Mentions Democratic Party (US)

Peter is co-host of the If Books Could Kill podcast, which I highly recommend.

 The percentage of Republican men who believe that women should return to their traditional roles in society has jumped from 28 to 48%. Among Republican women, the increase is from 23 to 37%. This has happened in the span of two years. As alarming as this is, it’s important to ask yourself: what do you think happened here? Do you think that Republican voters, organically and of their own volition, drastically shifted their fundamental perceptions of women’s role in society? Of course not. They are being influenced by messaging from conservative elites, who themselves are radicalizing on issues of race and gender.

This dynamic is often obvious. YouGov polling shows Republican support for higher tariffs at 51%, with just 5% supporting lower tariffs. A year ago those numbers were 38 and 20%, respectively. Again, what happened? Did they all read the same economics textbook? Or did they follow the lead of Donald Trump, who made higher tariffs a central campaign issue?

Democrats tend to miss this. When Kamala Harris lost, several prominent Democrats said the party had strayed too far from the public on trans issues. Gavin Newsom, speaking on his new podcast to his guest Charlie Kirk (Jesus Christ) repeated the talking point just this week. But just a few years ago the savvy political wisdom was that Republican anti-trans efforts had overstepped, alienating voters. Republicans, though, weren’t cowed by public opinion. Rather than retreat, they went on the offensive, seeking to reshape the public debate. And they did, leveraging inflection points like women’s sports to galvanize their base and push liberals into a defensive posture.

If you’re a political party, your goal is not just to know where voters stand, but to know how to move them. Instead, Democratic operatives seem content to reduce their platform to a focus-grouped ephemera, drifting whichever way the political winds blow it. 

In the wake of the Democratic Party’s disappointing 2024 election losses, a quiet but seismic shift is underway within its ranks. At the center of this transformation is Third Way, a self-proclaimed “centrist” think tank that has long positioned itself as the voice of moderation in Democratic politics. But a closer look at its agenda, funding, and recent maneuvers reveals a far more troubling reality: Third Way is spearheading a Project 2025-style assault on progressivism, steering the party toward a conservative, even far-right alignment that echoes the Trumpist playbook.  

The latest evidence of this shift came in a five-page memo leaked from a recent Third Way retreat with Democratic staffers and consultants. The document, obtained by journalist Donald Shaw, urges the party to abandon its reliance on small-dollar donors, arguing that their preferences “may not align with the broader electorate.” While the memo stops short of explicitly naming alternative funding sources, the implication is clear: Democrats should pivot toward the deep pockets of wealthy elites and corporate donors.

For over half a century, Trump has operated within a transnational organized crime network whose goal is to strip the US down and sell it for parts, much like the oligarch raids after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They have been aided in this endeavor by institutions, in particular the DOJ, which has long protected Trump, and by members of the Democratic Party serving as controlled opposition.

Many Americans did not want to believe this final twist. It is harder to reckon with betrayal than with a straight liar.

But the footage of a grinning Joe Biden with Donald Trump — the man who Biden claimed is a fascist who will destroy America and then handed the keys to the country, promising to accommodate him — seems to have finally woken folks up.

I warned you for nine years, because I wanted you to be prepared. Biden was a Placeholder President designed to fill the four years between two terms of Trump while plutocrats shifted American political culture sharply to the right. Media gutted, Twitter decimated, activism destroyed, books censored, minorities demonized, public health annihilated, victims blamed, empathy scorned.

That is the main thing they are after now: your empathy. They want you to hate each other so you don’t hate them first.

They want you to buy into every cheap cliché and every manipulated poll. They want you to hate each other so much, you agree to their plan of tearing this country into warring fiefdoms for oligarchs to plunder. They want you to prey on the vulnerable, even though you are vulnerable too, so that the powerful can escape scrutiny.

They want you to cheer your own demise, mistaking it for someone else’s.

West’s work at Uber and the Harris campaign illustrates his dedication to the people holding this worldview. He reduced his work in both places to simple games (find returns for Uber investors; raise more cash than the Republicans) where determining the “winner” was a simple matter of counting the money.

In both cases it was critical to complete control of funding and the narratives used to describe the game. No one at Uber had any real-world business accomplishments and no one had any idea how the business model could ever produce sustainable profits, but since they controlled the $13 billion in external funding neither repeated scandals or $32 billion in losses could threaten their control. Anyone who attacked them (or pointed to the huge losses) was denigrated as a unrepentant unionist set on fighting the inevitable tide of technological progress.

Democratic Party insiders fiercely controlled funding even though they no longer had the ability to develop candidates who could win competitive elections or messages and policies with appeal outside elite/PMC circles. Worsening election results were blamed on to Russian interference and the failure of media companies to aggressively censor “misinformation”.

