Let's revisit a grisly incident to see what it says about things.
After a career of dismissing mass
shootings and stoking political violence to silence those he disagreed
with, Charlie Kirk got shot on a college campus while debating gun death numbers. It's almost poetic.
To most people, this was just irony at work. But to centrist bullshit artists this was yet another opportunity to play genteel edgelords and prove that they can spin almost any position no matter how repugnant or factually bankrupt and still seem smart and reasonable to their readers.
Thus, they rushed to paint a totally unrecognizable portrait of Charlie Kirk. They turned the dead young demagogue into a non-violent champion of free speech who only loved a good debate. Naturally, they said they disagreed with Kirk on most things, but then they portrayed him as some modern Socrates. Their portrait was so grotesquely distorted that Dorian Gray's would howl with laughter, making any shaken guests immediately investigate the attic.
So, let's investigate the attic, because there's a mess of interesting things up there. I'll talk about Kirk first, then his amoral apologists. It's going to be a long look at most everyone involved because it's enormously important to recognize the rhetorical reflexes that still shape elite idiot opinion. They made and maintain the hellscape we inhabit today, and we must understand how they did it before we can fix it.
Charlie Kirk was a piece of work, and his unhinged bigotry is the reason. He thought most minorities were inherently incompetent and/or violent and repeatedly said so. Of course, it was all projecting.
Take this typical video clip in which Kirk called several accomplished Black women undeserving because they had credited affirmative action for giving them an opportunity to prove themselves. Kirk twists this into admitting they cheated. “Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Elsewhere, Kirk said, “I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” He later doubled down adding, “[W]e're not hiring based on merit anymore. We're hiring based on race."
Ugly stuff. But it gets much worse: Charlie Kirk also embraced the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. The paranoid fantasy combines antisemitism with anti-immigrant sentiment by claiming Jews are secretly working to replace Anglos with non-white immigrants to destroy white America. Remember the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which preppie-dressed Nazis marched with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us"? That's the replacement they were talking about.
This belief's been engineered to encourage violence against minorities by framing it as fighting back in self-defense. Those who spout it aren't interested in coexistence with anyone different because they associate coexistence with extermination. They fear demographic doom, economic dispossession, and cultural irrelevance, if not literal death camps. Of course, they're encouraged to let their imaginations gallop and run nuts with it. In that toxic fandom, everything's canon.
Accordingly, they'll obviously fight to prevent that imagined outcome. And to steel themselves in advance, they've inoculated themselves against any soft feelings for others. They see any appeal to human decency as trickery – tolerance is a Trojan horse to them. This explains their overt war on empathy voiced by JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Charlie Kirk. They think it's a sin. But that's for my next post.
Kirk was always cagey enough to never explicitly advocate political violence, but there's no question that he had used violent rhetoric to rile up his followers. In 2023, Kirk said trans people should be “dealt with" like “in the 50s and 60s." In 2024, Kirk said, “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately." (Never mind that the original Nazis persecuted trans people.) Also in 2024, two employees of his organization Turning Point USA, assaulted a queer professor. The group maintains and distributes an enemies list of academics they dislike. Those targeted are predominantly professors of color and they typically get deluged with death threats. Charlie Kirk celebrated vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse at a Turning Point event. The valorization of violence was overt.
Of course, when one follower said the quiet part out loud and on camera, Kirk was forced to disavow violence. But how he did it was quite telling: He projected his group's bloodlust onto their opponents. The follower had asked, “When do we get to use the guns?" That line got both cheers and applause. He continued: “That's not a joke, I'm not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?"
Kirk promptly denounced the question explaining: “you're playing into all their plans, and they're trying to make you do this. They are trying to provoke you, and everyone here." He summed: “To answer your question, and I just think it's overly blunt, we have to be the ones that do not play into the violent aims and ambitions of the other side." Yeah, I'd say “When do we get to use the guns?" was just a bit blunt. The “get to" in particular signaled impatient desire. Not sure you were talking about the other side, tho, bro.
This wasn't Kirk being peaceful or reasonable: He was covering his ass. These are the people he'd worked up in the first place and they had reason to expect he'd say something different. Bet it was disappointing.
Inciting-before-projecting was a familiar combo in Kirk's work. He'd done such edging in many episodes. In one, he spoke of “prowling Blacks" targeting whites “for fun," insisting it was “happening all the time" and on the rise. Kirk next claimed that over six hundred white women were killed by Black men every year. He said it three times total so that you wouldn't forget. Later in the episode, he got into a rambling explanation about how he thought “Karen" was a slur when he suddenly blurted: “And they also just want to start a race war. The left would love to see a race war."
Um, that sorta sounds like something you want, dude. You know, from all that stuff you said just before.
