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Tucker Carlson’s ‘skin-crawlingly creepy’ description of Donald Trump

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At a Wednesday rally for Donald Trump in Duluth, Georgia, disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson showed up in the guise of an emcee from a psychosexual nightmare realm.

After describing the American public as “a 2-year-old smearing the contents of his diapers on the wall” and “a hormone-addled 15-year-old girl slamming the door and giving you the finger,” a red-faced Carlson proposed a solution. “There has to be a point at which Dad comes home,” he said, to full-throated cheers from the crowd. “Dad comes home and he’s pissed. He’s not vengeful, he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. … And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.”

And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.

TUCKER CARLSON AT A TRUMP RALLY IN DULUTH, GA

The crowd went wild. And when Donald Trump came to the stage, it greeted him with rapturous cries of “Daddy’s home.” This segment of the nation, it seems, is eager for a spanking. Or at least titillated at the prospect of pain inflicted on others. This is not a new phenomenon within the MAGA movement, which has always been keen on the pain of those it deems wayward — but it is a florid illustration of the way patriarchal family dynamics and punishment stand at the center of contemporary right-wing morality.

Carlson, of course, is hardly the first person to conceptualize the nation as a family, although he may be the first to engage in a blissed-out ode to spanking on C-SPAN. George Lakoff, linguist and philosopher, posited that conservative ideologies rely on a “strict father” metaphor to conceptualize the nation and how it should be ruled. In his 2006 book “Thinking Points,” Lakoff explained that in this model, “The strict father is the moral authority in the family; he knows right from wrong, is inherently moral, and heads the household. … Obedience to the father is moral; disobedience is immoral. … When children disobey, the father is obligated to punish, providing an incentive to avoid punishment.”

Authoritarian conservatives, Lakoff argues, apply the strict-father model “not just to all issues but to governing itself.” In this vision, the state and its leader adopts both absolute control and the moral necessity to punish.

But Carlson’s words might have had a special resonance for a particular breed of authoritarian conservative: members of the evangelical right, who have been Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers; 77% of white evangelical protestants voted for Trump in 2016, and 85% did in 2020. Carlson — a maestro at knowingly appealing to the far-right masses — utilized a skin-crawling, sexualized misogyny in the culmination of his metaphor. But his central appeal to an angry father was consonant with a 50-year movement on the Christian right, one in which tens of millions of Americans have experienced, firsthand, the consequences of disobeying Daddy.

In the 1970s, in response to the student-led social revolutions of the 1960s — civil rights, feminism and gay rights — a newly awakened religious right created a movement designed to quash the impulses of rebellious youth. It was called “biblical parenting.” Its first megahit was James Dobson’s incredibly cruel book “Dare to Discipline,” which instructed parents, in great detail, to take a “rod of correction”-centric approach to child rearing. Dobson, founder of the evangelical institution Focus on the Family, recommends regularly spanking children from the ages of 18 months to 10 years old, with a spanking “of sufficient magnitude to cause tears.” This will efficiently quash “willful, haughty disobedience.”

Published in 1970, the book quickly sold millions of copies and launched a movement that centered God, and the rod, in child rearing. It’s a movement that has endured in millions of households across America, and across generations — leading to a new cadre of people, like the baying crowd in Duluth, for whom authoritarian principles were first nurtured in the home.

For my recently released book, “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America,” I reviewed 50 years’ worth of evangelical parenting manuals, from 1970 to 2017, and conducted  interviews with nearly 150 former evangelicals who were raised according to “biblical parenting” principles. Evangelicals also evince a consistently higher approval toward corporal punishment in polling than other groups, a case of successful propaganda enforced with paddles, switches, sticks and hands. The through line throughout decades of these parenting manuals, and in testimonies, was an emphasis on corporal punishment, sometimes brutal, in order to enforce, in the words of youth-centered ministry Youth With a Mission, “instant, joyful obedience.”

In this family model, the strict father isn’t just the moral core of the household; he is also its spiritual head, with the mother as a submissive co-enforcer. Obedience to parents, according to these texts, is both a necessary prelude for and expression of obedience to God. The stakes are existentially high: One frequently cited verse is Proverbs 23:13 — “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.” This system coerces parents into using physical violence on their children in order to save their souls. And in an extension of Lakoff’s “strict father” model of the nation, this model of the family, predicated on obedience enforced with physical violence, creates an authoritarian politics in its practitioners.

The best way to rebuke authoritarianism is to not just rebuke it, but to defeat it and make it look ridiculous and weak.

