There was a simultaneously flattering and humbling chat over on social media yesterday. One savvy observer lamented that we do not have a P.J. O’Rourke to help us navigate the blather and buncombe of our times. “I’m glad we had still had him for part of the Trump years, but his voice is one of the ones I miss most now.”
Someone named Robert Sage (who is evidently both a gentleman and a scholar), responded: “Feel like Charlie Sykes is the closest thing we have to his temperament now.”
This is true, I admit. Sadly. Because that is the sort of thing we need to describe the wild ride we’re all on right now.
Happy Friday.
And no this is not a paywall.
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More broken brains of MAGA
Seriously though, I wish we had an O’Rourke or an H.L. Mencken to describe what happened at Wednesday night’s low-energy Trump-centric kickoff of the nation’s 250th Birthday celebration.
But, alas, you are stuck with me, and I want to linger on a moment that is likely to get shoved aside in the rush of admittedly more momentous events.
At the kickoff for the Great American State Fair — which, of course, featured Donld Trump, Lee Greenwood, and Kash Patel’s girlfriend as entertainment— Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rallied the tepid crowd by saying this:
“Okay, to start this off, I think we have to give a big round of applause for our military band and singers.
Way better than those libtards that cancelled on us. So much better. Thank you, guys. President Trump will make you famous.”
Libtards.
May I remind you that Duffy is not a 9-year-old mouth-breathing bully. My fellow cheesehead is a husband and father who allegedly runs an $108 billion department, which makes him a grown-ass mouth-breathing bully. Dean Blundell writes:
A sitting Cabinet officer. At a federal event. Run by a nonprofit that calls itself nonpartisan. Used a slur for tens of millions of Americans. While standing next to his own children. One of whom has Down Syndrome — a community on the historical receiving end of the slur “retard” he just used in a different form, a fact several X commenters pointed out within hours.
Exit take: As tasteless as it was, Duffy’s “libtard” slur at least had the advantage of confirming the good judgment of all of the artists who bailed from the event.
**
BONUS: The broken moral compass of JD Vance. ICYMI, Vance shared some of his Deep Thoughts about Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal that brought him down:
"I think Nixon's historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12 hours news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy."
Vance, who is proudly the Number Two Man in the most corrupt presidency in history, then went on to blame the “Deep State” for taking Nixon down. because, of course.
BONUS BONUS: Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman in The Atlantic — “The Meltdown: One day that captures how Trump has gone from unpredictable to chaotic.” (Gift link)
A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.
And that was just yesterday.
Misunderstanding the DSA
Democrats are still reeling from the DSA insurgency, but I’m struck by how few members of the punditocracy (including Never Trumpers who ought to know better), seem to grasp the full dimensions of what is happening here. After the DSA sweep in New York this week, anti-Trump journalist Terry Moran exulted: “It felt like a new Democratic Party was declaring itself..”
“Watching Mamdani, it felt like a generation taking the keys away from Granddad.”
If only.
First of all, defeating 50-year-old Daniel Goldman — the lead counsel in one of Trump’s impeachments — is not taking the keys away from Grandpa. And his defenestration is hardly about the need to “fight Trump,” since he was one of the most effective Trump critics in Congress.1
But the problem runs much deeper: The reality is that the DSA are quite explicitly and self-consciously NOT Democrats. This is not an invigorating moment for the party: It is a hostile takeover.
“We’re using the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle, not because we share its goals. We build our own organization, get elected under the Democratic label, caucus with Democrats when it’s useful, and push our own agenda from the inside. We see the Democratic establishment as an obstacle, not a home.”
In other words, they are boring from within — what’s known as “entryism,” where radicals join or infiltrate established groups (unions, political parties) with the intention of taking them over.