That moment was no outlier. Kirk's videos were rife with violent racist fantasies. Remember when I said he promoted the Great Replacement theory? At one point, he claimed the Biden administration was trying to destroy Alabama by settling Haitian immigrants there: “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." Later, he gets lurid. “Just so we're clear, the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night – it's only gonna get worse – unless Donald Trump wins. ... There will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama and they will become your masters."
But Charlie Kirk wasn't uniquely evil. He was just another a bigoted shit spigot who spouted the same Klan propaganda as the rest of the alt-right. In that last instance, he was reheating the old “payback time" trope that automatically gets deployed whenever any minority benefits from anything, no matter how modestly. And this was a group effort since Kirk was magnifying a Fox News rage-bait story. No, he wasn't unique.
In fact, from Rush Limbaugh to Alex Jones, egging followers on in this fashion is standard practice for such authoritarian hatemongers. Indeed, much of what Kirk did had been done by Limbaugh before him. A lot of folks forget what an absolute monster Rush was.
For example, six months into the Obama administration, Limbaugh made a predictable prediction: “The days of them not having any power are over, and they are angry. And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That's what Obama's about, gang. He's angry; he's going to cut this country down to size. He's going to make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made – its mistreatment of minorities. I know exactly what's going on here."(1) Sound familiar?
I'd say his show basically became Birth of a Nation as radio play, but Rush was already a rabid racist. Yeah, he was big mad that a Black man became president, but it's not like he suddenly snapped in 2008. In the 1970s, he told a Black caller “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back." Limbaugh was always like that. But now he had more opportunities to inject his racism into other topics, and it sold more.
But if that's not enough to justify a Charlie Kirk comparison, consider Rush Limbaugh describing the 2020 Republican National Convention. He opened boasting, “[I]t’s been the most diverse political convention I’ve ever seen, including Democrat conventions." Yes, he said that. “It’s about saving America from a race war that the Democrats are out there actively trying to promote. They’re trying to foment it. They want this country to be black versus white, immigrant versus native, male versus female. That’s what they want. They want that chaos, they want this constant us-versus-them aspect of daily life." Then he made Trump sound almost as woke as the convention. According to Rush, Trump was someone who just wanted everyone to be happy and not, say, an angry man who wanted to use power as a means of retribution.
The centrist press has long downplayed MAGA’s manifest culture of violence and whitewashing Kirk now is just more of the same. Indeed, a large part of their whitewash is slyly implying that Charlie Kirk is not like those other demagogues by not mentioning those other demagogues. They can't say “Charlie Kirk is not like Alex Jones" without reminding everyone that he totally was. Comparison is the thief of spin.
To ignore Charlie Kirk's inflammatory commentary, they must ignore its ubiquity in that industry. There's no way to perfume that turd of a person without ignoring every relevant detail of his evil career, including the putrid alt-right media ecosystem that had spawned him and very many others. So all context is politely omitted and in death he becomes famous for being famous or, at worst, vaguely “controversial."
Curiously, the first to try his hand at rehabilitating Charlie Kirk's image for mainstream consumption was not a pundit but a politico: California Governor Gavin Newsom(D).
Newsom had been going on rightwing podcasts as well as having right-wingers on his. Indeed, most of his guests have been total wingnuts. His first three were Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, and Steve Bannon, in that order. All three unrepentant white supremacists(2) The episodes were stunningly chummy.
For example, Newsom gave zero pushback when Bannon claimed that Trump had won the 2020 election. But why harsh the bonhomie by being nitpicky? That's just rude.
In his interview with Charlie Kirk, Gavin Newsom had “praised or agreed with Kirk nearly 125 times, including saying he ‘appreciates' Kirk or his ideas a whopping 52 times." Did Newsom's lavish flattery win Kirk over? Of course not. On Kirk's very next podcast, he bragged that Newsom had been “overly-effusive in his praise of me" and then proceeded to detail how he believed that Newsom was destroying California.
Incidentally, virtually all centrist efforts to mollify conservatives play out this way. Please stop trying.
So, considering all this, it shouldn't surprise that Newsom portrayed Kirk positively and even as someone to copy. “The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate – never through violence." (Which circulating enemies lists technically isn't.)
More on the governor in a moment. Let's move on to Ezra Klein's whitewash of Charlie Kirk in the New York Times for a short bit. I'm going to zigzag some between Newsom and Klein in the rest of this post since Klein mentions Newsom in his piece and their interests and politics tightly align.
Like Newsom, Klein laundered Kirk and urged us to emulate him. “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way."
“Exactly"? Curious word choice considering it's a bit difficult for people to follow Charlie Kirk's shining example when you're so slim on specifics about his attitudes and activities. That's not exactly exactitude. By contrast, I got some specific quibbles with Kirk's methods.
Klein's piece on Kirk was a eulogy and politely lying by omission is considered good form in those. Plus some smug gushing: “A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness. In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan. What a testament to Kirk’s project." Yuck.