Consider that a child who has been systemically beaten in the name of God since toddlerhood grows up to be accustomed to brutality and to exhibiting instant and joyful obedience to authority no matter how capricious or unjust. Someone who empathizes with the aggressor to survive, and is inured to brutality by repeatedly being subjected to it. When you ask what might motivate a crowd of people to cheer on the idea of a national spanking — to picture, with approval, a nation submitting to punishment by an abusive father as just and righteous, a necessary corrective to disobedience — you might not have to look any further than the kitchen tables they were raised around as kids, where wooden spoons were broken on their backs.

The best way to rebuke authoritarianism, to break the tyranny of the strict father, is to not just rebuke it, but to defeat it and make it look ridiculous and weak. Mockery and defeat undoes the authoritarian more effectively than violence. When a system is predicated on a cartoonish hypermasculinity, the solution is to treat its leaders as deserving of ridicule, not fear. And until voting ends next month, we have the chance to do just that. To disobey, with glee and en masse, the edict of this punitive would-be father. He’s not our dad. He’s just a man on a mission of punishment, and we can — and must — deny him that chance.

Talia Lavin

Talia Lavin is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, GQ, The Village Voice, The New Republic and many more publications. She is the author of the books “Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy” (Hachette Books, 2020) and “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America” (October 2024). Her newsletter, The Sword and the Sandwich, is featured in Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024.

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Texas Democrats have returned home, ending redistricting standoff

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Texas Democrats who left the state to stymie Republicans over redistricting have returned to Austin, ending a two-week standoff over President Donald Trump’s plan to carve out five new GOP congressional seats.

Their return to the state means the Texas House now has the sufficient number of legislators needed to pass a new map benefiting the GOP. Democrats had used the gambit to stall legislative business and bring national attention to Republicans’ decision to pursue off-cycle redistricting ahead of the midterms.

In a statement, the Texas House Democratic Caucus said that members returned on Monday morning “to launch the next phase in their fight against the racist gerrymander that provoked a weeks-long standoff with Governor [Greg] Abbott and President Trump.”

The drama in Texas set off a national redistricting battle, most prominently with California Gov. Gavin Newsom vowing to retaliate against Texas Republicans by extracting an equal number of Democratic-leaning districts from California’s congressional map. Trump has also been pushing to take his redistricting plan to other Republican-led states, like Indiana and Missouri.

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Inside the DNC’s money problems

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The Democratic National Committee has fallen far behind in the cash race.

After a brutal 2024 election and several months into rebuilding efforts under new party leadership, the DNC wildly trails the Republican National Committee by nearly every fundraising metric. By the end of June, the RNC had $80 million on hand, compared to $15 million for the DNC.

And the gap — nearly twice as large as it was at this stage in Trump’s first presidency — has only grown in recent months, a Blue Light News analysis of campaign finance data found, fueled by several distinct factors.

Major Democratic donors have withheld money this year amid skepticism about the party’s direction, while the small-dollar donors who have long been a source of strength are not growing nearly enough to make up the gap. And the party has quickly churned through what money it has raised in the first half of the year, including spending more than $15 million this year to pay off lingering expenses from Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

The DNC has less cash this summer than it did at any point in the last five years.

“I understand that donors want some kind of a reckoning,” said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist. “But I also think that the kind of state party building that I think [DNC Chair] Ken [Martin] wants to do at the DNC is really vital to our success. And so I hope people kind of get over themselves pretty quick.”

The fundraising troubles reflect ongoing questions about the DNC’s direction under Martin, who was elected earlier this year, and comes as the DNC has faced months of bitter infighting. Continued cash shortages could limit the party’s ability to rebuild for a new cycle. And the DNC’s money woes stand in particularly stark contrast to Republicans, who have leveraged President Donald Trump’s fundraising prowess to raise record sums.

“Chair Martin and the DNC have raised more than twice what he had raised at this point in 2017, and our success in cycles thereafter is well documented. Under Ken, grassroots support is strong,” DNC Executive Director Sam Cornale said in a statement. “It’s now time for everyone to get off the sidelines and join the fight. Rebuilding a party is hard — rebuilding relationships and programs take time and will require all hands on deck to meet this moment.”

The DNC’s money woes stand out among major Democratic groups, Blue Light News’s analysis found: Democrats’ House and Senate campaign arms are near financial parity with their Republican counterparts, and several major donors who have withheld funds from the DNC are still giving to those groups.

