The Last State of the Union (#118)

Trump launches an illegal war; after taking the majority, Democrats should make this the last State of the Union speech; how to make Trump’s lying bad again; SOTU’s plans gave us a glimpse of the government’s doomsday plan; the forced-birth lawyer using abusers to attack abortion; and why we need to stop spreading lies online—even about people we hate.

Here we go. I’m glad you’re here.

#1

• US and Israel launch joint attack on Iran as Trump urges regime change (Emma Graham-Harrison and Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, Link to Article)
• Trump’s Enormous Gamble on Regime Change in Iran (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, Link to Article)
• Why in the world is Melania Trump leading a UN security council meeting? (Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian, Link to Article)

As often happens under the Trump regime, major news happened after I had this newsletter planned out. While it is too early to come to many conclusions about what has happened so far, there are points I want to emphasize before they get lost in the Bannonian “flood the zone with shit” strategy for which the Trump regime is infamous.

Let’s be clear: this action violates the United States Constitution, the United Nations Charter, and (perhaps worth noting given President Trump’s actions earlier this week to politicize the gold medal-winning US women and men’s ice hockey teams) the UN’s Olympic Truce Resolution for the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The resolution calls on Member States to observe the Olympic Truce from seven days before the start of the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games (6 to 22 February 2026) until seven days after the end of the Paralympic Winter Games (6 to 15 March 2026), ensuring safe passage and participation for athletes and officials.

The president did not consult Congress. The president has not explained his plan to the American people. Congress has not authorized this action as the Constitution clearly requires. There is no emergency that requires action before Congress can meet, as The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols explains:

The United States has gone to war against Iran. America has only one ally—Israel—in this operation (the Arab states of the Gulf, which fear the Iranian regime, are targets of Iran, but so far are not participating in the attack), and both Washington and Jerusalem are making claims about “imminent” threats that require “preemptive” strikes. But we should dispense with such statements: Iran is not presenting immediate danger to the United States or Israel. Even President Trump, in a recorded address, didn’t bother overly much with such excuses; instead he presented a farrago of charges and accusations going back a half century that included everything from killing American troops in Iraq to terrorism. These indictments are all grounded in truth, but none presents a rationale for immediate attack. Trump ended by calling on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government.

This is not a preemptive war. It is a war of choice, a discretionary war. It is a war for regime change. Many of Iran’s 92 million people want the regime removed. But it is far from certain that this will be the outcome.

The Iranian people deserve a government that does not murder and oppress them. And there is a small chance this military action may remove that regime and leave a stable democratic government. But such a success does not change the fact that it is illegal for a president to launch a war in this way. He is not yet a dictator.

So we must not accept what Trump and his regime have done. We must make note of it. And we must hold people accountable when the opportunity arises because, as Andrea Pitzer noted after the US attacks began:

One of the reasons we got to this point as a nation has been a failure to hold elected officials accountable for their illegal actions. We need to stop making that mistake.

My thoughts are with our military personnel in harm’s way, the Iranian people, and the civilians throughout the Middle East who are under threat. I hope they can stay safe as this war plays out and possibly escalates.

I guess it was not a coincidence that Trump did so many military honors during his State of the Union address, or that—and yes, this is real—First Lady Melania Trump will preside over the UN Security Council on Monday. I have not seen an announcement changing those plans as I publish this newsletter.

#2

• The State of the Union Revealed a Sad Reality (David Frum, The Atlantic, Link to Article)

But there comes a point when sad realities must be faced. The speech last night was empty and uselessly garrulous. Its length was its first declaration of disrespect for those obliged to sit through it. Trump’s name-calling of his predecessor and of the members of Congress in the chamber, his demands that legislators rise at his command, his strategic deployment of systematic untruth in service of those demands to rise and clap—put together, he misused the State of the Union ritual in ways so radical as to call the ritual itself into question. Are members of Congress really supposed to sit meekly and quietly while the president uses the rostrum of their chamber to abuse and insult them in the ugliest language? The president is present in Congress as a guest: That’s the reason for the famous language about the “high honor and distinct privilege” of welcoming him to speak. He has no right to be heard in person; it’s a courtesy.