Try more like a testament to Newsom's abject failure as a father. It's an enormous self-own.
It's also insight into his household's
politics because Pop's been veering right on his policies for a while
now – most probably to position himself for a presidential
run. This is the same tired centrist triangulation by which a Democrat
throws some vulnerable groups under a bus to pick up conservative voters and it
never works. It's self-sabotage. If the Democrat doing that wins, it's despite
doing that not because of it.
So to employ this strategy, Gavin Newsom used the interview with Charlie Kirk as an opportunity to tout his conservative views. And here's something some writers missed. People aren't just angry that Newsom had Kirk on his show or was amiable: They're mad that Newsom himself said specific things to deliberately distance himself from those people, showing he was just another unreliable ally. As Politico observed:
Newsom’s interview with Kirk was friendly, sometimes exceedingly so. He mentioned the influence Kirk and other MAGA-world figures have had on his 13-year-old son, distanced himself from the use of pronouns and the gender-neutral term “Latinx,” called police defunding “lunacy,” denounced “cancel culture” and agreed that there had been some internal issues in the leadership of the Black Lives Matter organization.
The most headline-grabbing Newsom comment was the one in which he agreed with Kirk that trans kids shouldn't be able to participate in school sports. “I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness – it’s deeply unfair.” Newsom had a good record on LGBTQ+ issues before. (He was mayor of San Francisco fifteen years ago.) It seems like he's now trying to scrape it away, but he's actually trying to have it both ways by betraying the community while touting his record.(3)
But transfolk aren't the only group that felt betrayed by Newsom in recent years. He has vetoed multiple popular bills by labor(4) and environmental(5) groups, leaving many shocked and bewildered Democrats in the state legislature to wonder if they should even bother trying to pass anything in the first place. As one retired legislator said of his former colleagues, “‘WTF’ is the most common text message I get.”
Granted, Gavin Newsom has always hated government regulation because he's a businessman. But these groups still felt betrayed because they loyally had his back in the past. As Calmatters reported, “In 2021, during the failed attempt to recall Newsom, unions gave at least $23.6 million to defend him."(6)
Newsom's callous war on the homeless has also shocked lots of Democrats. He had ordered the clearing of encampments while at the same time threatening reluctant county governments with funding cuts if they didn't comply fast enough. Advocates noticed similarities with Trump's federal war on the homeless, but Newsom's office brushed off the comparison by saying they were prosecuting it more competently and humanely – a familiar centrist defense when enacting conservative policies. It's how the Clintons had characterized their push for welfare reform. The governor's press release read: “Unlike the haphazard strategies employed by the Trump Administration, California’s SAFE Task Force brings together each of the tools created by Governor Newsom to clear encampments and connect people with the care they need.” Gavin even used one camp teardown as a photo op that was almost on par with Bill Clinton's Stone Mountain moment. I think such cruel displays are well past their sell dates for most Democrats.
Needless to say, Gavin Newsom's alt-right-friendly podcasts have also done some significant damage to his approval ratings. Newsom has always defended the podcast as an effort to understand Democratic losses. “It’s just exploring the other side. Why are they kicking our ass?” But I suspect he already understands the other side from the inside. He is intimately familiar with it and trying to legitimize it. His “exploring" is better called heavy petting. So swaying Newsom's son doesn't sound like such a great feat to me. Seems like much of Charlie Kirk's work was already done for him in the Newsom household.
Prioritizing ambition over compassion is typical of this type of Democrat. Remember when Donald Trump illegally deported Maryland family man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to an infamous prison in El Salvador? Trump initially claimed it was “an administrative accident.” The Supreme Court ordered Trump to get him back, but he balked claiming that he didn't have the power to do so. This triggered a constitutional crisis and made Garcia a symbol of the deportee issue. Some Democrats leapt into action while others dismissed it all as a trivial distraction.
Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen flew down to El Salvador with four House members to try to free his constituent. Their pressure ultimately got Garcia back to the States, proving that Trump had the power to do this all along. But ICE then re-arrested him and repeatedly attempted to deport him to various African countries, initially Uganda, then Eswatini, and finally Ghana. Garcia has never been to Africa.
In stark contrast with Van Hollen, centrist Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) claimed the administration's actions were a red herring. “They’re doing it because they want to distract people from the fact that our economy is in a tailspin thanks to them, their tariffs.” Governor Newsom echoed the tone-deaf talking point. “They don’t want this debate on the tariffs, they don’t want to be accountable to the markets today. They want to have this conversation. Don’t get distracted by distractions.”
In other words, “If you must defy Trump, do it quietly." But there's no quiet way to effectively pressure this attention-addicted administration. The strongly worded letters that centrists prefer don't work.
