Gross political opportunism, poorly disguised as caring for a colleague. Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) took to X to hound his New Jersey colleague, GOP Rep. Tom Kean, after his return to work after being hospitalized for depression: "I believe every person should have access to mental health support, including paid time off and sick leave. Congressman Kean has opposed these very benefits for all workers that Members of Congress get. It’s time for that to change." Kim’s mean-spirited partisan hackery was at least expected. Less defensible was PBS News Hour’s “journalism” Tuesday. Reporter Lisa Desjardins: Our Kyle Midura caught up with the congressman today to ask about his pledge of transparency. Producer Kyle Midura: Does this experience changed how you think about access to health care, mental health services more generally? When you committed to full transparency, was the extent of that always going to be one floor speech? Are you going to open up at some point, take questions? PBS producer Kyle Midura hassles Rep. Kean, recently hospitalized for depression: "Has this experience changed how you think about access to health care, mental health services more generally?" pic.twitter.com/r1craxT46u — Clay Waters

On Tuesday afternoon's On the Line show, during a discussion of the Supreme Court decision upholding bans on transgender participation in women's sports, MS NOW legal analyst Lisa Rubin claimed that Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion is "not talking about science," and it  "speaks of hate, not of jurisprudence." MS NOW host Alicia Menendez put on the leftist spin by declaring that the decision is a "major blow to transgender rights." She soon went to MS NOW contributor Kimberly Atkins Stohr, who asserted: "There is ample evidence that transgender girls and women playing sports pose not -- neither a competitive nor a physical risk to cisgender athletes, which is basically the basis upon which Justice Brett Kavanaugh based much of his decision." MS NOW Sees 'Hate' in Clarence Thomas Comments on Males in Women's Sports pic.twitter.com/wB5WlYjcIK — Brad Wilmouth (@bradwilmouth) June 30, 2026 She soon complained about "fearmongering" by conservatives: ... trans women who are receiving hormone therapy are either the same or sometimes at a lower level of -- of endurance, ability, strength, jump height, all the measures of sports that they're not putting anyone in danger competitively or physically. Yet these are the talking points that conservatives have been using and have found to be politically useful in fearmongering against trans people. And now the court has sort of embraced that rationale absent evidence. That's the part that is really troubling for me. Toward the end of the segment, Menendez brought up Justice Thomas's words: Lisa, you wanted to talk about Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion. I want to read you just a little bit from it, and then you'll unpack for me why it matters. He argued, quote, "A man does not have to be -- does not have a legal right to compete against women just because he believes that he is a woman," and, quote, "men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe they are." This goes beyond the legal scope of the case. These are like right-wing talking points that are showing up in his concurrence. Rubin soon complained: He's not talking about science. He's citing sort of like philosophical articles for the proposition that sex is immutable, that it's binary that man, woman, boy, and girl are terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex. And here I'm quoting from his concurrence, to use language to obscure reality, to show, quote, "indifference regarding the truth is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens as equals." She then argued that the other majority members were trying to distance themselves from Justice Thomas's choice of words, and concluded by claiming that his argument was based on "hate." Here's Rubin: Now, I was wondering earlier today when I read the majority opinion, it goes out of its way to say that people on both sides of this issue are worthy of respect, whether they identify as trans women or as cisgender, biologically born females. "Everybody who wants a space on that playing field is worthy of respect." And that stuck out to me because that's not something we've heard this court say this week about other disfavored litigants. And I wondered: Why did Justice Kavanaugh include that? That's why. Because that statement and Justice Thomas's concurrence is one that even the justices in the majority want nothing to do with because it speaks of hate, not of jurisprudence. Transcript follows: MS NOW's On the Line June 30, 2026 1:38 p.m. Eastern ALICIA MENENDEZ: This morning, the Supreme Court delivered a major blow to transgender rights. In a 6-3 ruling, the court sided with Idaho and West Virginia, upholding their bans on trans athletes and women's and girls sports, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing that, quote, "schools may determine eligibility for women's and girls sports based on biological sex." (...) KIMBERLY ATKINS STOHR, MS NOW POLITICAL ANALYST: There is ample evidence that transgender girls and women playing sports pose not -- neither a competitive nor a physical risk to cisgender athletes, which is basically the basis upon which Justice Brett Kavanaugh based much of his decision. In fact, it shows evidence -- the growing amount of evidence, because still there are still studies going on, and we're still figuring this out, as Sotomayor points out. But that points that trans women who are receiving hormone therapy are either the same or sometimes at a lower level of -- of endurance, ability, strength, jump height, all the measures of sports that they're not putting anyone in danger competitively or physically. Yet these are the talking points that conservatives have been using and have found to be politically useful in fearmongering against trans people. And now the court has sort of embraced that rationale absent