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution provides that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” The Constitution does not set an annual schedule for such information, nor does it require the information to be delivered in person. George Washington and John Adams started the in-person tradition. Thomas Jefferson ended it, both because it reminded him too much of the British practice of the speech from the throne that opens a session of Parliament and (very likely) also because he disliked speaking in public. Woodrow Wilson reverted to the Washington-Adams precedent. Then came television, and the modern State of the Union spectacle. The spectacle is founded, however, on an invitation from the speaker of the House. No invitation, no spectacle.

Absolutely agree. If Democrats take over the majority in the House of Representatives, they should not invite President Trump to give a State of the Union message next year.

Trump has abused the ritual. There is no need for Democrats to invite him to continue that abuse. As Frum notes later in his article, it is quite likely that a future Republican speaker would return the favor by not allowing a Democratic president to speak.

To which I say, don’t threaten me with a good time. Okay. Fine. I don’t think such a result is a big deal. I don’t think the State of the Union speech has been worth very much in most instances.

Here’s an opportunity for Democrats to take a stand. Show voters upset with the system that Democrats understand the status quo is unacceptable. Take away an audience and spectacle that Trump longs for.

Democrats could host another event that focuses on how the Trump regime is failing the American people and what Democrats will do instead.

#3

• Make Trump’s Lying Bad Again (Brian Beutler, Off Message, Link to Article)

Democrats can’t force Trump to be truthful anymore than they can force Republicans as a whole to operate in a spirit of good faith. But they can choose not to play patsy.

I wish Democrats would stop making it so easy for Trump to make them look weak.

Right before this paragraph, Beutler describes a dynamic that frustrated me in the buildup to the speech. The House Democratic Leadership made clear that they didn’t want any heckling, protests, or signs. They would not endorse a boycott of the event, which would have indicated that things are not normal right now.

Instead, Leader Jeffries and his team made clear their preference that members of the Democratic caucus in attendance should sit in their seats quietly.

Is it any surprise, then, that Trump tried to take advantage of that tactic with a rhetorical trick? As Beutler writes:

Trump knew he could say, in essence, ‘if you like illegal immigrants more than U.S. citizens, stay seated,’ and Democrats would stay seated.

I agree with Beutler that this did not work out as well as Trump and Stephen Miller may have hoped. But it was another tactical mistake (and another reason why I think Democrats, when they take the House majority, should decline sending an invitation to Trump to do it again).

Democrats still need to focus on not falling into the traps Trump sets with his repeated lying. As Beutler continues:

But [the State of the Union is] just one night a year. We have 1058 days to go. To really make issue of his untrustworthiness, Democrats would need to convey distrust in all their interactions. To worry less about correcting his lies, lie by lie, and simply cite his promiscuous lying as a basis for non-cooperation.

Trump and the GOP don’t do much legislating, at least not in its intended spirit, so this wouldn’t actually entail subordinating the public interest. If Trump were honest and wanted to work cooperatively with Democrats, it would be faithless of them to refuse on purely partisan grounds—or to pretend Trump was untrustworthy as a false justification for denying him an accomplishment.

But just about every time Democrats have provided Trump their votes, they’ve quickly come to regret it. We see how they’ve have been rewarded for their budget votes: With ever-escalating abuses of power. They funded Trump’s Justice Department only for Trump to try to throw Democratic senators and congressmen in jail. They funded the Defense Department only for Trump to foment war with Iran. Every time they’ve funded his government, he’s turned around and refused to spend the money as instructed, in violation of the law.

So…stop doing that! The GOP’s remaining priorities are largely stunts designed to generate ads and talking points ahead of the election—the legislative equivalent of Trump’s ‘stand if you support citizens over illegals’ gambit.

Democrats don’t have to keep flailing about like Charlie Brown trying to kick a moving football. They need to create conflicts with the Trump regime to get media coverage and the attention of voters, especially those voters who want Democrats to fight or who believe the system is failing them.

Fight the SAVE America Act. Continue fighting against additional funding for ICE, Border Patrol, and the Department of Homeland Security. Make it as difficult as possible to confirm Trump’s appointees. Delays are useful right now.

This is not a normal situation. Democrats should do more to make clear to voters that they understand this dynamic.

