Saturday, October 14, 2023
Ominous Threats Rise as House GOP Is Mired in Moronic, Clownish Politics
Bilious rhetoric pours from members of Congress presiding over their dilapidated institution. Never has there been such a disjunction between the seriousness of the nation’s problems and the irresponsibility of its political class.
[L]ook around. There is turmoil in the party that controls only one congressional chamber and cannot control itself. The unfolding presidential campaign is doing nothing to elucidate intelligent responses to two regional wars abroad and fiscal incontinence at home. About the nation’s peril, consider this:
“The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time — Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran — whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia. And no one alive can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today.”
[M]ilitary preparedness is jeopardized by Congress’s inability to perform its most basic function, budgeting. Since 2010, it has failed to pass defense appropriations bills before the next fiscal year begins. “Continuing resolutions” continue the planning difficulty.
The war Hamas launched against the United States’ most important Middle East ally underscores a lesson from Ukraine: War remains a matter of mass — artillery, armor, air support. And much of the U.S. defense industrial base has atrophied. This cannot be rectified quickly. One thing, however, can be.
Senate rules, which allow maximum individual latitude, presuppose minimal maturity. To protest a Defense Department policy pertaining to abortion, a caricature — Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who says the three branches of government are “the House, the Senate, and the executive” — is blocking confirmation of hundreds of senior military promotions. This, says Gates, is “making the United States a laughingstock among its adversaries.” The Senate should immediately end this moronic behavior. Senators should either change Tuberville’s unfurnished mind (“My dad fought 76 years ago in Europe to free Europe from socialism”) or change the rule he is abusing.
Russia’s attempted annihilation of Ukraine has become an attritional war. As Johns Hopkins University foreign policy scholar Hal Brands says, “The U.S. and its allies need to start equipping Ukraine now for operations in 2024 and after.” And they need to ponder this: “Without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats, Russia might well have lost the war by now.” China’s President Xi Jinping might believe that Vladimir Putin’s nuclear arsenal has made U.S. assistance to Ukraine timid and hesitant. Brands says:
“If Ukraine is a precedent for how America handles crises with nuclear-armed great powers, the U.S. is in big trouble in the Western Pacific. … It’s not clear why the U.S. would be more willing to risk nuclear war for Taiwan — another strategically important but distant democracy — than it was for Ukraine.”
All but one of the Republican presidential aspirants should stop tiptoeing around the crucial fact about the other one: Donald Trump is an unexampled threat to national security. He is unambiguously supporting Putin, as is a growing cohort of congressional Republicans who, by opposing material aid to Ukraine, are preparing to enable Trump to keep his promise to end the war “in 24 hours.” This would consign Ukraine to eventually losing the 82 percent of its territory that Putin has not yet seized.
As the world becomes more ominous, clownishness among Republican presidential aspirants — let’s attack Mexico! — becomes more insufferable. Ron DeSantis promises gas at $2 a gallon — cheaper in inflation-adjusted terms than when the price was 26 cents in 1948. At a July event, a crazed New Hampshirite told Vivek Ramaswamy that the Federal Reserve is “adding zeros to the bank accounts to the media or maybe your political opponents.”
In the world beyond Iowa and New Hampshire, events are turning and turning in a widening gyre. Chaos, the métier of the Republican front-runner, is rising. Last week, the world spun into a new level of dangerousness. This coming week, any Republican aspirant worthy of the office she or he seeks will at last forthrightly stand against Trump’s siren call of isolationism.
Sadly, I do not expect the GOP to become responsible in the face of threats or to end its allegiance to a man who continues to act as if he is a Russian asset. Both Trump and today's GOP are a threat to Americ and its security.
Friday, October 13, 2023
The Right Wing Media Laments the GOP It Created
Rep. Matt Gaetz is a “POS demagogue” for orchestrating the ouster of Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, a man who “repeatedly” lied to conservatives and, perhaps worst of all, is the “favorite Republican of the Democrat Party and their media.” Harsh words from conservative talk radio and cable news host Mark Levin.
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade recently laid into another one of the GOP mutineers, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), . . . And then there was Jeanine Pirro announcing twice that she was “furious” on Fox’s The Five, adding, “You’ve got the Republicans going out there and showing how dysfunctional they are as Matt Gaetz is engaging in fundraising.”
