Mariah’s first number one hit was “Vision of Love” in 1990. Her last was “Thank God I Found You” in 2000. She had a number one song every year during that period. It’s a record no artist has broken. Her career streak ended with “Loverboy,” the lead single from Glitter, which peaked at number two. During the lead up to Glitter’s release, Mariah suffered a public breakdown and emotional collapse. She later revealed in a 2018 People magazine interview that she’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Fortunately, she did find her way back professionally and personally. She’s also earned at least $75 million from royalties to her 1994 holiday classic “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” She pockets around $3 million from the song each year. The 1990s remain good to Mimi.

You can watch the entire film Glitter below.

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Labor Day has passed, and it’s time to pack up our white clothing. If you haven’t already, you should take advantage of my 40 percent off fall sale for paid subscriptions. That’s just $30 a year. Thanks to all who have upgraded to paid subscriber status recently.

This week, I wrote about the late Kevin Conroy, who played Batman in the classic animated series but was also an inspiring hero in real life.

Texas Republican Bo French became famous this week for going full racist. I know it seems as if MAGA goes full racist all the time, but this we truly out there.

There is a reason that Dr. Martin Luther King’s most famous speech is known as “I Have A Dream” and not “Go Fuck Yourselves.”

I interviewed author (and my first podcast guest) Billy Corriher about his new book, Justice for the People: The Anita Earls Story.

That’s it for this week. See you back on Monday.

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You can watch or just listen to our discussion here at the newsletter, but I’d also appreciate it if you hopped over to my YouTube Channel to leave a like and subscribe.

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However, the left is equally guilty of taking Dr. King’s words out of context. These days, you can’t scroll social media for long without coming across this passage from Dr. King’s slightly less famous Letter From A Birmingham Jail:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Upon this rock, many on the left have built their own church of aggressive, unyielding activism. Thus, they are quick to cite this Dr. King line as the ultimate checkmate against any call for a measured political response to any issue. Over the years, many Democratic politicians, including Joe Biden and curiously Kamala Harris, have been dismissed as one of those contemptible “white moderates” who prefer an easy, tension-free “negative peace” to a more demanding “positive peace.” They “just want to have brunch again.”

It’s true that Dr. King was far more radical than the sanitized version discussed in most history classes, but he also wasn’t the political equivalent to a bull in a china shop. He was an ever careful strategist, who considered the impact of his actions and words.

Perhaps Dr. King’s savviest political tactic was remaining apolitical. He refused to endorse specific candidates or formally ally with either Democrats or Republicans. He did break this longstanding policy in the 1964 election, when he warned about the threat Republican Barry Goldwater posed to civil rights progress. It’s also worth noting that Dr. King didn’t abandon Lyndon B. Johnson, despite his escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

What’s often overlooked if not outright ignored about Dr. King’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail is that he addresses the searing message to “My Dear Fellow Clergymen” and not to “You Clueless Fucks.” Dr. King consistently employed what was described as “radical civility,” and it was perhaps his most potent tool. He was direct and morally unwavering, but he always made clear that his enemy was a corrupt system, never people themselves. Such civility in the face of true oppression and cruelty often requires just as much will and discipline — if not more — than non-violent resistance.

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“The strong man is the man who will not hit back, who can stand up for his rights and yet not hit back,” Dr. King told thousands of supporters at Holt Street Baptist Church on Nov. 14, 1956. “If we as Negroes succumb to the temptation of using violence in our struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and bitter night … a long and desolate night of bitterness. And our only legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”

This can also apply to the rhetoric we use against our political and ideological opponents. I’ve struggled myself with Dr. King’s challenge in this regard, as it’s personally easier for me to resist throwing a physical punch than a rhetorical one.

I’m far more tempted to embrace Nietzsche’s asserted “contempt for man,” as humanity currently exists, but Dr. King believed true progress could only come when we rejected contempt and especially hatred for others, even those whose actions we strongly oppose.

Dr. King definitely chafed at the use of politeness as a shield against positive social change, but he didn’t think candor was the same as cruelty.

During a lecture at Brandeis University, Dr. King said, “And so we come to love all men, not because they are likable, not because we like the way they act. And it’s interesting that there’s a passage in the Bible which says love your enemies, and I’m very happy it doesn’t say like your enemies. It’s pretty difficult to like some people. Like is an affectionate sort of thing. You like to be with some people. You like their attitude, you like the way they think, you like the way they act. That’s an affectionate sort of thing, and you like them. But there’s some, there’s some people that it’s pretty difficult to like. I find it rather difficult to like Senator Eastland. I find it difficult. But there is an ethical something which says to me, love Senator Eastman, and love is greater than like”

Democratic Senator James Oliver Eastland from Mississippi was a staunch segregationist and powerful opponent of racial integration. In the 1930s, Eastland took over his family’s cotton plantation, where he “employed” Black sharecroppers, who he treated abominably.

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As head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Eastland — who Joe Biden once complimented in a tone-deaf moment — often intercepted and tanked civil rights bills. He was so terrible that Dr. King declared during the 1966 Meredith March against Fear in Mississippi, “We have to get rid of Jim Eastland if the Civil Rights movement is to go forward,” which of course Eastland effectively leveraged in his successful re-election campaign.

Dr. King paired his activism with avowed patriotism He was honest when he said in 1968 that “America is still a racist country,” but he avoided a “burn it all down” approach. Instead, he demanded that America live up to its ideals, which of course meant that he believed in an idealized America.

“Certainly, this is the glory of America, with all of its faults,” Dr. King said during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. “This is the glory of our democracy. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation we couldn’t do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime we couldn’t do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right. My friends, don’t let anybody make us feel that we are to be compared in our actions with the Ku Klux Klan or with the White Citizens Council. There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and lynched for not cooperating. There will be nobody amid, among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation.”

People will point out that Dr. King never enjoyed significant public approval during his life. His peak approval was 45 percent in 1965, and after he publicly opposed the Vietnam War, his approval dipped to 33 percent — almost Trump-level. This is often used to justify taking an especially antagonistic approach on an issue. After all, Dr. King preached loved and was still never that popular. The cynics will insist that “radical civility” and a measured approach are the shackles of “respectability politics,” but there’s a reason Dr. King’s most famous speech isn’t titled Go Fuck Yourself. The dream still matters.

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This is an objectively racist statement. It lacks even the subtle racism of a 1950s Tom & Jerry cartoon. The students who so offend French are of South Asian heritage. They’re also wearing cowboy hats and backward ball caps, while rooting for the home team. This is no terrorist conspiracy. They are engaging in the world like any other youthful American college student.

However, it appalls French that the UT’s graduating class is so clearly diverse. Currently, white students account for “just” 30 percent of the student body, followed by Latinos at 28 percent and Asians at a close third with 26 percent. Black students are at a distant fourth with about 5 percent. Now, this is different from Texas’s overall demographic breakdown: Black people make up 12 percent of the population. White people are 39 percent, and Latinos are just slightly ahead at 40 percent. Asians are only 5.5 percent of the total population. Suddenly, French is concerned about equality of outcome.

The Texas Railroad Commissioner is part of three-person group that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. It has nothing to do with college admissions. He insists that UT-Austin and other institutions have prioritized international students and workers, possibly through fraudulent means. He has no evidence for this claims, but who needs proof when you have racist instinct?

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During an appearance Monday on the right-wing Mark Davis Show, French stood by his ethnic slur.

“I don’t have anything against the people specifically in that picture,” French told Davis. “I think that the bigger conversation is, are we going to have policies to prioritize Americans … or are we going to have policies that prioritize foreigners? And I think most people in the America First movement think we ought to be prioritizing Americans.”

French’s racist implication is clear: Diversity is itself evidence of corruption. It’s why bigots will reflexively dismiss any form of diversity in the workplace, academia, even superhero movies, as “DEI.”

The irony, of course, is that right-wingers have used people of Asian descent as a cudgel against affirmative action, particularly in college admissions. Critics argued that colleges held applicants of Asian descent to higher performance standards and actively limited their enrollment numbers compared to other racial groups, specifically Black Americans. This was the foundation for the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court case. The conservative majority ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in almost all college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which they acknowledged exists for the purpose of this decision.

French’s post was so over-the-top dueling banjos racist that Republicans denounced his remarks.

“This is racism, plain and simple,” state Rep. Drew Darby from San Angelo said. “I have served on the Energy Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Railroad Commission, for most of my tenure in the Texas House, and I have never seen conduct so unbecoming of a Railroad Commissioner or candidate in that time.”

Sen. John Cornyn, who’s already lost his seat, mustered the courage to condemn French’s post and what it says about today’s GOP.

"This is the Republican nominee for statewide office," Cornyn lamented on social media. “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.”

Democrat James Talarico thanked Cornyn for his statement and pressed his Republican Senate opponent, Ken Paxton, to condemn French’s racism. Paxton’s response and was peak MAGA:

“I condemn racism in all its forms, including James Talarico saying white men are America’s top terror threat and that he prays to overcome his own ‘whiteness,’ whatever that means. Only one person in this race has a history of dividing Texans by race, and it’s James Talarico. I will continue to focus on uniting our State and bringing together the broadest possible coalition to fight for Texas, our values, and our families.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott notably released a statement that danced around French’s racism while arguably agreeing with his absurd premise: “A selective picture of Longhorn fans celebrating our biggest home victory-ever-actually shows a way that Texans unite. We all support our college football teams. The way we win the state is the same way we win football games. We unite under the brand of Texas. That doesn’t mean that Texas cannot also lead in having the toughest immigration laws of any state in America and freezing H1B visas at our universities.”

Republican State Rep. Lacey Hull responded to French’s post, “Please delete this. This post breaks my heart. I see college kids cheering on their football team.” The Fort Worth Young Republicans angrily snapped back, “The weepy moralizing is disgusting. Why doesn’t your heart break for the Heritage Texans who were locked out of opportunity at our state flagship? Every spot that goes to an immigrant is a spot taken away from Texans whose families made UT a world class university.”

French’s post crudely but clearly communicates that MAGA’s predominant issue with immigration is not an unreasoning fear of terrorists and rapists. No, these “Heritage” Americans can’t stand anyone thriving in the United States who’s slightly darker than skim milk.

Last week, at the GOP’s desperate midterm hate rally, Vice President JD Vance told a crowd of Trump sycophants, “We were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” (Don’t watch below.)

MAGA’s dystopian campfire tales around a burning cross always ignore that Donald Trump was president from 2017 to 2021. As with every malignant narcissist’s fantasy, the world went to absolute hell in the tragically brief period Trump was out of office. When Vance said “we,” he’s referring exclusively to the white people who noticed with mounting frustration that their broke-ass towns had become poorer, less safe, and less prosperous, and rather than look inward, they instead blamed the imagined “dirty” immigrants. They also somehow blame the same immigrants for “taking” spots at universities and jobs that they believe rightly belong to their stupid kids.

Rep. Drew Darby added in his social media post chastising French: “The right thing to do is immediately delete this and issue an apology.”

Of course, the post remains up, and French won’t apologize. Today’s Republican has no interest in ever doing the “right thing.” Although, Karl Rove did announce that he’ll vote for French’s Democratic opponent, Jon Rosenthal, but for MAGA, that just means that Rove is part of the accursed “establishment.”

“The establishment raised and spent $7 million against me in the primary,” French said on Monday. “Many of the people who criticized me yesterday were some of the same people involved in that effort. It’s no surprise that the less-conservative people in Texas are the ones attacking me.”

French is hardly nouveau racist. Sunday’s social media post was consistent with his past words and deeds, but maybe it was enough to finally trigger a “have you no sense of decency?” moment. Predictably, Trump dismissed Rove as a “loser” for rejecting French. There’s never a decency moment for him.

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However, despite my personal nostalgia, the episode that aired the next day, Nothing to Fear, is the relevant one for this piece. It’s the first appearance of the Scarecrow (Henry Polic II), whose fear gas causes Batman (Kevin Conroy) to experience overwhelming self-doubt, as we discover his greatest fear is that he’s let down his parents, whose senseless murders inspired his crimefighting crusade. It’s not an unreasonable fear, and one to which most people can relate. Sure, he’s Batman and all, but some parents are impossible to please.

Batman eventually overcomes the Scarecrow’s gas when he confronts the monstrous hallucination of his father, who mocks him as a failure. He declares, “You are not my father. I am not a disgrace. I am vengeance. I am the night. I am Batman!” (Watch below.)

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This line had become legendary even before the series aired. I recall the early advertisements for Batman: The Animated Series, and they ended with Batman delivering this line. It was when we knew Kevin Conroy was bringing something special and unique to the character. The creative team for the show realized this almost immediately during Conroy’s audition for the role.

“I did a cold audition, I had never done an animated voice before. I said the only exposure I’ve had is the Adam West show from the 60’s and they said “NO! NO! NO! That’s not it.” I said ZIP POW POP and they said “NO! It’s, think film noir, think the 40’s New York. Think dark, think a kid who just watched his parents get murdered and spends his life avenging their deaths and he lives in the shadows. He’s got this dual personality and he’s never resolved this torture of his youth. I said you are telling the Hamlet story, this is heavy stuff. And he said yeah, no one has ever said that before, but yeah I guess it is. This is like a classic archetypal, Shakespearian tragedy. So I just used my theater training and put myself into that head. And I got into this very dark place and came up with this voice. And as I did it I saw them all running around in the booth. And I thought well either I did something really bad or something really good because I hit a nerve, I know I hit a nerve. And they came out and they said well we’ve seen about over 600 people and how would you like to do the part?”

Conroy was gay, which he kept private professionally because in the late 1980s/1990s his sexuality had cost him multiple on-screen jobs. It’s arguably why he was auditioning for the Batman cartoon in the first place. Conroy later revealed that growing up in a strict religious household and hiding his true self helped him connect to Bruce Wayne’s dual life. It also adds resonance to the scene in Nothing to Fear where Batman “defeats” the specter of a disapproving parent.

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Almost a decade after Batman: The Animated Series premiered, Kevin Conroy, who lived in New York, answered the call after the September 11 terrorist attacks. He helped feed first responders in those grim days. When asked if he had restaurant experience, Conroy laughed and said, “I’m an actor. Of course, I have restaurant experience.” He went to work at Nino’s, a few blocks from Ground Zero. In the documentary I Know That Voice, Conroy describes a conversation he had with a fellow volunteer.

“In the middle of the night, the nights into this, this one guy goes ‘So, my day job is I’m an architect. What’s your day job?’ I said I do voices mostly.”

“I knew it!” the architect exclaimed. “You’re the guy who does Batman. You’re that Kevin Conroy!”

“So this guy goes into the dining hall,” Conroy said, “and this is the first week after the attack and there is just this sombre sadness and you hear the guy go, ‘guys, guys, you’re not gonna believe whose been cooking your dinners. It’s Batman!”

“There’s this long silence and you hear ‘bullshit’ from the back of the place. Then somebody else said: ‘Make him prove him’ and I was like ‘oh, this is good.’”

Conroy’s normal speaking voice is closer to the one he used as Bruce Wayne, so for these brave men, he shared his secret identity, unmasking himself as the Dark Knight by lowering his register and proclaiming, “I am vengeance! I am the night. I am Batman!”

A brief, stunned silence was broken when someone shouted, “Holy fuck, that is Batman!” And the room was filled with laughter for the first time. The architect then turned to Conroy and asked, “What does it feel like to be Santa Claus because that's just what happened here.” (Watch below.)

The Santa Claus allusion fits well, because like Santa, Kevin was giving selflessly to others, without seeking acknowledgement or glory. That is also the hero Batman truly is — the one Conroy played so well for decades. He doesn’t only seek “vengeance.” He helps those in need however he can.

In his moving autobiographical short story “Finding Batman” from the 2022 DC Pride anthology, Conroy describes discovering his version of the immortal hero.

“I began to speak, and a voice I didn’t recognize came out. It was a throaty, husky, rumbling sound that shook my body. It seemed to roar from thirty years of frustration, confusion, denial, love, yearning ... yearning for what? An anchor. A harbor. A sense of safety, a sense of identity. Yes, I can relate. Yes, this is terrain I know well. I felt Batman rising from deep within.”

A voice Kevin Conroy had channeled through his personal pain had become a beacon of hope for so many. Conroy passed away in November 2022, but that beacon still shines.

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Lane starred in another movie that opened that weekend, The Glass House. She plays a junkie doctor named Erin Glass who lives with her creepy pervert husband in a Malibu house that’s made of glass. I think this pushes the title pun too far. I don’t have a clear memory of how I spent the first weekend after 9/11, but I’m certain I didn’t see either of these movies.

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Labor Day has passed, and it’s time to pack up our white clothing. I’ve also started my 40 percent off fall sale for paid subscriptions. That’s just $30 a year. Thanks to all who have upgraded to paid subscriber status recently.

This week, I wrote about Star Trek, which aired its first episode 60 years ago on Tuesday. It remains one of my favorite TV series.

An armed loon with Republican ties could’ve possibly killed Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor in Ohio. This won’t alter how Republicans talk about Democrats, and the smear campaign is only likely to escalate.

I recalled the last day of the 1990s, September 10, 2001.

It’s still hard to believe I was in New York on September 11, 2001, the day the world changed forever and regrettably for the worse.

Over at , I wrote about Mike Johnson, the worst House speaker in history.

Public Notice

Mike Johnson runs out the clock on his own speakership

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6 days ago · 432 likes · 8 comments · Stephen Robinson

If you’re a fan of the Cheers TV show, you might enjoy my discussion of a classic episode with Ryan Daly on the Cheers Cast podcast.

That’s it for this week. I’ll see you back here on Monday.

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Her phone was ringing off the hook, but she didn’t recognize the number on her caller ID. Turns out it was her mother, who’d just seen news of the first plane crashing into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Cell phones weren’t yet universal so her mother was calling from a payphone.

We ignored what we assumed was a telemarketer, which on most days is the worst outcome when you answer a call from a number you don’t recognize. We left for work, stopping at the bagel shop across the street. There was a TV on behind the woman making my egg and cheese on a cinnamon raisin bagel (don’t judge), and the news was already airing footage of the first plane crash. Because this was still just a Tuesday and not yet 9/11, no one immediately assumed a terrorist attack. Americans believed themselves forever safe, but as a nation, we were old enough that such innocence is indistinguishable from arrogance.

The start-up where I worked was in Chinatown or, as the CEO told investors, “South SoHo.” As I walked to the office, it still felt like a pleasant late summer day, but that changed once I crossed Canal Street. That’s when I was struck by the smell, an intense burning metal. Scientific American describes the smell that would linger in the air for months as the “acrid miasma of 91,000 liters of jet fuel and the 10,000,000 tons of building materials and contents burning at temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius.” I only remember it as the smell of lower Manhattan during the final months of 2001.

Coworkers stood outside the office, confused and shocked. By this point, the second plane, Flight 175, had struck the South Tower, just six minutes after the building-wide PA system announced: “The building is secure, please return to your desks.” New York’s WNYW was among the first to report that this was an intentional attack. This Tuesday in September was now 9/11.

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My ex-girlfriend and I reunited at a coffee shop near her apartment. Although cell service was rapidly deteriorating, we were eventually able to leave messages with our parents. In the age of landlines, changing apartments usually meant a new phone number, so it was harder to keep in touch with people prior to social media, and for all its ills, we would’ve given anything at the time for the ability to instantly inform everyone we’d ever met that we were still alive. I’d only worked with my friend Andy for a few months at that point, but he still made an effort to try to call and see if I was OK. I’ve always appreciated that.

New Yorkers are friendlier than the rightwing narratives suggest, and there was a reassuring, communal vibe on Second Avenue that day. We packed into bars and cafes, day drinking and stress eating, while reminding ourselves that the world had changed. It’s a stark contrast to the early days of the pandemic when all the comforts of normality were suddenly snatched away.

That night, on my ex’s apartment’s rooftop, we watched smoke billow up from the wreckage just five miles away. Exactly a week earlier, we’d seen PJ Harvey during her tour behind the album, Stories from City, Stories from the Sea, her love letter to New York. We listened to that album until the morning.

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The supposed “real” Americans outside the city briefly loved New York during the weeks after 9/11, but our tenuous citizenship wouldn’t last long. I worked less than a mile from Ground Zero and would often walk past this open, festering wound in the city. I can clearly remember doing so the day that the Bush administration launched Operation Enduring Freedom, a juvenile name that would define the misguided yet predictable response to 9/11. The war in Afghanistan would endure for decades while freedom slowly rotted on the vine.

September 11 didn’t make us a better nation or a more empathetic people. Nietzsche advised that we should “distrust all in whom the urge to punish is powerful,” and that rapacious desire inspired 20 years of war and unthinking jingoism served with a side of freedom fries. Every year on this day, the worst people tend to speak the loudest, declaring "Never again!" without humility or self-awareness. They seize on legitimate grief to feed their own bigotry and hatred against Muslims or anyone who dares believe in non-violent resolutions to our differences.

Twenty years later, even against a viral threat that devastated our nation without destroying a single building, Americans turned on ourselves because that urge to punish remains so strong. We’re still channeling our grief into greater destruction. Maybe some day we’ll stop. That’s something to at least consider during this year’s moment of silence.

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A week or so later, after the world had changed, my then-girlfriend’s former classmate heard this story and concluded that the random lunatic shouting at us on the street might have been “one of the 9/11 terrorists!” She’d just graduated from Columbia University but that apparently doesn’t necessarily make you smarter, either. She’d already started looking for enemies everywhere, all part of the terrorist plot against the United States. The seed of hatred was real, but that didn’t justify what grew from it.

The Three of Cups Lounge closed in 2018, a victim of rising rents in the East Village. Hatred still endures, though. Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and “patriotic” bigots can’t stand the fact that the current mayor is Muslim. They are acting as if Zohran Mamdani was the deranged man screaming epithets on the street and then apparently went on to commit 9/11. He wasn’t, of course. He was nine years old in 2001 and wouldn’t have been out that late, even for a New York child. Hatred doesn’t acknowledge such innocence, though, and bigotry demands collective blame for the 9/11 attack, one that Muslims have endured for decades.

Muslim New Yorkers died on 9/11. They were among the office workers and maintenance staff that keep the city running. Unlike Donald Trump, they were among the first responders who rushed into danger and lost their lives saving others.

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It’s appalling, if not surprising, to see prominent bigots demand that Mayor Mamdani stay away from all 9/11. This obviously includes slime trail Rudy Giuliani, who you might’ve heard was mayor on September 11, 2001. He claims Mamdani’s presence at 9/11 events would be “inappropriate,” and he’s someone who attempted to overturn the 2024 election, tacitly encouraged the January 6 attack, and passed gas in a woman’s face.

New York City Council Member Vickie Paladino said out loud, “I’m not asking politely for the mayor not to come to 9/11 ceremony. I am demanding he not show his face at that sacred ground. He does not belong there. We, the people, do not care for Zohran Mamdami.”

Mamdani is actually quite popular, for a politician, but even if he weren’t, he’s the elected mayor. He’s also a citizen and resident of New York. He’s free to go wherever he wishes.

Paladino later claimed on Fox News that if Mamdani visits 9/11, it’s a message to “Osama bin Laden that, look, we conquered New York.”

Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011. President Barack Obama oversaw that successful mission so I get why Republicans want to pretend it didn’t happen. Still, the only way anyone can send a message to Osama bin Laden is through a medium. The racist statement that “we conquered New York” reflects the bigoted fury that a Muslim was ever elected mayor of the greatest city in America that’s not New Orleans.

Chris Miller at Vanity Fair wrote, “But there’s also an inchoate, emotional, and Islamophobic component that sees the city’s first Muslim mayor as a stand-in for the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly weapons, part of the “them” who attacked ‘us.’”

That’s a lot of words to say “these people are gutter racists.” Fox News host Kennedy gave away the game when she gloated that right-wingers had put Mamdani in an “impossible position” where he’s damned if he doesn’t show up and damned if he doesn’t. Of course, she wants Mamdani at the 9/11 commemoration so that the families can “turn their backs on him” in silent protest. She wants this moment of shared grief weaponized against a political enemy. It’s small, petty, and predictably in character.

