Hello, and welcome to TGIF. I’m Will Rahn, filling in for Nellie Bowles one last time while she raises money to replace the Orgy Dome at Burning Man. Joining me as always are the brilliant Sean Fischer and Suzy Weiss. I’ve told Sean he can write more jokes than usual this week. He can be reached at Sean@TheFP.com if anything upsets you. Compliments and praise for this edition of TGIF can be sent to Letters@TheFP.com.
Also: For our New York City dwellers, join Coleman Hughes and Steven Pinker for a live taping of Conversations with Coleman at the Comedy Cellar in a few weeks. Get your tickets here.
→ No more Mr. Nice Democrat: Nate Silver, the left-leaning data guru and influential pundit, made a perplexing argument this week. And by “perplexing,” I mean “uncharacteristically dumb.” It came via a post praising California governor Gavin Newsom’s aggressive redistricting effort, which Silver said “marks the end of a decade-plus of a ‘when they go low, we go high’ attitude among Democratic leaders.” He says Democrats “perhaps for a change, [are] in a mood to fight back.”
I’m sorry, but what are we talking about here? I don’t remember the Democrats exactly rolling over when Donald Trump first won the White House. In fact, if memory serves, they spent most of his first term insisting he was a Russian asset. That line of attack seems pretty stupid now, but at the time—when Vladimir Putin’s meme brigade was out in force across social media—it also seemed pretty stupid.
Recall Joe Biden’s interregnum presidency, in which he called anodyne changes to Georgia’s voting laws “Jim Crow on steroids.” His allies were quick to denounce anything Republicans did as authoritarian, racist, fascist, a threat to our democracy, and on and on.