If you’re looking for wisdom on the latest Trump whiplash-inducing move, you’ll have to look elsewhere. OK, I’ll share Josh Marshall’s take with you.
About Damn Time. Younger D’s Challenge Entrenched Incumbents:
A small but growing group of young Democrats are being propelled to act by outrage among rank-and-file voters, and especially among young people. Infuriated by the early months of President Trump’s second term, impatient with the status quo and frustrated with party leadership, they are mounting bids for office.
Some of these efforts look like long shots against well-funded and better-known incumbents. But they amount to a manifestation of the anger felt by voters toward the Democratic Party — after President Joseph R. Biden Jr., ignoring their concerns, waited until late in the game to abandon his attempt at re-election — and the sentiment that a younger generation might be better equipped to oppose Mr. Trump.
“They’re looking to build a Democratic Party that will fight instead of fold,” said Amanda Litman, the leader of Run for Something, a progressive group that pushes young Democrats to run for office. Young people, Ms. Litman said, were essentially saying: “It’s time to pass the torch. And if they’re not going to pass it, we’re going to take it.”
Time to point out that ‘long shots against well-funded and better-known incumbents’ brought us Marie Pinkney, Kamela Smith, Eric Morrison and Madinah Wilson-Anton, to name but a select few. I am aware of one great prospective challenger who is being warned to wait their turn here in Delaware. Don’t. Not in a state where folding, not fighting, recently gave us the Musk/Zuckerberg gift from the El Foldos.
The War On Empathy. Spearheaded by Musk and, of course, the ‘Christian Right’:
Just over an hour into Elon Musk’s last appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the billionaire brought up the latest existential threat to trouble him.
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. “And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.”
“The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy,” Musk continued to Rogan, couching his argument in the type of pseudoscientific language that’s catnip to both men’s followings on X. “The empathy exploit. They’re (immigrants from poorer, browner, and more Muslim countries) exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump and his agenda as a “sin” or “toxin”. The debate has emerged among Catholics too, with JD Vance recently using the medieval Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” to justify the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and foreign aid. (Vance’s stance – that it’s righteous to privilege the needs of one’s family, community and nation over those of the rest of the world – earned a rebuke from the pope, but support from other influential Catholic thinkers.)
‘Influential Catholic thinkers’. Why am I fixating on that phrase? Anyway, a lengthy piece that is well worth your time.
Hey, that’s all I’ve got today. I leave the rest to you.
What do you want to talk about?