Democrats Are In Disarray

But how long will it last?

Mar 17, 2025

For something as obvious and predictable as Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s failed fiscal gambit last week, it has had an outsized impact in prompting open conversation among Democrats about whether they need to move on from the New York Senator. The leftist activist group Indivisible called for Schumer to step down, calling for him to be replaced with “a Minority Leader who’s up for the fight this moment demands.” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro went on Bill Maher to criticize Schumer’s misuse of legislative leverage. And prominent party voice MSNBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend announced she was quitting the Democratic Party live on air.

This consternation arrives at the same time Democrats are experiencing historic new lows in party favorability. Dual polls out this weekend from NBC News and CNN showed the dire state of affairs:

Just over a quarter of registered voters (27%) say they have positive views of the party, which is the party’s lowest positive rating in NBC News polling dating back to 1990. Just 7% say those views are “very” positive.

Among the American public overall, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating stands at just 29% – a record low in CNN’s polling dating back to 1992 and a drop of 20 points since January 2021, when Trump exited his first term under the shadow of the January 6 attack at on Capitol.

These look bad, and they look even worse when you realize the polls were taken entirely before Schumer’s heel turn along with other Democrats to prevent a government shutdown — a move unlikely to play well with Democrat voters who already thought the problem was not fighting Trump hard enough. John Hickenlooper, the Democrat Senator from Colorado, summarized the mood around the shutdown choice as “full of despair.” He might be speaking for the majority of his party now.

For Republicans to maximize this opportunity, though, they’re going to need to resist the temptation to slow down. It’s a limited window to stick to their ambitious agenda in a crowded field of threats and risk. They can’t afford to assume that the other side maintains this degree of disarray as the midterms approach. Cracks always emerge in coalitions as events intervene. No Republican should ever underestimate the ability of their party to screw up in a key moment when they should press the advantage. That’s one reason why getting it right in this moment is so critical. You have to move fast when the wind is at your back, before it inevitably shifts again.

The NYT Changes its Tune on Lab Leak

Mary Harrington:

Was the Covid-19 virus a chance case of animal-to-human transmission, or a deliberately engineered virus escaping from a gain of function laboratory? In the latest sign of a deep shift in America’s underlying political tectonics, the New York Times has published an op-ed complaining that “We were badly misled” about the origin of Covid-19. The lab-leak theory was always plausible, we’re now permitted to say; but groups of supposedly neutral and independent scientists colluded to produce independent-sounding denials, so as to make it seem like a fringe position. Now, apparently, we need “an honest conversation” so that nothing similar happens again.
It’s tempting just to respond with outrage to the pivot, when for so long it was the Times which led the charge in dismissing, politicising, and vilifying the lab-leak theory. But if we take the Grey Lady’s stance on any given topic less as objective fact than a primer for respectable chattering-class opinion among America’s coastal elite, over time its own reporting supplies a tacit explanation for why the official line has now firmly changed. In short: the NYT has embraced the deterioration in US-China relations.
Back in January, the Times reported on a change in position at the CIA on the origins of Covid. The reporter is at pains to emphasise that Joe Biden commissioned the report which has changed the Agency’s line, from which we are presumably to infer that this is not mere Trumpaganda. But the same article also suggests that the Biden administration was keen for the Covid virus not to be a lab leak — not least because the global political ramifications were so immense.
This was all contested early in the pandemic: in February 2020 the US State Department summoned the Chinese ambassador to protest statements made by Beijing, according to which the virus was a US military project. Republican Senator Tom Cotton, meanwhile, claimed shortly after that the virus was a Chinese bioweapon, a statement the NYT dismissed at the time as “fringe”. Both sides must have recoiled from pressing the point; but the more general one was made again in official 2023 hearings by John Ratcliffe, then Director of National Intelligence and now head of the CIA., when he pointed out a lab leak would have “enormous geopolitical implications”.
What would it do to relations between Washington and Beijing for China to have released a virus that killed over a million Americans — especially if it was created as a bioweapon to begin with? Lately, it appears that the US is preparing to lean into those implications: following the CIA’s change of stance, Cotton has called for the Trump administration to “make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world”.
But especially in light of just how coordinated the earlier efforts were to suppress the lab-leak theory, it would be naive to read this as representing an outbreak of truth. Rather, it more likely just reflects America’s hardening stance in relation to China. The recent pandemonium in Europe concerning Russia and Ukraine can be understood in the same light: as second-order effects of a US decision to deprioritise European security, in order to focus resources on its perceived chief great-power rival, China. Analysts have likewise argued that Trump’s stance toward Putin can be viewed as a “reverse Nixon”, aiming to peel Russia away from alliance with China.
In other words, the Grey Lady’s change of official stance in relation to lab leaks has little to do with “honest conversation”, and much to do with shifts in the broader geopolitical picture — especially in relation to China. We may never know if the virus was a military project, or whose. But what should be clear is that America’s rivalry with China has now hardened to a point where the lab-leak theory, once marginalised through official collusion, is crystallising as a propaganda talking-point for the same institutions that previously buried it.