Even a casual glance reveals ideas so extreme, so profoundly anathema to the vast majority of voters, that they sound like they were cooked up in the offices of a Trump-aligned ad maker. Here’s just a sampling:
Abolish prisons and police and free all prisoners
“Defund the police … [and cut] budgets annually towards zero”
“Decertify police unions”
“Disarm law enforcement officers”
“Close local jails” and “free all people from involuntary confinement”
Require public ownership of most real estate, insurance, banks, and telecom
“Social ownership of all major industry and infrastructure”
“The nationalization of businesses like railroads, utilities, and critical manufacturing and technology companies”
“Nationalize and bring under public ownership institutions of monetary policy, insurance, real estate, and finance”
Ban private health care
“Public ownership and funding of our healthcare system, including hospitals and other healthcare providers, pharmaceutical research and production, and other medical research and production facilities”
“End or limit counterproductive [patent and copyright] protections”
Eliminate all fossil fuel use, discovery and production
“Nationalize fossil fuel producers to phase them out as quickly as necessary—no new fossil fuel projects can be authorized or built”
Massively cut the military and withdraw from the world
“Dramatically slash US military spending to a level sufficient for a genuine national defense, not the projection of power outside the country”
“Close all US foreign military bases”
“Immediately withdraw from NATO”
“Abolish USAID, NED, (and) Voice of America”
Open all US borders
“Demilitarize the border and end all immigrant detention and abolish ICE”
“End all deportations and enforcement actions, immigration detention, private prison contracts, and deputization of local police forces”
Terminate America’s constitutional democracy
“Abolish the US Senate”
“Extension of voting rights to non-citizens”
“A second constitutional convention to write the founding documents of a new socialist democracy”
Today, the Democratic Party lets DSA candidates run as Democrats, even though the DSA is ideologically committed to a hostile takeover of the party. The DSA isn’t a formal party; it calls itself “a political and activist organization, not a party.” What it is is a fifth column within the Democratic Party. There is no sensible, informed Democrat who thinks these people are good for their party. I mean, sure, they will feed the alligator one limb at a time in exchange for their turnout efforts, but no grown up believes open socialism, open borders, and closed prisons is a good message for a national party—or good policy.
The real danger now is that Democrats either (1) do not recognize the threat, (2) now lack the courage or the will to defend themselves from the takeover, or (3) draw exactly the wrong lessons from New York.
In Wisconsin, a lengthy list of Democrats are competing to be the next governor, including Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, who serves alongside retiring Gov. Tony Evers, and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who narrowly lost the 2022 Senate race in the state.
But it’s been another candidate — state Rep. Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist — who has unexpectedly seen a surge of momentum in recent weeks in a field that lacks a clear front-runner. Hong has been at the top of the limited public polling ahead of the August primary and placed second this month in a straw poll at the Wisconsin Democratic Party convention.
As the contest enters its final stretch, Hong is seeking to capitalize on victories by democratic socialists and their allies across the country. On Tuesday, three candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani won House primaries, including two that featured Democratic incumbents. That followed democratic socialist candidates winning the Democratic primary for mayor in Washington, D.C., and advancing to a runoff in the Los Angeles mayoral race.
Darializa Avila Chevalier is almost certainly headed to Congress, having won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district. In 2024, while she was a sociology PhD student at Columbia,1 she founded a group called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest”, which was involved in the Palestine protests. In a now-deleted Instagram post, CUAD declared: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Avila Chevalier’s group also tweeted “Marg Bar Amrika”, meaning “Death to America” in Persian.
Avila Chevalier is also known for making plenty of “controversial”2 statements on social media. In 2019, in another now-deleted tweet, she lambasted Black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women”:
In 2020 she endorsed a theory that COVID-19 began in France, rather than in China.
Also in 2020, Avila Chevalier was an ardent supporter of the movement to abolish the police:
During the nationwide protests in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, Avila Chevalier responded to a user asking what a better slogan would be than “defund the police,” by posting, “F**k you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.”…Two days later, Avila Chevalier rejected an argument that abolishing police meant ending policing only “as we know it.”…“No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever,” she replied, adding several clap emojis.
