Headline of the Day

Democrats Assemble A New Band of Centrist Dimwits to Help Them Lose Elections and Insult Harry Reid's Legacy

—Splinter, discussing the creation of yet another group within the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) to fight their real enemy, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

The New York Times makes much hay over the fact that the founder of The Searchlight Institute, former chief of staff for chief of staff for Harry Reid and [sotto voce] John Fetterman. Adam Jentleson.

The problem according to him is that Democrats are not hating enough on the ghey or the transgender. 

I guess he knows what to do to rake in Democratic billionaire money: 

“A new Democratic think tank wants to curb the influence of liberal groups” reads a headline in the New York Times today. This is led by one of the Democratic Party’s premiere peacockers for billionaires, Adam Jentleson, the former Chief of Staff to Senator John Fetterman who would very much like you to only remember him as a Deputy Chief of Staff to the late great Senator Harry Reid, and the Times acquiesced. There are three references to Jentleson’s time with Reid that ended in 2015 in this writeup, versus just one of the last job he held as a much more powerful figure in John Fetterman’s orbit. This article is another profile as stenography, a specialty of political media, where they frame an entire story about someone through the lens that person would want it shot through.

Jentleson wants you to think that Democrats are under threat from the dreaded “groups,” just not his group. The other groups. You know. Those ones. Those lefty loony tunes who lost Democrats the 2024 elections and…uh…also helped drive perhaps the largest youth voter turnout ever in 2020 that Democrats like Jentleson never ever want to talk about. The story this wing of the party tells itself is that Democrats went woke in early 2020, lost in 2024, and we’re not going to talk about anything that happened in between. I am so sick of having this same nonsensical debate with a group of powerful people with far more control over the party than like, Sunrise Movement. The belief is that somehow small organizations like that are more responsible for why Kamala Harris lost Michigan than Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party is, who supposedly had no choice but to adopt these supposed narrow issues the “groups” like that lost Democrats the election.

………

This is a grift the same way that all Democratic consulting is a grift. It’s a bunch of (white) people like Adam Jentleson and Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias with a very narrow and extremely superficial vision of politics only shared by the rich people whose funding they covet. All that places like Searchlight Institute do is sell liberal out of touch rich people’s ideology back to them as wise and brilliant. The story this kind of politics tells is completely incoherent, because Democrats won an election doing the woke stuff they hate and lost the one where they backed a genocide to the dismay of all the woke folks who voted for them in 2020. Democrats even unexpectedly held on to the Senate in 2020, which enabled them to pass half of Biden’s key domestic agenda, something so impressive it makes Barack Obama jealous.

 You know, people like Mr. Jentleson make me think more faborably on the idea of party purges.