#4

• The Bloody Show (Jonathan M. Katz, The Racket, Link to Article)

It is difficult to convey the sheer luridity of what the president unleashed last night. But I’ll try. Trump described no fewer than 17 separate instances of severe injury, violent death, or graphic bodily harm in his joint address, often in vivid detail. At least ten stories involved people whose loved ones were seated in the chamber. In several of those cases, the grievously wounded themselves were present. Conservatively, I’d estimate a quarter of Trump’s record-smashing 1 hour and 47 minute harangue, not including pauses for camera close-ups and extended applause, was devoted to staging scenes of death and dismemberment. Because much of this material was concentrated in the speech’s latter half, the cumulative psychological effect on those who watched to the end was likely more pronounced.

This might feel like a curiosity — another strange tic of a deeply weird politician who has, for the last decade and change, dominated American public life (and/or a tic of his speechwriters).² But it is much more than that. The constant invocations of people “lying dead in a bathtub bleeding profusely,” “viciously slash[ed] … through her neck and body,” of “blood all over,” of legs shredded “into numerous pieces,” of “gushing blood … flowing back down the aisle,” all direct quotations from different passages of the speech, are part of a specific kind of politics. They were meant to do very specific political work: organizing power through the spectacle of injury and the promise and celebration of state-sanctioned violence.

There is a name for this. The political theorist Achille Mbembe called it necropolitics. His argument, laid out first in a 2003 article and more recently in a 2019 book, is that state power ultimately reveals itself not in how it fosters life but in how it organizes death — that, as the Cameroonian scholar writes, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die.” Who is protected and who is abandoned? Who can be confined, deported, or exposed to violence? Those political decisions are made easier when the public is trained to see the world as a battlefield of butchered innocents and lurking monsters.

Is the State of the Union really the American carnage that Trump described in his first inaugural address?

Trump and his minions want to create a society with an in-group that it protects and an out-group against whom violence is not only justified, but necessary.

As Katz and other analysts (like James Fallows, coming up next) explain, it is worth noting the people who faced violence that Trump did not mention: Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Ruben Ray Martinez, and Nurul Amin Shah Alam. Only some kinds of violence are acceptable under the Trump regime.

Also, we should not let pass how Trump used one of his trademark made-up numbers to send a neo-Nazi dogwhistle to his fans. As Katz explains:

Trump underscored his visceral anecdotes with a bigger lie. He repeated his claim that the Biden administration had allowed “millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions” into the country. “There were murderers, 11,888 murders,” he claimed, apparently making a hash of the even more overtly neo-Nazi dogwhistle he debuted in October.³

What neo-Nazi dogwhistle? As Katz explains in the footnote:

In October, at that strange summit of all the generals in Quantico, Trump claimed, “You know, we had 11,488 murderers allowed into our country by this guy who had no clue." As Zach Roberts reported, the number he had used up until that point, “13,099” was also fake, drawn from a letter released by ICE that included all non-detained individuals who had entered the country with homicide convictions since at least 1984. Absent any source for the statistic, it seems clear that the new number was simply a neo-Nazi code: 14 stands for the “14 words,” a white supremacist slogan. 88 means “Heil Hitler,” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. There is no evidence that immigrants of any kind commit a disproportionate number of crimes in the U.S. Indeed, both documented and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population.

We must never accept this kind of rhetoric. But it is one we see repeatedly in the official Trump regime social media streams.

#5

• Nasty, Brutish, and Long. (James Fallows, Breaking the News, Link to Article)

I didn’t write about Donald Trump’s performance at the Capitol on Tuesday night, because I couldn’t stand to watch the whole thing. I turned it off when it still had 45 minutes to go. For context: All presidents from Richard Nixon through the first George Bush kept their SOTU addresses near or below 45 minutes, total. One of Nixon’s lasted only 28 minutes. One of Reagan’s, just 31. Two of Carter’s, just 32 each.

And I didn’t write about it yesterday, after going back to watch those last, lost 45 minutes, because after doing so I thought: This is too horrible to deal with.

But today is a new day. So here, in listicle form—which, as it happens, matches the “structure” of Trump’s rambling two hours on stage—are a few points that struck me about what we’ve been through.

For a little more context: Before the speech, I’d done a set-up article about how SOTU’s “normally” work, and where I thought Trump’s might diverge. It turns out that my imagination was not nearly dark enough.

James Fallows is the person to whom I turn for the best analysis of major presidential addresses. He has experience writing them (for President Carter) and analyzing them as a writer and editor since.

