I am standing outside Democratic National Headquarters, watching the party throw a party. It looks like so much fun! James Talarico is toasting Gina Hinojosa. Abdul El-Sayed is mocking JD Vance. Troy Jackson is leading a conga line with Adam Hamilton, Josh Turek, Sherrod Brown, Amy Acton, Roy Cooper, Annie Andrews, Jon Ossoff, Peggy Flanagan, Chris Pappas, Deb Haaland, and Keisha Lance Bottoms dancing along; Mary Peltola and Scott Colom are standing to one side, hoping to join in. It sounds like champagne bottles are popping every thirty seconds.
But out here on the sidewalk, I am hunched over in a raincoat over an open flame along with a cluster of college-town liberals. We ran a good candidate—Ray Bilger, a veteran with a distinguished service record and a kickass vintage 1971 Cutlass Supreme. You would think—and the local Democratic party certainly hoped—that he might just check a few culture-war boxes and draw some support from the rural voters in northern and northwestern Pennsylvania who keep re-electing Glenn “GT” Thompson even though GT is a complete cipher. Well, not complete. He did vote to cut their Medicare and he does not seem perturbed by the fact that so many hospitals have closed in his district that women are now driving across three counties to have their babies delivered by EMT personnel. When asked about his support for the war in Iran, which has spiked gas and diesel prices into crisis range for the rural poor, he replied, in perfect MAGAspeak, that we have been at war with Iran for 47 years. He is, however, very committed to promoting whole milk, so there’s that.
He defeated Bilger 62.3% – 36.5%. No blue tsunami, obviously, can ever be strong enough to reach Pennsylvania’s 15th district.
This is not a surprise. It has long been a minor branch of Republican political science to gerrymander college towns, and somewhat-blue Centre County (which Bilger won by 14 points) shares a Congressional seat with seventeen other counties with names like Forest and Elk, where you can always find houses festooned with flags celebrating Pennsylvania’s proud Confederate heritage.
Nevertheless, my household—which is now officially a compound, ever since our firstborn and his wife and their two charming children moved into the house behind ours—is in full celebration mode. Despite the discouraging returns from the heart of Trumpistan, there are at least two reasons to be cheerful today.
The first, obviously, is the scale of the victory: Senate seats and governorships that had seemed totally out of reach just a few months ago. Control of the House and Senate. There is hope—for now, still only a hope—for a reckoning that will rein in the most corrupt and vicious administration ever to blight the Republic; that will bring ICE’s murderers and torturers to justice; that will send Steven Miller to prison; that will rebuild our public health infrastructure; that will undo (to whatever extent possible) the depredations of DOGE and Hegseth’s purge of the armed forces; and that might even, just for the hell of it, release the Epstein files (hey, remember the Epstein files?). Beyond that, the more distant hope—in time and in likelihood—that Supreme Court reform is understood as the absolute necessity Josh Marshall has long been insisting it is, and might we consider statehood for DC and Puerto Rico? (Guam and the Virgin Islands will just have to wait.)
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The second reason to be cheerful is that this massive blue wave follows—and perhaps was even strengthened by—some of the most unhinged batshit Republican campaigning in the long history of batshit.
Somebody, apparently, saw that Texans were worried about the price of beef and gasoline, and that Latino voters were repelled by ICE’s war on brown people, and decided that the thing to do was to spread the word that James Talarico is a gay vegan who throws up when he tries to eat meat and oh yes also checked into a mental health facility in … Ohio?
Yes, Ohio, where somebody else decided that the best thing Vivek Ramaswamy could do in the closing weeks of his campaign was to insist, and then insist even harder, that Amy Acton was lying about having been raped by her stepfather at the age of twelve. “What we need right now,” someone apparently said, “is to lock down the protect-the-child-rapist vote. That’s our base. Go find Acton’s mother—she’ll definitely deliver for us bigtime.”
“Or better yet!” replied another advisor. “Let’s have the President himself stand in front of the Reflecting Pool he destroyed and babble incoherently about how much money the oil industry is raking in!”
But for sheer WTFness that no ordinary person can understand, nothing can beat the very online right. And no, I’m not talking about the Department of Education’s Halloween memes or the Ramaswamy campaign’s decision to tweet out an AI-modified photo of the candidate in which a woman’s breasts are hyperinflated, a man in the background is blown up to the size of Jabba the Hutt, and Vivek’s skin is about three shades lighter. I’m talking about the Anakin Skywalker memes.
A few days ago, some drug-addled Nazi trillionaire posted something about Anakin Skywalker seated on a throne along with Padmé and little Luke and Leia, captioning it “this is what they stole from us.” And the brain worms infesting the site formerly known as Twitter decided that this would be the right’s winning message: Make the Dark Side Great Again! But for some far-right influencers, this wasn’t sufficiently compelling. “No,” they said, “championing Darth Vader doesn’t go far enough. We need to replace that squish Padmé with a gender-bending version of Draco Malfoy, and call her ‘Malfoid.’ That will definitely keep Iowa, Kansas, and Ohio in the red.”
Tim Walz had a word for these people. It was the right word.
Now, I’m betting that no one reading this knows any of these shitposters personally. But there is another, more insidious form of weirdness spreading on the right, and if you have unfortunate forebears, you might actually encounter it in the real world. I don’t have any MAGA family members, myself. I have plenty of MAGA neighbors, like the pleasant elderly man who was determined to own the college-town libs by wearing his TRUMP 2028 hat to the local Y on election day. But because my family is MAGA-free, I didn’t know about this new thing until the Amy Acton ad dropped—whereupon savvy people explained that though it seems vile to normies, it actually taps into a larger phenomenon, a new genre of MAGA grievance we might call the Great Parental Estrangement Crisis.
On Bluesky, the indispensable Michael Hobbes rightly called this “a quietly metastasizing moral panic,” but Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, with her finely-honed sense of MAGA pathologies, diagnosed it two years ago: for some reason, selfish millennials and Zoomers are cutting off contact with their loving parents. Sometimes it’s because they have self-righteously determined that they are not OK with people who are OK with a regime that leaves brown children orphaned by shipping their parents to concentration camps and/or countries they’ve never lived in; sometimes it’s because they choose “identity over family,” which is MAGA code for young people refusing to stop being gay or not agreeing to detransition before the holidays.
Over the next two years, as the newly energized Democrats do all the things I’ve enumerated above while launching Woke 2.0 (even crazier! woke with a vengeance!), instituting shari’a law, leading struggle sessions as dictated by critical race theory, and requiring all women’s sports to permit trans men to play (especially in field hockey and squash, the perennial holdouts), those estranged parents will surely become even more estranged. And weird. Let us all be kind to these people—from a safe distance.