Uber subverted the idea that corporations served the larger economy through risky investments that produced meaningful productivity/efficiency advances whose value was demonstrated in competitive markets. It successfully convinced capital markets to ignore their total lack of competitiveness and profitability, and to only pay attention to their narratives about powerful technological innovation and Amazon-like growth potential.

California Party insiders abandoned the belief that Democrats should serve the concrete interests of a broad range of voters and needed to assemble a broad coalition of interests in order to win elections. The Harris campaign raised a billion dollars from companies and investors who were openly working to capture political processes so they could personally profit from market rigging and directly harm the many Democrats who benefitted from Biden Administration antitrust enforcement.

[…]

The Harris-West decision to ignore elite/non-elite issues and center the campaign on fundraising also helped ensure that it would be impossible for the national Democratic Party to recover from a Trump victory and establish any meaningful opposition to Trump policies. Some billionaire/corporate donors might have had some preference for a Democratic win, believing that (as with Obama) a this would neutralize opposition to pro-oligarchic policies from the left and offered more stability than a Trump victory. But the interest of the donors who contributed $1.1 billion to Harris was always purely transactional and (as events have proven) they rapidly switched their allegiance to Trump. So the national Democrats have absolutely no one that can serve as a plausible opponent to any Trump policies, the Party’s historic pro-working class branding has been destroyed, and the Party totally lacks the money and infrastructure needed to move forward.

Every time a farm worker is infected with H5N1, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette for the rest of us. The virus is making trillions of copies of itself, and many of them carry random mutations. If any of those copies carry mutations that allow it to achieve human-to-human transmission, it will likely be passed on to a contact- or contacts- of that worker. You’ve just witnessed the potential birth of a new pandemic.

So basically, you really, really don’t want this thing- this Spillover Event- to happen even a single time. Every time you do, you’re potentially gambling with 8 billion people’s futures. The Biden Administration has allowed it to happen 61 times in less than a year. And instead of treating it like an emergency, which they almost certainly would’ve before COVID, the USDA, FDA, CDC and White House keep treating their Russian Roulette “wins” like permission to play another round.

Like most of the conclusions the White House appears to have drawn about public health, this betrays a poor understanding of statistics. When you win a round of Russian Roulette, it doesn’t mean you’re “good” at Russian Roulette, or that the game is easy, or that you’re on a hot streak, although gamblers believe these sorts of things about gambling all the time. It just means you got lucky. It shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to go around again.

Where Hong Kong, Finland, Spain and many other governments took immediate and drastic action to avoid spillovers, the US has watched the virus spread and worsen, looking the other way as infections among farmers crop up. Through negligence and incompetence, the US government is creating the conditions for another global pandemic, despite having had months to avert it entirely. 

For transgender Americans looking for help or protection from the Biden administration in its dying days, Raquel Willis has a stark assessment.

"Unfortunately, the signals coming from our government right now, under a Democratic president, are telling us that we’re essentially on our own," the 33-year-old activist tells The Independent.

[…]

What does Willis think of the standard Democrat line that the GOP’s war on trans is only a "distraction" from the "real issues"? Willis pauses and considers her words carefully before answering.

"In this moment, it is not enough to simply call anti-trans attacks from Republicans a distraction," she says. "Perhaps if this was 2015, 2016… there might be an argument.

"But lives have already been targeted and changed by these efforts. So we are beyond that point, and we can’t confront discrimination with inaction."

The Harris campaign, she adds, set a "horrible example" by declining to respond to the GOP’s late-election blitz of anti-trans TV ads, on which the party is estimated to have spent at least $215m.

"That was a loss before the election even happened," says Willis.

"If the Democratic Party wants to claim to be representative of progress and of the Left, it cannot leave communities on the chopping block, because it will continue to lose if it does so."

For the last few years, the GOP has coalesced around an idea that would short-circuit essentially all trans health care in America: banning federal funds from going to businesses that provide health care specific to changing one’s sex or gender identity, including hormones and surgeries. It would essentially signal to the private sector that if it wants federal dollars, it needs to stay away from sex- or gender-affirming care, and bow down to right-wing pundits who aim to, in their own words, “eradicate” and “erase” this form of health care. 

[…]

Bans like these can lead to the private sector discontinuing behaviors altogether — and once they are in place, they are hard to get rid of: The Hyde Amendment, enacted in the 1970s, led to most abortions no longer being performed in hospitals, and is continually renewed each year. 

Medical groups and civil rights advocates in D.C. tell Rolling Stone they believe that if a Hyde-level ban on federal funding were enacted, many hospitals will simply prioritize federal dollars over continuing this highly specialized form of medical care. So much medicine is performed through hospital systems and universities that this could mean ending access for many.  

