Fast Takes: Dems totally gaslit us on Platner, the DSA is wrecking our party and more

“Even before all the scandals,” fumes National Review’s Jim Geraghty, the left celebrated disgraced Democrat Graham Platner “with an astonishing degree of credulity and acclaim,” given his total obscurity and “poppycock” public persona.As “disturbing revelations” from his past piled up, Platner insisted “he had no other dark secrets,” and “Democrats lined up to endorse him” even though (or maybe because) “he had just arrived on the scene.” His only strong belief was that “Israel was evil and controlled Washington,” but top Democrats insisted this “scuzzy” candidate was “solid and reliable.” Such massive “gaslighting” by the Democrat leadership served to conceal the fact that “Graham Platner is an awful human being,” a fact that was “as hidden as a supernova from the start.”“The democratic socialist surge” has “stunned the nation,” observes Evan Barker at the Free Press — but “I wasn’t surprised”: “I taught DSA-aligned staffers how to build a money machine for the left; coached progressive politicians on how to speak to donors; and collaborated with billionaires to create a robust fundraising network.” But I also “witnessed a daily bashing of white people, animosity for the ‘deplorables’ who voted for Trump, deep hatred of men, and an obsession with race that infiltrated every conversation.” The only hope? That Democrats “condemn” these radicals’ “belief systems” and show the world how they’ve driven “the party of the working class” to abandon “every ideal it claims to represent.” Otherwise, “this far-left earthquake .

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will not stop in deep-blue cities.”In his Mount Rushmore speech, President Trump warned that “our American identity [is] under a renewed attack, a generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism,” yet a week later, “more socialists had won Democratic Party primaries,” grumble the Washington Examiner edit...