Ezra Klein is a smart guy, but he's too credulous of people who want to smuggle extremist positions through moderate language (eg. he likes Douthat) and he's incapable of judging a game of checkers because he thinks all board games are 4d chess.

Sadly I think he'd have a good chance, even though voting against him again would be fun.

I'm not sure why, but we still don't fully understand the false efficacy of deploying state violence against protests.

The dispersal may have ended the news story and killed the media attention, but people don't somehow become convinced just because they were silenced.

Columbia, in NYC, was the epicenter.

Students took to their campus quads to protest complicity in what is plainly a genocide, and they got a fascist crackdown as reward.

Student leaders here on visas were detained and threatened with deportation for thought crimes.

Gen Z voters turned out big for Mamdani, which you can view as a rejection the false equivalence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

After all, many of them have been subject to a similar campaign accusing them of being antisemitic for not being Zionist.

IMHO, Mamdani set the battle grounds for this election to be fought on, affordability. His messaging made it the issue NYC residents said they cared most about.

The classic ploys of trying to make it about crime and public safety were attempted and failed. Mamdani owned the attention.

This becomes more stark when you look at the accounts of the Israeli reaction, where its right-wing leaders attempt to equate Zohran with the 9/11 hijackers among many other clear Islamophobic claims:

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/w...

I'm not an expert in the interplay between Zionism, Islamophobia and antisemitism, and I'm not part of any of these groups.

It's nonetheless pretty clear that Zionist groups were relentless in this characterization (eg. the ADL), and non-Zionist groups weren't:

bsky.app/profile/jaco...

Can they both lose?

Centrists never seem to think the answer is to fight for your convictions and move the public.

In the 90s, "liberal" was a political smear. Self-identified Liberals co-opt this term, and its potency has been lost. The GOP has to call anyone left of Mussolini "far-left radical marxists" now.

"D's are too liberal" is conventional wisdom in the US, but this is a product of the information environment. As Rufo clearly stated, their strategy is to establish a label and then poison the public's association with that label. Woke, DEI, Green New Deal, Democrat.

The three most high profile congressional Democratic leaders are Schumer, Pelosi, and Jeffries. They are written about constantly. The first two have been in power for decades.

Can you name a single issue that animates them?

As Klein himself says, aligned independents and progressive policies tend to outpoll the Democratic brand. So which is more likely to be right? That the policies are too liberal and Dems should moderate, or that the filling the halls of power with empty suits void of conviction is bad?

"The democrats keep doing this thing and losing" is something that the left and the center agree on, but the left's diagnosis is that the Democrats are feckless poll-tested cowards, and the center's diagnosis is that the Democrats are too progressive.

I like Klein and I find he is thoughtful and earnest enough to not deserve the kinds of heat he gets from the left, but he is obsessed by a retvrn to 1960s era party depolarization, and the consensus on liberalism, anti-communism, and racism it was built on is gone and should stay dead.