DNC leadership must be ‘gender balanced’ with ‘non-binary’ members counting as neither male nor female.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at media pundits’ new acceptance of the turning tides on the culture war, and we cover more media misses.
The DNC Finally Goes Too Far
It’s been just three weeks since President Donald Trump took office, but there’s already been a sea change on culture-war issues.
Major companies have rolled back their DEI initiatives. The NCAA banned men from women’s sports. Amazon returned a book on transgenderism to its virtual shelves. The list goes on and on.
The cultural shift apparently has not been lost on some of the Democratic Party’s most reliable pundits, who finally seem able to recognize that the party had adopted a number of radical positions that were unpopular with American voters.
In fact, the party’s positions have been so radical and nonsensical that James Carville questioned whether there is a “plant” in the progressive wing of the party working to see how many “stupid things” Democrats can embrace.
Carville’s comments came in response to the DNC chair race. On his podcast, he read a description of former DNC Chair Jamie Harrison’s announcement during the elections that they must be “gender balanced.”
“Our rules specify that when we have a non-binary candidate or officer, the non-binary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six offices must be gender balanced with the results of the previous four elections.”
Carville said the rule was typical of the level of “jack***ery” the party has embraced.
“And it’s like, there’s a, a plant somewhere in quote, progressive, unquote America, that just to seize how many jack***, stupid things that they can embrace, it’s stunningly stupid. Both of them,” the Democratic strategist said.
“We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is, and it always will be the economy, stupid. We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted by anything else,” Carville continued, referencing his famous phrase.
As we wrote last week, the committee elected 24-year-old gun-control activist David Hogg as one of three vice-chairs. Aside from peddling incoherent gun policy, Hogg has also represented the most progressive wing of the party in recent years, calling to “Defund the police not USPS” and to “Abolish ICE” in 2020.
Carville wasn’t the only figure to blast the party over its DNC meeting; Time political columnist Joe Klein pointed to the gender rules as evidence that the party’s “intellectual corrosion is comprehensive,” in an article for his Sanity Clause Substack.
“Yes, friends, still crazy after all these years . . . and the encroaching dementia is not benign. Can this party be saved? I have my doubts,” Klein wrote.
Klein referred to several other articles that drew similar conclusions. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait recapped the meeting in a headline titled, “The Democrats Show Why They Lost.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, which reports, “Democrats Have a New Leader but Haven’t Come to Grips With Failure,” an audience member stood up at the meeting to “lament that there was only one at-large seat set aside for a transgender person, and called on the candidates to add another seat and for ‘making sure those appointments reflect the gender and ethnic diversity of the transgender community.’”
Klein, for his part, said the “intellectual corrosion” is matched only by the party’s “self-righteous arrogance.”
“I’ve been through Dems in Disarray syndrome multiple times in the past: in 1972, in 1980, in 1988, in 2016 . . . but, gotta say, this is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he wrote.
“The Democrats have twice now enabled a World-Historic Demagogue to be elected President of the United States,” he later added.
He said Biden’s policy alignment with the progressive wing of the party in 2020 brought in “left-nuttiness below the radar throughout the government.”
Meanwhile, over in the pages of the New York Times, opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote that liberals’ “permissive” stance on drugs in West Coast blue cities has backfired.
“As a good liberal, I used to oppose arresting people for using drugs,” Kristof writes. “They need health care, not handcuffs, I thought. But then to my surprise and dismay, I found myself praying that my old pal Drew Goff would be arrested.”
“Yet it’s also true that Drew’s most recent tumble into addiction came in part because of a permissive liberal culture toward drugs on the West Coast. This was meant to be compassionate, but it almost killed him (and has killed many of my other friends),” he wrote.
And Senator John Fetterman, who campaigned as a progressive but has since become more of a pro-Israel moderate, said recently that the Democrats’ brand has grown “toxic” after years of “shaming and scolding” voters.
Headline Fail of the Week
“Racial gap widened in deaths among US moms around the time of childbirth,” the Associated Press reports, citing the CDC’s updated data on the U.S. maternal mortality rate.
While several other outlets — including Yahoo, PBS, and CBS News — pursued similar framing, Michael J. New explained in a piece for NR last week why that framing misses the larger story: that maternal mortality fell from 22.3 per 100,000 live births to 18.6 from 2022 to 2023, for a decline of nearly 17 percent and the lowest number since 2018.
He writes:
The new CDC data did show a slight increase in the maternal mortality rate among African American women in 2023. However, the CDC’s own report indicated that this increase was not statistically significant. Granted, it is newsworthy that the maternal morality rate fell for other racial and ethnic groups and not African American women.
He concludes it is “sad, but unsurprising, that many media outlets have chosen to downplay the positive public health trends that have occurred post-Dobbs.”
Media Misses