But the truth is that angry conservative media hosts have only themselves to blame for McCarthy’s downfall and the disarray currently facing House Republicans. The leaders of conservative talk radio and cable news have spent years assailing GOP congressional leaders — including McCarthy — and they are largely responsible for turning far-right rebels like Gaetz into stars. Going back to the 1990s, conservative media created the political ecosystem in which torching and targeting Republican leaders is good politics on the right. And they’ve ensured that the next speaker, whether it’s Steve Scalise or someone else, will face the same poisonous incentive structure that took down McCarthy.
In 1994, the burgeoning conservative talk radio empire provided crucial support that helped catapult the GOP to control of the House for the first time in 40 years. The contributions of talk radio were so great that the day after that fall’s electoral earthquake, a jubilant soon-to-be-speaker Newt Gingrich called Rush Limbaugh, the king of talk radio, and thanked him for helping Republicans “overcome the elite media bias,” and arming “millions of people across the country with the facts that let them argue in October and November so successfully.” The Republican freshman class made Limbaugh an honorary member, and greeted him like a rockstar at their orientation.
Yet, as soon as the celebration ended and Republicans faced responsibility for governing, tension emerged between the GOP leadership and conservative hosts. They had fundamentally different goals: Republican congressional leaders had to compromise with then-President Bill Clinton to get anything done. Meanwhile talk radio, which would be joined in 1996 by Fox News, was a business. The goal was to get the largest audience possible to tune in for the longest possible time. And that demanded entertaining, engaging programming above all else.
Explaining why Republicans had to backtrack from promises and cut bipartisan deals, however, was neither entertaining nor engaging. It was dry, boring — and unsatisfying. Hosts therefore never hesitated to blast the GOP for such betrayals or to boost rank-and-file members trying to pressure leadership. . . . . The tension between conservative media and elected Republicans only grew over time.
The relationship between conservative media and Republican leaders began to deteriorate in more fundamental ways in the late 2000s and 2010s. Two factors were at play.
First, competition increased in conservative media. Fox was now a massive political and media force, while conservative talk radio shows proliferated thanks to syndication and the profitability of the format. . . . In 2013 and 2014, OAN and Newsmax TV, two more conservative cable networks, joined the fray.
Additional competition meant pressure on hosts not to get outflanked on the right by new upstarts who could make a name for themselves by being incendiary and demanding even greater ideological purity and hardball tactics from congressional Republicans.
Second, conservative talk radio hosts sensed the smoldering anger among their listeners over how four years of unified Republican governance really hadn’t produced the conservative revolution that was promised. Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land, spending was up and Bush had even added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
These dynamics left hosts with every business incentive to tee off on Republican leaders. As former House Speaker John Boehner later explained to POLITICO Magazine, Levin, whose show went national in 2006, “went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys—I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.”
In 2012, Congress confronted the “fiscal cliff,” a combination of expiring tax cuts and automatic spending cuts designed to have such unpleasant consequences that legislators would be forced to act. Democrats had enormous leverage. President Barack Obama had gotten reelected after pledging to raise taxes on the wealthy, and his party had also gained seats in both houses of Congress.
If ever there was a moment for Republicans to compromise, this was it. Yet, when Boehner made an initial offer to Obama, Limbaugh blasted the speaker’s press conference as a “seminar on how to surrender.” . . . . He repeatedly urged Republicans to stick to their principles even though they’d get blamed if the country went over the cliff.
The debate illustrated how antagonistic conservative media had become toward the Republican leadership during this period.
In addition to routinely heaping scorn on Republican leaders, talk radio hosts promoted far-right members of Congress who were all too happy to embrace the ideological purity and political warfare demanded by conservative media. These members became frequent guests, who were happy to lob rhetorical bombs, which made for good radio and good fundraising opportunities for lawmakers.
During an epic rant, Levin dismissed Boehner as a “fool” and a “moron” and branded McCarthy, then the House majority leader, “the sleaziest of the bunch” — a man he wouldn’t even let “sell me a used car.” He accused Republican leaders of wanting to “destroy the conservative movement.” This was a call to action: Levin’s listeners needed to “go after” Boehner, McCarthy, and then-Majority Whip Steve Scalise.
The whole episode underscored how conservative media portrayed politics: Far-right fighters like Meadows who scorned compromise and playing by the rules were heroes, and party leaders were traitorous, spineless villains. It became clear to ambitious young members that antagonizing leadership was the key to achieving political stardom.
From Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a cadre of conservative bomb throwers became some of the biggest names in politics, despite having very little traditional influence on Capitol Hill. They routinely took to the airwaves to slam their own leaders on everything from spending to abortion, and occasionally even managed to lead their party into a government shutdown a la the futile effort to defund Obamacare.