Don't get me wrong: I'm totally for walloping Trump on the economy, but inflation and immigration aren't mutually exclusive issues. Moreover, everyone gets reminded of inflation every time they shop, but Garcia's plight doesn't have that built-in reinforcement and therefore needs people to make noise. Don't get desensitized by falling for false trade-offs.
Speaking of strongly worded, Van Hollen's response to Newsom was both sharp and to the point: “I think Americans are tired of elected officials or politicians who are all finger to the wind. Anybody who can’t stand up for the Constitution and the right of due process doesn’t deserve to lead." Van Hollen's actions proved popular and put him on the map. As Coach Finstock had quipped on Blue Sky, “Gavin Newsom, a schmuck who has spent every waking moment the last 10 years of his life thinking about political optics, getting dogwalked by a guy half the country didn't even know existed like 5 days ago."
But again, Newsom's reptilian attitude is hardly unique: It's the mentality of centrists generally. They imagine a selfish conservative electorate and proceed to court it. And no poll or outcome can ever shake their assumptions about what voters want. I strongly suspect this is in part because they have the same traits that they attribute to the electorate and consider them common sense. So empathy looks crazy, reckless, and embarrassing to them. They truly think it's a bad look.
Matt Yglesias promoted this mentality as strategy for victory at the centrist WelcomeFest held this past summer. The Gospel according to Matthew (and, again, centrists in general) says Democrats lose elections when they defend controversial groups and positions that they should distance themselves from instead. In other words, don't help those people – they're “bad groups" and they'll damage your reputation.
Naturally, Yglesias was absolutely wrong. News coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's illegal abduction and deportation had hurt Trump, not the Democrats. Probably because most people aren't sociopaths.
Of course, Yglesias' approach is wrong across the board because: a) Conservatives constantly manufacture bogus controversies to mobilize their voters and b) They do that because politics are inherently adversarial. Ultimately, applying his advice means giving conservatives everything they want – which of course still won't satisfy them any or alter this dynamic one jot because they'll just invent new grievances.
I'm going to drill into this a bit deeper because it ties into who centrists reflexively defend or betray. And that will finally segue into finishing up with Ezra Klein.
Matty's batty advice is certainly nothing new. Centrists have been telling Democrats to steer clear of social issues forever – especially anything sex-related. Accordingly, Democrats have always been fair weather friends to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Such issues are “hot potatoes" before they get adopted, but the next election could still get them dropped (which centrist pundits always advise doing). In defeat, these issues often get made into scapegoats. For example, John Kerry's 2004 loss got blamed on gay marriage and Kamala Harris' 2024 loss got blamed on trans rights. Did either candidate campaign on those issues? Absolutely not. But they didn't conspicuously distance themselves either and centrist consultants see that as a grave mistake. Of course, electoral victory doesn't secure solid support for these issues either. They can still get blown off entirely or discarded as sacrificial bargaining chips.
For example, in 2008, Barack Obama promised to codify Roe v Wade on day one. “The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." Instead, he launched a task force on teen pregnancy that sought consensus between both pro- and anti-choice groups. He explained that codifying Roe was “not the highest legislative priority." His priority was comity: “I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on.” For her part, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted there should be “no litmus test" on abortion and claimed it was “fading as an issue" anyway. Of course, today we know it didn't quite fade away.
Instead, the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade in Dobbs v Jackson. Everyone who could count to nine knew this was coming. Anti-abortion “trigger laws" were already in place in many states, abortion rights advocates had long been sounding the alarm, and the court's decision got leaked almost two months before it was officially handed down. Yet Democratic leadership inexcusably got blindsided. Why?
Likely because of their severe allergy to controversy and their contempt for activists. And after the ball finally dropped, they continued to malign activists and angst about antagonizing conservatives. I blogged about the whole shit-show. It was a perfect case study for the inherent perfidy of centrist thinking.
Predictably, the groups and issues that centrists insist are radioactive often turn out not to be. For example, it's been shown over and over that transphobia is ballot box poison – even in red states. It had destroyed many Republican campaigns, yet centrist pundits still tell Democrats to drink that very same Kool-Aid.
To centrists, Gavin Newsom making transphobic overtures to the right is just smart maneuvering. After all, his saying it's “deeply unfair" for transwomen to participate in women's sports in 2025 only echoes Hillary Clinton's saying that cis women had a “legitimate concern" with transwomen using women's restrooms in 2019. And both Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigeig have also voiced “concerns" over trans girls playing in sports even though, once again, trans girls already avoid testosterone for their own reasons. Still, centrists consider transfolk a “bad group," so it's a “no-brainer" to them.