She has also supported the abolition of prisons — a view she probably still holds. In a recent interview, when repeatedly asked point-blank whether she would put a murderer in prison, she refused to answer the question.
In 2022, she claimed that America’s support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was America “bullying Russia”:
Exit take via Goldberg: “The Democratic Party just gave a massive in-kind donation to the GOP and its crazies. Because a lot of voters may be disgusted with the GOP—and they should be—but if you convince them that the alternative is these gargoyles, they’ll continue to vote for what they see as the marginally less insane party.”
Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump? Were they standing in the way of the mayor’s “affordability” agenda? Were they moderates in any real, practical sense? Did a salacious tryst with Sydney Leathers come to light?
Pfft. Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough, silly. “Free Palestine” is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.
They’ve given up on global warming. Do Black Lives still Matter? Unclear. Abortion, tax hikes, gun control, nationalized healthcare: All now take a backseat to Israel and AIPAC, an American group that funds pro-Israel candidates, and the big, bad bogeyman on the left. A generation after Pat Buchanan was drummed out of the GOP for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” the vanguard of the left has decided that Ronald Reagan’s onetime communications director was right, actually.
Charlie, I think your extreme read on the DSA is being shaped by two things: the PTSD of watching MAGA hollow out your former party, and a deep-seated wariness as a ‘recovering conservative’ of anything that smells like socialism — your words, not mine. I get it. But as a lifelong center-left Democrat, I have to be honest: you’re doing the party and the country a disservice by flattening something that is genuinely more nuanced than you’re giving it credit for.
I’ve done the same research. Read the same materials. Listened to people who proudly call themselves members. And I’ve landed somewhere very different than you.
Here’s the reality: within the broader left, the DSA is often criticized for being too cozy with the Democratic Party — too reformist, not radical enough. That’s not the profile of a fringe insurgency. That’s a faction fighting over the soul of a coalition, which is exactly what healthy political movements do.
Is the DSA to the left of most Democrats? Yes. Are they far from Zionism? Absolutely. Are they antisemitic? I don’t believe that, and the evidence doesn’t support it. Does every DSA member want to abolish prisons and police? That’s simply not true, and saying so without qualification isn’t analysis — it’s a smear.
Here’s the bigger problem: if you want working-class voters, independents, and young people to turn out against GOP extremism, you can’t afford to treat every city’s political culture as a threat to be neutralized. Different communities lean differently on the democratic spectrum. That’s not a bug. Embrace the coalition or lose the election.
The goal is a New Deal-scale realignment — FDR-level ambition. That requires a big tent. And big tents don’t have litmus tests at the door.
I don't know much in the bigger picture of this world, but here are a few things I think I know, when I do not overthink them:
1) Sean Duffy always has been a mouth-breathing bully, among many others in the Wisconsin GOP tribe who were all-in on divide-and-conquer and other ways to make life worse for many fundamentally good people who deserved our thanks far more than their scorn. I'm happy to see that you have dissociated from them, Charlie. Consider it a badge of honor, for those people showed so little of it in their heart and their soul when their moment of opportunity came.
2) J.D. Vance will always be one of those people far more impressed with his own supposed intelligence than what it actually is. He really is not that smart of a person, with arguments all too easily deconstructed and a lack of historical awareness that expose both his youth and his inexperience with ideas that are bigger than his mind is capable of processing adequately. If he were a smarter person, he would recognize that he is being played by his boss, and to a declining level of approval even within MAGA circles. He sees trees. The rest of us see a forest.