The message was clear: Demand political warfare, savage anyone who compromised with Democrats — no matter the situation or the consequences of not compromising — and reap the political benefits. It’s this culture that has shaped Gaetz and his allies.
The only surprise might be that conservative media personalities are so aghast at McCarthy’s ouster; perhaps it’s because they’ve been painfully aware of just how hard McCarthy worked during the nine months of his speakership to cater to right-wing priorities. In the end it didn’t matter.
But they only have themselves to blame. Conservative talk radio and cable hosts created the political ecosystem that precipitated McCarthy’s downfall and so long as they continue rewarding similar tactics, this incentive structure will plague whoever succeeds him.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Israel's Lesson For America
Israelis are struggling to understand what has just hit us. We first compared the current disaster to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Fifty years ago, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack and inflicted on Israel a string of military defeats, before the Israel Defense Forces regrouped, regained the initiative and turned the tables.
But as more and more horrific stories and images emerge about the massacre of entire communities, it dawned on us that what has happened is nothing like the Yom Kippur War.
So how did it happen? How did the state of Israel go missing in action?
On one level, Israelis are paying the price for years of hubris, during which our governments and many ordinary Israelis felt we were so much stronger than the Palestinians, that we could just ignore them. There is much to criticize about the way Israel has abandoned the attempt to make peace with the Palestinians and has held for decades millions of Palestinians under occupation.
But this does not justify the atrocities committed by Hamas, which in any case has never countenanced any possibility for a peace treaty with Israel and has done everything in its power to sabotage the Oslo peace process. Anyone who wants peace must condemn and impose sanctions on Hamas and demand the immediate release of all hostages and Hamas’s complete disarmament.
Moreover, irrespective of how much blame one ascribes to Israel, this does not explain the dysfunction of the state. History isn’t a morality tale.
The real explanation for Israel’s dysfunction is populism rather than any alleged immorality. For many years, Israel has been governed by a populist strongman, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a public-relations genius but an incompetent prime minister. He has repeatedly preferred his personal interests over the national interest and has built his career on dividing the nation against itself. He has appointed people to key positions based on loyalty more than qualifications, took credit for every success while never taking responsibility for failures, and seemed to give little importance to either telling or hearing the truth.
The coalition Netanyahu established in December 2022 has been by far the worst. It is an alliance of messianic zealots and shameless opportunists, who ignored Israel’s many problems — including the deteriorating security situation — and focused instead on grabbing unlimited power for themselves. In pursuit of this goal, they adopted extremely divisive policies, spread outrageous conspiracy theories about state institutions that oppose their policies, and labeled the country’s serving elites as “deep state” traitors.
The government was repeatedly warned by its own security forces and by numerous experts that its policies were endangering Israel and eroding Israeli deterrence at a time of mounting external threats. Yet when the IDF’s chief of staff asked for a meeting with Netanyahu to warn him about the security implications of the government’s policies, Netanyahu refused to meet him. When Defense Minister Yoav Gallant nevertheless raised the alarm, Netanyahu fired him. He was then forced to reinstate Gallant only because of an outbreak of popular outrage. Such behavior over many years enabled a calamity to strike Israel.
No matter what one thinks of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the way populism corroded the Israeli state should serve as a warning to other democracies all over the world.
Israel can still save itself from catastrophe. It still enjoys a decisive military edge over Hamas, as well as over its many other enemies. The long memory of Jewish suffering is now galvanizing the nation. The IDF and other state organs are recovering from their initial shock. Civil society is mobilizing like never before, filling many gaps left by governmental dysfunction.
In this hour of need, we also call upon our friends throughout the world to stand by us. There is much to criticize about Israel’s past behavior. The past cannot be changed, but hopefully once victory over Hamas is secured, Israelis will not only hold our current government to account, but will also abandon populist conspiracies and messianic fantasies — and make an honest effort to realize Israel’s founding ideals of democracy at home and peace abroad.
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Israel and Hamas: A Cautionary Tale for America
Saturday will be remembered as one of the most devastating days in Israel’s history. . . . These tragic events have one protagonist: Hamas.
But there are two major Israeli blind spots that prevented us from recognizing and forestalling what we should have seen. The first is a policy of trying to appease the enemy, in the hopes that Hamas would eventually grow out of its jihadist origin.
Our second blind spot was letting our internal political differences consume us, distracting us from external threats and dividing both our society and, critically, the army.