But centrists also thought throwing immigrants to the wolves was a good move, and the Kilmar Garcia case disproved that. Indeed, we're seeing people defy ICE nationwide. In 2022, centrists said “Abolish ICE" was a losing slogan that would doom Democrats in the midterms. It didn't. And today, it's becoming an increasingly mainstream sentiment. Indeed, ICE is now more hated than Donald Trump. And in the process, timid centrist appeasers are losing the soccer moms. Average people are digging their heels in:
Polls are often volatile and can go up or down in response to new information or distortions. But while propaganda can get ignorant attitudes to spike, they're typically only temporary. By contrast, accurate info often gets more durable results. LGBTQ+ rights is one example. Yes, reactionaries are still trying to turn back the clock, but public support for the community remains strong.
Yet this didn't deter Ezra Klein from advising Democrats to run anti-abortion candidates in three of those four states. (He forgot Kentucky.) Nope, he of course encouraged adopting:
the willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win. Taking political positions that'll make it more likely to win Senate seats in Kansas and Ohio and Missouri. Trying to open your coalition to people you didn't want it open to before. Running pro-life Democrats.
Yes, he said that. And, yes, we're
back to talking about Ezra Klein now. I'm sorry, but we're almost done.
I'm not totally sure that he knows what the word “obviously" means, because his definition is the opposite of mine: I see a promising opportunity where he sees his strategic appeasement at risk. I see a growing advantage to press where he sees something to smother and offer the conqueror as obedient tribute.
Naturally, Klein presents this manifest submission as pragmatic resistance. But the problem with this crooked framing is that establishment pundits like him have always given this exact same advice for decades, no matter who was president or which party controlled Congress. And, interestingly, Klein kinda admitted this immediately before: “And the stakes of politics are almost always incredibly high. I think they happen to be higher now." So, surrender is almost always necessary but it's especially necessary now?
This isn't Klein rising to the moment by bravely facing harsh new truths. Just the opposite: He's flying on autopilot. That block quote above comes from his appearance on Ross Douthat's podcast, and the subtitle of that episode is a criticism Klein made of the Democrats that's made far more frequently by exasperated progressives: “They’re failing and rethinking nothing."
Yeah, because the Dems are still following your tired centrist advice. And that advice is derivative as well as discredited since you're only echoing Nancy Pelosi on abortion: The call is coming from inside the House of Representatives. The party's already routinely surrendering and you're saying surrender harder like it's some bold tough love innovation.
Just like Governor Gavin Newsom, Ezra Klein claims that he's simply trying to understand the right and why we lost in 2024. But these things aren't mysteries. Voters didn't like being gaslit about inflation and were disgusted by President Biden aiding and abetting Israel's brazen genocide in Gaza. And, of course, Kamala Harris' incompetent campaign passed on championing popular progressive economic policies to tour with Liz Cheney instead. But centrists dislike those explanations, so the search for answers continues.
Seriously, I just love how these weasels pretend that Bernie Sanders doesn't exist to justify their misleading inquiries. Take Sanders' subsequent Against Oligarchy tour. It had crisscrossed the country for months filling stadiums to capacity in Republican-held swing districts proving how popular progressive economic policies are. Sanders has an analysis of the country's ills that also identifies why Democrats keep losing and most people seem to agree with it. The tour echoed that famous moment in 2019 when Sanders went on a Fox News town hall in a Trump district and got almost everyone there to raise their hands in favor of Medicare for All. Indeed, he does this outreach pretty frequently.
In other words, Sanders is “practicing politics in exactly the right way" and showing the exact “moxie and fearlessness" that Ezra Klein says that the left lacks. But centrists dislike his policies, so they instead interview more Nazis. For some reason, centrists find analysis by Nazis infinitely more interesting, so they stubbornly continue “exploring the other side" as Gavin Newsom puts it.
Incidentally, last March a Rutgers University study asked Rust Belt voters to describe why they despised the Democratic Party in their own words rather than just having them tick off boxes. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't the Culture War stuff that Klein and Newsom prefer to focus on, but the fact that the Democrats don't deliver to their constituents. “Only 11 percent of independents and 19 percent of Republicans explicitly mentioned ‘wokeness' or ideological extremism in their description of the Democratic Party." It turns out people are hurting and don't like it. Who knew? Needless to say, this supports Sanders' analysis.
Of course, centrists playing dumb to sell rancid milk in new bottles is itself nothing new. Remember that Ezra Klein just recently published a book called Abundance that advocated deregulation as if it were some untried exciting new thing and not one of the dominant governing dogmas of the last half century.
It's like this: Your doorbell rings. It's Ezra Klein in a suit carrying a briefcase full of pamphlets. With an earnest look and a soothing tone, he asks, “Have you heard the good news about Reaganomics?"
Klein's timing was entertainingly terrible. The book dropped last March while Elon Musk was taking a chainsaw to crucial government programs and agencies, which made himself phenomenally unpopular in the process. Of course, Ezra Klein doesn't endorse what Elon Musk did. Certainly not. Klein would do it competently and humanely, like Gavin Newsom's teardowns of homeless encampments.