Kennedy and others claim this is all justified because Mamdani is friendly with Hasan Piker, who’s made controversial statements about 9/11. Of course, as I must often point out, so did Bill Maher, who lost his ABC series Politically Incorrect when he said just a week after 9/11, “We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”

When Piker accused Paladino of blatant racism for her anti-Mamdani rants, she responded on Fox News, without any self-awareness, that Piker “should go back where he came from.” He was born in New Jersey, though he grew up in Turkey. Either way, he’s a citizen. (She also demanded “five minutes” alone in a room with Piker, which … I mean, he’s not my type. Still, she might want to keep that to herself. She was on national television.)

During his address to Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush offered his explantation for the 9/11 attack.

“Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

Bush’s argument was obviously simplistic and facile, but Americans couldn’t even act as if they truly believed it. Instead, too many embraced a self-defeating circular argument: “The terrorists hate our freedoms so we must disregard all those freedoms or the terrorists will have won.” It’s 2026, and Republicans in particular have little respect for a democratically elected government. The political right and left can both struggle to tolerate freedom of speech from anyone who disagrees with them. Instead, we continue looking for enemies, either in elected office or on a random street in the East Village.

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County Sheriff Jerry Greene, who has endorsed Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, downplayed the incident: “I think it was to ask her a couple of questions. He was just, you know, pretty aggressive about it.”

The kook was reportedly screaming, ‘Dr. Acton! Dr. Acton!” while charging toward her, which is definitely “aggressive,” but that’s a potentially lethal combination when the “aggressor” is carrying weapons.

“We spoke to Dr. Acton this afternoon and she said to share with Ohioans that she is ok,” Gov. Mike DeWine posted on social media. “Violence or the threat of violence at political or public events is always unacceptable.”

Ramaswamy released a tepid statement through his spokesperson that did not mention Acton directly: “Candidates should be able to meet with voters without having to worry about threats or violence.” He did later publicly wish Acton well, even though the previous weekend, he claimed she’d be “the first socialist governor that Ohio has ever seen.” (She’s not a socialist.)

Obviously, Donald Trump had nothing to positive or reassuring to offer, even though he was on social media all weekend, manically posting unhinged nonsense and imperialistic threats.

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Acton’s attacker was identified as Patric Havas, who last voted in 2024 as a Republican. His brother is reportedly Andrew Havas, U.S. Sen. Jon Husted’s former Franklin County campaign chair. Andrew Havas resigned in July when it was revealed he’d spent time in jail related to accusations of sexual misconduct with a minor. If the political parties involved were reversed, Republicans would frame this as further evidence that the “radical left” has an issue with political violence. Instead, MAGA has already unleashed the conspiracy theory brigade.

Known lunatic Laura Loomer called the attack against Acton “staged and pre-planned.” She posted on social media, “This Amy Acton story is the biggest hoax of the weekend. How exactly were people injured? Nobody pulled a gun. This is a nothing burger story meant to distract from the fact that she was accused of being drunk on camera at her event yesterday where she was screaming like a lunatic.”

This is social media, so she posted this drivel without evidence or fear of any real consequence.

Smearing Democratic victims of political violence (both actual and attempted) is standard operating procedure among MAGA. Last year, a right-wing extremist named Vance Boelter assassinated Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark. Barely a day after the horrific shooting, Republican Sen. Mike Lee posted two hateful, cruel messages on social media, both of them featuring security camera photos of a mask-wearing Boelter just before he opened fire.

The first post falsely blamed Democrats for the assassination of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark: “This is what happens When Marxists don't get their way,” Lee wrote.

Lee also shared images of the killer — a staunch Trump supporter — with the caption, “Nightmare on Waltz street.” (Yes, Lee misspelled the governor’s name.) Lee would only delete the vile posts after grieving Minnesota Sen. Tina Baldwin confronted him.

Shortly before the 2022 midterms, a deranged man broke into the San Francisco home Nancy Pelosi shares with her husband, Paul, and almost bludgeoned him to death with a hammer. (She fortunately was in Washington, D.C. at the time.) Republicans, including Donald Trump’s first failed attempt at reproduction, used the almost fatal attack on an elderly man as an easy punch line. Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo on social media of a pair of men’s underwear and a hammer with the caption, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”

Charlie Kirk, who Paul Pelosi would outlive, suggested that one of his fans should post bail for Pelosi’s attacker: “If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out ... Bail him out and then go ask him some questions.”

Loomer’s lies about Sunday’s incident are consistent with how MAGA responds to blatant politically motivated violence from the right. They just reshape reality to fit their twisted world view.

It wasn’t long after the vicious attack on Paul Pelosi that right-wing activists, politicians, and media outlets started spreading even more vicious rumors — most of them absurd yet sickeningly homophobic — about what happened.

Hours after the Minnesota shootings, Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno posted on social media, “The degree to which the extreme left has become radical, violent, and intolerant is both stunning and terrifying.” Billionaire propagandist Elon Musk — far more dangerous than Hasan Piker — declared in a June 2025 social media post, “The far left is murderously violent.”

In January, yet another deranged man (they’ll never run out) sprayed apple cider vinegar from a syringe at Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar during a town hall meeting in Minneapolis. She easily could have been killed or maimed, but Trump predictably expressed zero sympathy or remorse for his hateful rhetoric against her. In fact, like Loomer, he suggested without evidence that the whole thing was staged: “I don’t think about her.” Trump told reporters. “I think she’s a fraud. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”

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MAGA has no shame or remorse and eagerly weaponizes those traits within the left. That’s what happened after Trump’s attempted assassination last year at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Although the shooter was reportedly a registered Republican, Trump and Republicans still blamed Democrats and the “radical left.” Their goal was to chill legitimate political criticism of Trump during the 2024 election, and it quite possibly contributed to his victory. The mainstream media immediately put President Joe Biden on the offensive about his “rhetoric” during the campaign.

Auditioning for his eventual spot on the presidential ticket, JD Vance declared on social media that the “central premise of the Biden campaign” had directly led to Trump’s attempted assassination. Republicans embraced this argument without any acknowledgement of their own blatant hypocrisy: Trump himself had called Biden a “threat to democracy” and repeatedly said “this country is finished if we don’t win this election.”

You’ll notice that the GOP’s most useless idiot, Sen. John Fetterman, will often lecture liberals to “turn down the temperature” if anyone so much as sneezes near a Republican or ICE agent, but he’s so far remained silent about what very well could have been an attempt on Dr. Amy Acton’s life. Meanwhile, Republicans will continue their smear campaigns.

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Star Trek actually had two pilots. The first was 1965’s “The Cage,” which feels like a different series. The captain of the Enterprise is Christopher Pike, played by Jeffrey Hunter who was well known for his starring roles in The Searchers and The King of Kings. There’s no Doctor McCoy, and Spock isn’t second in command. That’s Number One (Majel Barrett), who’s the stoic, reserved officer on the bridge. (Spock actually smiles in one scene). NBC rejected the pilot as “too slow,” “too cerebral,” and “too intellectual,” which is basically the same as the second note. Pike and Number One, who’d eventually get a name, would gain a second life on the series Strange New Worlds.

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry would try again with a second pilot, 1965’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Lucille Ball, who owned Desilu Studios, convinced NBC to give Roddenberry’s project a second chance (this is yet another reason I love Lucy). Hunter declined to return, but instead of recasting Captain Pike, Roddenberry created a new character entirely, Captain James Kirk, and eventually cast William Shatner, who makes Kirk a dynamic, confident leader in contrast to Pike’s brooding self-doubt.

The second pilot introduces Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) and Lt. Sulu (George Takei). There’s still no McCoy, so it’s not quite Star Trek yet. However, Spock (Leonard Nimoy) is now second in command and fully the coldly logical Vulcan audiences would come to love. When Kirk asks Spock if he could at least “act like he has a heart,” you realize how important McCoy is as the emotional counterweight to Spock, allowing Kirk to function as the synthesis of both perspectives. (Watch below.)

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Although arguably just as intellectual and philosophical as “The Cage,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before” features a classic Kirk fist fight in the climax, which sold NBC on the series. However, NBC considered “The Man Trap” a more accessible episode to launch Star Trek. It’s a straight-forward “monster of the week” installment, with horror elements that were familiar to audiences who enjoyed The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. George Clayton Johnson, who wrote the script for “The Man Trap,” also wrote some of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, such as “The Four of Us Are Dying,” “Nothing In The Dark,” and “Kick The Can.”

“The Man Trap” also looks like Star Trek. The Enterprise crew were all in their classic uniforms, compared to the somewhat drab versions from “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Lt. Uhuru (Nichelle Nichols) is now on the bridge. While “The Corbomite Maneuver” was the first episode Deforest Kelley filmed as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, “The Man Trap” features him extensively and offers more backstory for the character than we get for Spock or even Kirk himself.

Kirk and McCoy beam down to the planet M-113, which like everywhere else they visit on the show is apparently Space San Diego because they’re just wearing their indoor uniforms. My Aunt Birdie would’ve been waiting for the crew in the transporter room with an armful of thick coats. Forget the “class M planet” explanation, I need a full environmental suit when visiting New York in the winter.

Kirk describes the mission in his opening captain’s log as “a routine medical examination of routine medical examination of archaeologist Robert Crater and his wife Nancy. Routine but for the fact that Nancy Crater is that one woman in Doctor McCoy’s past.” This is a sci-fi adventure series, so McCoy’s romantic life is not the primary conflict. No, Nancy (Jeanne Bal) is actually a shape-shifting monster who sucks the salt out of poor saps.

Next on the menu is our first “red shirt” (though he’s wearing blue). Nancy appears differently to the men present. McCoy sees her as the young woman he loved years earlier, but "Yeoman Johnson" (Michael Zaslow) blurts out that that Nancy looks just like a woman he met on Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet, which sounds like someplace where you do more than just chew gum. Nancy later invites Yeoman Johnson to take a walk with her. You’d think Starfleet training would cover such diplomatic basics as “don’t fool around with a married woman while on duty.”

When Kirk and McCoy discover Yeoman Johnson’s mangled corpse, McCoy delivers his now-classic, “He’s dead, Jim” diagnosis. It’s later revealed that Crater has a sick relationship with the salt monster, who killed the real Nancy Crater years earlier, but now Crater provides the monster with salt and in return receives “companionship.” Crater says the salt monster is the last of its kind and compares it to the buffalo, which while delicious is not a sentient killing machine. This analogy makes no sense, but that’s what happens when you shack up with a salt monster.

The salt monster kills another red shirt (this one wearing a gold uniform) and infiltrates the Enterprise. It eventually turns on Crater, proving that he probably shouldn’t have trusted the monster that killed his wife. The salt monster, disguised as Nancy, tries to trick McCoy into helping it and almost murders Kirk until Spock intervenes. There’s a hilarious moment when Spock tries to prove to McCoy that this isn’t the real Nancy by smacking her in the face : “If she were Nancy, could she take this?” Spock’s never met Nancy, though, so he’s possibly underestimating her tolerance for two-fisted punches. (Watch below.)

Shatner’s performance as Kirk is confident and layered, nothing at all like the sketch comedy parodies. He’s a firm leader but also compassionate. Kirk snaps at McCoy for rambling on about his “lost love” when he should focus on discovering what killed Yeoman Johnson — “You could learn something from Mr. Spock, Doctor. Stop thinking with your glands!” — but he later apologizes with a self-effacing smile that makes you believe these are old friends.

“The Man Trap” is a solid introduction to Star Trek, and it recalls the days when you could discover a TV series at almost any part of its run and not feel confused, as if you’d wandered into a movie mid-way. All the classic Star Trek elements are present — though McCoy is obviously more vulnerable and doesn’t outright challenge Kirk or Spock, as he’ll often do in other episodes.

Star Trek didn’t have a traditional first episode. There is no “origin story” for the crew or its mission. Everything is explained in Kirk’s famous narration during the opening credits: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!”

Technically, the Enterprise crew doesn’t really explore strange new worlds in “The Man Trap.” Its mission is relatively mundane, and the crew doesn’t seek out “new life” so much as survive it. The episode ends somberly, with McCoy killing the image of her beloved and delivering extinction to an intelligent, if slightly murderous, life form. Even Kirk is left thinking about the buffalo. In that sense, it does feel more like an extended Twilight Zone than what will soon come afterward.

Still, 60 years later, we’re still watching and enjoying Star Trek, and it all started with “The Man Trap.”

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Yet, fall remains my favorite time of the year. When I was younger, fall meant the return of my TV friends and the resolution of season finale cliffhangers. I watched the season four finale of Melrose Place at my friends Crystal and Ann-Marie’s apartment in Athens, Georgia, and caught the season five opener in my New York apartment. A lot used to change during the summer.

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Fall also contains my favorite holiday, Halloween. It’s officially spooky movie season, and soon I’ll begin my annual Simpsons Treehouse of Horror rewatch. Fall is so delightful, I happily put up with the relentless rain.

It’s Labor Day weekend, so I’m starting my 40 percent off fall sale for paid subscriptions. That’s just $30 a year. Thanks to all who have upgraded to paid subscriber status recently.

This week, I wrote about Joe Walsh and how he’s chosen to set the rules for who can enter the Democratic Party’s supposed “big tent.”

Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician and someone who probably reads the newspaper, is running for Senate against known dullard Darline Graham, who inherited the seat from her brother, the late Lindsey Graham. This is South Carolina. Andrews is a Democrat. Graham is a Republican. I think you know how this will end.

I examined the concept of fearlessness as depicted in HBO’s Lanterns series.

I shared some fiction and might do so again.

Dear God, please don’t let Republican Christine Drazan win Oregon’s gubernatorial race. We have enough problems already.

That’s it for this week. See you next Tuesday (but not in the insulting way).

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Polls show a tight race in the rematch between incumbent Tina Kotek and Republican state Sen. Christine Drazan. A recent Drazan internal poll has her up over Kotek 48 to 44 percent, but campaign internal polls are like that mirror at the bar that makes you look sexy when you’re actually very drunk. However, Kotek’s approval rating has polled as low as 38 percent during her first term, and just 41 percent of Oregonians believe the state is headed in the right direction. Worse, Kotek’s support has cratered in the Portland metro area. According to a May survey, only a third of Portland metro area respondents said they had a positive opinion of the governor, and this was prior to the Democratic primary where Kotek didn’t even face a serious challenger.

Those Portland numbers are obviously concerning, because that’s where she has to run up the margins to win. It doesn’t take a long drive outside of Portland before you start seeing Drazan signs.

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Fortunately for Kotek, her lousy numbers in Portland doesn’t mean we’re going to consider voting for Christine Drazan or any Republican. In fact, it’s likely that her numbers here are low because she’s disappointed the left, which every Democratic governor tends to do. The far left is often the political version of Prince’s mother.

Kotek’s progressive critics argue that the governor has shifted too far to the center on business-friendly initiatives, drug policy, and public safety. Her Republican critics believe she hasn’t done enough and still blame her for most of the states’s problems.

Halfway through her term, Kotek tried positioning herself as a pragmatic progressive or what Josh Shapiro and Elissa Slotkin might call a “get shit done” Democrat. She had a lengthy discussion with business leaders in December 2024 about her plan to make downtown Portland more than just a drive-through-very-quickly destination.

“I think this is about: Can you make stuff work?” Kotek told reporters. ”I am very progressive when it comes to public policy, but I am pragmatic and I’m tired of things not working.”

However, it might take some time for things to start working, perhaps even forever. Political consultant and Kotek ally Doug Moore, who was once director of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, said, “I know everyone wants to wave a magic wand and say. ‘You’ve got to fix everything right now.’ That’s not how public policy works.”

Sensing a possible opening, Drazan campaigned in downtown Portland last week, promising better days ahead with her at the helm.

“I won’t stand here and promise you that (all Oregon’s problems) will go away immediately, but I will stand here and promise you this: We will stop accepting failure,” Drazan said. “Failure is no longer an option.”

Unfortunately, failure has seemed like more than just an option but actual policy. Homelessness has risen by double digits since 2023. The public school system is struggling. Oregon public schools are ranked near the bottom of the nation, and not surprisingly, student enrollment is plummeting. The Portland Public School District is facing $65 million in budget cuts, with significant staff layoffs, and as many as 20 schools could close due to declining enrollment. The only things we can really blame on Donald Trump directly are the increasing grocery and gasoline prices.

As governor, Drazan says she has plans to address all these issues. “We cannot keep doing what we have been doing and expect a different result,” she states on her campaign site. “Nothing will change unless we do.”

Most of her plans involve typical 1990s-era blue state Republican solutions: She’ll end regulations that she believes are driving up the costs of housing, energy, food, transportation, childcare, healthcare, and business. She’ll prioritize affordability and “work to ensure that homelessness is rare and temporary, not chronic and permanent.” Any present-day MAGA policy is absent or buried underneath more appealing euphemisms. So, yeah, I’m concerned.

Drazan has made her own pitch to the center. In her campaign ad, she says, “Our problems are not partisan problems. They’re leadership problems.” However, Drazan is not an actual political moderate. Long ago, northwest Republicans were at least crunchy enough to appreciate nature, but Drazan has a 20 percent score Oregon League of Conservation Voters. She has an “A” rating from the NRA Political Victory Fund, and Oregon Right to Life endorsed her in 2022. She isn’t really trying the Susan Collins faux-moderate spin, though she laughably gets credit in the media for agreeing with the reality that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

So far, though, Drazan has benefitted from keeping a low profile. JD Vance isn’t campaigning in Klamath Falls. Kotek defeated Drazan by just three points in 2022, which is not a “solid blue state, don’t worry about it” margin. Former Democrat Betsy Johnson had about nine percent of the vote as an independent, and it was believed she was more of a spoiler for Kotek than Drazan. However, Johnson held more center-right views on guns, homelessness, and climate than Kotek. Had she not run, manyh of her supporters might have swung to Drazan, and she’s not on the ballot this year.

Oregon is actually not overwhelmingly Democratic or liberal. According to 2020 exit polls, self-identified independents and moderates are the largest groups.

Of course, independents and moderates might roll their eyes at whatever Democrats are doing in Oregon, but that doesn’t mean they are ready to break toward a Republican, especially when Trump invades and persecutes states he doesn’t like. The governor is on the front lines of that not-so-cold war.

Democratic governors have a demonstrated habit of polling in the basement during their terms but still winning re-election. Yet, they almost always underperform the presidential and Senate Democratic candidates. There were Hillary Clinton voters who didn’t vote for Kate Brown, and more than 100,000 people voted for Ron Wyden but not Tina Kotek. Of course, every Democratic seat in the Senate matters, but fed-up center-left voters might feel like a Republican governor is not an existential threat, especially with Democrats holding a supermajority in the statehouse. How much damage could a Republican governor do? (A lot.)

That’s why, unless Democrats make some major changes in the state, a Republican is eventually going to get lucky, and as usual, I hope it’s not this year.

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Matt was wrestling not just with the idea of death but that dying might surpass living. He’d calculated how long he could expect to go on and was young enough to consider eighty-five (the average life expectancy for an extremely privileged white male) an overwhelmingly large number, but now he wondered if life was like a gallon of milk where the last quart was rancid and you’d have to drink it anyway.

He twirled his spoon in his clam chowder. It had the same consistency as his grandfather’s handshake.

“Do you worry about getting old?” he asked his father.

“No,” Mr. Williams snapped in response. He peeled open his can of Rainier beer and Matt felt a sudden cool dampness on his arm. “See... getting old is like ... well, getting married.” He pointed to their young waitress. “You see something nice you’d like to pork and you can’t do anything about it. You feel powerless.” He paused. “That’s why you should get married, though. It’ll prepare you for getting old ... for dying. With single guys, it’s like a sudden stop.” He slammed his broad hand against the table to demonstrate.

This was the sort of question Matt would have asked his mother, and her answer would’ve sedated him, but she’d stayed behind at the nursing home. She could tell her husband wasn’t willing to remain longer than the agreed-upon hour, as that would inconvenience him, and he didn’t like having his routines upset, for anyone. There was, after all, local news to watch and complain about. But she enjoyed being alone with her father. He barely recognized her, though, and gradually started confusing his youngest daughter with his late wife. This was understandable. The Elliott women were uniformly small, quiet, blonde, and distinguishable from one another only in ways they’d been taught to conceal. However, Matt believed his mother might have appreciated those few hours each week when someone, even through a cloud of dementia, treated her like a loving spouse.

Marilyn Williams had two older sisters: Samantha, known ironically as “Sunny” because she never laughed, and Frieda, lovely but clumsy, like a doll with a manufacturing defect that had escaped detection. Neither had much interest in what was left of their father, who they felt lingered tackily like a Christmas tree after New Year’s, and neither were shocked or concerned when after their father finally passed away, the bulk of the estate and control of the family business went to Marilyn. There was no need, as their stipends continued to arrive uninterrupted, and Marilyn even increased their amounts — not so much to appear emotionally reckless but just enough to not seem vindictive.

“Granddad knew how special you are,” Matt said. They were in the study and he watched his mother sign her name to a document heavier than she was. “That’s why he put you in charge.”

“She was the prettiest,” his father bluntly declared as he passed by the room.

Mark Williams believed his wife had spent the past decade kissing up to her “old crow” of a father — just like the mousy reporters promoted over him at The Times kissed up to management. He’d recently been transferred — a word he consider euphemistic feminist double-speak; you were either promoted or demoted, and this was obviously a demotion — to the style desk. He edited stories he didn’t understand and believed no one else could understand because it was all bunk. His writers were the type of women and men for whom gender was an afterthought, and his Newsroom Barbie boss was so demure and prim, so irritatingly polite, that he felt like he left one wife at home only to take direction from another in the office.

No one quite knew what the Elliott family business was or had been, but it somehow had roots in most Seattle businesses older than Amazon and Microsoft. Matt’s father offered to help his mother, but as usual, his assistance was never an expression of sympathy or compassion but his firm belief that she was useless — like an antique clock, “expensive and pretty to look at but a newer, cheaper model does the job just as well if not better” (his own grotesque words). Sensing this, Marilyn Elliott asserted herself in business, which for her meant extended sessions in tall, black office buildings with officious men who kissed her hand as she disarmed them with smiles and nods, and they made that massive sum of hers even more ridiculous ... without sweating or straining or contemplating the sweating and straining of the people whose labors made it all possible. She never had to know their names, their (many) struggles, their (limited) successes. She was only told about “dividends” (downsizings) and “returns” (more downsizings and occasionally outsourcing).

After a day of meetings, his mother would retreat to the study and quietly drink Macallan Scotch while seated in a leather club chair facing the tough yet refined portrait of Matt’s grandfather, whose resemblance to Matt became more apparent each day. Matt thought it was like glimpsing the future and remembered the rheumy shell of a man at the nursing home.

Matt never commented on his mother’s nightly ritual, which after a while became unrooted from any specific time and place. It eventually ensured that Marilyn would avoid her father’s fate.

One early September day in 2011, the maid discovered Marilyn’s body alone in her room. Gasping at the sight of the still, cold form lying on the canopy bed’s marble white sheets, she allowed herself a short break to recover from the presence of death before she returned to the business of her life, and soon the body was removed, along with the bottle of Grey Goose on the nightstand, which was the only witness to Marilyn’s departure from the world at sixty-four.

At her funeral, everyone commented on how Marilyn looked more like fifty-four, which was true, but it ignored the reason they were gathered together that fall day: Peering underneath the surgically smooth skin and the artificially blonde hair, a physician might put her age more accurately at seventy-four. The doctors called it an illness, her sisters called it suicide, and her son Matt called it murder.

Matt resented that his father phoned him with the news, because it underscored the inescapable intimacy between them. He refused to speak to him in the days leading up to the burial, and fortunately, his mother’s final, knowing gift was to leave detailed instructions for her services so father and son wouldn’t have to debate her wishes.

Their friend Cindy drove Matt and his wife Sara to the funeral in her red Honda Prelude, which she’d received just after college when her famously frugal uncle finally splurged on a new automobile and promptly died the next day. Her friends jokingly named it “the death car,” an appellation that was only reinforced when she struck a deer on her way to the Williams family cabin.

Sara’s lean arms draped around Matt in the backseat, and Cindy chattered soothingly from the front as they pulled into the church parking lot, which resembled a luxury car showroom. The Prelude sheepishly passed wellborn Mercedes, BMWs, and Lexuses before stuttering into a free spot.

“I don’t think I’ve been here since my grandfather died,” Matt said to Sara, who exited the two-door’s backseat with the deft ease that came from more than a decade’s practice.

Matt ignored the rain and his father, who lumbered out of the stretch limousine that had contained only him and the driver, and he strode across wet pavement to his friends Charlie and Gina Merrick. Charlie’s light hair had gained a damp color, and he held an umbrella over his wife, who grasped Matt’s hands as he approached.

“This is the most well-attended funeral I’ve ever been to,” Gina said proudly, “and my Grandpa Payton knew Ted Turner.”

Matt was supposed to say some words to sum up his mother as a person and not as an industry, but anger clouded his thoughts since her death, so Gina graciously volunteered to speak on his behalf. Behind the pulpit and on top of three-inch heels, she told those assembled about the “great lady” she had the “honor to know.”

“Marilyn Elliott was not exceptional because she had attempted to be a force for good in Seattle.” Gina paused to adjust her glasses like his mother did when about to stress her point: “Marilyn Elliott was a force for good because she was exceptional.”

Gina’s reference to Matt’s mother by her maiden name, and the source of her wealth, caused Matt to glance in his father’s direction. He sat at a separate pew with Matt’s aunts Sunny and Frieda and their latest husbands (after the second round, Matt had stopped thinking of their partners as uncles). His father’s black suit, which he’d last worn at Matt and Sara’s wedding, strangled him like a boa constrictor. Matt was appalled that his father hadn’t cared enough to bother buying a new suit for the occasion, as he had.

Before leaving for the cemetery, Sara took Matt aside as he was about to enter the “death car.”

“Mark would like to speak to you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He told me.”

He looked at his wife and, for a moment, could only think that she was wearing black for the first time since he’d met her.

“I have nothing to say to him,” Matt declared, and he said nothing to anyone as they went to bury his mother.

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The only asset Marilyn Williams bequeathed to her husband was the antique clock from her bedroom. That was a master stroke, like leaving behind a single penny as gratuity on a check — clear recognition and indictment of poor service rather than the neglectful stiffing of the working class. Everything else went to her son. Early in November, after the will was read, he met with his mother’s two trusted financial advisers (there had been three originally, but the third was indicted for securities fraud in 1993). Mr. Lovejoy filled him in on the specifics, and the more obsequious Mr. Dinsford would turn to Sara and repeat everything slowly as if the original transmission had been scrambled in the static of her blonde hair. Her informed and confident responses assured him that his condescension was not necessary, although Matt, who thought Lovejoy spoke Latin, appreciated it.

Mark Williams liked to plug his thick fingers into his hairy ears regarding the fact that anyone might have authority over him, which was a trait that had not served him well at home or at work — a difference, he thought, that grew harder to discern as the years passed. He’d been “offered a package he couldn’t refuse” from The Times in 2006, a year before he turned sixty. His was a generation, perhaps the last, whose men believed they would work until they were sixty-five and then go off to fish with grandsons. He didn’t mind so much the early dismissal. That was business, but he wished he could have been fired ... like men once were, before political correctness corrupted the word, suffocating it under fluffy layers of euphemism.

His severance was not worth discussing. The job had provided him with a sense of worth, and reduced to just numbers, it sagged limply next to the Elliott fortune. He bought a boat, which he planned to take up to Edmonds but never did. Now, he was sixty-four and unemployed, and his security, his freedom, his life all belonged to his son. Not even putting both fists in his ears could block out that reality.

“He’s gonna try to bully you like he did Marilyn,” Gina Merrick told Matt at Thanksgiving. “Keep your guard up.”

“I’ve gotten pretty good at that,” he said and wished he believed.

They sat on a white sofa in a rosy patch of light from the living room fireplace. Regardless of who came to Gina’s for Thanksgiving each year, the twilight of the gathering always included the same core people. Matt could hear Sara and Cindy in the kitchen hand-washing and drying the fine china, as Charlie Merrick put them away for Gina’s next dinner party.

“You know, I’ve invited Marilyn to Thanksgiving for years.” Gina’s blue eyes sparkled at the thought. “But she ....”

“Wouldn’t come without my father,” Matt finished and he wished for all those lost holidays with his mother that his father had cost him.

“Well, I suppose she thought it might’ve looked odd. Anyway, you’re the boss now. You’re in control.” She sipped her sherry. “It’s delicious,” she murmured, “Savor it.”

Matt and Sara met his father Sunday at a restaurant Mark had selected downtown that was loud, with a lingering aroma of cigars, and whose menu was a single worn page listing different cuts of steak. There was silence, long and confused, as if a band that had broken up years ago reunited for a concert without its lead singer. Finally, after chugging his first Rainier beer, Mark spoke.

“Just wanted to tell you, I’m selling the house. No reason to stay there by myself.” He added with presumptuous generosity, “You should stop by and decide what stuff you want for yourself.”

“No,” Matt said.

“What?”

“Mom left the house to me. Sara and I will decide if we sell.”

Mark turned to face Sara, who he believed was the source of his son’s resistance.

“You want to live in the house, Ms. Richter?” Sara had kept her surname when she married Matt, so Mark called her nothing else. “Why? To fill it with all those kids you’re not having?”

Having previously confirmed that his lack of grandchildren wasn’t just a matter of his son “shootin’ blanks,” Mark considered Sara’s refusal to procreate a rejection of utility, like a fireplace that refused to burn wood.

“This isn’t my choice, Mark,” she said, as though speaking to a small child, “or yours. It’s Matt’s.”

Sara reached for a warm towel from the tray in the center of the table and cleaned her hands without intending or considering any symbolism behind the action. Matt delivered his next words like a valedictory speech.

“You’re right. It doesn’t make sense for you to stay in that house by yourself. I’m going to sell it, and then I’m donating every dime to alcoholism treatment.”

Mark’s broad flat hand patted an imaginary yawn.

“This again?” he barked in weary anger. “Your mother was a lush, and that was her choice, not an illness. But I see what this is about. You want to blame me for it, like I stuck a funnel in her mouth and poured gin down it.”

“You might as well have.”

As the meal continued on its rancorous path, Sara picked shards of bacon out of her salad, and Matt detailed every slight, dig, and insult he’d witnessed his father commit against his mother. It was a scathing closing argument to the jury and the defendant cut into his T-bone with deliberately controlled incisions and ate each bite, dripping grease onto his plate, without indicating whether he was listening or was so moved as to demand that Matt stop.

Finally, Sara placed cash from her wallet on the check she’d requested.

“We’re not getting dessert,” she said sharply, calling the meal officially at 10:07 p.m.

“See, Ms. Richter, you’d make a great mom. You’ve certainly been able to handle my son better than his mother ever could. Now, that’s what really ate at her.”

Sara’s hand clamped around Matt’s wrist, which was all that prevented him from lunging across the table.

Mark Williams moved out of the house the following week. Matt said he could stay for as long as the house was on the market, and Mark’s rejection of that offer was firm and obscene.

The fireworks of that last meal with his father subsided, and there was an extended refractory period before he could move on. Gina’s friend at Keller-Williams showed the house to prospective buyers, most of whom found his mother’s death in the gilded bedroom an appealing selling point. Marilyn Elliott was important enough for the circumstances of her death to escape the messiness of her actual life and assume the role of tidy historical footnote.

Once a contract was signed, and expensive set pieces from his childhood transported to his Capitol Hill home, Gina invited Matt and Sara over to celebrate. After dinner, while Sara and Charlie talked to the Merrick children in the playroom, Gina toasted Matt on her deck.

“Freedom is a fragile thing,” she pronounced, “and is never more than a generation away from extinction.” On Matt’s puzzled look, she added, “That’s Ronald Reagan. See, you’ve defended your freedom and put your father out of your life.”

They clinked their wine glasses together. Gina sat in a chair near the fire pit, and its flames sparked hot and glowing against her tan skin and sandy hair.

“Good riddance, I say. He was awful to your mother ... and to Sara. She must be thrilled.” Gina was personally thrilled on her friend’s behalf, so she assumed without question that Sara shared her sentiment.

“Just make sure you don’t fall into the glasnost trap,” she continued. “He’ll try to reach out to you or Sara and pretend to be all humble and pathetic but he’s just trying to guilt you into giving him money, which your mother definitely didn’t want Mark to have.” She shook her head at the prophesied skullduggery. “Basic extortion tactics.”

Another Seattle winter passed in leaden darkness, and then spring drizzled meekly over the city — all without any news from Mark Williams. Matt had no desire to see him, but he was curious as to what had happened to him without resources, either financial or social. The closest he had to friends were the old newspaper buddies he kept in touch with through regular emails (forwards of stories they deemed awful and not up to their standards), but none of their wives would ever allow Mark’s bombast and pomposity into their house.

Gina’s words nagged at him: She’d predicted that Matt’s father would contact him or Sara, not both but one or the other. And Matt recalled how at his mother’s funeral, his father had approached Sara by herself.

“Have you heard anything from my father?” Matt finally asked Sara. They were walking home from dinner, and uncertainty had nodded his head when their waitress offered him a third glass of wine.

“Yes,” she said as if reciting the time.

“And when were you going to tell me about this?”

“You’ve said repeatedly that you don’t want to talk about Mark.”

“This is completely different. You don’t like to talk about TV, but if Downton Abbey was going behind your back and talking to me, you’d want to know, wouldn’t you?”

Matt had stopped in the street while making his not-quite-drunken but still possibly insane analogy. He now had to run to make up the distance Sara’s long-limbed stride had put between them. When he’d reached her at Prospect Street, Sara spoke with the calmness of someone who never drank and had grown accustomed to the logic gaps of escalating blood alcohol levels among those who did.

“If you now wish to discuss Mark, I am happy to do so.”

Sara paused near a tattooed man walking an Airedale. She folded her arms and calmly explained how weeks earlier, Matt’s father had provocatively added her to his email group, perhaps eager to see how his daughter-in-law would react to the heated exchanges, especially the “joke” forwards, where the subjects of mockery were never the same race, gender, sexual orientation, or political party as Mark and his friends.

She would respond, never goaded to anger, and carefully catalogue all factual inaccuracies. Mark would reply in all-caps (he’d reached the age when all his emails were in all-caps, but it fit him): YOU DIDN’T GET THE JOKE, MS. RICHTER.

“How dare he!” Matt shouted, startling the Airedale, who barked in shared frustration. “How dare he come to me through you!”

“Is that what you think he’s doing?”

“What else? Think about it! Gina said this would happen. Has he asked you for money?”

“No,” Sara replied. “He’s living in Kent now. I haven’t inquired any further.”

They left the topic on the street with the Airedale, now happily urinating on a parked car, but it followed them home and into their bed.

“I hate him,” Matt said. “Is that wrong?”

The lights were off, and Sara had turned over on her side, which indicated that she was done speaking for the day. She bristled at conversations in bed, and Matt was irritated enough to pretend he didn’t know this.

“Your feelings are neither good nor bad,” Sara said flatly. “You have no obligation to him.” She sat up. “However ...”

Matt sulkily tugged on the sheets until they covered his chin. He’d learned to dread this adverb whenever his wife wielded it.

“You’ve always disliked him ...”

“Hated him,” Matt insisted. He had gone all in and wasn’t willing to fold politely on the confessed emotion.

“Very well. It seems like you’ve always hated him because he was not someone else. That has never made sense to me.”

“He married my mother and he never liked anything about her. He spent their entire marriage picking away at her!”

“That was her choice.”

“What are you talking about? She didn’t choose to be bullied.”

“She chose to stay with him. He didn’t fool her. How could he? He’s hardly complex.”

“You’re defending him? After the way he treated you?”

Sara pressed on, steering the conversation forward without distraction.

“Look, he has no right to your love or your money. But if you think he’s just after your money, that’s simple enough to resolve — just give him some. You have more than you could ever need. You’ll probably spend more funding Frieda’s Scientology pursuits.”

“You didn’t know my aunt before she discovered something that worked for her. She was lost.”

“Well, they’ve gone to great expense to ‘find’ her.”

She flipped over on her side, ending the conversation, but Matt wasn’t finished.

“This is why he always liked you more than me.”

It was a strange comment, and it separated them as a couple and pitted them as rival siblings, fighting for approval from a distant parent.

“Mark doesn’t like me ...”

“Really? He never put me on his email list. He’s always wanted a reaction from you, and he could never get it. He’s in unrequited hate with you.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I believe you are avoiding a reasonable solution to your perceived problem.”

“No!” Matt shook his head angrily in the dark. “He’s not getting a cent from me. That’s not what Mom wanted.”