[…]

“I think if they had to make the choice of, ‘Do we provide this care and potentially have to close our doors to everybody,’ they probably won’t do it,” says Asa Radix, head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. “It’s very disturbing. Legislation like this — even if it hasn’t passed — creates an environment where people are incredibly afraid. This is the type of issue where people actually feel suicidal. Are we going to see folks dying by suicide because potentially of laws like this being passed?”

[…]

Right now many in the LGBTQ+ advocacy community, as well as some Democratic lawmakers and staff, are quietly terrified the party might let Republicans enact it anyway, should they be forced to choose between funding the government or allowing the medical system to continue to provide this care unabated. 

At a minimum, anxious Democrats and advocates believe that party leaders will capitulate on trans health care coverage in federal funding negotiations on the margins, allowing language that bans government-backed insurance plans from covering these services. 

This conflict is actually playing out before Trump has taken office or the GOP controls the Senate. Democrats just this week compromised on a military authorization bill that will ban TRICARE and other Defense Department health plans from covering care for servicemembers’ trans children.

Some world-class hand-wringing going on in Washington. Take that, fascism! We are resolute in our misgivings about supporting you every step of the way!

The 2025 NDAA, which authorizes an astronomical military budget of $895 billion, contains numerous policy items including a 4.5% pay raise across the board, a more substantial 14.5% raise for junior service members, and over $600 million in military funding for Israel. It also includes multiple sections that would place new restrictions on gender-affirming medical care for military families on government TRICARE health plans, the military’s health insurance program for active duty members. Under Sections 708 and 709 of the bill, no Department of Defense funds or facilities may be used to “perform or facilitate sex change surgeries,” and TRICARE plans may not provide hormone therapy, puberty blockers, or “other medical interventions for the treatment of gender dysphoria that could result in sterilization” to anyone under 18. (Right-wing sources have increasingly pushed false and misleading claims that puberty blockers and hormones lead to sterilization.) Another section would prohibit the Department of Defense from establishing any new positions “relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or from adding those responsibilities to existing DoD positions.

On Wednesday, members of the House approved the NDAA in a 281-140 vote, CBS reported. 81 Democrats voted in favor of the budget, while 16 Republicans voted against it. The bill will now be sent to the Senate for another vote.

Normally, party leaders “whip” members into voting one way or another based on their party’s collective goals — but House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he would not whip Democratic votes for or against the NDAA on Wednesday, even though the bill contains overtly anti-trans policy (for the second year in a row). “We’re not whipping on the National Defense Authorization Act. It’s a member-to-member, case-by-case analysis in terms of people making decisions as to what is the right thing to do,” Jeffries told reporters ahead of the vote, according to The Hill. Jeffries added that the bill contains “a lot of positive things” but “some troubling provisions in a few areas, as well.” The New York representative slammed Republican extremism in a press conference on Wednesday, but also told reporters that he and his party “are ready, willing and able to find bipartisan common ground with the incoming administration on any issue.” Jeffries was among the 81 Democrats who voted in favor of the NDAA on Wednesday.

[…] 

In a series of Bluesky posts on Wednesday, Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott called the gender-affirming care ban “reprehensible” and called on Republicans to “prioritize national security and servicemembers, not culture wars,” but voted in favor of the bill that day. As The Hill reporter Brooke Migdon observed, 50 other Democrats who signed a September letter denouncing the NDAA’s anti-LGBTQ+ provisions voted to advance it this week.

Er… I think you'll find they can.

“We are in possibly the second-biggest surge of the pandemic if you look at wastewater levels,” said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, who runs a long-Covid clinic at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and has had ongoing Covid symptoms since August 2022. “There is no urgency to this. No news. No discussion in Congress. There is no education.”

[…]

Since the Biden administration declared the end of the national emergency in May, Americans across the political spectrum have largely followed the example set by the government and entirely disposed of any level of Covid precautions. Liberal and left-wing outlets have participated in the normalizing of Covid too, dismissing or even ostracizing people who still take precautions as if they are tin-hat conspiracy theorists. “We can’t be in lockdown forever,” has become a common refrain, as if wearing a mask on the subway constitutes “lockdown.”

In September, Biden himself participated in the spread of this kind of harmful disinformation when he declared the pandemic “over” on 60 Minutes. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” he said. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” This is, essentially, governing via “vibes”—so much for “following the science

Slate politics writer Alex Sammon wrote that "close watchers now expect AIPAC to spend at least $100 million in 2024 Democratic primaries, largely trained on eliminating incumbent Squad members from their seats."

Sammon said that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), and Summer Lee (D-Pa.)—"the most outspoken and unapologetically leftist contingent of the Democratic Party in national office"—are among AIPAC's top targets.

"The price of defending apartheid keeps going up," quipped Palestinian American writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer in response to the report.