One of the things that happens a lot on the center right is adjudicating who you're still willing to talk to after a reporter calls you a white supremacist or a stooge of Putin.
It can get pretty ridiculous. You can have a street and a train station named after your family in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and some random person with a laptop can say you're part of the KKK.
You can be officially banned, as I am, from traveling to Russia - not just for marrying a McCain but for humanitarian work preceding it - and it doesn't stop Daily Beast writers from saying you literally work for the dictator who banned you.
Tulsi is experiencing a bit of this right now. Dipshit journos parroting Kamala talkers about Trojan Horse stuff only reveal how easily they are used. Real obvious who those are. And none of it responds to the Tulsi critique.
At the end of the day, I take many of these people to be useful idiots without a real brain in their heads. But it's concerning how many of them have real platforms. It's like Jimmy Kimmel telling you what a bill says: Pretty dumb.
Oh, this is convenient: here's someone who misquoted me and my employees and smeared us as white supremacists. Zero humility. No engagement. Wanting to fix Baltimore is racist.
Why do most DC thinktanks still exist when they've had zero policy successes for the past 8 years, with the obvious exception of Brookings engineering Russiagate?
As I've written previously, the policy successes of the DC right thinktanks were welfare reform (Heritage), the Iraq surge (AEI), and judicial shift toward liberty (Cato, the most successful). What have they done in the past ten years?
I can list the accomplishments from @ManhattanInst @FamStudies @NCLAlegal @TheFIREorg off the top of my head ... but their budgets are much smaller.
First, not a single candidate Trump endorsed who lost backed his fictional "no exceptions even in the case of rape incest or life of the mother". Literally zero Republican candidates think abortion should be banned when a mother's life is at risk.
Second, Trump claims the pro-life position moved large numbers of voters against Republicans. Yet the most pro-life R incumbent candidates all won! DeSantis, Kemp, Abbott, DeWine, go down the list. And all the Senate candidates who won were super pro-life too. Oops!