“According to the terms of the will, Marilyn only specified that you inherit her money. It’s entirely your choice what to do with it.”

“Fine! And I choose to give him nothing! Just like what he gave Mom.”

He waited for another volley but his partner had fallen asleep on the other side of the net. Matt went downstairs to sleep on the couch. It was the first time it had come to this and he could’ve just gone across the hall to the guest room, but he felt compelled to fulfill the cliche.

He woke with a start the next morning when Sara entered the living room, freshly showered and already dressed. She patted down a wild thatch of brown hair that jutted out sideways from his head.

“Was I snoring?” she asked tenderly, without any sign of resentment. “Did I keep you up?”

“No, no, I ...” He seized the opportunity that presented itself. “I couldn’t sleep, so I just watched some TV and must have dozed off.”

Matt quickly concluded that it wouldn’t diminish the sacredness of his vigil if he never actually told his wife about it.

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“Yes!” John Sr. admitted like a scaredy cat, and the ring moved on to Hal Jordan, who becomes Earth’s first Green Lantern .

Nicholson told The Wrap, “I’m just grateful that the writing room put this into the script. How can you expect this African American man in this world … to be fearless? It really raises a lot of questions on who has the privilege to move through life without thinking about those things, even in the fictional world.”

John’s mother, Bernadette (Jasmine Cephas Jones), later asks Laura Linney’s Guardian, “Do you understand how unfair it is to ask a Black man in America if he's afraid?”

Now, I don’t think the Guardians need mandatory DEI training because they asked John’s father their standard question. Fearlessness and will are the key traits of a Green Lantern. Yes, you can end up with jerks like Guy Gardner, but this isn’t a personality test. Obviously, Hal Jordan’s former mentor, Sinestro (Ulrich Thomsen), proves there are some flaws in the Guardians’ screening process — his name is Sinestro — but I’d argue that Sinestro succumbed to fear — fear of losing control.

Interestingly, Bernadette demonstrates the necessary traits for a Green Latnern — fearlessness and iron will — when she demands that Laura Linney’s Guardian “prove” that she’s actually an alien and not some “unfortunate white lady.” The Guardian hesitates because she’s found that her “natural appearance” is “upsetting to humans.” Bernadette defiantly says, “I don’t get upset. Show me.” (Watch below.)

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The Guardians identify John as a future Lantern while he’s still an infant, and the Stewarts train him for his destiny like they’re Joe and Katherine Jackson. This “training” is straight-up child abuse: John’s father regularly fires a gun at an apple placed on John’s head. This is more likely to make John a serial killer than “fearless.” At best, he could become the star attraction at a traveling circus. This would seem to undermine the argument that existing as a Black person in America is to live with constant fear. John shouldn’t need impromptu William Tell sessions or his parents abandoning him in violent neighborhoods to master his fear. Richard Pryor joked in a 1974 routine that aliens in flying saucers could never scare Black people — “not after 400 years of this shit.” He said Black people would probably warn the aliens about what might happen if they stuck around.

Bernadette later tells John that Hal only has the ring because he was privileged enough in life never to have experienced true fear. But I think this misunderstands what the ring demands from a Lantern, and I disagree with the idea that fearlessness itself is a form of racial privilege. After all, Rosa Parks was fearless. Martin Luther King Jr. was fearless. Harriet Tubman was fearless. In Tubman’s case, while it was reasonable for someone escaping with her to fear capture and possibly try to turn back, she still had to treat that reasonable fear as a liability. I’d argue that fear is the true privilege. The Confederacy was not fearless. Segregationists during Jim Crow were consumed by fear. MAGA is itself a fear-based movement. Fox News is a perpetual fear-making machine.

During an interview, which infuriates John Stewart Sr., Hal Jordan explains how he passed the Guardians’ test. He claims after his father died when he was young, he felt like “there was nothing else to fear.” Hal’s fearlessness is thus the feeling that he has nothing left to lose. This mirrors his chosen career as a test pilot. It also recalls a classic line from Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again. The Kingpin, after learning Daredevil’s true identity as Matt Murdock, systematically destroys his life and leaves him for dead. However, he later realizes to his horror that Murdock is now more of a threat to him than he ever was because “a man without hope is a man without fear.”

If John Stewart Sr. fears losing his son’s love, it doesn’t seem to bother him. He abuses his own power over John. Perhaps, like Sinestro in the beginning, he believes it’s for the right reasons. However, this is further evidence that the ring was right to reject him. You can’t trust that level of power to anyone who surrenders to fear — even if you might think it’s justified in their case.

The average white man would also freak out if encased in a green bubble, and they’d blame illegal aliens for their soiled pajamas. Fear is what causes us to put up walls and scapegoat others for our problems. Unreasoning fear is the biggest threat to the world. Perhaps I’ll sound like a Scientologist, but being afraid — just like getting upset — is a choice. A Green Lantern can’t control if they feel fear but they must choose, even within a split-second, not to be afraid. When Linney’s Guardian reveals her true form, you can see Bernadette control her fear. She says, “I don’t get upset,” but she means, “I make that choice every day.”

Writer John Broome and artist Gil Kane introduced Hal Jordan in 1956’s Showcase No. 22. Abin Sur’s power ring claims that Hal was “born without fear.” As the decades passed, this started to seem more like brain damage than a particularly heroic trait, so writer Peter David revealed in a 1988 storyline that the power ring messed around with Hal’s mind so he’d become truly “fearless.” (The ring was admittedly on a tight deadline.) Writer James Owsley would later revise the ring lobotomy reveal. Instead, Hal was chosen because he possessed the necessary will to overcome his fear. This makes sense, as someone who is literally “fearless” is literally psychotic. In the 1997 New Batman Adventures episode “Never Fear,” Batman is exposed to the Scarecrow’s gas that removes all fear. This make him extremely dangerous. As Robin points out, Batman is no longer afraid to kill. “Fear is the glue that holds society together,” Scarecrow explains. “It's what makes people suppress their worst impulses. Fear is power.”

Although I wouldn’t describe fear in those stark terms, I do agree that fear is necessary, but we must always muster the will to keep it in check. The most recent Lanterns episode shows that Hal himself was struggling with this. The Guardians planned to replace Hal with John, and while they’ve only told Hal that John is his “backup,” he sees through this ruse. He tells John point blank, “The only way you’re getting this ring is over my dead body.” That is not defiance in the face of the unknown. It is fear of losing not just his power but his purpose. That’s a universal fear for which privilege offers no protection.

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The consistently silly “Democratic Wins Media” social media account posted after the primary, “BREAKING: Stunning new polling shows Democrat Annie Andrews TIED in South Carolina's Senate race against Darlene Graham. This is huge.” This is not in fact “BREAKING” news, as the poll had already been released.

The Impact Research poll shows Andrews and Graham tied at 41 percent. Kasie Whitener, a libertarian, has five percent of the vote, and 13 percent are undecided.

An Impact Research memo declares, “This seat is very much in play, in part because of Dr. Annie Andrews’ favorable profile and the fact that newly-crowned Senator Darline Graham holds an overwhelming amount of baggage and is deeply unpopular.” So, hooray?

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Impact Research is Andrews’s own pollster, so this is all slightly biased. It’s like your mother’s review of your middle school talent show performance. Still, Impact claims it “tested positive bios on each candidate” and “after introduction, Andrews takes a 5-point lead statewide, with an even wider 39-point lead among Independents – solidifying her Democratic base and winning over voters in the middle by large margins.”

Andrews — according to her “positive bio” — is “a mom and pediatrician. After nearly fifteen years caring for sick kids at the Children’s Hospital in Charleston, she saw how Washington’s corruption hurt kids and families while special interests and career politicians benefit. Andrews is running for Senate to fight for affordable healthcare, lower grocery and prescription drug prices, and take on Washington by passing term limits on all politicians, banning insider stock trading by members of Congress, and she’ll refuse corporate PAC money.”

This all sounds great, but I remain skeptical. Andrews is a compelling candidate if she were running in Virginia, Georgia, or even North Carolina, but my home state is very different. For one, the voters will eventually notice that Andrews hasn’t mentioned God or Jesus.

Democrats have a coalition that currently consists of white college-educated voters and people of color. Particularly in southern states that have recently flipped, Democrats started winning white college-educated voters, but in South Carolina, white college-educated voters remain solidly Republican, often voting no differently than white voters who only attend college for football games.

Virginia and Georgia’s major cities are Democratic strongholds. Joe Biden won Cobb County — Newt Gingrich’s former stomping grounds — by double digits in 2020. It was key to both Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff’s victories. Maricopa County is the largest in Arizona and winning there is how Trump and Gallego carried the state. However, Greenville County, the largest in South Carolina, went for Donald Trump by around 20 points in 2020 and 2024.

The suburban college-educated white Republican voters in South Carolina are likely social conservatives, as opposed to “just lower my taxes and lock up criminals” suburban moderates/conservatives in other places. Those voters are more reachable on terms that are comfortable for Democrats. Andrews’s website openly declares her pro-choice position as a priority: “Reproductive Freedom: Trust Women.” That’s nothing to hide from, even in South Carolina, as more than 80 percent of South Carolinians believe a woman should have access to an abortion if a pregnancy threatens her life or health. A similar number supports abortion access in the event of rape or incest. However, support for legal abortion is much lower — about 46 percent — for reasons beyond those limited parameters. Andrews’s position is more consistent with the national one.

Andrews’s campaign launch ad went after Lindsey Graham on his unwavering Trump support and how he voted to confirm all of Trump’s awful nominees, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Andrews, a medical doctor, rightly blames for the state’s recent measles outbreak. But, again, this is South Carolina. Trump’s approval is underwater in my home state, but recent polling has him at a shockingly decent 43 percent. His approval is lower in Georgia, North Carolina, and even Florida.

Democrats who are bullish about Andrews will point to Doug Jones’s upset victory over mall-cruising pervert Roy Moore in a December 2017 special election, which he pulled off without winning white college-educated voters.

Jones promptly lost decisively in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, who just barely meets the qualifications for sentience. He did about the same among white voters without a college degree, but Tuberville greatly improved upon Moore’s performance with college-educated white voters. Moore’s grossness made all the difference with this demo. However, Darline Graham is not Roy Moore. She has no real personal baggage, no mall-cop-alerting scandals. She’s just an idiot. Republicans have no problem electing idiots to the Senate.

The last Democratic senator from South Carolina was Fritz Hollings, who was also the first politician I met during my internship at The Greenville News. Hollings was known for his very Southern aphorisms, but perhaps my favorite is “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.” In 1950, as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, Hollings authored legislation that mandated the death penalty for lynching after the horrific 1947 lynching of 24-year-old Black man Willie Earle.

Hollings was governor of South Carolina from 1959 to 1963, when the Confederate flag started flying over the state house. He was politically ambivalent to civil rights as governor, doing little to actively support it but also not openly opposing racial progress. He was elected to the Senate in 1966, and the following year, he was one of only 11 senators who voted against Thurgood Marshall’s confirmation to the Supreme Court (though Tim Scott would’ve likely done the same).

Hollings was a political moderate but supportive of civil rights in his later career. He was the only sitting U.S. senator to endorse Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, praising Jackson’s platform. He served in the Senate for 38 years but declined to run for re-election in 2004. He was 82 but his retirement was an acknowledgement that no Democrat could win statewide in South Carolina’s current political environment. I wish I could share the hope that Dr. Annie Andrews might change this grim reality.

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I get it, though: Republicans are making hay of Piker, who frequently makes statements that are simultaneously offensive and poorly thought out. Piker was a wedge issue in the recent Michigan Democratic Senate primary, but Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has distanced himself from Piker and has no plans to campaign with him during the general election. Nonetheless, very serious Democrats want to extend the five minute of hate against Piker.

People have argued that although Piker — and many of his staunchest supporters — are often foolish, there is still room for them within an anti-MAGA coalition, the Democrats’ supposed “big tent.” Others counter that the “big tent” isn’t quite that big. It’s more medium-sized.

Former Republican House Rep. Joe Walsh, who registered as a Democrat last year, posted last week on social media, “This shouldn’t have to be said, but the Democratic Party tent shouldn’t include racists. It shouldn’t include antisemites either. No room for bigotry of any kind. No tent should be that big.

Right?”

