SATURDAY: The messaging continued along...

SATURDAY, JULY 4, 2026

...right at the base of Mount Rushmore: In the last two weeks, we've alerted you to the rise of the sudden new messaging. 

Last night, the messaging continued. 

The sitting president was standing there, right at the base of Mount Rushmore. Sixteen minutes into the tapioca, he made an adjustment. 

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, at 9:21 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, the messaging began:  

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/3/26): You must love our country. There has never been anything like us anywhere on Earth, and we are not going to let anyone take that away.   

Yet as we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack. A generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of Communism, there is now a resurgence of the Communist menace in our land.   

With that, the messaging started. The president moved away from one childish theme—we're the best people who ever lived—directly to another.  

Shawn McCreesh was on the scene for the New York Times. In this morning's news report, he describes the sudden pivot:   

At Mount Rushmore, Trump Veers From Patriotism to ‘Communism’   

Four months before tough midterm elections, President Trump used the backdrop of Mount Rushmore one night before the nation’s 250th birthday to characterize his political opponents as “godless,” “evil” communists.

“We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish stupid and unwise,” he said...

The larger purpose of the speech wasn’t hard to miss. He was sharpening a line of attack that the White House has started to use to head off a newly insurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party that appears to be resonating with liberal voters.  

Mr. Trump read from an apocalyptic script as the stony faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln looked on. He said the word “communism” so many times, you might’ve thought the Cold War was still on.   

With respect to those stony faces, observers swore they saw a tear emerge from Mr. Lincoln's eye even as the current president executed two flyovers in his new Qatari jet.   

(Will he use the plane for personal travel if he actually leaves the White House? No one seems to have nailed down the answer, and our news orgs don't much seem to care.)   

Back to the president's address:  

Just exactly how many times did he say the word "Communism?" Moving one step beyond McCreesh, we offer a provisional word count:  

Word count, Mount Rushmore address
"Communist:" 6
"Communism:" 8 

By our preliminary count, that's 14 usages in the six minutes devoted to this part of speech, with one additional "Marxist" thrown in. 

(As best we can tell at this time, he didn't say the word "Commie.")  

For the record, who are the Communists creating the current Communist menace? On what basis was he assessing them to be Communists?

The president didn't say. But as the messaging spreads during the summer and into the fall, you aren't likely to see any serious discussion of that second question. Our national discourse simply doesn't function that way.   

We were struck by one part of the president's description of the Communist menace. No one believes that he's religious, but he stressed this set of claims: 

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Communism is the exact opposite of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It's death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.

The godless Communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions and to really propose [sic] what's good. They don't love God and they don't want God. They don't love religion and they don't want religion, and they won't have it. But we won't let them win.  

The unnamed foes aren't simply Communists—they're actually godless Communists. 

They don't love God and they don't want God. By prevailing rules of the messaging game, observers are supposed to believe that the sitting president does.   

Presumably, this will be the messaging as we move toward the mid-term elections. It wouldn't hurt for us Blues to recall the various ways, down through the years, that we helped create this mess.

REVERSIONS: Will the Democrats win either House this fall?

FRIDAY, JULY 3, 2026

Can we find a way out of this mess? Karoline Leavitt is back on the job at (what's left of) the White House.

Last evening, she was advancing the messaging which has taken shape since last Tuesday, when the mayor's three candidates won.

Assessed by standard cultural norms, the lady did look fabulous. On the other hand, as she started to speak, here's what the lady said:

LEAVITT (7/2/26): That was quite a monologue...This is not your granddaddy's Democrat [sic] Party. This is not the Democrat [sic] Party of JFK. This is a full-blown Communist revolution that is taking over Capitol Hill right here in D.C.

Let's be fair! In Red America's agitprop circles, it's been against the law to say the actual name of the Democratic Party for at least three decades. The childishness of that conduct is part of basic anthropology, but the refusal to say its name—the refusal to say its actual name—is not a MAGA invention.

