolm — the first black woman ever elected to Congress — appeared at his bedside and commiserated with him.

The History Channel explains what happened during that visit:

Chisholm’s unexpected visit to Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring lasted roughly fifteen minutes. The congresswoman recounted that she told Wallace “I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone,” and that the governor “cried and cried” in response. She added that, despite their profound disagreements on fundamental issues like racial equality, she agreed with Wallace’s criticisms of “the domination of corporate institutions…and unresponsiveness of the Government to the people.” Wallace won two primary races after the shooting, but it effectively ended his campaign.

I view Klein, Cohen, and Burgis/Day’s articles as sitting firmly in this tradition. Their message was simple: as much as we abhorred this man’s words, he was still human. And everybody likes someone who they agree with. The challenge for us is still trying to find the good in someone who we disagreed with on just about everything under the sun. And that’s a challenge well worth taking on after the poor man was gunned down in front of his children.

That’s an idea that progressives should be able to hold in their head, right alongside all of their criticisms of Kirk. They should also consider that Kirk was a social conservative giving voice to zoomer social conservatives in some of the most culturally liberal places in America. For many young Republicans, he was a lifeguard in places they felt were fundamentally hostile to them.

Liberals laughed at the memes with Malcolm X/Charlie Kirk comparisons, but in some ways he kind of was the conservative version of the NOI. Despite holding lots of retrograde views, he also gave hope to people who were ensconced in communities they felt like outliers in.

But if Republicans — who’ve been engaged in a sort of secular canonization of Kirk in the past week — want to understand the country they live in, they have to understand why Kirk’s words rubbed so many Americans the wrong way.

Kirk was a controversial political figure for good reason. Unless your social or political cause is just marching around and saying that we should save puppies, you’re going to be doing something that somebody doesn’t like. Politics in a polarized country is inherently fractious, and Kirk was one of the more contentious political figures out there.

He was contentious because his words were often spoken with little concern for the offense they caused or the dehumanization they represented. In the era of Trump, who is quick to judge others but slow to ever reflect on any of his conduct whatsoever, Kirk represented a style of caustic dialogue that has swiftly taken over the Republican Party.

Take, for instance, the election season hysteria about Haitian immigrants who had settled in Ohio and other parts of the country, like Huntsville, Alabama. In a conversation with co-host Blake Neff (who, by the way, was a long time Internet friend of mine from back when we were all teens) at the time, Kirk posited that the whole thing was part of a nefarious conspiracy to overwhelm American communities with foreigners:

The Harris-Biden regime, they are stuffing foreigners in the reddest communities across the country, in small town red America, I think partially as revenge. Blake might not agree with this, but I think that they get, like, off on this sinister, like, we're gonna go send the Haitians into red America.

Those foreigners aren’t just there to work, despite what the liberal media would have you believe. Instead, Kirk, posited, “the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night — it's only gonna get worse if — unless Donald Trump wins.”

That was one of Kirk’s more nuanced takes on immigration. The week of his assassination he warned that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” part of a larger turn to the hard right he had made in the last years of his life. When he referred to the likely future mayor of New York City, he sounded like some kind of 18th century unreconstructed bigot, referring to him scornfully as a “Mohammedan,” rather than a Muslim.

(His argument here was that Mamdani’s religion meant he has been given “a free pass,” which has to be news to the Super PAC consultants who made millions of all the attack ads and mailers.)

He wanted a ban on all “third world immigration, legal or illegal”; what he thought America needed was a “net-zero immigration moratorium with a ban on all third worlders.”

This comment shocked even some of his fans, with one top commenter on a Facebook post featuring these comments writing, “I Love Charlie Kirk. But you should definitely re write that statement. Legal immigration is accepted and should always be accepted. Anything beyond that sounds radical.”

But Kirk was undeterred. As President Trump has been involved in deep negotiations with India over trade matters, Kirk was adamant: “America does not need more visas for people from India.”

(For what it’s worth, about 1 in 7 doctors in America are of Indian origin and we still have a massive physician shortage in this country — I assume Kirk was not pursuing his M.D. on the side so I’m not sure what his solution here would have been.)

If you’re deep in the lore of the hard right Internet, you’ll know that Kirk spent much of his time covering his right flank. A group of openly racist social media users called the groypers and their de facto leader Nick Fuentes frequently criticized Kirk, seeking to take control of the young online right.

It’s possible that Kirk’s increasing embrace of outright immigration bans for most of the world and his disparaging comments towards faith and ethnic groups were a kind of jockeying of his own. Much as politicians move left or right to box out their opponents, Kirk would also have to pivot to fend off the groypers.

That might also explain his comments on the wars in the Middle East. Although Kirk was known to staunchly defend Israeli foreign policy, friends of his had reported that in the final months of his life he had grown more and more uneasy with the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu. Here, too, politics was going on in the background. Turning Point, Kirk’s student activist behemoth, relied on conservative donors who pretty much universally were sympathetic to Netanyahu. Meanwhile, America’s youth, including many on the right, are increasingly horrified by the war in Gaza and annoyed at Netanyahu’s arrogance towards Trump. Would Kirk have ultimately broken with these donors outright and sided with the students he interacted with on a nonstop basis? It’s possible, but the assassin’s bullet meant we would never see where this journey might have led Kirk.

What once could have been a moment of unity following Kirk’s death quickly gave way to polarization, like seemingly everything in our politics does. Bitter comments from people offended by Kirk’s life’s work collided with anti-free speech attitudes and actions by the Trump administration and its constituents, dashing any hopes of national reconciliation following the death of the late activist.

But there is no reason why we as Americans have to be caught up in the same polarization following Kirk’s passing — or the passing of any deeply controversial political figure.

In a follow up piece, Klein told his readers that he ended up grieving for Kirk “because I recognize some commonality with him. He was murdered for participating in our politics. Somewhere beyond how much divided us, there was something that bonded us, too. Some effort to change this country in ways that we think are good.”

I think in my many years of reading Klein, this is probably the most challenging idea he has ever presented to his readers.

There are people out there who think completely different from you.

They advocate for things you find disturbing and unacceptable.

Yet they still think they are doing the right thing, just as much as you think you’re doing the right thing.

That doesn’t mean that they’re right. But in their minds, they may be no more evil than you think you are.

Maturity may mean being able to hold both of those truths in your head at the same time.