Our Best Stuff From a Week of Tricks and Treats (But Mostly Tricks)
Afghanistan evacuations, daylight saving time, and the Virginia governor’s race.
Happy Saturday! There is a slew of great football games to watch this weekend, plus the World Series, and of course it’s Halloween weekend. I don’t have any great ideas for a last-minute costume for you, but may I suggest you not dress up in khakis while carrying a tiki torch while posing in front of Glenn Youngkin’s campaign bus?
It’s safe to say that something stupid happens on Twitter every day, and we don’t cover it 99 percent of the time. For good reasons. But the stupid thing that happened on Friday touches on a few issues plaguing our politics and our discourse.
Youngkin, you probably know, is the GOP nominee for governor in Virginia. He was endorsed by former President Donald Trump in May but has largely avoided Trump during his campaign. He’s had no rallies with him and specifically stayed away from an event hosted by Steve Bannon in which Trump appeared by video and where the audience said the pledge of allegiance to a flag that someone waved at the Capitol on January 6. But his opponent, Terry McAuliffe, has made an effort to tie Youngkin to Trump (as Audrey noted in a piece covering a McAuliffe rally with Joe Biden).
Late Friday morning, I noticed a tweet by a reporter from a local NBC affiliate in Charlottesville, Virginia.


On first glance, it looks pretty bad for Youngkin. A group of supporters trying to evoke the 2017 Unite the Right event where demonstrators marched with tiki torches in defense of monuments to Confederate soldiers in Charlottesville. The next day, protesters and counterprotesters clashed, violence broke out, and a woman died. The scene all but screamed “White Supremacists for Youngkin.”
But first glances aren’t everything. I was lucky enough to start my journalism career before the internet was a big deal, and way before social media influenced everything. The newspaper came out once a day. News magazines came out once a week. The only 24 hour news network was CNN, and it wasn’t yet dominated by talking heads analyzing everything. So I didn’t face some of the same pressures that young reporters do today. But we were taught to be skeptical. To question everything. Not to rush out details that we couldn’t confirm. One thing that bugged me about that tweet was that the reporter said, “saying what sounded like …”
As it turned out, appearances—and sounds—were deceiving. Long story short, the whole thing was a stunt by the Lincoln Project, a PAC formed in 2019 to defeat President Trump. I don’t normally turn to Wikipedia as an authority, but its description of its founders as “people who claim to be former and present Republicans” is spot-on. It moved quickly beyond its mission of defeating Trump and also campaigned against GOP Sen. Susan Collins in an effort to throw control of the Senate to the Democrats. (Who knew Trump himself would be more effective in making that happen? But I digress.) The Lincoln Project has spent money on anti-Youngkin ads and otherwise supported McAuliffe this time around.
Conservatives on Twitter quickly recognized that the whole thing was likely a stunt, and Friday afternoon the Lincoln Project issued a statement defending its actions. “The Youngkin campaign is enraged by our reminder of Charlottesville for one simple reason: Glenn Youngkin wants Virginians to forget that he is Donald Trump’s candidate.”
So we have a media environment in which reporters are “breaking news” not in their publication or on their broadcasts but on social media, which is designed to make things go viral, true or not. We have a political environment in which we are immensely polarized and where people don’t have to work very hard to find information that confirms their priors. It seems like skepticism, and even curiosity, is at an all-time low. It’s a toxic stew.
There is one potential positive takeaway from all this. The Lincoln Project wants Terry McAuliffe to win. But there was nothing about this stunt that helps his campaign. It’s true that most Americans don’t live on Twitter, and if you’re lucky (or smart), these shenanigans probably escaped your notice. So maybe it won’t hurt him—we’ll find out in a few days. But it backfired spectacularly enough that we can only hope that it serves as a warning to others. If you want to make a case that the other side is harmful and a threat to democracy, the best way to do that is to show that your side is honest and trustworthy. The worst way to engage in deception.
On that note, have a great weekend. May your Halloween bucket be filled with lots of Reese’s Cups and no circus peanuts. Thanks for reading.
Crazy at Any Price
Jonah wrote recently about how the provisions of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act are very popular—until you ask people how much they’d be willing to pay for them. It’s a theme he returns to and expands on in the midweek G-File (🔐). He touches on how withdrawing from Afghanistan was very popular with Americans—until we did so in embarrassing fashion. It turns out Americans think the disgrace of losing a war is a pretty high price to pay. And while people on both sides are upset with our election processes and our dysfunctional parties, no one really wants to do anything about it that would bring about meaningful change. “Trumpists in California would harangue me about how not voting for Trump was tantamount to destroying the country. ... And yet, were any of them willing to move to a swing state so their vote would matter? Or were any voters from reliably red states willing to move to California to bring it into the fold? That’s a very small price to pay if you actually believe we’re one election away from the apocalypse,” he writes.