In the past five years, as Israel dissolved government after government and held divided election after divided election, and even more so in the past year since Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected prime minister, the nation has been busy tearing itself apart from within. The Jewish state seems to have forgotten its second role in the world, as a place that embodies the idea of Jewish solidarity. Israelis instead found themselves engaged in an all-out war — not against terrorists but against themselves.
As a nation, Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy. We let animosity, demagogy and the poisonous discourse of social media take over our society, rip apart the only Jewish army in the world. This is our tragedy. And it carries a lesson for other polarized democracies: There is someone out there waiting to gain from your self-made weakness. This someone is your enemy.
In Israel, as in America, most of the political divisiveness and fraying of national unity has been caused by the far right trying to inflict its agenda on the majority of the citizenry and its willingness to undermine democratic norms to accomplish this goal. Worse yet, anyone opposing this agenda has been deemed an enemy, much as the MAGA movement sees anyone opposing Der Trumpenfuhrer as an enemy worthy of violence. Meanwhile, the world and especially America's enemies watch as the House of Representatives remains paralyzed and buffoons and/or those favoring autocracy control events. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the sad situation and calls for Americans to wake up to the danger facing the nation. Here are highlights:
Two years ago, I wrote my first newsletter for The Atlantic, in which I worried that the United States was “no longer a serious country.”
Of course, we’re still a powerful country … But when it comes to seriousness—the invaluable discipline and maturity that allows us to discern matters that should transcend self-interest, to set aside churlish ego and emotionalism, and to act with prudence and self-restraint—we’re a weak, impoverished backwater. . . . I was, to say the least, pessimistic about the American future.
Today, the situation is even more dire. The Russians continue an all-out war of conquest in the middle of Europe, a conflict that could engulf the planet if the cowards in the Kremlin remain mired in their imperial delusions. Thousands are dying in Armenia and Sudan. And now Israel is at war, after suffering its worst surprise attack since the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago and with more Israeli citizens killed in a single day than ever in its history.
And yet much of America, and especially the remnants of the Republican Party (a party whose leaders during the Cold War defined themselves as the responsible stewards of U.S. foreign policy), remains in the grip of childish, even inane, politics. The international community in this difficult time needs a United States that is sane, tough, and principled; worthy of the title of leader of the free world; and determined, in the words of President John F. Kennedy, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Instead of Kennedy’s inspiring vision, America has the ignorant and incoherent Donald Trump as an apparent lock to capture the eventual GOP presidential nomination, the House of Representatives without a speaker, and a public that cannot find Ukraine or Iran on a map.. . . “And what kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern? When we’re dysfunctional? When we don’t even have a speaker of the House?”
The idea that someone as ridiculous as Jim Jordan could be in contention to lead the House should make every American pause and wonder how the United States has come to such a moment. Jordan is among Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters—Trump has already endorsed him for the speaker’s job—and one of the most cynical and huckstering members of Congress from either party. . . . But on the central issue of American democracy, he is much more dangerous.
Jordan yesterday threatened another attempt to shut down the government (this time over immigration policies). But more to the point, how can the United States respond as one nation to the various crises around the world when the speaker of the House is an election denier spewing conspiracy theories about the current president?
The situation is no better over in the usually more staid and thoughtful U.S. Senate. As conflicts erupt around the world, hundreds of military promotions, including the chief of naval operations and many other senior appointments, remain frozen. They are being held up by Tommy Tuberville, a former Alabama college football coach who thinks U.S. servicepeople should be denied access to abortion and decries what he thinks is too much “wokeness” in the military.
The old saw about partisanship ending at the water’s edge was never completely true. The right and the left in the United States have argued plenty about foreign policy, but they once did so with a seriousness of purpose and an understanding that millions of lives, the security of the nation—and in the final analysis, the survival of humanity—were at risk. If any adults remain in the GOP, they need to get control of their party and get to work.
America - or more precisely, today's Republican Party - are putting America at risk of suffering its own version of what befell Israel this past Saturday. Frighteningly, the GOP and its cult followers do not seem to care.
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
The GOP Push to Bring Abortion Bans to Virginia
A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia.
An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation.
After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a position that they believe will prove more palatable to voters outside the red heartland. In the current legislative session, Youngkin and the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the state House of Delegates, attempted to pass a 15-week limit on legal abortion, with exceptions thereafter for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother. But they were blocked by Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the state Senate.