evidence. That's the part that is really troubling for me. (...) MENENDEZ: Lisa, you wanted to talk about Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion. I want to read you just a little bit from it, and then you'll unpack for me why it matters. He argued, quote, "A man does not have to be -- does not have a legal right to compete against women just because he believes that he is a woman," and, quote, "men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe they are." This goes beyond the legal scope of the case. These are like right-wing talking points that are showing up in his concurrence. RUBIN: And it doesn't even embrace the science. I mean, both sides here had scientific experts -- one for the plaintiffs essentially saying that trans athletes who take puberty blockers are no differently situated than cisgender women. The folks who are defending the statutes that were anti-trans athletes said, "No, actually, there is a biological difference between the two that has nothing to do with circulating testosterone, and it is like an immutable physical difference between the two, regardless of what side you take on that." That's not what Clarence Thomas is citing. He's not talking about science. He's citing sort of like philosophical articles for the proposition that sex is immutable, that it's binary that man, woman, boy, and girl are terms that correspond to adults and children of each sex. And here I'm quoting from his concurrence, to use language to obscure reality, to show, quote, "indifference regarding the truth is to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens as equals." Now, I was wondering earlier today when I read the majority opinion, it goes out of its way to say that people on both sides of this issue are worthy of respect, whether they identify as trans women or as cisgender, biologically born females. "Everybody who wants a space on that playing field is worthy of respect." And that stuck out to me because that's not something we've heard this court say this week about other disfavored litigants. And I wondered: Why did Justice Kavanaugh include that? That's why. Because that statement and Justice Thomas's concurrence is one that even the justices in the majority want nothing to do with because it speaks of hate, not of jurisprudence.

Commies are taking over the Democrat party! You might think that was a charge leveled by some rightwing reactionary who somehow confused socialism with communism. Instead it was the morbid fear expressed by longtime liberal Jonathan Chait in Wednesday's Atlantic magazine, "There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists." So panicked was Chait at the specter of communism taking over his beloved Democrat party that he did not just mention it in passing. In fact, the C-word was invoked eleven times in Chait's article in which he accuses the Democratic Socialists of America of being the parasitic pathway for injecting communism into its host party. 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. So how did that attempt to somehow keep communism out of a socialist party work out? Not well as could have been expected. The communist influx threw open the question of whether the DSA would support authoritarian parties and states around the world. Communist organizers, as Harrington feared, began to reshape the DSA as an ally of any anti-Western force, even the most murderous and oppressive. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the DSA opposed the invasion but blamed it on “the expansion of NATO and the aggressive approach of Western nations,” and opposed any military aid to allow Ukraine to defend itself. Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left. In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated. ...The DSA’s Red Star caucus was formed the year after the North Star caucus, in an apparent rebuke. It writes that nearly half of the members of the National Political Committee, the DSA’s highest leadership body, “openly identify as communists.” Almost half of the DSA's leadership are "openly" communist so that should make that leadership mostly communist when you factor in the secret communists. And now that party with its mostly communist leadership is in the process of taking over the Democrat party: ...During the New Deal era, Stalinist organizers pitched themselves as “liberals in a hurry.” The Progressive Party, which ran Henry Wallace for president in 1948, was secretly run by Communist Party loyalists, but it appealed to standard liberals by touting themes such as civil rights, economic justice, and an end to the Cold War. The DSA employs a similar formula, drawing voters in by denouncing oligarchy and genocide and promising to expand health insurance. Chevalier’s campaign, like those of other DSA candidates, has focused on affordability, fighting corporate greed, and similar progressive themes. When she was asked by MS NOW if she is a communist, she replied, “I’m not. I’m a democratic socialist,” and called questions about her adherence to totalitarian ideologies “a distraction.” ...The DSA’s long-term strategy is to exploit the Democratic Party’s ballot access and reservoir of voters to build its following, and then, after it gains enough power, break off to form its own party, after which the husk of the old Democratic Party would wither and die. This gambit is called the “dirty break,” a term coined by a 2017 article in the left-wing magazine Jacobin. A bit of faulty logic on the part of Chait here. Why would the commies who take over the Democrat party need to "break off to form its own party" if they already control the Democrats as we now see happening with little pushback from the current Democrat leaders? Finally, almost by TDS muscle memory force of habit, Chait makes sure to take the obligatory shot at Orange Man Bad by absurdly associating communists with MAGA: "Democrats are likely to face the same kind of pressure that Republicans confronted with MAGA’s hostile takeover: first to ignore their allies’ sinister goals, and then to rationalize and eventually justify them."

