FRIDAY, MAY 29, 2026
Democratization's spawn: Why do certified experts insist that our nation already qualifies as a classic failed state?
Look at what remains of the discourse, these experts all say—and sure enough! Last night, the assault on the possibilities of the American project was present again, for all to see, on the second most-watched "cable news" program within the American firmament.
Talarico was being baited again. The Times was averting its gaze:
Stephen Miller Goes All In On Schoolyard Talarico Taunts: ‘Less Testosterone Than Jasmine Crockett’
Stephen Miller went all in on taunting Texas state Rep. James Talarico on Thursday, telling Jesse Watters that when the Senate candidate gets his blood drawn, “soy milk comes out.”
Miller joined Jesse Watters Primetime to discuss the still unresolved conflict with Iran, before moving to a favored topic for both men–attacking Talarico’s masculinity. The top advisor to President Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday that Talarico was the “first transgender Senate candidate” – a post that made headlines after the official DNC account replied by calling him an “ugly f*ck.” Miller repeated the line to Watters on Thursday, before launching into a long, insult-laden rant against Talarico.
“Well, first of all, I think it’s very bold, one could say brave, courageous, that the Democratic Party would choose Texas of all places to nominate their first transgender Senate candidate,” he said.
Willa Pope Robbins was on the scene again, reporting for Mediaite. (videotape included), Believe it or not, the transcript runs like this:
WATTERS (5/28/26): Could we see another historical defeat in Texas? Because the Democrats have nominated James Talarico, who to me just screams "Texas."
MILLER: Well, first of all, I think it’s very bold, one could say brave, courageous, that the Democratic Party would choose Texas of all places to nominate their first transgender Senate candidate.
He’s clearly transitioning into a female. You know, when Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn’t come out; instead, soy milk comes out. This man has less testosterone than Jasmine Crockett.
It is a mind-boggling choice. They would choose a person to run for that office who looks like he doesn’t belong in the Senate but in a cabaret show. Look, at the end of the day, I have a hard time believing that the people of Texas, some of the toughest, roughest, strongest men and women, the pioneer heritage, the frontier history, from the Mexican American war, through the Alamo and everything else, are going to choose somebody with that much soy to be a U.S. senator compared to a real conservative patriotic, God-fearing and truly be loved statewide figure in Ken Paxton.
WATTERS: They should have nominated Crockett!...God bless him, as they say down there. More UFO files straight ahead.
(For the slightly fuller videotape, you can start clicking here.)
So it went, with UFO files coming next, as millions of American citizens watched from locations within our failed state.
No, Virginia! James Talarico isn't transgender, nor is he "transitioning into a female." (Elsewhere, some people are.) Also, there have been no published reports of soy milk in his veins.
Regarding the question of Texas heritage, the hopeful has said that's he's eighth generation; we've seen no one dispute that claim. Other Texans have elected him to the Texas legislature, where he has served four terms.
In that transcript, you're looking at the latest swill from the garbage can Suzanne Scott pries open each night at Fox. In fairness, Watters didn't make the mistake this time of openly saying "gay."
As we noted yesterday, he had done so the previous day; it was part of the latest ugly clown show performed by him on The Five. That had been a bit of a rookie mistake, but also a mistake born of ardor.
Experts say that a modern nation which tolerates this is, in fact, a failed state—and there was a time, not long ago, when swill like this would never have been seen or heard on a nationwide "news" broadcast.
Those days are long gone, the certified experts all say. They say this low-IQ garbage is with us for good. It's the fruit of democratization.
Not long ago, people like Watters and Miller had to seek each other out in furtive fashion. But then, the democratization, along with the rich, did come into our lives.
Talk radio came, and the Internet came, and 24-hour cable news went demonically partisan. After that, social media came, and before long the crowning blow:
Before long, the podcasters came! The rise of these new platforms created the world described by this new bromide:
Every gay-baiter a king!
These people could find each other with great ease now; they could congregate in large numbers. At the Fox News Channel, ownership hired as many of these people as they could.
As a result, we the people can now hear gay-baiting, and trans-baiting, along with ugly insults directed at women, pretty much whenever we please.
A new subgroup had been formed. An earlier type of discourse is gone, but various subgroups remain.
Democratization let this world emerge. Helen Lewis explores this new world in her lengthy cover report for the June edition of the Atlantic.
Lewis may be our most instructive current writer. Inevitably, she lives across the pond.
Yesterday, we linked you to her current essay. As we noted, it carries this dual headline, and her text begins as shown:
THE MEN WHO WANT WOMEN TO BE QUIET
A virulent form of misogyny has become the single most important force holding together the American right.
Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”
Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.
Douglas Wilson is more a pastor than a podcaster, but he does have a video-streaming service. He's connected to Pete Hegseth, and he doesn't want women to vote.
Wilson is entitled to his views—and as we've noted, matters of sexuality and gender have always been hard. When Moses descended from the mountain, his tablets didn't describe the perfect way to structure relation between men- and women-folk.