While the speech was boring and poorly written and spoken, Fallows explains why we must continue to pay attention:

The speech is already moving into the “old news”/ “asked and answered” category, driven out by the latest, smoking-gun Epstein cover-up revelations, and the possibility of unauthorized, open-ended, politically motivated war with Iran. And whatever tomorrow brings.

But the speech “matters” in the way several other also-terrible, also-mostly forgotten performances by Trump still do. For instance: Less than five months ago, Trump gave a 70-minute rant to a captive audience of some 800 US admirals and generals, dragooned from around to world to hear their Commander in Chief and “Secretary of War” boast and preen. That speech is hardly mentioned now. But I know it lives in the minds of military leaders. I can imagine future histories of US civil-military relations, or the excesses of the Trump years, built around this event and its aftermath.1

Similarly: Just last month Canada’s Mark Carney gave a speech at Davos that is still cited in the news and will also, I think, play a role in histories of our times. News stories no longer bother even to mention Donald Trump’s resentful, incoherent response from the Davos stage the very next day. But I can imagine future histories of the Trump-era “rupture” in world order built around that two-speech, back-to-back Carney-Trump sequence.

As for what we heard two days ago? People writing about our times will, I think, say it “mattered” mainly as a signifier. As an illustration of the state of the Republican party, it showed how utterly servile the Congressional GOP had become. At normal SOTUs, members of the president’s party pop up for planned applause lines every few paragraphs. This week, JD Vance and Mike Johnson were like marionettes or seals, popping up to lead vigorous applause every few sentences. Future historians will also consider this a window into the state of the president. That is, of how many of his character flaws and cognitive struggles were on display.

#6

• The Franchise: Trump’s (Election) Lie-Laden State of the Union (Khaya Himmelman, Talking Points Memo, Link to Article)

Speaking of stories we cannot overlook as we wade through the Bannonian zone of shit, Trump once again repeatedly lied about the fairness of elections in our country. As Himmelman writes:

Here’s some of the most egregious election-related lies Trump included in his remarks: 

“Cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant.”

“They [Democrats] have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.” 

“So in my first year of the second term — should be my third term.”

Trump spent a few minutes of his lengthy speech also talking about a non-existent issue and a favorite GOP myth:  non-citizen voting and the need for the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that would, among other things, mandate documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration in federal elections.

Himmelman explains how Democratic Attorneys General are preparing for this inevitable assault on the Constitutional duty of states to administer elections.

It is also wise for all voters to prepare by ensuring they have a valid passport and a certified birth certificate on hand. This is particularly important for people whose names differ from those on their birth certificates—a fact many married people face.

Getting these documents takes time, so starting now is vital to beat the rush should the Trump regime and its Congressional Republican lackies manage to pass the SAVE America Act. What looks unlikely today because of the Senate filibuster can become reality all too quickly if the Senate Republicans cave to Trump’s demands.

Which, lately, has been the smart bet.

#7

• The Big Secret Hidden in the “Designated Survivor” (Garrett Graff, Doomsday Scenario, Link to Article)

Oh, yes, a seemingly random State of the Union announcement by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) provides an unexpected and fascinating glimpse into our government’s doomsday planning. As Graff (who has covered these issues extensively) explains:

One of news organization’s favorite news nuggets in covering the State of the Union each year is the announcement of the “Designated Survivor,” the Cabinet secretary who has been chosen to skip the event and who would assumed the “acting” presidency in the event of a catastrophic attack on the Capitol.

Last night, the Cabinet “survivor” was the VA secretary, Doug Collins, who also served the role during President Trump’s address to congress last year. But the more interesting announcement was that California Democrat Rep. Mike Thompson made a big deal that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had chosen him as the party’s “Designated Survivor.”

Most news outlets dutifully and playfully reported news like Mike Thompson’s announcement without ever asking the obvious question: Why, exactly, does the Democratic minority in the House need a “Designated Survivor”?

The idea of a “congressional designated survivor” really only began after 9/11, and the mere existence of a “minority party designated survivor” actually tells us something super interesting about the most secret and least-known government continuity plans.

