Happy Sunday! While I was perusing the news yesterday, I came across an interesting item in The Daily Beast: “Elephant Takes Revenge, Kills Suspected Poacher in South African National Park.” It’s just a brief post that summarizes a longer article from ABC News, and that article is a little tamer, saying that investigators believe the poacher was killed by an elephant but not ascribing revenge as a motive. But it got me thinking, and I realized it’s almost a theme for the week. 

If you read our articles and newsletters even only occasionally, you know that we’re concerned about our polarization and the nastiness of our discourse.  (In fact, I have to be careful not to plagiarize myself from just a week ago.) The extremes of both parties can be loud and demanding and suck all the oxygen out of the room,  making it hard for the rest of us to get a word in. So today I’m going to highlight some accounts of pushback.

Progressives have been enormously frustrated with Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for their refusal to go along with the $3.5 trillion spending package that would provide free community college and universal childcare along with many provisions to fight climate change. I summarize our coverage of Sinema below, but one of my favorite (non-Dispatch) stories of the week came from Axios, which reported on a meeting between Senator Bernie Sanders and Manchin. Sanders has long complained that the spending package is too small and that we should be spending $6 trillion. Manchin is having none of it: “”I’m comfortable with zero,” he reportedly told the Vermont senator.

And in Jonah’s midweek G-File  (🔐), he writes about David Shor. Shor is, to quote Jonah, “an avowed socialist and data geek.” Shor gained a measure of fame, or rather infamy, in the summer of 2020 when he sent a tweet calling attention to a study from Princeton that showed that peaceful protests effect change but violent protests can create a backlash that hurts the protesters’ cause. It cost Shor his job, but he hasn’t backed down. He has continued to speak out about how young “woke” progressive elites are out of touch with mainstream Democrats to the detriment of the party.