Michael Mann demands a court packing litmus test for all Democratic candidates, joining Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg in the push to reshape the court.
Page A3From§Eachthe midnight edition — 31 August 2026
One Fox pundit demands a Democratic litmus test; another applies it, faulting a candidate over Christian remarks.
As it ran on the front
Here's how you run a con with a byline: first you publish the demand — 'litmus test for all Democratic candidates,' straight from a law professor, no shame in it, right there in the piece. That's step one. You don't say what the test measures yet. You just establish that a test exists, and that everyone running has to take it. Step two, a different columnist, different week, applies the test to an actual person, and — surprise — the guy fails, because two years ago he said something about Christians being villains, and now that's the disqualifying grade.
Nobody had to coordinate this. That's the part that fools people into thinking it's not a strategy. It doesn't need a memo. You just publish 'there should be a test' on Monday and 'this guy fails a test' on Thursday, and the reader's brain does the connecting for free, because that's how these things get built now — not as a conspiracy, as a genre. A litmus test is just a purity requirement with a lab coat on. It sounds clinical. It sounds neutral, like you're checking pH, not deciding who gets to run.…
…(cont) And notice what the actual content of the failing grade was: comments where the guy agreed Christians have, in some historical arrangement, been villains. That's a sentence you could find in a seminary textbook. That's not radicalism, that's undergrad church history. But run it through the litmus paper and it comes out red, because the test isn't measuring truth, it's measuring loyalty to a specific narrative about who the real victims are in this country.
The point of a litmus test for 'all Democratic candidates' was never to filter one guy in Texas. It's to make every other Democrat watch what happened to him and adjust their own answers in advance, before anybody even asks the question. That's the actual product being sold here — not an opinion, a chilling effect, wearing an opinion's clothes. Cheap to produce, runs in two papers, no byline required to take credit for the outcome.
“First guy says every Democrat needs to pass a purity test, then the next column runs a Democrat through it and fails him for something he said about Christians. That's not commentary, that's the test being built and graded in back-to-back bylines.”
“Voters ask candidates about their values all the time, that's called vetting, not a litmus test, and if a candidate previously said Christians are the villains, voters are allowed to weigh that — that's just democracy, that's not disqualification, well, the piece is literally headlined that it won't win Texas, so maybe it's a little bit disqualification.”
The receipts
A resurfaced interview with Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico won’t help the candidate win in Texas during the midterm elections, Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha said on Fox News’s Saturday in America. “If he’s running for…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.