Sorry: Empowering a blatant antisemite is the opposite of serving "the needs of the world"; such unhinged hate is a warning sign of even deeper depravity.
Page A3From§Eachthe midnight edition — 2 September 2026
Vulnerable Democrats denounce socialism the same week the party is accused of selling its soul to it.
As it ran on the front
I had this page marked with an old gas receipt, which tells you how long it's been riding around in the notebook. Here it is — 'Democrats are selling their souls by accepting Abdul El-Sayed,' one outlet's word for it, right there in my handwriting where I copied it down. And underneath, same week, near as I can tell, same week: 'Vulnerable Democrats vote to denounce socialism amid midterm pressure.' I wrote both of those down the day I saw them, because something about the two of them sitting together didn't sit right with me, and I've learned not to trust the things that don't sit right until I've written them down at least twice.
The word I keep circling, and I've circled it three times now, is 'vote.' Not accused of. Not rumored to have. Voted. That's a different category of thing. An accusation is somebody's opinion about you, printed under somebody's byline. A vote is a record, on a roll call, that a person could go pull if they wanted to spend an afternoon at it.…
…(cont) So I got to thinking about the difference between what gets said about a person and what a person actually goes and does on the record, and I went out to the garage to work it through, because the kitchen's carried a lot of this house's thinking lately and I figure it's earned a week off.
Now, out in the garage I've got a toolbox, steel, three drawers, and in the top one there's a crescent wrench sitting next to an index card that says 'lent to Ted, get it back Friday.' If a fella walked up to you at the counter and told you I'd sold that wrench for good, given it up, washed my hands of it — and then you walked into my garage and opened that drawer yourself and found the wrench sitting right there, next to a card in my own handwriting saying otherwise — I wouldn't tell you what to make of that. I'd just tell you what's sitting in the drawer.
That's about the size of what I've got here. One document says the soul's been sold. The other document — the vote — is the card in the drawer. Maybe both things are true at the same time. I've seen stranger arrangements sit next to each other in this notebook and both turn out to hold up. My wife says I go looking for a pattern where there's just two people talking past each other, and she's usually the one who's right about that kind of thing, not me.
But I've been doing this long enough that when two documents land in the same folder and don't quite agree with each other, I write down the word that doesn't fit, and today that word is 'vote.' I closed the notebook on it, put it back on the seat of the truck, figured that was that for the day.
Actually — before you go, one more thing, since you're still standing there. If the soul really was sold the way the one story's got it, what's sitting in the drawer where the receipt for that sale ought to be?
“Somebody's lying about what this party even is, and it's not the socialists. One outlet says Democrats sold their souls to the left, and the same week the Democrats who are actually on the ballot vote to denounce socialism on the record. Pick a conspiracy, fellas, you can't run both at once.”
“Look, the New York Post is simply reporting what everybody already knows — the party's been captured by its socialist wing, full stop. I mean, obviously the same caucus just went on record denouncing socialism, which, if they were captured, why would they — you know, that's actually a fair point. Let me get back to you.”
The receipts
Several Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives voted with Republicans to adopt a resolution that formally denounces socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The move reflects increasing pressure on Democrats to respond to the successes of DSA-backed candidates in primaries around the country as Republicans…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.