With every seat in both chambers on the ballot in November, Youngkin and the Republicans have made clear that if they win unified control of the legislature, they will move to impose that 15-week limit. Currently, abortion in Virginia is legal through the second trimester of pregnancy, which is about 26 weeks; it is the only southern state that has not rolled back abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
Success for the Virginia GOP could also encourage the national Republican Party to coalesce behind a 15-week federal ban with exceptions.
But if Republicans fail to win unified control in Virginia, it could signal that almost any proposal to retrench abortion rights faces intractable resistance in states beyond the red heartland. “I think what Youngkin is trying to sell is going to be rejected by voters,” Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me. “There is no such thing as a ‘consensus’ ban. It’s a nonsensical phrase. The fact of the matter is, Virginians do not want an abortion ban.”
The districts where Griffin, a business owner and former Marine, and Cole, a pastor and former member of the state House of Delegates, are running have become highly contested political ground. Each district comfortably backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to support Youngkin in 2021 and then tilting back to favor Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger in the 2022 congressional election.
The zigzagging voting pattern in these districts is typical of the seats that will decide control of the legislature. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculates that all 10 of the 100 House seats, and all six of the 40 Senate districts, that are considered most competitive voted for Biden in 2020, but that nearly two-thirds of them switched to Youngkin a year later.
These districts are mostly in suburban and exurban areas, especially in Richmond and in Northern Virginia, near D.C.
Virginia Republicans aren’t betting only on their reformulated abortion position in this campaign. They are also investing heavily in portraying Democrats as soft on crime, too prone to raise taxes, and hostile to “parents’ rights” in shaping their children’s education, the issue that Youngkin stressed most in his 2021 victory.
Democrats also warn that with unified control of the governorship and state legislature, Republicans will try to roll back the expansions of voting rights and gun-control laws that Democrats passed when they last controlled all three institutions, from 2019 to 2021. A television ad from state Democrats shows images of the January 6 insurrection while a narrator warns, “With one more vote in Richmond, MAGA Republicans can take away your rights, your freedoms, your security.”
Yet both sides recognize that abortion is most likely to tip the outcome next month. . . . only 17 percent of state residents said they wanted abortion laws to become more restrictive.
“Part of what makes it so salient [for voters] is Republicans were so close to passing an abortion ban in the last legislative session and they came up just narrowly short,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist with experience in Virginia elections, told me. “It’s not a situation like New York in 2022, where people sided with us on abortion but didn’t see it as under threat. In Virginia, it’s clear that that threat exists.”
The one big imbalance in the playing field is that Youngkin has raised unprecedented sums of money to support the GOP legislative candidates. The governor has leveraged the interest in him potentially entering the presidential race as a late alternative to Trump into enormous contributions to his state political action committee from an array of national GOP donors. That torrent of money is providing Republican candidates with a late tactical advantage, especially because Virginia Democrats are not receiving anything like the national liberal money that flowed into the Wisconsin judicial election this spring.
Yet all of these factors only underscore the stakes for Youngkin, and Republicans nationwide, in the Virginia results. If they can’t sell enough Virginia voters on their 15-week abortion limit to win unified control of the legislature, even amid all their other advantages in these races, it would send an ominous signal to the party. A Youngkin failure to capture the legislature would raise serious questions about the GOP’s ability to overcome the majority support for abortion rights in the states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race.
Monday, October 09, 2023
Sunday, October 08, 2023
Taylor Swift Reminds Right Wing Men That Women Dislike Them
Taylor Swift has a new boyfriend, and boy do people have opinions about it. In truth, most people who care are pleased with the pop star's latest choice of a boy toy, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. He seems like a nice guy, and it's charming that he's a risk-taker in the fashion department. Also, he has a Super Bowl ring, which puts him closer to multiple Grammy-winning Swift in the awards-collecting category. Most normal human beings wished the cute couple well for the short time they last, before Swift moves on to her next male muse.
There was one group of people, however, that displayed alarmingly over-the-top anger at this low-stakes celebrity hookup: Right wing dudes on the internet. They're so mad you'd think their own wives left them for Kelce, and not some singer-songwriter they've never met.
Things only grew worse for them Sunday night, when Swift went to the Chiefs vs. New York Jets game with her Hollywood friends, drawing even more camera attention. There were even ads for the documentary of her "Eras" tour this summer, rubbing girl cooties all over the NFL, at least in right wing eyes.
"Taylor Swift's Popularity Is A Sign Of Societal Decline," reads an overheated headline at the Federalist. In the article, Mark Hemingway complains Swift is training young women to expect too much from men they date, and that unmarried 29-year-olds are fooling themselves about when they say they're happy.
