Living in a Cage of Fear Leads to Dumb Messaging

We look to our elected officials to understand current politics better than we do, so this is bad:

Based on the Supreme Court’s order referenced by Jeffries, the judge handling the Garcia case demanded that the government disclose where he’s being held. Yesterday, there was a hearing in front of the judge who originally had the case and she tried to get the government to disclose Garcia’s whereabouts and the DoJ basically refused, setting up yet another test for the courts. This has been the pattern of the Trump Administration. Jeffries’ premature spike here is dumb.

This is dumber:

Even some idiot writing a blog told his readers on April 9, 2025 that Trump keeping Chinese tariffs at 125% renders his supposed back down meaningless, and the markets were plummeting yesterday when Chuck’s social media team tweeted this out.

AOC and Bernie are criss-crossing the country to huge crowds (LA today, Utah, Idaho and Montana on Sunday, Monday and Wednesday). Both of our titular leaders are getting ratioed into the earth on social media, and Schumer is running around trying to keep his job. Why?

My take is that they’re in a cage of their own making. They think some billionaires are good, specifically the ones who give them money, so they can’t call out insider trading or the oligarchy too hard. They don’t want to stick up for immigrants too much because their pollsters say that people don’t like immigrants. They run and hide when trans rights come up, or worse. This cage of fear is so goddam limiting.

It’s not a huge mystery why a former waitress from the Bronx who’s smart and quick on her feet, and a curmudgeonly old guy who has been saying the same things for 20 years are far more popular than these two guys. AOC and Bernie believe in something, and they’re not afraid of saying it. This is the time in our politics where people who don’t live in a cage of fear, and have some clue how they’d use power if they got some, will advance.

The politicians living in fear cages are making a bet that, yet again, Democrats will win the midterms and 2028 on the strength of being not-Trump. Even Canadian PM Mark Carney, who in his bones is a cautious central banker, sees the massive opportunity that Trump has given him, and he’s got a pretty ambitious plan for fighting tariffs and strengthening his country. The path that Jeffries and Schumer want the party to follow will lead to tiny incremental change that will frustrate people who voted for them, and then the voters will grab the wheel and we’ll be in the ditch again.

So, in short, I’m with Kay: against the status quo.