Brett T. at Twitchy chronicled how the tweeters mocked the liberals at Axios for warning: “GOP reboots the Red Scare as young Democrats embrace socialism.” They don't want to spend any time identifying the actual communist sympathies displayed by the Democratic Socialists of America candidates winning primaries.  The use of the term “Red Scare” always implied falsehood, that there were no actual communists to be exposed. Warning about the dangers of the Soviet Union was for kooks, and so was worry about communist spies in the United States (they were real). Today, you're supposed to ignore communists winning seats in Congress, as in CNN gumshoe Andrew Kaczynski's report that incoming congresswoman Darializa Avila Chevalier was tweeting communist content in 2020: Archived posts and retweets during this timeframe included a recommendation that Karl Marx’s Capital was an “essential must-read,” a complaint that public libraries did not carry enough Marxist literature by Lenin and other revolutionary writers, and a retweet from a Communist-identifying account lamenting that bookstore “banned books” displays did not include The Complete Works of J. V. Stalin. Graham Platner identified as a communist in a 2020 Reddit post, but he gets a syrupy cover story in Time magazine, must like Zohran Mamdani did. But who needs to present evidence? Axios implied communism's on the ash heap of history (so pay no attention to say, China or Cuba or North Korea): 70 years after the Red Scare and 35 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, President Trump and Republicans are trying to re-introduce a national fear of "godless communists" ahead of the critical midterms. Why it matters: A wave of resounding victories by Democratic Socialists has the GOP trotting out a message that last worked when most of those candidates weren't even born. It's too soon to know if the message is working — but Trump and Republican strategists see an opening with voters old enough to remember Soviet-era nuclear drills and spy dramas. So the right-wingers are still channeling Tom Clancy novels, those crazy kooks. Then came the "reality check"!  Reality check: Democratic socialism is not communism. New York's Zohran Mamdani and Washington, D.C., mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George both call for expanded government programs, Axios' Josephine Walker writes. "Any attempt to smear us as 'extremists' falls flat when so many Americans are struggling with the rising cost of housing, homelessness, unaffordable healthcare, and underfunded schools," a DSA spokesperson told Axios in a statement. Mamdani spoke of "seizing the means of production," which certainly sounds like Karl Marx copy. Axios presented DSA statements as "news" like helpful press aides.  PS: Axios also wants you to believe that establishment Democrats are "centrists," not liberals, with this piece: House Dem centrists plot Mamdani Caucus counterattack Moderate House Democrats are warning they're prepared for "war" if incoming progressives and democratic socialists try to hijack the House floor to secure ideological concessions.