Speaking of tents, another worn out centrist trope is their cherished “big tent" rhetoric. Nancy Pelosi was awfully fond of using it when stressing there should be no litmus tests on abortion. Of course, part and parcel of welcoming anti-abortion voters is telling pro-choice ones to shut the fuck up. (Also opposing pro-choice primary challengers.) Naturally, Neera Tanden agrees with Klein: “We need to expand the tent."
The idea seems somewhat reasonable until you realize centrists don't want any “bad groups" in their big tent unless they're both silent and invisible. In other words, in the closet.(9)
And yes, you guessed it: This is Matt Yglesisas' strategy, which is often called “Popularism." Amusingly, Ezra Klein himself had given a rather apt description of popularism. “All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff."
Except John Kerry and Kamala Harris had shut up about what they thought was the unpopular stuff and it didn't help them any. Probably because this tired strategy doesn't account for centrists having no nose for what's popular. Hence, Ezra Klein and I disagree on what is “obviously more likely to help you win." I think things like Medicare for All, Green New Deal, free college and forgiving student debt are popular because that's what the polls show. But centrists don't want to talk about the popular stuff, so they advocate copying conservatives instead. They pretend that's what's popular, and they won't ever shut up about it.
Incidentally, platforming white
supremacists is also part of this “big
tent" mindset, which may explain why the Abundance Agenda gang is race-science-adjacent.
Well, that and the fact that reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire tech bros are big funders of both groups. A contributing factor in that is the “libertarian to alt-right pipeline" that's been getting attention in recent years, although it's not all that new. Look up “paleolibertarian" which got going in the 1980s. Alt-right libertarianism is damn rampant in The Valley, at least among the CEOs.
Related to this are the similarities between centrists and libertarians. As I've blogged before, centrists are genteel libertarians (or libertarians are edgy centrists). They're insufferably smug selfish suburban weirdos who worship entrepreneurs and trust corporations more than governments. Combine that insight with the aforementioned alt-right pipeline and the recent trajectory of centrist thought makes more sense. Of course the Abundance bunch has such fashy fellow travelers! How many racist dog whistles did the Clintons toot while ushering in “The New Economy" in the 1990s?
Finally, centrists enjoy boasting about their “open mindedness" – that's another important pole holding up their big tent mindset. Remember when centrists mocked progressives by saying, “Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out"? But progressives aren't the ones networking with Nazis.
Centrists try to silence progressives in several ways. One is by accusing progressives of being censorious scolds. It's funny because they're obviously projecting. They're the ones who are routinely tone policing and concern trolling to disrupt progressives' messaging. To them, it's not what you say, but how you say it.
Seriously, this is literally their whole shtick. It's stupid, but effective. So why would they ever deviate from it? Especially since they're paid so handsomely to flog their narrative forever.
Colleges are favorite targets of their bogus scolding. Newspaper columnists have bemoaned the “intolerant atmosphere" on campuses for so long it's become a genre. In 2016, the New York Times' Nicolas Kristof wrote three tedious pieces lamenting that colleges had become liberal “echo chambers." The first was dramatically entitled “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance." Does he think he's Saint Augustine?
Predictably, as a centrist pretending to be a progressive in the paper or record, it's Kristoff's job to say conservatives “have a point" when they don't. Such pundits prey on liberal open mindedness to legitimize the right's bullshit hobby horses. In short, they write brain pan lubricant.
But the conservative assault on
academia launched long before 2016. That began when William F. Buckley
wrote God and Man at Yale way back in 1951, which remains the template for this rhetoric today: Alleging communist indoctrination of students? Check. Trying to get
professors fired? Check. Lying about textbook
content? Check. Claiming that colleges are hostile environments to conservatives? Check. Again, none of this Charlie Kirk shtick is new. The only difference is that Buckley
openly called for colleges to instill conservative views. College indoctrination was not a problem for Buckley provided it was for his side. Today's Buckleys don't have any problem with it either, but they have to pretend to for rhetorical effect.
Incidentally, centrists love Buckley. They shouldn't, but they do.
Of course, colleges aren't perfect institutions. The nationwide crackdowns by administrators on peaceful
student protesters who opposed the genocide in Gaza prove that. But the same
pundits and outlets that had catastrophized over free speech on campus for
decades had also cheered on the crackdowns. The centrist press has a longstanding double standard that constantly favors the right in
campus free speech coverage: Murders and bomb
threats by the right routinely get ignored, obscured, or minimized while petty annoyances
by the left are reported with ponderous concern.
Such conservative coverage by the supposedly liberal media can be seen on other issues. Consider the New York Times' routine transphobia. The media watchdog group FAIR had found a “pattern of platforming transphobes before trans people, spreading dangerous misinformation and framing trans rights as up for debate." Like the rest of the centrist press, the Times would rather look objective than be objective, so the side with less evidence gets quoted more and questioned less to make everyone look equally at fault. Often, straightforward stories get tortured into confusing ones to discourage readers from making judgements.
