Hell hath no fury like a Democrat scorned.
“House Democrats have a plan to help them win back the working class: turn the world’s richest person into their boogeyman,” Ally Mutnick writes at Politico. Elon Musk, who liberals once touted as a Captain Planet superhero, now ranks above Donald Trump as progressive public enemy number one.
Representative Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Judy Chu (D-Calif.) barged their way into Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) office on Wednesday to confront him about Elon Musk’s access to the Treasury Department’s payment system. Democrat protestors outside of the Treasury building chanted “Elon Musk has got to go” and held signs reading “Stop the Billionaire Takeover.” Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer tweeted: “An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government.”
Past boogeymen for Democrats have included Herbert Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and Richard Nixon, who shared the displeasing experience of seeing political enemies turn their names into nouns and adjectives. The other common denominator? They all had been members in good standing of the Republican Party.
That would seem a prerequisite for boogeyman status among Democrats — but not anymore. A total-politics mindset necessarily fosters rigidity. When politics becomes everything, one tolerates disagreement on nothing.
Democrats, as emphasized in this space last week, now hate the heretics more than the heathen. Their vituperation targets deviationists, not people far outside their ideological or political orbit. This is characteristic of extremist movements. (READ MORE: RFK Jr. Treatment Proves Democrats Hate Heretics More Than the Heathen)
Recall that progressive activists did not follow, say, John Thune into a bathroom but Kyrsten Sinema. They root out impurities. In this sense, they evoke not traditional political movements but the Puritans, the Jacobins, the Stalinists, and even cultists of all sorts.
Joe Rogan, who, like Musk, did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020, just endured, like Musk, a sliming from progressives.
The former Bernie Bro’s sin? He interviewed Donald Trump and not Kamala Harris. The Harris hangers-on blame this on Rogan’s biases, which, honesty compels us to note, include wanting to end prohibitions on drugs, supporting legalized abortion, and endorsing universal health care. In other words, he would seem like a prime candidate to woo away from the Trump coalition. Instead, Democrats attack him. The Rogan bashing, of course, began a long time ago. The Atlantic, for instance, six years ago labeled his program “a safe space for retrograde assholes” and bizarrely described the host as “seething” and suffering from an empathy deficit.
Excerpts from Fight, a book about the 2024 campaign, remarkably points to “the podcaster’s conditions for an interview” when, in fact, Harris’s camp kept insisting that Rogan alter his show’s time and place format, which always takes place in his studio and usually runs about three hours. “The vice president of the United States is offering to come to your f—ing show,” a passage in the book summing up the feeling of Harris aides reads, “and you keep putting up more hoops.”
“They didn’t talk to us,” Rogan said of the authors, “which is kind of crazy. They didn’t even ask.”
Rogan noted of the Harris campaign, “They never agreed to do the show.” He contrasted the ease of booking Trump with the protracted negotiations and restrictions involved with booking Harris. She wanted a stenographer and staff in the room. She wanted “off-limits” subjects. “We offered one day,” he explained of Trump. “He said yes. That was it.”
This same phenomenon imbues Senate votes on the president’s cabinet nominees. Long ago, Republicans would cheer Democrat John Kennedy for appointing Republican Doug Dillon as secretary of the treasury and Democrats would cheer Republican Ronald Reagan for appointing Democrat Jeane Kirkpatrick as ambassador to the United Nations. Rather than an olive branch, partisans now see a mace when the other side appoints one of their guys to a position of power.
Marco Rubio, a lifelong Republican, received a 99-0 confirmation vote. Democrats called Tulsi Gabbard, who nominated Bernie Sanders for president at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, “traitorous” and “likely a Russian asset.” They depicted Robert F. Kennedy Jr., namesake of a party martyr and until recently a Democrat in good standing, as a conspiracy theorist.
This is the politics of catharsis. It may feel good after a loss to bash the people one views as deserting one’s side. In the long term, it permanentizes the otherwise temporary occurrence of party switching. Rather than figure out why Musk, Rogan, Gabbard, Kennedy, and so many others ditched the Democrats, they bash them.
In a business of addition, subtraction almost never amounts to smart politics.
READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn:
Why So Many Dead Bodies Surrounding ‘Zizian’ Trans Cult?
RFK Jr. Treatment Proves Democrats Hate Heretics More Than the Heathen
Shhh! Biden Pardoned a Cop Killer Hours Before Trump Pardoned J6 Rioters