That said, the claim that the Democrat Party is a coven of Commies is a piece of messaging which blew up last week when Mamdani's three candidates won. 

As for Leavitt, she was guesting last evening on Jesse Watters Primetime. During the opening monologue to which she referred, the chyrons had assisted with the messaging in the ways you see here:

COMMIES DON'T MAKE GOOD LIFE CHOICES 
COMMIES ARE WELCOME IN THE "BIG TENT"  
COMMIE: THEY'RE AFRAID OF OUR POWER 
TECH CEO: I WARNED YOU COMMIES WERE COMING   
DEMS GO FULL COMMIE BEFORE MIDTERMS 

As Watters delivered his monologue, large visuals behind him had offered additional thoughts:   

COMMUNIST REVOLUTION 
A CUP OF COMMUNISM 
PERV WATCH

No explanation was offered for the PERV WATCH visual. We're guessing that it wasn't meant as a description of Watters himself, but this is the way Red Americans are being messaged in the wake of last Tuesday's primary wins.   

This is no country for nuanced discussion! (Few things could be more clear.) As she continued to speak with Watters, Leavitt was soon saying this: 

LEAVITT: The way that we stop this Communist revolution in its tracks is for great Americans across the country who love America, who are celebrating her and 250 years of our great nation this week, to vote against this Communist revolution, vote against the Democrats. 

There's only one choice. It's President Trump, the Republican Party, and it's common sense. Communism versus common sense.   

"That's a good way to frame it," the thoughtful Watters thoughtfully said. "If the Commies get in, they're going to blow things up."

So it went as the messaging agents pushed the message along. The emphasis is somewhat different this time, but a reversion to the days of Joe McCarthy can almost be discerned at such times.  

That said, are any actual Communists getting nominated in Democratic Party primary elections this year? For example, is New York City Assemblywoman Claire Valdez a Communist?  

Under the circumstances, you're asking a fairly obvious question! That said, consider what happened when Valdez spoke with CNN's Erin Burnett, one day after she was nominated by New York City voters for a seat in the House:   

As we noted yesterday, Burnett mentioned the fact that President Trump was already messaging Communist. But wouldn't you know it? Burnett failed to ask the obvious question:  

Are you now, or have you ever been, a Communist or something like that?  

Burnett didn't ask, and Valdez didn't say. For the full transcript, click here.

That said, even as the interview started, producers posted a list of stances Assemblywoman Valdez was said to support. Six proposals appeared on the screen. This is what viewers saw: 

CLAIRE VALDEZ POLICY PROPOSALS
Universal rent control nationwide  
"Medicare for All"  
Shrink private sector, grow public sector 
Abolish ICE   
End all arms sales to Israel
Support Palestinian statehood  

Has Valdez actually made those proposals? In part because we watched this interview, we can't tell you for sure. 

For the record, three or four of those proposals tend to have majority support in nationwide polling. For starters, we refer to Medicare for All, to the abolition or replacement of ICE, and to support for Palestinian statehood.  

Ending all arms sales to Israel? This recent Economist/YouGov poll found that only 24% of all respondents supported that position. (An additional 17% favored reducing such sales, with 21% of respondents saying they weren't sure.)

That said, ending all arms sales to Israel was favored by 35% of Democrats, and by 47% of liberals. It was the most prevalent of four possible positions among each of those groups. Especially among liberal respondents, it was the dominant stance.   

Is Assemblywoman Valdez simply the equivalent of a liberal / progressive Democrat? Or is she somehow different? Given the current state of our public discourse, there's little chance that you will ever see anyone try to examine that question.  

On the other hand, the cries of Commie started quickly and they continue to come. They came from the giant platform of the sitting president, and from the most powerful organ, by far, in the realm of round-the-clock "cable news."   

That said, we advise you of this:   

Reversions are widely present within our agonized nation. Cries of Commie Communist Commie strike us as a groaning reversion by the right, but human imperfection being what it is, there's no way to stop reversions from taking place wherever we humans may gather. 