#EndDST
We haven’t seen Scott Lincicome this worked up since someone asked him to try Guy Fieri’s trash can nachos. In Capitolism (🔐) this week, he unleashes a stemwinder against daylight saving time. He explains why it’s anti-health, anti-science, anti-family, and more. It doesn’t save any energy, its nominal reason for existing. In fact, it probably causes us to waste energy. We should all be able to agree that it’s a bad idea that needs to go, but did he need to make it so personal? I’m pretty sure he’s talking about yours truly when he writes, “Sure, some late-night revelers who overindulged might struggle with a few light mornings in the summer, but personal suffering is often the only way to learn needed life-lessons, and that’s what blackout curtains are for, anyway.”
‘An Unprecedented Mobilization’
We're no longer subjected to daily images of Americans and Afghans trying desperately to flee Afghanistan, but that doesn’t mean everyone who wanted to get out did so. Charlotte reports on the ongoing effort by lawmakers and private citizens to evacuate stranded people. One such group is Task Force Argo. The group has aided more than 2,000 people and has a backlog of 3.500. “In all, Task Force Argo has rescued Afghans and Americans of a range of ages and backgrounds,” she writes. “The volunteers evacuated an 80-year-old grandmother and American citizen, a baby who was born on September 11 of this year in one of their safe houses, twins and college students in danger of becoming forced brides, senior members of the Afghan National Security Forces, and a man interrogated and shot by the Taliban.”
The Right Way to Reject Critical Race Theory
It’s a funny thing, our debate over critical race theory. Many of the people who are upset about the prospect of it being part of a K-12 curriculum seem to be angry about schools teaching the legacy of slavery and racism in this country accurately, or complain about reading assignments that just happen to be by black authors. Meanwhile, administrators and politicians try to say that CRT is not being taught in public schools while also obfuscating about faculty trainings that advise teachers to “embrace critical race theory” and “engage in race-conscious teaching and learning.” It’s tempting to call for a “pox on both houses” but Frederick Hess has a better idea. He describes CRT as full of “toxic, illiberal, Marxist doctrines” and highlights data that shows that minority voters want schools to teach traditional Western values. He argues that, “These issues hit parents where they live. They’re about what values their kids are bringing home from school. Conservatives have the chance to defend shared values that resonate deeply with many who have not historically found themselves on the right.”
And now the best of the rest:
Patrick T. Brown breaks down the social spending measures in the Build Back Better framework. His takeaway? If you like the college student debt crisis, you’ll love the childcare subsidies.
As part of the debate over critical race theory in schools, parents have been demanding more input over their district’s curricula. David digs into the court precedent in his Tuesday French Press (🔐), and informs readers that while the courts have ruled that parents can choose whether to send their kids to public schools, districts control the subject matter.
As I mentioned above, Audrey covered a rally this week in which President Biden campaigned for Terry McAuliffe. She also writes about McAuliffe’s struggles in the polls and what he might have to do to outlast Youngkin.
Dr. Anthony Fauci insisted in his fights with Rand Paul that a grant to a company called EcoHealth that worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology did not go to fund “gain of function” research that could strengthen a pathogen. The truth is both complex and murky. We get to the bottom of it as best we can in The Morning Dispatch (🔐).
Last but not least, the pods: On Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah get into the generational battles between Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z, and also discuss some legal stuff. On the Dispatch Podcast, the gang talks about the idea of taxing unrealized capital gains of billionaires, Taiwan, Facebook, and more. And Jonah welcomed David, Haley, and his old friend Jack Butler onto The Remnant to discuss Dune and other sci-fi nerdery.
I at first had some high hopes for the Lincoln project. So I gave them money. Big mistake. The appeals kept coming. And I realized they were the same as the grifters they claim to dispise. Too bad, really. Some of their ads are hilarious. But they are becoming what they profess to hate.
It's unfortunate that Mr. McAuliffe has nothing more positive to offer Virginians than "Youngkin is a Trump candidate". If he did, he might not have had to resort to that. Sometimes wisdom comes from other places and this is a much remarked thread from Heather Richardson's "Letters from an American". Spoiler alert, LFAA is relatively left leaning but normally as reasoned and reasonable as TMD and TD in general. This is quoted with the permission of the author in an effort to encourage the kind of dialogue we all say we'd like to see more of.
