Fish or Cut Red-Bait

A peculiar bunch of statistics that has been making the rounds in the ongoing moral panic over the Democratic Socialists of America, whose successful endorsements in some recent elections and primaries have come as a shock to some writers, and led President Trump and colleagues to new flights of McCarthyism asserting that communists are "taking over" the Democratic party:

In a survey of New Jersey DSA members. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent) identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7 percent as democratic socialists.” https://t.co/6vzmaA7qJl via @NYTOpinion

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 30, 2026

What Kraushaar could have found out by looking more closely at the Times link or preferably the survey itself is that he was reporting it completely wrong: :

The mistake is from typos in a report by Thomas Edsall of a 2024 survey of the organization's Central New Jersey branch, covering six counties, which has been used to spread the story that "communists" have taken over the club. The Times corrected the error soon after publication, but Kraushaar apparently never checked. Anyway, it's not 10.7% that identify as democratic socialists; that was the anarchists, as probably should have been obvious (an organization that calls itself "democratic socialists" should really have more democratic socialists in its membership, that's what made me look it up myself). The democratic socialists are the 39.3%, and added together with the social democrats' 8.9% (plus I think one cis man calling himself a "social liberal") a bare majority of definitively non-communist members. The balance of 35.7 percent belong to an ice-cream parlor menu of "Marxists", not necessarily "communists".

Vivisecting Section 3

I'm still kind of dubious about the magical qualities of the 14th Amendment Section 3, as I was back in September, but I should add that I'm a lot more impressed than I was expecting to be by the case Colorado's Supreme Court makes for reversing the original district court ruling, which had concluded that Donald Trump did indeed "engage in" an "insurrection" against the United States, but 14/3 didn't apply to him, because as president he was not an "officer under the United States", as the Amendment specifies:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

The president isn't an officer? Even though he holds the Office of the presidency and swears to execute the Office faithfully when he is inaugurated and can be removed from Office if he's impeached and convicted? Not to get all originalist on you, but that's what "officer" meant in the 18th century, what we more often call an official, somebody who holds an office in an organization, and of course the president of the United States is one. Imagine a law that removes all the other officers, in Congress or the judiciary or the civil service, it they've taken part in a rebellion against the government, but doesn't disqualify the big cheese? That won't let Lieutenant Henry Numbnuts of the former Confederate Army serve as a section head in a customs office, but it's OK for Jefferson Davis to be president? No.

And so the Colorado Supreme Court reversed that, unsurprisingly, but there was no reason to mess with the main part of the decision, which was very solid, and it's intact in the new ruling. Unless you were working on such a tight deadline that you didn't have time to read it, as apparently happened to Jonathan Chait:

Elle ne regrette rien

I got stuck in irritation at Jonathan Chait and his complaints last week ("Elizabeth Warren’s Book Shows She Has No Idea Why Her Campaign Failed") about Elizabeth Warren's memoir, Persist, which fails to be the book he wants to read, which will explain the thing he feels he already knows, which is that "progressive" Democrats in 2020 were so "disoriented" by the way the 2016 election had overturned all their assumptions about "electability" that they found themselves inside a "bubble" of believing the assumptions weren't true: 

Persist, Elizabeth Warren’s new memoir of her life and presidential campaign, is an excellent and informative account of how that bubble  formed. Her campaign was perhaps a prime case study in the delirious post-2016 atmosphere and the errors in political judgment it produced.

The problem is that she is so deep inside that bubble she seems not to recognize it for what it was. She can paint a compelling portrait of what the inside of the Democratic Party activist bubble looked like, but shows no awareness that there is anything outside of the bubble, or even that she was inside of one.

Excuse me, sir, this is an Arby's. Or, less metaphorically, a traditional inspirational text about the importance of persistence, and anything but a political operative's autopsy of a failed campaign. It opens not with the sorrow of her quitting the presidential campaign in March 2020 but the exhilaration of watching Biden and Harris winning in November, and eager anticipation of the hard work that must come next, and she remarks,

Hi It's Stupid: Rudy

Painting by Burhan Dogancay,1998, via WikiArt.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Rodolfo Giuliani really had no idea Andrij Derkach was a Russian agent. No, hear me out!

Giuliani had been hanging out last December with Derkach, a Ukrainian MP formerly from the Russia-backed Party of Regions and supporter of the corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych, now in exile in Russia, and Ph.D. graduate of the KGB's Higher School in Moscow (his dissertation was on the "Organization and Conduct of Meetings With Secret Agents"), and Derkach had supplied him with edited audio of phone conversations between Ukraine's former president Petro Poroshenko and then–Vice President Joe Biden, which Giuliani believes, or claims to believe, are evidence of some kind of corruption on Biden's part, though The Washington Post was not convinced in May:

The recordings played at the news conference Tuesday [19May] shed relatively little new light on Biden’s actions in Ukraine, which were at the center of President Trump’s impeachment last year. They show that Biden, as he has previously said publicly, linked loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general in 2015. But Derkach used the new clips to make an array of accusations not proven by the tapes...