 In a new essay for The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait offers what may seem like a peculiar thought:   

Even today, Communists do exist within tour nation's population! Even today, there may be people who are drawn to such ideas, or at least so Chait says.   

That may seem like a surprising claim. Chait's essay appears beneath this double headline:   

IDEAS
There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists
The DSA was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become. 

With the weekend drawing on, we don't have time to walk you through Chait's extensive history of Democratic Socialists of America—the DSA. 

His history takes us back to the Michael Harrington era. We'll give you this small taste:  

A tragic irony of history is that the Democratic Socialists of America was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become.

The writer and activist Michael Harrington helped found the DSA in 1982. His goal was to build a socialist movement that would eventually pull the Democratic Party toward more humane domestic and foreign policies. He believed that a commitment to freedom of speech, elections, and other democratic norms was an absolute requirement for any socialist organization. And generations of bitter experience taught Harrington and his allies that socialist organizations had failed because they allowed communists to infiltrate them and take control of their organizing structures. Its founding bylaws accordingly permitted the expulsion of members who were “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization,” a slightly jargonish way of describing communists.   

A decade ago, the excitement generated by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign on the left and the frightening rise of Donald Trump spurred an influx of tens of thousands of young members. Some of the new recruits were Marxist-Leninist organizers who saw the DSA’s growing membership as fertile ground.   

And so on from there. 

Chait sees the DSA as a source of trouble. We offer a personal note:   

Some of (the parents of) our best friends have been Communists! That was true of the parents of a best friend in high school, but also of the parents of a close friend during our early years in Baltimore.   

There's a (cherished) third example we could cite, but we aren't going to do so. However, also this:  

In the street fighting days of the late 1960s. some of our best friends in college were drawn to the Communist-adjacent ideas of groups like SDS and the PLP. Other people were strongly drawn that way.

The ideas of those groups didn't make much sense to us—but they did to them, and our friends were very good people.  

Full disclosure:

There are no ideas on the face of the earth which won't appeal to some people. Some people may even favor abolishing borders and abolishing police! (Burnett didn't ask about that.)

Chait is afraid of the DSA. We can't swear that he's wrong. 

We can say that the cry of Commies Commies Communists is going to roll down like the waters of that famous mighty stream. The most challenging of the mayor's three nominees has already triggered a tsunami of negative messaging from the warrens of MAGA agitprop, and it isn't going to stop.

Beyond that, exercised Democratic voters may proceed to nominate candidates in certain districts and certain states who won't be able to win. (Or not!) Republican voters have taken that fall in the recent past. We Dems could do that too.

Will Democrats win November's elections? Evrything is possible, of course, but some things don't come to pass.

We don't know who's going to win. Nor are we sure that our struggling, routinely gonzo nation can find a way out of this mess.

THURSDAY: Pride in the nation, plus cable news ratings!

THURSDAY, JULY 2, 2026

It's the semi-stupidity, Stupid: We humans just aren't super-sharp. 

That doesn't mean that we're bad people; it means that we're people people. Still, this shortcoming tends to obtain all the way up the line:

Here's an anecdote from the career of (Lord) Bertrand Russell, IQ roughly three million. It's drawn from Stephen Budianky's 2021 biography of Kurt Gödel:

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel

[...]

(page 108): ...Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it could all be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond doubt. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems. The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion, "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."   

As far as we know, that "often remarked" fact is an actual fact. In Budiansky's formulation, Russell and Whitehead performed that act of labor in their giant text, Principia Mathematica.   

(How giant was it? According to Budiansky, Russell and Whitehead's "massive manuscript, with its complex notation which could only be written out laboriously by hand, had to be carted in a four-wheeler cab to the offices of the Cambridge University Press when it was finally done." Years after publication, Russell is quoted as having said this: "I used to know of only six people who had read the later parts of the book." Russell was gifted with a self-effacing sense of humor.)