Walsh has had a history of controversial statements that could’ve easily qualified him as a “racist.” Like many Tea Party Republicans in 2010, Walsh rode the wave of anti-Obama sentiment among the party to electoral victory, defeating Rep. Melissa Bean in Illinois. (Somewhat ironic, given current handwringing among Democrats, is how election insiders at the time thought hardliners like Walsh would endanger GOP chances at winning the midterms.)

When incorrectly predicting a Mitt Romney victory in 2012, Walsh told a Tea Party rally: “There’s something different on the ground and I think it’s going to overtake us all again. I think it’s going to overtake the political class. I think it’s going to respectfully pick this president up and pat him on the head and say, son, son, son, Mr. President, you were never ready to be president, now go home and work for somebody and find out how the real world works.” (Walsh is the same age as Obama.)

Walsh had also suggested that Obama was only elected in the first place because he was “a black man who was articulate.” There are a lot of us who fit that pretty low-bar qualification, and it’s not as if America’s lining up to make us president. It’s this racist notion that life is somehow easier for Black people.

He claimed that radical Muslims were “trying to kill Americans every week.” He also promoted the conspiracy theory that Obama was a “secret” Muslim. “Obama is a Muslim. Happy New Year!” Walsh wrote in 2017. (Those were simpler days, now the conspiracy theory is that every liberal is openly antisemitic.)

He told an audience in Schaumburg, Illinois, that “the Democratic Party promises groups of people everything. They want the Hispanic vote, they want Hispanics to be dependent on government, just like they got African Americans dependent on government. That’s their game.”

Walsh served just a single term in the House. Tammy Duckworth defeated him in 2012, on her way to the Senate. He then transitioned into a career as a professional shit stirrer on conservative radio (a very last decade form of podcasting or Twitch streaming). He was briefly kicked off the air after using racial and ethnic slurs on his show. “I’m told that Redskins is every bit as racist as the N-word, so there can be no Washington Redskins,” Walsh said. “Well, to me, that’s really hypocritical. I don’t get it. If Redskins is like the N-word, then why do you get to say Redskins, but you don't say the N-word?” (This is similar to a John Mulaney bit that’s actually funny.)

Live-tweeting through his racist tirade, Walsh revealed, “Found out if I said Redskins or Cracker or Redneck Bible Thumper, I could stay on. But if I said Nigger or Spick, they cut me off.” An intern at the radio station could’ve explained these broadcast standards basics to him.

After five Dallas police officers were shot and killed on July 7, 2016, Walsh posted on social media, “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out Black Lives Matter punks. Real America is coming after you.” People reasonably interpreted this as a threat, especially since Obama was leaving office the next year so “Real America” couldn’t come “after” him peacefully at the ballot box. This felt more like raising a lynch mob. Walsh later insisted, “I wasn’t calling for violence, against Obama or anyone. Obama’s words and BLM’s deeds have gotten cops killed. Time for us to defend our cops.” Walsh deleted the first post — presumably before it resulted in a visit from Secret Service — but replaced it with one even more racist: “Obama says Cops are racist so 2 uneducated black thugs shoot 10 Dallas Cops tonight, killing 4.” (Obama never said “cops are racist” and obviously the race of the shooters was only relevant if you’re in the race war promotion business.)

Walsh was predictably a major Donald Trump supporter in 2016. Shortly before the election, he posted on social media, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” This was hardly a pro-democracy statement. It presaged the anti-democratic rhetoric that lead to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Like Trump’s later defense of his attempted coup, Walsh later claimed his remarks didn’t literally call for violently overturning a free-and-fair election.

“It means protesting,” Walsh insisted. “Participating in acts of civil disobedience. Doing what it takes to get our country back.”

When music legend Stevie Wonder took a knee at at a concert in September 2017, which actually was non-violent protest, Walsh dismissed him as “another ungrateful Black multimillionaire.” At least JD Vance trust the racially coded language when he calls liberals of color “ungrateful.” Walsh made Vance look PC.

Walsh eventually broke from Trump with a zealot’s conviction. He launched a primary challenge against Trump, which is when he finally apologized for all his past racist remarks. Now, you know you said some racist shit when you have to stress that you’re not a racist when running in a GOP primary against Donald Trump.

“I wouldn’t call myself a racist,” Walsh told John Heilemann in 2019, “but I would say … I’ve said racist things on Twitter. There’s no doubt about it. And an apology is not enough.”

I agree that an apology alone is often insufficient, though it’s certainly a good first step. Has Walsh proven himself a reliable ally? That’s hard to say. He has a demonstrated habit of temporarily altering his views according to what he believes best benefits him politically. He ran as pro-choice in the 1990s when trying to compete in Democratic-heavy districts. In 2012, though, he “argued that the research is pretty clear that with the advances in modern medicine an invasive and traumatic procedure like abortion is often, thankfully, not necessary to save the life of a mother.” In 1996, he’d claimed that he was “the most gay friendly Republican around.” Then in 2014, he posted on social media, “The LGBT community has become nothing more than a group of constitutional terrorists” — not LGBT activists but the community as a whole.

Walsh campaigned for Kamala Harris in key swing states. Harris wasn’t expected to repudiate him for his past statements. It turns out that apology was enough. Maybe the “big tent” will eventually welcome a “redeemed” Piker, along with Walsh.

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Dolly died after what her family describes as “a brief battle with cancer,” and Tim had lived for 14 years with the physically devastating effects of a stroke, while never losing his trademark charm and flair. Actor Peter Cullen, who voiced heroic Autobot leader Optimus Prime, died at his home on Wednesday.

I first discovered Tim as my childhood hero Captain Hook in 1990’s Peter Pan & The Pirates cartoon. His Hook is why I will respond to any self-evident statement with “an acute observation … though a trifle obvious.” (Watch below.)

The same year, Tim terrified me (and a generation of children) as the nameless entity in the TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s It. He presents as a slightly seedy but otherwise normal clown you might see at a children’s birthday party, yet with a mere word or glimmer in his eyes, he transforms into a living nightmare. “Kiss me, fat boy!”

Of course, 1990 was also when I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was finally released on VHS for its 15th anniversary. Tim’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter — the sel-identified “sweet transvestite” mad scientist — is an other-worldly creation who commands the screen. He would find it impossible to fully shed the mad doctor’s platform heels though he fully embraced the film’s legacy and its fans.

Tim originated the part of Mozart in the 1980 Broadway stage production of Amadeus. He wasn’t considered for the lead in the 1984 film adaptation because director Miloš Forman wanted an American cast. He did let Curry screen test for the part of Salieri, which won F. Murray Abraham an Oscar.

Tim’s film career would have similar near misses. He was fantastic in 1982’s Annie, which otherwise received mixed reviews. Clue (1985) boasts arguably his second best performance on screen, but it was a box office bomb — only later achieving a second life as a cult classic. (And just how many actors could have played both Frank-N-Furter and Wadsworth the butler?) Tim would later deliver a series of scene-stealing performances in 1990s films, including The Hunt for Red October, Oscar, Home Alone 2, National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1, Three Musketeers, The Shadow, Congo, and Muppet Treasure Island. Throughout his career, Tim was a gift whenever he showed up on stage or screen.

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Although fellow Boomers, Dolly’s career and impact were very different from Tim’s. People on my social media feed mourning Tim’s passing also share many of my cultish interests. They’re Rocky Horror people or Clue people or Spamalot people. But what’s astonishing about the reaction to Dolly’s death is how uniform it’s been — regardless of race, religion, social class, people genuinely loved Dolly. I haven’t seen anything like this since Fred Rogers died.

Like Tim, though, Dolly gained fame through a larger-than-life character who dressed flamboyantly. But while the flashy outfits, oversized platinum blonde curls, and healthy figure are what caught audiences’ attention, Dolly maintained it with her stellar song craft.

Born in a one-room cabin in rural Tennessee, without running water or electricity, Dolly was a musical prodigy. She wrote her first song when she was six, started performing on TV by 10, and made her first recording at the age of 11.

Over the next six decades, she released more than 60 albums. She was an instant success on the country music charts, and a decade after her first album, Hello, I’m Dolly, she hit the pop mainstream with the platinum selling, Here You Come Again. She sold more than 100 million records worldwide.

Dolly also accomplished what — and I say this with love — artists such as Prince and Madonna never managed to pull off, an impressive movie career. Her first film was the box office smash 9 to 5 in 1980. She’s a revelation as Doralee Rhodes, a role Megan Hilton would bring to exquisite life on stage. Dolly came up with the title track’s distinctive rhythm by running her acrylic fingernails back and forth against one another. The song “9 to 5” became a working class anthem, and it’s also damn funky.

Dolly followed up 9 to 5 with 1982’s The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, which I think played in South Carolina movie theaters billed as either “Best Little” or “Texas.” Colin Higgins directed Dolly in both films, but he would later die from AIDS in 1988 at the age of 47.

Steel Magnolias, featuring a young Julia Roberts, was another big hit for Dolly, who played beauty salon owner Truvy Jones. However, I have a personal affection for Dolly’s 1986 TV movie, A Smoky Mountain Christmas, which made my holiday that year. Here she is — in full seasonal attire — promoting the movie on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. (Watch below.)

Dolly’s songs championed the average American, but not with “America First” bravado but with inspiring vulnerability. “Jolene” is a desperate woman’s appeal to her spouse’s mistress. Then there is the heartbreaking “I Will Always Love You,” where she offers to stand aside for the love of her life: “If I should stay, I would only be in your way. So I’ll go, but I know. I’ll think of you every step of the way.”

Not long after Dolly released “I Will Always Love You,” Elvis Presley wanted to cover the song. There was one big catch, though: Elvis wanted half the publishing rights. The 28-year-old Dolly turned down a fortune in 1974. She might’ve written “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” but she was nothing like the narrators in those songs. She always knew her worth. This would pay off when Whitney Houston covered “I Will Always Love You” for 1992’s The Bodyguard. Whitney’s version was a massive hit, selling more than 24 million copies worldwide and earning Dolly more than $10 million in royalties. (Teenage SER didn’t think the song’s lyrics fit the actual plot of the film, but what did I know?)

Dolly used the money from the “I Will Always Love You” cover to invest in a Nashville strip mall in a Black community. “This is the house that Whitney built,” she said.

Dolly was a visionary businesswoman. Her theme park, Dollywood, has created 23,000 jobs in rural Sevier County with a direct economic impact of almost $2 billion.

“When I first had the big idea to start Dollywood, my accountants and lawyers all thought I was making a big mistake,” Parton said in an interview with Forbes. “I was found out to be right, and they were found out to be gone.” Dolly was always more than her stage and screen persona, but she was also never less than the Dolly her fans loved.

Dolly was a tremendous public servant, who believed she had an obligation to share her wealth and success with those less fortunate. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library was a free-book-gifting program for pre-school-aged children across the country. She had a personal commitment to childhood literacy. She said, “My daddy was the smartest man I have ever known, but I knew his inability to read probably kept him from seeing all of his dreams come true. Inspiring kids to love to read became my mission.”

Dolly also helped give us Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Covid vaccine.

Dolly was famous for almost the entirety of my life. Other artists might’ve shared her humble beginnings but she maintained a sense of normality and accessibility that eventually escape longtime celebrities. She always felt like that girl from rural Tennessee.

Existing in a world without Dolly Parton feels impossible to comprehend right now, but as I grow older, I realize that it was a privilege to have grown up in a world with her. It’s a gift I’ll cherish.

A twisted and unhappy person online posted in response to Dolly’s death: “If everyone likes you that means you never took any controversial stands.” This is probably how he rationalizes his own toxic behavior. No one likes him because he’s so brilliant and willing to make bold stands. However, Dolly is an example of how you can be bold artistically and personally, while still remaining kind. This is her true legacy and wise people will learn from it.

I was just about to schedule this piece for publication when I learned that Peter Cullen had also died. Cullen’s bad ass baritone made him a perfect fit for such villains as the Red Skull (Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends), KARR (KITT’s “evil twin” so to speak on Knight Rider), and the sinister Venger from the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. However, he is best known for that model of heroism Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots from the 1980s Transformers cartoon. Inspired by advice from his own childhood hero — his brother, Cullen’s Optimus was commanding yet gentle, powerful but wise above all. When Optimus was killed off in the 1986 Transformers movie, kids were traumatized because he was far more to them than just a giant robot. For many kids less fortunate than myself, he was the protective, reliable father figure they never had.