3) The DSA Gegenreaktion (look it up) is hardly a surprise, a sort of letting out of the bottle the pressure that has been building up since the Escalator Moment in 2015 and the seemingly bottomless wellspring of abuse of power that MAGA embraces as somehow draining the swap (er, with the biggest swamp monster ever). Two things can be true at the same time: the worst extremes of it are no better than the worst extremes of the far right, and are counterproductive toward neutralizing the MAGA threat, while also reclaiming some of the high ground of classic liberalism being a rising tide that floats all boats where it has been driven underground by the train of thought that because the term "socialism" is attached to it, it must be inherently wrong and evil. (As someone with extensive life experience in Europe, don't get me started on how much better the infrastructure is over there on vital things such as public transportation, funding of quality education, and incentives for child-bearing and rearing that make us look utterly backward, when higher taxes well spent are a good investment rather than a drain of personal resources.) Surely there is a middle ground somewhere in this if people here have the courage to set labels aside, stay away from the jagged far edges of the road, and find common ground where it works for the biggest number of us, to the ultimate benefit of all.
Charlie, I think your extreme read on the DSA is being shaped by two things: the PTSD of watching MAGA hollow out your former party, and a deep-seated wariness as a ‘recovering conservative’ of anything that smells like socialism — your words, not mine. I get it. But as a lifelong center-left Democrat, I have to be honest: you’re doing the party and the country a disservice by flattening something that is genuinely more nuanced than you’re giving it credit for.
I’ve done the same research. Read the same materials. Listened to people who proudly call themselves members. And I’ve landed somewhere very different than you.
Here’s the reality: within the broader left, the DSA is often criticized for being too cozy with the Democratic Party — too reformist, not radical enough. That’s not the profile of a fringe insurgency. That’s a faction fighting over the soul of a coalition, which is exactly what healthy political movements do.
Is the DSA to the left of most Democrats? Yes. Are they far from Zionism? Absolutely. Are they antisemitic? I don’t believe that, and the evidence doesn’t support it. Does every DSA member want to abolish prisons and police? That’s simply not true, and saying so without qualification isn’t analysis — it’s a smear.
Here’s the bigger problem: if you want working-class voters, independents, and young people to turn out against GOP extremism, you can’t afford to treat every city’s political culture as a threat to be neutralized. Different communities lean differently on the democratic spectrum. That’s not a bug. Embrace the coalition or lose the election.
The goal is a New Deal-scale realignment — FDR-level ambition. That requires a big tent. And big tents don’t have litmus tests at the door.
I don't know much in the bigger picture of this world, but here are a few things I think I know, when I do not overthink them:
1) Sean Duffy always has been a mouth-breathing bully, among many others in the Wisconsin GOP tribe who were all-in on divide-and-conquer and other ways to make life worse for many fundamentally good people who deserved our thanks far more than their scorn. I'm happy to see that you have dissociated from them, Charlie. Consider it a badge of honor, for those people showed so little of it in their heart and their soul when their moment of opportunity came.
2) J.D. Vance will always be one of those people far more impressed with his own supposed intelligence than what it actually is. He really is not that smart of a person, with arguments all too easily deconstructed and a lack of historical awareness that expose both his youth and his inexperience with ideas that are bigger than his mind is capable of processing adequately. If he were a smarter person, he would recognize that he is being played by his boss, and to a declining level of approval even within MAGA circles. He sees trees. The rest of us see a forest.
3) The DSA Gegenreaktion (look it up) is hardly a surprise, a sort of letting out of the bottle the pressure that has been building up since the Escalator Moment in 2015 and the seemingly bottomless wellspring of abuse of power that MAGA embraces as somehow draining the swap (er, with the biggest swamp monster ever). Two things can be true at the same time: the worst extremes of it are no better than the worst extremes of the far right, and are counterproductive toward neutralizing the MAGA threat, while also reclaiming some of the high ground of classic liberalism being a rising tide that floats all boats where it has been driven underground by the train of thought that because the term "socialism" is attached to it, it must be inherently wrong and evil. (As someone with extensive life experience in Europe, don't get me started on how much better the infrastructure is over there on vital things such as public transportation, funding of quality education, and incentives for child-bearing and rearing that make us look utterly backward, when higher taxes well spent are a good investment rather than a drain of personal resources.) Surely there is a middle ground somewhere in this if people here have the courage to set labels aside, stay away from the jagged far edges of the road, and find common ground where it works for the biggest number of us, to the ultimate benefit of all.