In the passage we've posted, Budiansky seems to be chuckling about that apparent side trip to the dark side of Neptune on the part of Russell and Whitehead. One page later, he discusses a related, extremely well-known artefact of academic logic—the peculiarity famously known as "Russell's Paradox:"  

(page 109): "Russell's Paradox," as it came to be known, echoed paradoxes that had been around since antiquity. The prototype is the Liar's Paradox, attributed to Epimenides the Cretan, who asserted, "All Cretans are liars." Russell noted that this was akin to the conundrum posed by a piece of paper on which the sentence, "The statement on the other side of this paper is false" is written on one side, and the sentence "The statement on the other side of this paper is true" on the other.

"It seemed unworthy of a grown man to spend his time on such trivialities," Russell later recalled, and "at first, I supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradictions quite easily, and that there was some trivial error in the reasoning." The more he thought about it, the more he realized it was a flaw in the reasoning too deep to be ignored...  

Budiansky seems to be taking this foolishness seriously. We can't tell you why.   

At any rate, so it went as people with the planet's highest IQs ran down famous rabbit holes of their own peculiar making. 

Luckily, CNN's Harry Enten isn't quite that smart! On the other hand, he recently stood in line to join the crowd of observers who are puzzled, or who are willing to say they're puzzled, by this puzzling manifestation: 

...CNN Data Guru Stunned by Democrats’ ‘Nutty’ Lack of Pride in America

CNN’s Harry Enten expressed shock over Democrats’ lack of pride in America during a Tuesday morning segment previewing the country’s 250th birthday celebration.

After being asked, “Who is proud to be an American?” by anchor John Berman, Enten replied:  

"There is such a polarization, partisan split on this issue, the largest that I’ve ever seen. Just take a look at this. This is where it really gets interesting, and I would dare say a little bit nutty..."  

You can continue reading from there. Fox has been pimping this blather quite hard. We stop here to ask a question:  

Is there anyone alive on the planet who doesn't know why liberals, Blues, progressives or Dems might balk at expressing pride in this country at this particular point in time?   

Really? Is anyone really that dumb? You may not agree with, or share, the outlook of those citizens. But is anyone really so dumb that they can't discern at least one obvious reason for this "nutty" manifestation? 

Moving right along, we move to some recent cable news ratings, as reported by Forbes. We start with some of the basic numbers, before a Forbes writer does it again: 

Fox News Beats CBS, NBC And All Of Cable TV In Prime Time   

Fox News Channel ended the second quarter with a strong ratings delivery in June, leading not just every network in cable TV in prime time, but outperforming CBS and NBC as well. In June, Fox had an average weekday prime time audience of 2.63 million viewers, compared to NBC’s 2.42 million viewers and CBS’s 2.05 million viewers.

For the second quarter, Fox News finished first among the cable news networks with 2.5 million viewers in prime time, well ahead of MS NOW (1.06 million viewers) and CNN (716,000 viewers). 

For better or worse, Fox News averaged roughly 30 percent more viewers than MS NOW and CNN combined. Moving right along once again, these were the top-rated programs:  

FNC’s The Five continued its incredible run as the most-watched show in cable news...In the second quarter, The Five finished first with an average total audience of 3.58 million viewers, followed by Jesse Watters Primetime (3.23 million viewers), Gutfeld! (2.84 million viewers), Hannity (2.8 million viewers), and Special Report with Bret Baier (2.72 million viewers)—all airing on Fox News. 

[...] 

In June, The Five was most-watched with 3.39 million total viewers, followed by Jesse Watters Primetime (2.96 million viewers), Gutfeld! (2.64 million viewers), Special Report with Bret Baier (2.55 million viewers), and Hannity (2.41 million viewers).

As a rough rule of thumb, the dumber it gets, the more people watch. By the way, do those numbers include a given evening's rebroadcasts, or are they just the numbers for the initial airings? 

In all our years of checking such numbers, we've never seen anyone say!