The Right’s Loud Anti-Semitic Wing

David Harsanyi:

Joe Rogan has 14.5 million followers on Spotify. About 11 million people reportedly download each episode. To put that into context, Fox News, which dominates cable news, averaged about 2.38 million viewers during prime time in 2024. Rogan, as we witnessed during the 2024 presidential race, is now a media power broker.
How does he normalize antisemites? On March 1, Rogan’s guest was the legendary comic actor Bill Murray. On March 4, he interviewed guitarist and lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan. Then, on March 5, he slipped in “independent researcher” Ian Carroll, an unhinged antisemitic activist, who went from obscurity to over 1 million followers on X in a short time.
As bigoted cranks go, Carroll is extraordinarily boring. This isn’t Gore Vidal we’re dealing with. Carroll contends Israel was responsible for 9/11. He’s “researching” whether sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was working for Israeli intelligence to blackmail the entire U.S. government. He’s in on the Pizzagate conspiracy, which is too stupid to merit an explanation. In the days before social media Idiocracy, Carroll would be handing out xeroxed flowcharts of Jewish power for Lyndon Larouche at the regional airport.
Rogan gravitates toward unconventional topics and hosts offbeat guests who are passionate about esoteric beliefs, some of them conspiracy theorists. And a free society should make room for people who push back against conventional wisdom. The problem is that no matter what bizarrely insane things his guests propose, Rogan is going to give them a hearing without real pushback — basically personifying Carl Sagan’s warning that you shouldn’t keep your mind so open that your brains fall out. And that’s fine, I guess, unless the person you’re interviewing is a wanna-be Julius Streicher.
The same week that Carroll was on Rogan, podcaster Theo Von, whose show This Past Weekend likely gets about a million downloads per episode, hosted one of the most contemptible antisemitic nitwits in the country. There’s no political or moral crisis in the world — today or ever — that Candace Owens doesn’t blame on the Jews. The authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would probably tell her to cool it.
Owens, who has nearly 7 million followers on X, is the model of a quasi-educated bigot who grabs strands of history and extrapolates to create alternative realities that are plausible to her credulous audience. During a recent interview with an accused sex trafficker Tristan Tate, she suggested that communist dictator Joseph Stalin was secretly Jewish and used the Soviet Union as a tool against Christians. “I found a friend who,” she explains, “understands Georgian, and they were like, everybody knows that Stalin was Jewish, and I am like, Americans don’t know this.”
No, we don’t. Not if we’ve read a book. Then again, Owens accuses rabbis who disagree with her of being “drunk on Christian blood,” an old-school blood libel, and says Zionists are engaged in a “holocaust,” a new-school blood libel. Unsurprisingly, she is skeptical of the actual Holocaust. She’s a 9/11 truther. She peddles the debunked Khazar theory (the fiction that Ashkenazi Jewish people have no historic roots in Israel.) Israel, contends Owens, is “a safe haven for pedophiles” where “they practice incest and pedophilia as a sacramental right.”
In any event, this seems like a person who should not be platformed by any decent human being. And yet, Von barely bothered challenging any of this perfidious woman’s quackery.
Much of the normalization of these types of people can be traced back to Tucker Carlson, a top 10 podcaster. Carlson, who worked at the three major cable news networks, earned fame through decades of insightful commentary, not for trying to be the modern-day Father Coughlin. But you could see coming in the waning days of Fox News when Carlson, later fired by the network, hosted Hitler fanboy Kanye West. He cut many of the rapper’s egregious statements to make him palatable to the audience. Owens, a friend of West, was a Carlson regular back then, and now.
Whereas many of the new social media stars are intellectual clods desperate for attention, Carlson knows what he’s doing. One of his recent guests was Darryl Cooper, “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” who contends that the “chief villain of the Second World War” was not Adolf Hitler but Winston Churchill who forced the former into the Holocaust (34 million X views on that one.)
Cooper was Joe Rogan’s guest last week. The “historian” made the absurd claim that Hitler, who he believes is in heaven, hid his antisemitism from the German public.
Carlson is far more sophisticated than most deranged X influencers, relying on euphemisms and proxies to spread his ugly anti-historical message. A few days ago, for example, Carlson blamed “neocons” — wink, wink — for the destruction of “ancient Christian communities, from Iraq to Gaza and in many places in between. Can this be an accident? You wonder.”
Is he contending that former President George W. Bush, probably under the influence of rootless “neocons,” invaded Iraq specifically to destroy the Christian community of the Middle East? Because that sounds like a big story.