"I started by answering her question on why I felt democracy was in such trouble. That included the super majority legislature, the vigilante injustice of the anti-abortion law going around the US Constitution, the gerrymandered redistricting that will assure minority rule, and talked about there was no voter fraud and we needed more not less voter access. Basically concluding that we were going to minority rule. I don't think I used the word Republican at all. In fact, in things like gerrymandering I stated that both parties used it when they could. Then I asked her what she thought. Here I stopped her when she tried the what if game -- Obama did the same wrong thing that Trump did... I told her two wrongs were still wrong. She had to agree with that and didn't use the what if game again. She was not convinced about voter fraud. And about how a poll watcher had been mistreated. We had a long discussion about the Harris County (Houston) judge who "overstepped" her authority in setting up putting in ballot drop boxes and encouraging mail-in voting. She didn't buy that the pandemic was the excuse for all this. I countered with Governor Abbott restricting the number of ballot drops to one per county rather than based on population was so unfair. She was convinced that Trump won the election because he had been ahead in the early returns and then all the voting machines stopped when the mail-in votes were counted and all the sudden everything was going the other way. I told of my technical background in information security and about the ERIC (Election Registration Information Center) database used in 35 states including Texas use that can detect voter fraud and found next to nothing. I talked about being an Independent and agreeing with John Adams on the two-party system would be the worst evil to befall the Constitution. Talked about how the two parties now represented the extremes and there was a big middle like myself who were no longer being represented by anyone. I believe she related to the big middle not being represented. I'll post this much. I'll post my reply in chunks...
Cathy Learoyd (Texas)5 hr ago
To continue... It did surprise me a bit that my view on no voter fraud didn't make a dent in her perception that lots of voter fraud had happened. When I asked about all the court cases that had dismissed the notion of voter fraud, she said that was all because the courts threw them out on grounds of not having standing so never addressed the voter fraud! It is interesting that the far right has given all these people an answer for everything. This was a new one to me. We spent a lot of time on poll watchers and all the fraud they had found. I wasn't successful in convincing her most of the poll watchers have no idea what they are looking at and was glad the "voter integrity" law in Texas at least included training for poll watchers through the efforts of the League of Women Voters among others. I do fear the November 2022 election is going to have some bad events with angry poll watchers seeing what they want to see. All my talk on people not knowing what they were looking at didn't seem to make a dent in her thinking about voter fraud. Perceptions are real is one of my favorite sayings. I continue in the next post..
Cathy Learoyd (Texas)5 hr ago
To continue... I didn't go too much into Trump or Trumpism. Wanted to try to stay on common ground if I could. She did see some flaws in Trump but then liked his brash talk. We talked about bullying and politicians calling people names a bit. The question I thought of asking but chose not to was "Would you allow you children to bully and call names like that." Another question I thought of asking and didn't was "Who do you trust?" I'll save that one for our next discussion since I didn't want to get into discussing Fox News or whatever. She is a concerned citizen and has gone to Austin to give testimony at committee hearings. She spoke in support of the "voter integrity" law. She had spoken to the President of the Texas League of Women Voters after one hearing and asked her an OR question I call them. She has joined the chapter of the League here in the Hill Country of which I'm the Leadership Team Coordinator (an egalitarian way of saying President). It was our LWV meeting where I talked about the critical need right now to defend democracy -- which is the mission of the LWV along with empowering voters. She saw the League of tending left. The League is totally nonpartisan and will not endorse or oppose any candidate for elected office. It does do advocacy for voting rights, fair redistricting, women's health and other positions. These are based on inclusion for all which can be perceived to be a more left position these days rather than simply being supporting the Constitution and We, the People, all of us this time. I encouraged her to participate in the review of the League's positions that is happening in the next couple of months to be voted on at the April state convention. The discussion then went to talking about we all have different life experiences which forms our opinions and positions. My answer to the OR question she asked the LWV-TX President was why can't we have both -- fair elections without fraud and ease of access to all voters. She liked this approach and looking at the perspectives of those with different life experiences. While we had very different views on a lot of topics, we do seem to agree that Synergy (my favorite word) where listening to lots of perspectives will lead us to better solutions for all that any one perspective could come up with. I left this discussion feeling like the main thing is to move people away from the OR positions -- you're entirely wrong and I'm entirely right -- and move toward synergy of respecting all perspectives and come up with AND solutions