Speaking of the stupidity, Stupid, we'll quit with this classic mandated memorized press corps howler:  

The end of CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert left Fox News with the most-watched show in late night, with Gutfeld! drawing 2.8 million viewers...

There's no way to make them stop doing this! According to every known expert, Gutfeld! airs at 10 p.m. in the east, 7 p.m. on the coast. According to normal parlance, it simply isn't a late-night show, except 1) in Fox News Channel propaganda releases, and 2) inside the brains of the journalists who rush to repeat such claims.  

Russell and Whitehead filled 700 pages. Judged by the norms of the species, they were extremely high-IQ. 

"Why does arithmetic need a foundation," Wittgenstein thoughtfully asked.

Thought question: If Fox let Hannity add an exclamation point, might it outperform Gutfeld!?

REVERSIONS: One nominee has some horrible tweets!

THURSDAY, JULY 2, 2026

The other two nominees don't: On Monday, it only got worse.

No, dear reader! Mayor Mamdani's three nominees aren't all exactly the same. For example, at least as far as we know at this time, only one of the three has generated an awkward situation like this:   

Mamdani-Backed Chevalier Praised North Korea’s Kim in Unearthed Communist-Friendly Tweets  

Deleted tweets from Darializa Avila Chevalier (D)—one of the three [sic] Democratic Socialist candidates who won their Democratic congressional primary in New York City last week—showed the congressional hopeful praising communists like North Korean founder Kim Il Sung and lamenting that books by Joseph Stalin weren’t available.

The tweets were unearthed by CNN’s K-File on Monday. Journalist Andrew Kaczynski reported Chevalier praised Karl Marx as an “essential must-read,” complained public libraries didn’t have enough books by Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist leaders, and was upset a bookstore’s “banned books” display did not include The Complete Works of J. V. Stalin. 

She also showed affection for several brutal communist leaders.

[...] 

The latest batch of unearthed tweets comes after previous deleted posts showed Chevalier describing the U.S. flag as a napkin. She also questioned interracial dating and called for abolishing borders and prisons.  

For starters, let it be said that Mediaite's Sean James opened with an apparent misstatement. In fact, only two of the three nominees are members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). 

The third nominee--former New York City comptroller Brad Lander--joined DSA as a University of Chicago student, way back in 1991. According to the leading authority on Lander's career, "he split with and left the Democratic Socialists of America in 2023 following the October 7 [Hamas] attacks."   

At present, two of the three are DSA; one of the three is not. But Avila Valdez is generating headlines which seem to belong to her alone--except on venues like The Five, where imitation journalists loudly pretend that behaviors engaged in by one of the three have of course been engaged in by all.   

As in The Sixth Sense, so too here--we Americans have a hard time seeing that we've already become a failed state! That said, are the other claims actually true--the other claims summarized by James? 

We aren't huge fans of Kacynski's overall work for CNN, but his new starts off like this: 

Deleted tweets on Darializa Avila Chevalier’s account had favorable references to communist leaders and Marxism

Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic congressional nominee endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who ousted longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat in Tuesday’s primary, maintained a since-deleted Twitter account with repeated sympathetic references to communism, Marxist ideology and Soviet figures, including Vladimir Lenin.

Avila Chevalier, a sociology PhD student whose victory sent shockwaves throughout the Democratic establishment, has been under fire for a since-deleted Twitter account, previously reported by CNN, that included phrases such as “seize the means of production,” along with calls to abolish police, prisons and borders. Other controversial tweets include one that said Black and Arab men are both “Fetishizing ugly colonizer women” and another that described wiping her dirty hands on the American flag in lieu of a napkin.

As an undergraduate, Avila Chevalier attended Columbia University, where she organized with Students for Justice in Palestine, and after graduation became involved in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. She also attended a controversial October 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square—one day after Hamas’ attack on Israel—that featured speeches and rhetoric praising the attack.   

There are some slippery accusation swimming around in that prose. We often get the impression, watching Kacynski's interviews, that his thumbs may perhaps be placed on some scales--sometimes in reports criticizing Blue targets, sometimes in alleged exposes of key Red figures.   