While Americans were coming together to celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, warmly welcoming the many nations of the World Cup into our home, and cheering on America’s team from living rooms, bars, and stadiums across the country, the miserable crones of ABC’s The View were trying to divide and spread hatred. Here’s examples of how they hated on America in 2026. When America toppled Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in a one-night raid, they couldn’t admit it was a good thing. Co-host Joy Behar clutched her pearls that America would have the nerve to take out a dictator and then whined about America’s military might and that it was directed at a smaller, weaker nation: Here’s what I don't understand. I may not be up on all of this stuff because I have a life. But, okay, Maduro is a bad guy. We took him out. So is Kim Jong-un, so is Putin, so is -- what's that other guy in Hungary? And we're going to go into all these countries and just kidnap the leaders?! (...) Its always somebody who is weaker than we are! It's always a country that we can overpower! It's not China. It's not Russia. It's not North Korea. Sorry Joy, but every country is weaker than we are. America’s unhealthcare system is unmatched.   Behar admits she doesn't actually follow the news and topics she has to talk about because "I have a life." Then falsely claims Maduro was "kidnap[ped]." pic.twitter.com/NOOFE6HOBp — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) January 6, 2026   Amid the war with Iran, not-so Sunny Hostin ridiculously parroted anti-American Soviet propaganda suggesting that the United States was the greatest nuclear threat in the world.  “I think we can also agree that this country is the only country that has ever used a nuclear weapon! This country! This country!” she shouted when guest co-host and CNBC anchor Sara Eisen stated the fact that the world would be better with Islamic regime of Iran in it. It also sounded similar to when she and moderator Whoopi Goldberg claimed last year that being black in America was worse than living in Iran.   The View's Sunny Hostin suggests America is worse and more of a threat to the world than Iran because the U.S. nuked Japan 80 years ago (if that's not her intent, then why even bring it up?): HAINES: Because we view, as Americans, our lives are different, they matter now.… pic.twitter.com/PB7yOjYyky — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) March 20, 2026   Their anti-Americanism really skyrocketed in June as the Fourth of July quickly approached. In two different episodes, Behar and Hostin insisted that Americans should be embarrassed of their country. According to Hostin, not only was America an embarrassment, it was also a “failed experiment”: HOSTIN: And at this point, I am embarrassed at our government. I'm embarrassed at our lack of healthcare. I'm embarrassed on the assault on the press. I'm embarrassed of our Congress. I'm embarrassed by the criminal felon president that is in the Oval Office that has a UFC cage on the White House lawn. (...) HOSTIN: I'm embarrassed about all those things. And I'm also embarrassed at how America is now seen across the globe. I don't think that many Americans understand that we are part of a wonderful global community. And when you look at our allies, our allies are now giving us a one-star rating as a country. While I am conflicted about this country because I feel that it is at this point a failed experiment, quite frankly.    Sunny Hostin, who once said she was more comfortable in Ghana than America, says she's "embarrassed" by the country as America nears 250 and calls it a "failed experiment" in self governance: SUNNY HOSTIN: And so I think we have a very complicated history here. I think it's a… pic.twitter.com/gILwK0E8y8 — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) June 5, 2026   As a counter to President Trump’s recent speech praising America on the National Mall ahead of America’s 250th birthday, Behar tapped a soundbite of comedian Larry David’s hatred of America because of the UFC event at the White House. And Behar agreed: DAVID: It was a travesty, yeah. What else can you say about it? It was embarrassing. I was embarrassed to be an American, yeah. [Cuts back to live] [Applause] BEHAR: So, I have -- I'm very good friends with Larry David, and so I'm not going to -- I think he's right in many ways. I mean, you listen to Trump. We have -- we used to have friends around the world. Now we don't have them anymore.   The View decries celebrating America's 250th birthday. Joy Behar agrees with Larry David that it's 'embarrassing' to be an American pic.twitter.com/PUAzTFUI6J — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) June 26, 2026   Behar went on to declare that “we should all be” "embarrassed" to be Americans. In another part of Hostin’s comments, she said she’s “discouraged by how this country is viewed by the rest of the world.” Well, given how the World Cup tourists have been embracing American culture and having a blast in the various cities across the country, you’re full of it, Sunny. And here’s my evidence:   This fills me with pride as an American. pic.twitter.com/7y2iLfgBml — Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) July 2, 2026