There are really four separate sets of government Doomsday plans. The three that get the most attention and are best known are “Continuity of Operations,” (COOP) which deal with department and agencies would keep functioning in a catastrophe; “Continuity of Government” (COG), which deal with the survival and succession of government leadership; and “Continuity of the Presidency” (COP), which deal with the survival and succession of the presidency. There’s a fourth set of plans — in some ways the most important — that are not publicly known at all and are hidden even from inquiring members of Congress, known as “Enduring Constitutional Government” (ECG).

ECG is sometimes called the “most classified” or “most secret” plan in the entire US government, and while that’s not a real classification level, if I could pick a single classified file in the entire US government to read, I wouldn’t waste my time on any of the UFO files, the Kennedy assassination files, or anything like that — I’d go straight to the ECG plans.

ECG has to do with how the three branches of government would operate after a devastating attack on Washington; the plans have been described in official documents obliquely as “a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, coordinated by the President, to preserve the capability to execute constitutional responsibilities in a catastrophic emergency.”

We don’t know what ECG means in practice — indeed most of the leadership of the US government doesn’t even know what ECG means in practice — but from years of careful parsing of documents and reading between the lines of vague hints and references I’ve come to think of it as a series of plans about how the US would preserve the spirit of the Constitution in circumstances where it can’t preserve the letter of the Constitution.

It’s clear that ECG doesn’t look like our peacetime government at all — but we have no idea what it does look it exactly.

And that’s where Mike Thompson’s announcement gives us a tiniest of important hints.

Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be useful at all for a single member of Congress to survive — who cares if there’s only one surviving member of the Democratic minority of the House of Representatives?

Evidently, though, the ECG plans must care.

Congress itself has long been a particular puzzle for continuity planning — it hasn’t done a good job creating its own Doomsday plans, as I’ve written about — and it would take months or even perhaps a year or more to reconstitute itself after a widespread catastrophe, depending on when precisely the catastrophe occurred relative to the electoral calendar.

As Graff later notes, it is unclear why these plans must be kept secret from the American people. We should have a greater understanding of how government leaders would attempt to keep our democracy alive under doomsday scenarios (including what could have happened on 9/11 had the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 not revolted against the hijackers to keep the plane from possibly crashing into the United States Capitol while the House of Representatives was in session).

The failure of our government after the 9/11 attacks to fix the Continuity of Government crisis that would be created by an incident causing the death of a majority of Members of the House of Representatives is one of my obsessions.

The public deserves to have at least a high-level overview about these plans. We shouldn’t have to guess why it is important for the minority party in the House of Representatives to have selected a designated survivor.

#8

• One lawyer could take down California’s abortion shield. His star client is a convicted abuser (Raheem Hosseini, The San Francisco Chronicle, Link to Article)
• Exposing Republicans’ Bad-Faith Abortion 'Coercion' Obsession (Kylie Cheung, Abortion Every Day, Link to Article)

Before he was the star plaintiff in an audacious lawsuit targeting a Bay Area doctor and interstate access to abortion medication, Jerry Hernandez Rodriguez was somewhere in Texas ducking a warrant for allegedly beating his girlfriend.

It was Nov. 7, 2024. Rodriguez, previously convicted of assaulting one woman and threatening to kill another, phoned the Webster Police Department to call his latest accuser a liar. When a detective answered, department records show, Rodriguez told him he was aware of the felony arrest warrant, but wouldn’t divulge his whereabouts.

Eight months later, Rodriguez resurfaced with a new story — one that presented him not as an abuser of women but as a victim of their reproductive choices. His girlfriend’s abortions, he said in his lawsuit, constituted the killing of his unborn children.

The image makeover came courtesy of Jonathan Franklin Mitchell, a prominent conservative attorney and key figure in the campaign to push a nationwide abortion ban through the courts.

Forced-birth advocates are trying to claim that allowing the easy distribution of abortion medicine leads to coercion.

But the facts tell a different story, as Abortion, Every Day repeatedly explains. Kylie Cheung wrote about earlier this week:

But before this, the anti-abortion movement initially threw their support behind abusive men—openly or privately recruiting them to take legal action over their partners’ abortions. Ultimately, this failed to yield results, and, if anything, may have been counterproductive: In now two high-profile cases, the man’s history of abusing his partner came to light in court—exposing exactly what kind of person would sue over his partner’s abortion, and wield the legal system to punish or control their victim’s reproductive decisions.

It speaks volumes that the anti-abortion movement’s first instinct was to collude with abusers—only pivoting to pretend to care about some victims when this didn’t work.