On the other hand, has Avila Chevalier issued "calls to abolish police, prisons and borders?" Does she issue such calls today? For the New York Times account of these awkward matters, see yesterday's report. 

(A brief aside: Avila Chevalier's past complaints about "ugly colonizer women” suggest that she might be best suited for a regular spot on the Gutfeld! show, whose host routinely attacks women with whom he disagrees for being too fat, for being too ugly, and for being insufficiently sexually attractive to satisfy his grisly demands.)

Of the three congressional candidates endorsed by Mayor Mamdani, no one has generated awkward copy in the way Avila Chevalier has done. By possible way of contrast, consider what happened when the third nominee, Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, was interviewed by CNN's Erin Burnett on Wednesday, June 24.

Assemblywoman Valdez, age 36 though perhaps looking younger, had won nomination the previous day. The interview started like this:  

BURNETT (6/24/26): Out front now, State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, and this is her first national interview since her win. And obviously, it's a win that has sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party, through the Republican Party, you name it.

Assemblywoman, you know, what do you -- what do you think? Now, you've had not even 24 hours here. What do you think your victory means?

VALDEZ: I think it means that the movement that elected Zohran Mamdani last year continues, and that the movement that has been fighting for working-class New Yorkers for years before his election continues. We have a lot to win, and when we go to working people, when we say, you know, "This is our platform. We want to fight for you, we want to fight to abolish ICE and win Medicare for All, to make your lives more dignified and affordable, to empower workers," that resonates with people and we win. 

And so, I'm very proud of the campaign.   

That's what the candidate said. In Burnett's next question, the C-bombs were cited. She asked about a reversion:  

BURNETT: [The president is] seizing, as are other Republicans, on your victory and other victories by Democratic Socialists here in New York as a negative. Let me just play some of what they've said.

PRESIDENT TRUMP (video): Well, they're going radical left. They're going really, you know, you talk about the Democrat socialists, you took really -- it's really Communist.

SPEAKER JOHNSON (video): These are the times that Reagan was warning about. He was warning about Communism overseas. Now it is on our own shores.

REP. SCALISE (video): Call it the Bolshevik Revolution of 2026, but the Mamdani takeover of the Democrat Party is official now.

BURNETT: Okay, now, I'm just going through here, and, you know, Trump using the word "Communist." Mike Johnson using the word "Communism." Is that a badge of honor to hear them talk like that?

VALDEZ: You know, I'm a proud Democratic Socialist. And what that means for me is that my union taught me that when we organize together, we can take on bad bosses, we can win good wages, we can win dignified working conditions. And it's funny that they would invoke Reagan, who famously decimated the labor movement, attacked-- after PATCO, really set the tone for what the federal government has done to the labor movement over the last decades.

My goal in running for office is always, "How do we get as many people as possible into unions? How do we pass the PRO Act? How do we stand on the side of working people so that they have the power to fight for themselves and their coworkers and their neighbors?" And that's the movement that I come out of, and I'm very proud to be a part of that.   

Communism, the Communists, and of course the Commies and Bolsheviks! People like President Trump had already swung into action--but is it actually true? Is Assemblywoman Valdez a Communist? 

 Is Assemblywoman Valdez a Communist? Possibly seeking to avoid participation in a reversion, Burnett never asked!  

Along the way, as the interview proceeded, CNN listed the policies Valdez supports. The list of policies appeared on the screen as the interview proceeded.  To watch the full session, click here.

Were we supposed to be shocked by the policies Valdez supports? Tomorrow, we'll show you what those policies were--and we'll show you how they're polling.   

All in all, one nominee has left a trail of awkward, embarrassing, exploitable tweets. As far as we know, the other two nominees haven't. 

On Fox, they're screaming about the Commies.  We regard that as a striking reversion, but there are quite likely others to choose from.

Tomorrow: Chait spots a different reversion