When a live-action Transformers movie was made in 2007, fans who’d grown up with the cartoon made it clear that there could be only one Optimus Prime. Cullen voiced the character in seven films over 16 years, ending his impressive career as a blockbuster movie star.

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August ends in a few days, but my special summer subscription sale is still in effect — 40 percent off the usual annual paid subscriber rate. That’s just $30 a year. Thanks to all who have upgraded to paid subscriber status recently.

This week, I wrote about those bizarre no-shoe shoes from Chanel that actor Margaret Qualley wore to a movie premiere.

I questioned Hakeem Jeffries’s political instincts and ability to “meet the moment.”

Know-nothing nepotism prevails in my home state, as Lindsey Graham’s younger sister Darline Graham wins the Republican Senate primary. This is South Carolina, so Graham could basically stop campaigning tomorrow and still win the general election.

Author Evan Barker joined me to discuss some challenges facing the Democratic Party. Part Two runs next week.

That’s it for this week. See you on Monday.

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As you might have guessed, Darline Graham is Lindsey Graham’s younger sister, which is only a compelling qualification in a hereditary monarchy. (We all can agree that Princess Anne would’ve made a better replacement for Queen Elizabeth than her brother Charles.) However, Darline Graham — who has fully embraced nepotism by dropping her other surname — is an absolute dullard.

During last week’s GOP Senate debate, Graham was asked, “Are Taiwan and the South China Sea national security issues for the United States, and, if so, why?” and she responded like Sarah Palin after a massive head injury.

“I’m just gonna to be honest here,” Graham said, apparently having not prepped for this debate beyond wearing “brainy” glasses. “I’m not on national security … I’m not that informed on national security … But I do support the military. My brother was in the Air Force for 33 years so I will do everything I can to support the military.” The only appropriate response to this was “Yikes.” (Watch below.)

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Tim Scott, South Carolina’s now senior senator, insists that Graham is still perfectly qualified to serve in the Senate, which is technically true for a body that includes Ron Johnson, Tommy Tuberville, and whatever remains of John Fetterman’s mental faculties.

The Guardian described Darline Graham as “a frequent attendee at [Lindsey] Graham's political events,” which is the best you can say about her politically. I was a frequent attendee at Patti LuPone shows, but I am in no way qualified to replace her on stage.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster picked Darline Graham to serve in her late brother’s seat until January, when his current term ends, and although many liberals complained at the time, this sort of placeholder sympathy appointment is not unusual. In theory, the governor avoids picking a serious candidate for the seat who would then have the advantage of incumbency in the upcoming election. California Gov. Gavin Newsom made a similar pick when he replaced the late Dianne Feinstein.

Yet, Darline Graham somehow decided that she should serve a full term on her own. She’s never held any previous elected office and her primary political experience is exclusive to her brother’s campaign. She stood by his side when then-Vice President Joe Biden swore in Graham for another term in 2015. (Notice how robust the 72-year-old Biden was and how kind he is to Graham and his family. Graham would later openly betray his “friend.”)

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Trump had endorsed Darline Graham for all the usual reasons related primarily to the service of his own ego. He hasn’t had a great record with successful endorsements this year, so he’s bound to thump his chest and take all the credit for Graham’s victory. His hubris is perhaps warranted in this instance, considering Graham is a pudding brain with limited charisma. Her brother wasn’t actually that popular in South Carolina and often fended off primary challenges to his right, so she couldn’t rely entirely on her family name.

Graham’s runoff opponent was Rep. Ralph Norman, who’s 73 and older than Lindsey Graham, who’s dead. It’s the Senate so Norman probably figured he could easily serve another couple decades.

Norman has held elected office for 20 years, serving in both the South Carolina and U.S. House of Representatives. His stated understanding of national security extends beyond merely “support the troops.” You could almost feel sorry for him if you had excessive free time to waste.

Norman is a shameless election denier, who also doesn’t believe in the January 6 Capitol attack.

“I was there,” Norman said in 2024. “It was not an insurrection at all. So, I deny that that was an event that a lot of questions have yet to be answered, that you will find out in time.” (Yeah, that’s the actual quote.)

So, if you think U.S. senators should uphold basic democratic principles and acknowledge the violent insurrections that occur right in front of them, then Norman is clearly unfit to serve. Obviously, that’s not why Trump snubbed him.

Some liberals online have suggested that Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Annie Andrews might have a better chance at defeating Darline Graham. Such rosy optimism requires the absence of a short-term memory: Andrews ran against Rep. Nancy Mace in 2022 and lost by 14 points. Mace’s racially gerrymandered district has the same partisan lean as South Carolina overall.

Journalist Karly Kingsley posted on social media that Darline Graham’s “biggest problem [is … ] that nobody has an idea what her knowledge, skills, or beliefs are beyond being her brother’s legacy.” Of course, that’s more than sufficient for Darline Graham to beat Jesus Christ as a Democrat in South Carolina. Graham has already cynically pegged what matters most to South Carolina Republicans. During a clean-up-on-aisle-Fox-News interview after her Taiwan debate gaffe, Graham insists that the “people in South Carolina are more worried about boys in girls’ sports.” The state has already banned trans kids from school sports, so these people are worried about the wrong thing, which is usually the case.

Graham defended her demonstrated idiocy with the MAGA-friendly assertion that she doesn’t speak “politician.” She’s now on a glide path to the Senate.

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Before you are tempted to think that Kushner’s motivations were noble, please remember that his even more corrupt father Charles Kushner was sentenced to two years in 2005 for tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal donations. (The guy paid a sex worker to seduce his own brother-in-law.) He served 14 months, but Trump pardoned him between coup-plotting in December 2020. He’s now the United States Ambassador to France, where hiring sex workers for your relatives is less controversial.

Apparently, Kushner and Jeffries “discussed housing, immigration and the high cost of living as potential areas of common ground.” This is ridiculous for many reasons. The most obvious is that Trump’s underwater approval is because he’s failed to resolve issues related to housing and affordability, which he’s called a Democratic “hoax.” There’s no reason that Democrats should help Trump in those areas — just as Republicans refused to help Biden when he was similarly drowning. That might seem harsh — shouldn’t Democrats work constructively with the Trump administration for the next two years — but voters have repeatedly demonstrated that they’ll never reward Democrats for attempts at good governance while in the minority. It’s not even a complicated trolley problem

Kushner is a slime ball who has openly profited from his familial ties to the White House. He’s made corrupt deals with autocrats and filled his pockets from the conflicts in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine. He ran an “off-the-books” shadow coronavirus task force that operated secretly and with sociopathic intent. He reportedly was willing to let the virus ravage Democratic-run states that hadn’t voted for Trump (including New York, where Jeffries lives) and just blame the Democratic governors for the horrific body count.

There is nothing positive about Jeffries or any Democrat working with Kushner on anything. If a politician is meeting secretly with a gangster, it is safe to assume that the politician is not helping to reform the gangster. (Watch below.)

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Kushner has an obvious agenda: He’d like to avoid following his father’s footsteps into prison. He wants to avoid congressional subpoenas. I’m sure Hunter Biden would have willingly met with Kevin McCarthy in August 2022 if he thought it might keep Republicans off his back. Of course, Hunter Biden had nothing to offer the incoming House majority. Maybe Jeffries thinks Kushner does, but no one in full possession of their faculties should trust Kushner, who was probably the one who told the press about the meeting.

Of course, Kushner is not even the best point person for immigration or even domestic policy. He is deeply involved in Middle East policy. Kushner has unveiled plans for a “New Gaza” that would turn an attempted genocide into an investment opportunity for war profiteers. Jeffries remains devoted to Israel, despite growing discontent among Democratic voters over Israel’s actions in Gaza. (Yet even staunchly pro-Israel conservative Joe Walsh thinks meeting with Kushner was stupid.)

The Blue MAGA brigade immediately defended Jeffries with evangelical zeal. There was the usual tedious “you’re only criticizing Jeffries because you hate Black men” nonsense, and some truly tortured whataboutism regarding New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s White House meeting earlier this year with Donald Trump. This was the song of the truly desperate. After all, Mamdani was meeting with the actual president, not a self-serving incompetent (well, that’s technically Trump, as well, but he does hold actual elected office). Mamdani didn’t seek “common ground” with Trump and he’s continued governing in a fashion that irritates Republicans and centrist Democrats. No one complained when Jeffries and Chuck Schumer met with Trump at the White House last year for budget negotiations. That was their job — although it didn’t go well. Trump presented them with Trump 2028 hats and later released an AI deepfake video that depicted Jeffries with a fake sombrero and mustache pasted on his face.

Many Jeffries defenders seem trapped in the distant past, far removed from the fierce urgency of now. “That was nothing more than normal meeting to size up a political opposition,” someone posted on social media. “After all, Tip O’Neil met numerous times with President Ronald Reagan back in their days. There were no wringing of hands or recriminations then, there shouldn’t be either now. How else should a prudent leader gauge and engage the opposition?”

As Annie Wilkes said, “Have you all got amnesia?” Donald Trump is not Ronald Reagan. That is key part of mainstream Democratic messaging. Do Democrats think Never Trumpers are on their side because Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are such commanding leaders?

Another post argued, “Jared runs foreign policy and has a say in every important decision. He’s basically the defacto POTUS, same as in the first admin. Jared and Ivanka play Trump. This is probably the most powerful man in the world.”

Anyone who was alive and conscious during Trump’s first nightmare term would know that Jared and Ivanka were never moderating influences, certainly in no way that benefitted Democrats. Besides, the future Speaker should not enable the fact that an unelected, non-confirmed moron runs foreign policy.

Jeffries did release a carefully scripted impromptu video on Monday where he explained the “Jared Kushner situation.” Basically, just because he met secretly with the wallet inspector, that doesn’t mean he handed over his wallet.

The Blue MAGA acolytes suggest that we all shout “yippee yippee” over the meeting because it means Kushner knows that Democrats will soon regain control over the House. This is hardly a shocking admission, considering Trump’s dire approval rating and overall polling data — though Trump is actively attempting to steal the midterms under Jeffries’s nose.

During an appearance on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing, current House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the meeting.

“I know Jared is a smart guy and he hedges bets, but I'm telling you what, you better not bet against the House Republicans,” Johnson told host Peter Doocy. Sure, that’s probably cope but it’s true that Kushner is a craven opportunist who’s consistently wrong about almost everything. He’s not exactly a political bellwether.

“I don’t know what that’s about,” Johnson added. “I know Jared has interest in lots of other things going on … He’s not really directly involved in the admin, at least in the day-to-day in the White House.”

You hate to credit someone as loathsome as Mike Johnson with spectacular shade, but he does correctly point out that Jeffries is a fool if he believes he can trust any deal he makes with Kushner. We might all agree that Kushner operates as Trump’s shadow secretary of state, but he’s not the real Senate-confirmed secretary of state. Maybe Kushner can convince Trump to go easy on the Jeffries’s deep-fake videos, but even that’s a stretch.

So, just a couple months away from the midterms, Jeffries is the one who looks like he came to this meeting from a position of weakness, as if he actually needs anything from Kushner. Republicans have never operated this way when in a similar position. Kevin McCarthy wasn’t holding secret meetings with anyone in the Biden White House prior to the 2022 midterms. (And the backlash to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade did shift the dynamic of the midterms, so there was a chance Democrats might have held the majority.)

Of course, the most important reason McCarthy wouldn’t have had secret meetings with anyone from the Biden White House is because his primary focus beyond winning the midterms was ensuring he had 218 votes for Speaker. He wouldn’t risk alienating MAGA hardliners who were already skeptical of him. Conversely, Jeffries seems far more secure in his hold on the gavel. That strikes me as both arrogant and complacent. Thanks to GOP gerrymandering and the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act, Democrats are not guaranteed a healthy majority. They could have just a half dozen or so voters to spare.

No, there are not enough votes to make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Speaker but there are enough to repeat Kevin McCarthy’s humiliating experience in January 2023 when he wasn’t elected until the 15th vote. This was after making even more concessions with hardliners, and he still only kept the job for 269 days.

Perhaps Hakeem Jeffries is certain that the DSA members who’ve just won primaries will prove more reasonable than Chip Roy, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace. If so, he should start saying this during his cable news interviews, and he should probably spend the next few weeks having meetings with them and not Jared Kushner.

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