It's too bad that he didn't! As we noted yesterday, European literature begins with the Iliad, a war poem built around the belief of its principal characters that society should be built around male subjugation of women. That includes the subjugation of Helen, radiance of woman, and the subjugation of the kidnapped daughter of the local priest to Apollo:
"Never again, old man,
let me catch sight of you by the hollow ships!
Not loitering now, not slinking back tomorrow.
The staff and the wreaths of god will never save you then.
The girl? I won't give up the girl. Long before that,
old age will overtake her in my house, in Argos,
far from her fatherland. slaving back and forth
at the loom, forced to share my bed!
So said the furious Agamemnon, the furious lord of men.
Years later, Lewis is exploring the attitudes displayed by Agamemnon's heirs. She started with the Pastor Wilson, but soon she began to cite the furious podcasters who now people the land.
As with the troops under Agamemnon, the roll call of these furious fellows goes on and on and on. Before long, Lewis reports what Pastor Wilson says on his website, and she also states the name of the movement she is exploring:
[There is a] twinkly, avuncular Douglas Wilson, the guy who joined a hippie congregation fresh out of the Navy because he liked to play guitar...
But the 72-year-old shows a different side on his website, Blog & Mablog. For more than two decades, Wilson has been airing piquant opinions on unruly women—or, as he calls them, “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “Jezebels.” He once referred to Gloria Steinem and another feminist as “a couple of cunts.” And this is the polite version. Every year he celebrates “No Quarter November,” when he promises to tell readers what he really thinks.
[...]
Wilson is a prominent voice in what is sometimes called “masculinism”: a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men.
Podcasters and streamers and websites oh my! Lewis quotes one podcaster after another as she describes the reach of this throwback subgroup—a subgroup which was able to form in the way it has thanks to democratization.
There is, of course, no way to prove that the views and beliefs of any of these "masculinists" is somehow actually "wrong." As for Lewis, who is very bright, she is bright enough, and decent enough, to mention an accurate point;
Like most popular movements, masculinism has many entry points, and both defensible and alarming forms. At one end of the spectrum are legitimate concerns about male loneliness, the declining share of men in higher education, stagnant wages for non-college-educated men, and the deadening effects of day-trading, gaming, and porn. At the other end of masculinism are a misogynist vocabulary about AWFULs and the longhouse (terms that we’ll come back to) and a political agenda close to that in The Handmaid’s Tale, whereby women are denied the right to work, vote, and control their own bodies.
Respectable concerns are floating around inside this movement, Lewis is willing to say. (More on that next week.)
But then she turns back to (for example) the "misogynist vocabulary about AWFULs"—braindead language the brain-damaged dumbbells of Fox were yukking it up with only a few months back.
As Lewis explains at a later point, AWFULs are Affluent White Female Urban Liberals, a point which Gutfeld and Watters did in fact find amusing. And with that, we finally reach our one point of complaint:
In her essay, Lewis cites a wide array of masculinist streamers and podcasters, not excluding some women. She never mentions the grisly, abundantly braindead subgroup members who have been hired to play this way on the ersatz "cable news" shows of the ersatz Fox News Channel.
To a remarkable extent, Greg Gutfeld has dropped his former nightly practice of comparing the women of The View to horses, cattle, pig and cows, but also to whales and "livestock." (This certified idiot finds Joy Behar—she's 83—perhaps a bit too portly.)
That said, this strange man can't seem to quit the practice of insulting women in the ugliest ways possible. For his part, Watters seems to be a genuine nutcase when it comes to his incessant list of rules about what men should and shouldn't be allowed to do.
(Real men don't lick ice cream cones, Real men don't drink from straws.)
They also like to bash and bait people who are trans or gay. They like to bait people as gay even if such people actually aren't. This is all part of an ancient pattern, in which sexuality and gender have always been challenging—hard.
As this conduct continues on Fox, the New York Times averts its gaze—refuses to report the fact that this surprising journalistic behavior is taking place. As a general matter, the Atlantic is silent too—and even Lewis failed to mention the furious heirs to Agamemnon who patrol the nation's most-watched "cable news" programs for three solid hours each weekday night.
Agamemnon swore that he wouldn't surrender the girl. The rise of the movement Lewis describes suggests that these attitudes are deeply bred in the bone.
Some of these fellows may simply be wired in such a way that these reactions can't be stopped from surging up into their undersized heads. But these reactions are widespread, and a mutt like Gutfeld—the guy is 61 years old!—teaches young men, on a nightly basis, that this is the way they should see the world and that this is the way they should play.
You can take them off the plains outside Troy but you can't get the furies to leave them. They want to be in charge of the girls. We'll guess that, in large part, they're simply wired that way.
The democratization of media has let them find other angry men who are so inclined. They're no longer on the plains near Troy, but that blood still runs through their veins.
Gutfeld insults women every night. The New York Times refuses to report this surprising fact, along with the fact that he and Watters very much like to slime decent people and very much like to bait gays.
Cronkite and Brinkley are long gone. Brought off the bench by democratization, Watters and Gutfeld remain.