This built-in conservative spin benefits bigots, but do the bigots appreciate this free service? Nope. Again, Gavin Newsom's interview with Charlie Kirk won him no love. Conservatives take these olive branches as victory laurels, pretend to be persecuted, and resume their attacks. And as I blogged before, it's also a problem with some documentaries. So much obvious and abhorrent horseshit has been legitimized by this reflexive “both sides" framing that it's no wonder how we got here.
It makes you wonder if the New York Times is dumb or just playing dumb. The possibilities aren't mutually exclusive. Bias can make smart people do dumb things, but there's no doubting the paper's rightist bias.
For example, the Times is very invested in the narrative that progressive policies are driving away average Democrats and so the party must tack right and shush activists to win. Sound familiar? They publish news stories like this all the time. But there's just one problem: The “Democrats" they interview repeatedly turn out to be conservative Republican operatives. Oopsie. Are these interviewees adeptly gaming the paper's wishcasting or is the paper itself playing the game? Does it matter? Whether they're being duped, duping themselves, or deliberately duping their readers, both their motive and their narrative remain the same.
Regardless, centrists and conservatives are in sync. The right tries to silence its critics with enemies lists and violence, while the center either turns a blind eye to it and/or scolds the victims. Whether wittingly or not, silencing the left to benefit the rich has always been their shared political project.
When your rhetoric has a trajectory, you eventually get to where you were always going, and you probably should've asked where you were headed earlier. You're here now and there's no point in denying it: You've been spin-doctoring overt unreconstructed fuckos and you've got nobody to blame but yourself. Now might be a great time to revisit your thinking habits, what with everything coming to a head and all.(10)
I focused on some gross folks in this post, but they're not what's truly important. They just exemplify dynamics, mindsets, and arguments that constantly poison our politics. None of these people have ever said anything remotely original. Rush Limbaugh and Charlie Kirk just echoed old Klan crap. Gavin Newsom is imitating Bill Clinton. The self-sabotaging guidance that Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein regularly give the Democrats has been unwise conventional wisdom for several decades. And when these derivative imbeciles retire, they'll be replaced with new ones because there's always plenty of money to be made by defending our ugly oligarchy. They're different heads on the same hydra: Cut one off and two grow back.
Even without overt billionaire owner interference, the media is composed of enormous corporations that make their money almost entirely selling ad time or space to other enormous corporations. They're not going to bite the hands that feed them, nor their own hands. Remember, as corporations, they're not fond of unions, taxes, or regulations of any sort – whether safety, environmental, or financial. So even before any money changes hands, they already share the attitudes of their advertisers and that colors coverage.
That bias is built into their business. There's a clear conflict of interest between serving the public good and keeping advertisers and stockholders happy. The problem has always been there and will remain in place until news outlets become nonprofits. Obviously, it's worse now with oligarchs buying news outlets, but most don't appreciate the degree to which money has always dictated the media's decision making.
One CEO had actually admitted this conflict of interest. Witness former CBS CEO Les Moonves crowing about how profitable Trump's ads were during the 2016 election:
It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. ... Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun. ... I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.
Moonves wasn't booted out for saying this out loud. It was for sexual harassment instead. But it's important to note that having Moonves' priorities are mandatory in his position. When profit conflicts with the public good, management will always choose profit because that's the job. Moonves understood the assignment and so does every other corporate executive in this or any other industry.
That's why different pundits make the same arguments: The structural incentives remain. Today's rancid milkmen retire, die, or get fired and get replaced with new ones. The bottles have new labels with new logos, but the stuff inside is just the same as before. Simply finding new faces isn't going to fix anything because they're employed by the same companies and all their competitors have identical incentives.
We've heard enough from the Nazis in the attic. We already know what they think about things. It's familiar terrain, so there's nothing more to “explore" on their side. We have maps.
Ask a 20th century historian, if you still have any questions.
______________
1) Of course, Obama was the opposite of what Limbaugh said. He was way too conciliatory to Republicans. He didn't want to look like an “angry black man," but the country elected a black man while angry. We were pissed at Bush. We wanted Obama to prosecute the War on Terror torturers along with the bankers who had crashed the economy. But Obama wanted to move past all that and let everyone off the hook hoping this would bring healing and unity. Did any of this placate Limbaugh and his growing number of imitators? Of course not. He dialed the vitriol up instead of down because the accurate takeaway he got was that bullying works. Of course, Limbaugh had already learned that during the Clinton years.
2) Among them, Michael Savage is the least well known. Savage believes there is a “cultural genocide being promulgated against Caucasians" for which blames Obama. “It doesn’t take an Albert Einstein to see what he’s doing and who he’s targeting. In that sense, he’s a mad man. He’s a mad man. He has a specific vendetta that is obvious to anyone that studies what he is doing and who he is favoring.”