The tapes released in Kyiv offered no evidence to back Giuliani’s long-standing accusation that Biden pushed for the prosecutor general’s ouster to help his son. At the time, Hunter Biden was earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a month on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, whose owner, a former government minister, was under investigation in Ukraine. Still, the tapes gave Trump’s allies a chance to recycle that allegation closer to the 2020 election.

Derkach did not say he had gotten the tapes from the FSB, but rather than he got them from unnamed "investigative journalists" who had in turned obtained them from recordings made by President Poroshenko himself, which is not quite easy to believe .

But in a startling twist yesterday, it turned out that Derkach is a Russian agent! According to the US Treasury Department, which has slapped him with sanctions: 

For the Record: Why not compare it to the Holocaust?

"Binary" is so grating. What about something softer, like "Sophie's"? https://t.co/YlbET3j9pk

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) April 9, 2019

I don't see why not, Ben. He wouldn't be the first to notice a family resemblance https://t.co/H2fsafQjgG

— Oranges of Species (@Yastreblyansky) April 9, 2019

https://t.co/aYKA0QI2A7

— Oranges of Species (@Yastreblyansky) April 9, 2019

Chait's in pretty good company on this. What kind of company are you in, Ben? https://t.co/sUsQ8NSrYA

— Oranges of Species (@Yastreblyansky) April 9, 2019

Dual Loyalty

Illustration, coincidentally, from this morning's installment of Roy Edroso's ongoing study of "Grandpa's Inbox". Note how the rightwing bottom-feeder scum associate one of the congresswomen with the theory that there's an incredibly wealthy Jewish financier working to bring the entire world under his secret personal control.

So much stuff I really don't want to think or write about, from the presidential campaign, above all Bernie and Biden, to the whole tsuris over Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born freshwoman from Minnesota who wears the hijab, and her rhetorical approach to the pro-Likud lobbying forces in US politics, as described with some initial restraint by Jonathan Chait:

Earlier this month, Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!” in response to a report about AIPAC, a pro-Israel organization. Omar’s tweet echoed a longstanding anti-Semitic trope — in particular, the implication that Jewish political influence operates entirely (“all about”) through money.

After wide condemnation, Omar apologized. It seemed fair to read her tweet generously: Perhaps she was not familiar with the particular vein of anti-Semitism she happened to echo. Indeed, progressives often make crudely reductive statements about the influence of money in supporting policies they oppose (to wit: everything Bernie Sanders says), so it wasn’t necessarily anti-Semitic for Omar to extend that thinking to Jews. Her apparently sincere apology seemed to set to rest a minor offense.

Chait is right about the more simple-minded of us progressives attributing everything bad in politics to money influence, but has the story itself completely wrong, in fact: there was no report about AIPAC. There was a report about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had issued a vague threat against Omar and another new congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib of Detroit, who had done something he didn't like which he equated with Iowa Rep. Steve King's remarks about not understanding when white supremacy became a bad thing:

Post-Libertarians Shopping For Ideas

Hey la hey la, my Brooksy's back ("A New Center Being Born")!

Americans have lost faith in the big institutions of society. Many fly off to extremes, to the Donald Trump right or the Bernie Sanders left. Most of the rest of us feel adrift, gloomy and politically homeless.

But people figure it out. New ideas emerge. Old ideas are put together in new ways. Today, I offer you just one example — the Niskanen Center, which has become one of the most creative think tanks in America today.

I feel less politically homeless than any time I can remember, in a wildly quarrelsome but furiously loyal Democratic party—like an Italian or Jewish or Chinese family, full of drama and hot rages and sloppy kisses, not like an Anglo one—where there's suddenly room for all my contradictory priorities to be entertained, if not necessarily carried through. But anyway...

Check your privilege at the door, this joint is really jumpin

Image via Hand of Ananke.

I wasn't going to write anything about the Jonathan Chait political correctness pity party, because everybody I like had such great things to say about it already, but then there was this other thing I never got around to that ties in, from Jonah Goldberg's New Year's Eve piece (I wrote a lot about that sucker, too, but there's still more):

Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist and theater critic, recently interviewed Chris Rock for New York magazine. He wanted to know why right-leaning comedian Dennis Miller isn’t as funny (at least according to Rich) as Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. He asked Rock, “Do you think that identifying with those in power is an impediment to laughter?”

Universal deniability

Q: Why did dey tell de crocodile to consult a psychotherapist?
A: Because he was in de Nile.

From Openwaterpedia.

The Times's Richard J. Oppel concern-trolls Willard Mitt Romney a bit (technically, it's a news story, as you can tell in the print edition by the flush right margin—in the online Times everything is ragged right, which means that officially you can't tell the difference between news and analysis; I just noticed this for the first time and I find it strangely unnerving, [jump]