Regardless of the anti-abortion movement’s PR stunts pretending to care about women, the fact remains: Forced pregnancy is a tool in abusers’ toolbox—and it’s a tool that abortion bans place directly in their hands.

The aforementioned National Domestic Violence Hotline survey found that since Dobbs, hundreds of respondents said their partners threatened to report them to law enforcement or threatened to take legal action if they had abortions. Ainsworth says most callers to If/When/How’s legal helpline, which supports people facing state investigation or punishment related to pregnancy, were reported to the state by abusive partners and are experiencing abuse.

This is reproductive coercion.

These lawsuits are not about helping women or victims. They are about control and an ongoing effort to strip women of their rights and autonomy.

#9

• The First Version Wins (Parker Malloy, The Present Age, Link to Article)

Readers of this newsletter may know that I am not a huge fan of California Governor Gavin Newsom and am not planning to vote for him in the 2028 Democratic Presidential primary.

As a quick refresher: I am upset with how he has platformed radical right-wing voices like Steve Bannon on his podcast. I find his willingness to throw the trans community under the bus reprehensible. And while I appreciate his ongoing social media trolling of the Trump regime, there is no reason to resort to homophobic knee pad jokes as part of it.

All that said, a viral quote spread across the internet earlier this week that made Newsom sound like a racist.

But Newsom did not say what the alt-right social media accounts claimed. And then far too many people who, like me, are not Newsom fans, spread the fake quote and then complained when people pointed out the disinformation.

Malloy, who is also not a Newsom fan, explains:

A quote that Gavin Newsom never said went viral yesterday. It has, at this point, been viewed almost 55 million times.

Here’s the post, from the conservative account EndWokeness:

Gov. Newsom to a black crowd in GA: “I am like you. I’m a 960 SAT guy. I can’t read.”

Ted Cruz amplified it. Tim Scott amplified it. Nicki Minaj amplified it. Megyn Kelly said it would “haunt him forever.” Mark Levin said any Republican who’d said the same thing would see their career end. Rep. Randy Fine called on Democrats to demand Newsom’s resignation. Fox News ran it. RedState ran it. Townhall ran it.

But the quote, as presented in the tweet, is fabricated. Newsom didn’t say it.

What Newsom actually said, at a book tour event at the Rialto Center for the Arts in Atlanta on Sunday, was a longer, messier answer about living with dyslexia. He talked about discovering his diagnosis in his mother’s file cabinet. He talked about being the kid in the back of the classroom praying the teacher wouldn’t call on him. The key passage: “I’m like you. I’m no better than you... literally a 960 SAT guy, you’ve never seen me read a speech. Because I cannot read a speech. Maybe the wrong business to be in.” And then: “I haven’t overcome dyslexia. I’m living with it.”

End Wokeness compressed that into “I can’t read.” Those are not the same words. “I cannot read a speech” is a statement about dyslexia. “I can’t read” is a statement about illiteracy. They put quotation marks around a sentence Newsom never said, described the audience as “a black crowd” when video showed a mixed, possibly majority-white crowd (which even RedState acknowledged), and posted it to millions of people.

The truth and context still need to matter. Being upset with someone does not make it okay to spread lies about them. Parker notes the stakes involved:

That’s the part I need people to hear. Sharing a fake quote about someone you don’t like trains your own audience to stop caring whether things are true, as long as they feel true, as long as the target is someone who already makes them mad. And once people have been trained to accept that standard, they don’t limit it to the one politician you think deserves it. They apply it to everything. They apply it to the next accusation, the next clip, the next screenshot, the next thing that confirms what they already believe. You’ve misinformed your audience and made them less able to tell the difference between a real story and a fake one.

I believe there are enough real things in Newsom’s record to complain about. Lying helps no one—except the authoritarians who want to leave truth and democracy behind.

Follow me on BlueSky to see the stories I’m finding and the tabs I’m opening in real-time.

Craig Cheslog (@craigcheslog.com)

GenXer against fascism. Talking politics, women’s soccer, WNBA, Manchester United men and women, USWNT, USMNT, Green Bay Packers, Boston Celtics, Chicago Cubs, and Taylor Swift. (he/him/his) My newsletter: https://thelongtwilightstruggle.com/.

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