3) By the way, if you're confused or conflicted, the “hormonal advantage" argument falls apart once you remember that trans girls already take steps to prevent or stop male levels of testosterone production for their own reasons. It's the whole goal of Gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT), which misinformed transphobes are horrified by. Things tend to make more sense when you stop and think about them.
4) In 2023, Newsom gave union voters a shock. He had signed a fast-food bill that bumped the minimum wage in that industry up from $17 an hour to $20. But two days later, he vetoed two other labor bills. The first would've made strikers eligible for unemployment benefits after two weeks and the second bill would've extended workplace safety protections to domestic workers.
5) In 2019, Gavin Newsom vetoed an environmental bill designed to shore up state protections in response to Donald Trump weakening federal ones. Newsom was less interested in resisting Trump then, but this year he signed a similar but weaker bill. In 2024, he vetoed a clean air bill that would've required refineries to promptly notify the public of unhealthy emission levels. Later that year, he vetoed another bill that would have “established guidelines for water use in some coastal areas to make them more resilient to drought and climate change." And just this past July, Gov. Newsom threatened to veto the budget unless the legislature gutted the state's 54-year-old landmark California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. He, of course, argued that its regulations were hampering real estate development.
6) It's pretty reminiscent of Bill Clinton's Arkansas days. Labor had backed Bill to the hilt when he first got into politics straight out of Yale law school. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1974 and was the biggest recipient of union donations in the nation that year. But Clinton didn't reciprocate their support. Later, in the 1980s, Governor Clinton joined the nationwide conservative assault on public school teachers. Environmentalists had also enthusiastically backed Clinton from the beginning, and they got burned too.
7) How? Well, a few reasons. First, education efforts humanize oppressed groups. Others become aware of their plight, sympathize, and see things they hadn't considered. Friendships get made or strengthened and become support networks. Second, fresh lessons are still in recent memory. There's new resistance to repeating old mistakes because people now see where they lead. Third, there's also a broader perceptual shift beyond the specific issue that gets instilled through lived experience: The bad thing we were told not to worry about had actually happened, but it also got defeated. It's important to hold both possibilities in your head at once to prevent passivity. That activates and sustains agency. This realization is felt and remembered because it's something you experienced: Both events – the crisis and the win – shook you out of your political stupor and dramatically revealed that reality is something that we can actually bend and shape if we work together. Why didn't we realize this earlier? The answer may shock you.
8) The “all or most cases" framing of the question in these three polls is intended to capture the leanings of people with mixed feelings by nudging them to take a side. Gallup asks the question a little differently by making a third category for everyone with mixed feelings. All the respondents who think abortion should be legal “in some cases" go in that category.
Similarly, transphobes talk as if there are no safeguards or delays to minors transitioning when it's actually a very lengthy process. Immigration is still another issue where conservatives ignore well-documented obstacles. It takes years of bureaucratic hoop jumping to become a US citizen. Yet conservatives insist that immigrants just walk right in and collect all the same benefits. This pre-Trump (2008) cartoon flowchart shows what an obstacle course the process is. Yes, it's from Reason magazine, but broken clocks and all that.
9) At this point, I should probably clarify something that might not be obvious to some folks. Namely that it's batshit insanity to tell people who care about issues that directly affect them or those they love to never talk about those issues and loyally vote for you anyway. It's not only bad for morale and thus prone to backfire at the ballot box, but also totally contrary how democracy works – which looks even worse when your party is called the Democratic Party. Politics is about drawing attention to problems in order to get them fixed. There is no politics without criticizing, agitating, and mobilizing. And any party that tells its constituents to shut up is clearly not really listening to them and therefore not representing them.
But centrists don't really see themselves as public servants. They instead have this top-down model of politics that scolds voters and tells them, “If you don't make a stink, we might make some tweaks. But stay quiet in the meantime or you'll get nothing." It's a manifestly conservative and undemocratic attitude that smothers voter turnout. And trying to discipline constituents is not only alienating – it's also an impossible goal because you can't control voters. It's just the most obvious self-sabotage.
10) And if you're not employed yourself in the press, now might be a wise time to start with a healthier media diet. Unlike corporate media, progressive and lefty outlets have a greater track record of accuracy.
For articles, consider: The Nation, The American Prospect, The New Republic, In These Times, Jacobin
For audio and/or video, consider: Behind the News with Doug Henwood, Zeteo, Democracy Now!
And, while it's not a news source, the podcast If Books Could Kill is an always entertaining analysis of how many non-fiction airport books are at fault for circulating a lot stupid bullshit. (Yes, misinformation also exists in print and did long before the Internet.) The podcast's paid subscriber episodes are not about books but whatever they feel like talking about instead. But usually, it's a scathing profile of some particularly stupid newspaper pundit, which is why I'm singling it out here.
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