March 30, 2025

WE HAD TO HIDE THE TRUTH IN ORDER TO SAVE IT:

Now, with their party in the wilderness, Democratic heavy hitters are stepping up to admit that, well, the fake news was real. Here’s The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, in a widely shared recent appearance on Jon Stewart’s podcast, discussing the Kafkaesque regulatory structures that prevented Biden’s rural broadband legislation from ever being translated into reality:

And here’s Klein—currently touring to promote his book Abundance—in an interview with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, admitting that none of the major investment initiatives from Obama’s stimulus package turned into anything:

Meanwhile, Klein’s Vox cofounder, fellow “abundance” Democrat and author of One Billion Americans, Matthew Yglesias, wrote earlier this week that “Democrats can’t hide from immigration forever.” The headline is obviously true, but the article contained a fairly interesting passage about how the rhetorical sausage gets made in the upper reaches of Democratic politics and punditry. Yglesias quotes a 2021 article from Klein noting that in 2012, the Obama campaign realized that merely talking about the issue of immigration pushed voters to the right. Rather than come up with more popular immigration policies, the campaign staff concluded, it was better to simply duck the issue altogether while making up a fake story that immigration had hurt the GOP and selling that to their friends in the media. Yglesias writes:

It’s… important to remember what happened after Obama successfully ran this “don’t talk about immigration” reelection campaign—his team went out and told reporters that Democrats had won thanks to Hispanic backlash against Romney’s self-deportation rhetoric. The RNC then did an “autopsy” report on the election that concluded that Republicans needed to move to the center on immigration. And an immigration reform bill including a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented residents passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support.

Which is just to say that as far as I can tell, the Obama team fibbed about the role that immigration played in the 2012 campaign as part of a strategy to psyche Republicans into agreeing to an immigration deal—and it almost worked!

The problem with this comms strategy—creating a rhetorical hall of mirrors that not only bamboozles the electorate but baits the opposing party into acting against its own interests based on an entirely false premise—is that by “lying in politics,” you “trick your own supporters.” In this case, the Obama White House and allied pundits, in trying to trick voters, accidentally tricked the Democrats into thinking that immigration wasn’t something to worry about—a defensible “fib,” in Yglesias’ view, but one that now needs to be addressed for tactical reasons.

We’re glad Yglesias has at least discovered a utilitarian case against lying, since he doesn’t believe in the principled one:

Yglesias was publicly admitting that he was fine about lying to advance the socialist cause since at least 2010:

Meanwhile, last night governor turned professional podcaster Gavin Newsom told Bill Maher: ‘The Democratic Brand is Toxic Right Now.’

Gov. Gavin Newsom continues to make news by pushing back on the far left of his own party. In a conversation last night with Bill Maher, he said a few things which are likely to rile up the extremists on his own team.

First up, he made the case for talking to people on the other side of the aisle. “These guys are crushing us,” Newsom said. He continued, “The Democratic brand is toxic right now. We had a high water mark two weeks ago, that was a CNN poll at 29% favorability. It’s dropped in an NBC poll down to 27%.”

Those who are hyper-online have no doubt seen the hot-dog meme guy many times over the years on social media, which Know Your Meme defines as:

“We’re All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This” is a quote from the Netflix sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. The quote originates from a sketch where an unnamed man in a hot dog costume tries to pretend he is not the one who has crashed a hot dog-shaped car. The image of the man in the costume was widely used as a reaction image on Twitter and other websites in 2020 and early 2021, typically in response to complaints about problems from the people responsible for those problems.

Newsom is determined to live out that meme, as he prepares his 2028 presidential bid, though he’s far from alone on the left.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll