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You’re reading The Weekly, a Saturday morning recap of the best Dispatch content of the week, with some additional commentary from Managing Editor Rachael Larimore.
Hello and happy Saturday. Last weekend, while the rest of us were relaxing with family or catching up on projects, a number of right-wing influencers tried to launch a smear campaign against James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas. It failed spectacularly.
The story went that Talarico, who had missed more than a week of campaign events because of a bout with the flu, wasn’t really ill and instead had sneaked off to a mental health center in Ohio.
On Sunday night, contributing writer Jesse Singal found himself on an X.com livestream with right-wing political operative Rhein Amacher, who had shared the claims on social media along with audio of a call he’d made to the health center itself (after a few right-wing outlets declined to publish them). When the center posted to social media confirming that Talarico had not been treated there, Singal had a front-row seat:
It was a fascinating moment. I can’t say that every MAGA-affiliated type on the call was unmoved by this apparent debunking, but for the most part, at least among those dominating the conversation, the goalposts quickly shifted. It could still be true. Talarico had not provided sufficient debunking of the claim promoted by the guy who openly admitted he hadn’t done much vetting.
As of Monday, the most overheated MAGAheads are continuing to promote this very, very crazy story. Others, alongside most respectable conservatives, find the whole thing embarrassing (which it is). More fracturing. More micro-balkanization.
Singal mentioned micro-balkanization because, as it happens, he was also in the process of writing a story for us about the public discourse surrounding the Cornell fraternity rape allegation. He had noticed that leftists were issuing outraged statements that went beyond anything the victim had told police, and argues that the polarization that has divided us over the last decade-plus has extended beyond ideology to include factual reality. He ran through a few examples of this from recent years, writing:
What is perhaps most pernicious here is the paranoia micro-balkanization breeds, the extent to which it digs people deeper into conspiracy-minded foxholes. If you think that Kyle Rittenhouse was obviously guilty, or that the shooting of Jacob Blake was obviously unjust, or that it’s obviously the case that the Jane Doe case was prosecutable, or that Donald Trump obviously won the 2020 election, or that the lamestream media is obviously covering for Crazy James Talarico, then you are likely to become increasingly disillusioned by the fact that reality isn’t conforming to your false beliefs, that certain people aren’t being prosecuted or hauled off to prison.
Jonah kicked off his Wednesday G-File with his own thoughts about the dangers of these filter bubbles. Once people start believing their own set of “facts,” they assume everyone is aware of the same “facts” and when they say otherwise, they must be lying. He wrote:
The other day I was listening to a left-wing podcast and I heard a very charitable, fact-heavy defense of James Talarico and his comment about how he loves trans kids. I hadn’t heard of it before. But I am sure that a lot of siloed left-wingers have. So when they hear J.D. Vance insinuate that Talarico is gay and has a thing for underage trans children, I can only assume they believe that Vance is deliberately lying—which I don’t really doubt—but they probably also assume that all of the rank-and-file MAGA and Republican people who agree with Vance know the truth too, and are just deliberately smearing Talarico.
The result is that each side’s caricature of the other reinforces the other side’s caricature of them. And this makes every new allegation of wrongdoing even more believable.
Nick Catoggio also wrote about the failed attempt to smear Talarico in Boiling Frogs, and he has a theory as to the motivation behind it:
It’s a matter of saving face. As noted last week, the psychological stakes in Texas this fall are immense for the president and his postliberal acolytes: They demanded Paxton over the more electable John Cornyn, they got their wish, and now they’re on the brink of blowing a statewide race in America’s supreme Republican stronghold for the first time in more than 30 years. If a soft-spoken baby-faced left-winger proves more popular in the Lone Star State than an amoral Trump toady, not only will right-wing populists own the humiliation completely, their claim that postliberalism is the key to Republican electoral success will be shattered.
In Next Right, Michael Warren argued that the MAGA types pushing the story could have capitalized on Talarico’s illness but instead they overshot:
Remember when Hillary Clinton abruptly disappeared from the trail in September 2016 with a bad case of pneumonia? Her ill-timed illness reinforced Trump’s argument that Clinton did not have the “stamina” to be president. Four years later, Trump’s own sickness—he was hospitalized in October 2020 with COVID-19—capped an election year in which events seemed to spin out of his control, and he lost reelection.
So if the Paxton campaign and its media allies had wanted to make political hay out of Talarico being waylaid by the flu (never mind that Talarico has Type 1 diabetes and is at greater risk for complications from viral infections), they could have done so, and it might have been effective.
On that note, may you have a wonderful and relaxing weekend that doesn’t involve inventing scandals about your political opponents. And thank you for reading.
Prime Minister Carney’s objectives are far more ambitious than securing an acceptable trade agreement or upholding Canada’s dignity amid withering ridicule from Trump. Indeed, the prime minister’s agenda calls for a wholesale reimagining of Canada’s relationship with the U.S. and a reinvention of his country’s place in the world. I caught a glimpse of Carney’s aspirations on Parliament Hill in late spring, during a hearing convened in the House of Commons by the Standing Committee on National Defence. With headphones on for the French-to-English translation, I heard aerospace executives from established domestic firms like Bombardier and startups like Canada Rocket Company testify before lawmakers about the prime minister’s “defense industrial strategy,” a blueprint to galvanize the nation’s atrophied military manufacturing base at a clip not seen since World War II. The program goes hand-in-glove with Carney’s bid to increase defense spending to 5 percent by 2035.
It is difficult to imagine two more different figures than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gadi Eisenkot, his primary challenger in this month’s election. Netanyahu was born into a prominent family, served as a soldier in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, spent significant portions of his life and career in the United States, and has held various positions in the political system since the 1980s. He is known for his rhetorical abilities, political ruthlessness, and experience. The former chief of staff, by contrast, is a stocky, dark-complexioned man who speaks mostly in dry, uninspiring sentences. He grew up in Israel’s periphery with parents who immigrated from Morocco. He enlisted in the military and spent much of his 41-year military career in the Golani Brigade, known as “the people’s brigade” for its broad popular appeal and storied combat history. In politics, he has positioned himself as a centrist. “Eisenkot is, in many ways, Netanyahu’s antidote,” Nadav Perry, a political commentator and host of one of Israel’s most influential political podcasts, told The Dispatch.
Today, in grasping for equality with men, we have abandoned belief in the natural distinction—biological and otherwise—between the sexes. Prevailing gender theory has taught women to become more like men, in their bodies and in their behavior, in order to enjoy “equality.” Crucially, for the original women’s rights activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, men and women could not be reduced to mere members of the human species. They understood that women have unique potential, strengths, and vulnerabilities that, by their very biology, men did not possess (and vice versa). The latest waves of feminism have sought to paper over these differences in order that they may not be used as a public cudgel against women, or pointed to as a sign of women’s innate “inferiority.” But, in abandoning the reality of biology, radical feminism has prompted an equally radical anti-feminist reaction. Young men on the right often consume “edgelord” content on X, where popular accounts promote the disenfranchisement, subjugation, and disempowerment of women. The evangelical pastor Doug Wilson openly argues for the repeal of the 19th Amendment. The John Adams Society, originally a co-ed debating club for undergraduates at Harvard, has pushed women from its ranks and banned them from joining.
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Add Us as a Preferred SourceRachael Larimore is a managing editor of The Dispatch and is based in the Cincinnati area. Prior to joining the company in 2019, she served in similar roles at Slate, The Weekly Standard, and The Bulwark. She and her husband have three sons.