Media Matters documented dozens of examples of right wing pundits attacking the couple, often under the pretext that Kelce is allegedly evil for promoting the COVID-19 vaccine, since even good health is now demonized on the right. In the process, there was a lot of insulting of Kelce's manhood, as the soft-tummied commentators called Kelce names like "beta" or mocked how Swift would "break his heart." One Fox commentator demanded the couple break up. Stew Peters, a host on the popular Rumble network, took it a step further and called for both Kelce and Swift to be executed.
What was most hilariously telling, however, were the conservative men trying to front like they think Swift isn't that hot.
As Shakespeare — or was it Aaron Sorkin? — once wisely said, "He whosoeth labels himself 'alpha' most certainly is not." This protest-too-much reaction on the right is about a lot of things. As my colleague Olivia Luppino points out, "The NFL is historically a conservative organization with an even more conservative fan base," making it politically profitable for Republicans to pose like they're protecting it from Swift's feminist cooties. It's also generally strategic for conservative talking heads to cling like barnacles to whatever topic is getting a lot of pop culture chatter, hoping to leech some attention off for themselves.
But it also, crucially, is about the growing tendency on the right to stoke resentments in the MAGA audiences, regarding their increasingly barren dating opportunities. GOP propagandists have learned that a great way to get their mostly male audiences fired up is to indulge their grievances about women these days. Modern chicks, the gripe goes, have been spoiled by feminism, and that's why it's so damn hard for a Trump voter to get a date.
The right has long had a youth-recruitment problem, and this is the solution they've landed on: Appealing to incels and incel-adjacent young men, by blaming their romantic woes on liberalism, instead their own flaws and/or bad luck. . . . . unloading on Swift and Kelce is a lower-brow version of the same impulse on the right, to lash out at women — especially cute young women — who won't give MAGA dudes the time of day.
I certainly got a taste of how pissed-off some people are over the "undateable MAGA" problem, when I wrote about a 2021 survey showing young Democrats do not want to date Republicans. My social media feeds were awash with outraged conservatives, insisting that women had a duty to give Trump voters a chance. Never mind that this isn't some petty disagreement, not when Trump ended abortion rights and bragged about sexually assaulting women. Never mind that no one owes anyone romantic interest, or an explanation for why they're not interested. Never mind that the attitude of entitlement is part of what turns women off.
And never mind that being MAGA is entirely voluntary. No one is forcing young men to don the red hat that notoriously shrinks the available dating pool.
Indeed, the irony of all this is that, in appealing to young men through grievance, the right is only making men's problems worse. If you're having trouble with the ladies, going MAGA intensifies your unlikeability. But isn't that what cults always do? Sell their members "solutions" that actually compound their existing problems.
Most of the hand-wringing articles about the decline of marriage put the blame on nameless, faceless antagonists: The masses of single women who are allegedly "too picky." Swift, however, provides a famous face for conservatives to project their rage at. Not just because she's a successful businesswoman who seems perfectly happy stacking up more bodies in the ex-boyfriend vault. It's because the kind of women being called out for being "too picky" — middle class, self-sufficient, young, educated — are the same women lining up to buy her records or selling out her concerts.
The "undateable MAGA" is no myth. In the 2022 midterms, the gender gap in voting was bigger than it's every been, as Jill Filipovic wrote in her newsletter: "In the midterms, an astounding 72% of women under 30 voted for Democrats. Among men the same age, it was 54%. These gaps persist with age . . . .
No wonder so many right wing dudes are triggered — or are hoping to trigger their audiences — into fury at seeing Swift date Kelce. Even though Kelce hasn't made his political views known, Republicans think they have him pegged as progressive, because he promoted the vaccine. Swift herself has been more politically outspoken in recent years, though in ways so pedestrian that only out-of-touch right wingers can imagine she's being provocative. She supports LGBTQ people. She occasionally endorses mainstream Democrats. She's pro-choice and anti-racism. She wants her fans to vote, which really sent Republicans around bend.
For decades, conservatives have tried to bully women out of both their ambitions and progressive opinions, by warning both are a surefire way to end up sad and lonely. But, as the increasingly shrill discourse about "male loneliness" suggests, the right has long quietly feared the opposite is true: That it's men who are in real danger of being adrift without women as their anchors. Swift scares conservatives because she lives her life on her own terms, including her dating life. But their real fear is those legions of fans who feel the same way, a generation of young women who believe, correctly, it's better to be at home with friends and cats than married to someone who doesn't respect you.
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