“Donors see the DNC as rudderless, off message and leaderless. Those are the buzzwords I keep hearing over and over again,” said one Democratic donor adviser, granted anonymity to speak candidly about donors’ approach.

The DNC, on the other hand, touts Democrats’ success in state and local elections this year as proof the party’s investments are paying off. The group also began transferring more funds to state parties this year, and argues it is better-positioned financially than it was at this time in 2017, when it also significantly trailed the Trump-powered RNC.

Some Democrats attribute the slowdown among donors primarily to the need for a break after 2024, and the challenges of being the party out of power. Large donors would rather bump elbows with high-profile figures like a president or House speaker; Democrats cannot put on those kinds of fundraising events right now. The DNC also struggled for cash during Trump’s first presidential term, and that did not stop Democrats from taking back the House in 2018, or winning the presidency in 2020.

Still, the longer the DNC struggles to build up cash, the harder it will be to close that gap heading into the 2026 midterms and beyond. And the fact that other party committees are not seeing the same financial struggles puts more responsibility on Martin and his team to figure out a way to right the ship.

“Obviously, the sooner the DNC and other Democratic-aligned groups can get investment, the better. It’s better for long-term programs on the ground, it’s better to communicate our message early on,” said Maria Cardona, a DNC member and Democratic strategist. “However, I think you’re going to see donors coming into those things because they are starting to see Democrats fighting back, and that’s what they want.”

Just 47 donors gave the maximum contribution to the DNC in the first half of the year, according to the Blue Light News analysis of the party’s filings with the Federal Election Commission. Over the same period in 2021, more than 130 donors gave a maximum contribution. (In 2017, when the party was similarly struggling with large donors, the figure was 37.)

That means dozens of the DNC’s biggest donors from early last cycle have not yet given to it this year — accounting for several million dollars the party group has missed out on this time.

Many of those biggest donors have continued to contribute to other Democratic groups and candidates, indicating they are still aligned with the party and willing to dole out cash — though often not as much, and not to the DNC.

In the run-up to the DNC chair election earlier this year, several large donors publicly preferred Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, to Martin, who long served as the leader of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and also led the Association of State Democratic Parties.

“If Ken [Martin] really wanted to impress donors, he’d go do 20 or 30 salon events with donors and let them yell at him,” said the Democratic donor adviser. “If you take that on the chin, make some changes, then I think we could see some movement. But [he’s] not going to do that.”

With large donors lagging, the DNC has touted record grassroots fundraising from online donors. On ActBlue, the primary Democratic online fundraising platform, the group raised $33.8 million over the first six months of the year, up from $27 million over the same time in 2021.

But the total number of online donors was roughly the same in both periods — suggesting online donors are giving more than they were four years ago, but the group’s donor base has not expanded substantially.

Most DNC donors this year were contributors to Harris’ campaign or the DNC last cycle, according to the Blue Light News analysis. Another 14 percent of donors had no record of donations on ActBlue last cycle, suggesting the DNC is finding new small donors — but not nearly fast enough to make up for the drop-off among large donors.

In fact, the rate of online giving to the DNC has slowed in recent months. The party’s best online fundraising month was March, when it raised $8.6 million on ActBlue from 254,000 donors; in June, the party raised $4.1 million on the platform from 157,000 donors.

And reaching those online donors comes at a cost: The DNC has spent $5.7 million on online fundraising this year, according to its FEC filings. On Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram, it is one of the largest political spenders this year, according to the platform’s data. The total spent on fundraising expenses so far is nearly as much as the DNC has sent to state parties this year.

Another set of major expenses also stands out for draining the DNC’s coffers: continuing to pay off expenses from Harris’ failed 2024 presidential bid.

Her campaign ended last year’s election with roughly $20 million in unpaid expenses, according to people familiar with its finances, although none of Harris’ campaign committees or affiliates ever officially reported debt. The DNC has spent $15.8 million total on coordinated expenses with the Harris campaign this year, including $1.3 million in June. A party spokesperson declined to comment on future campaign-related payments.

Elena Schneider contributed to this report.

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Conservatives mock Comey over Taylor Swift video

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Conservatives mock Comey over Taylor Swift video

Conservatives are mocking former FBI Director James Comey over a post he made on his Substack on Sunday in which he discussed his admiration for pop superstar Taylor Swift. The post features a video of Comey calling Swift “a truly inspirational public figure” and noting her recent appearance on NFL stars’ Jason and Travis Kelce’s…
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