Consider the story that began this text. The magic of my childhood wasn’t simply in my freedom, although I cherished my freedom. The magic was additionally in that dinner, or — extra exactly — in that house. It was in mother and father who cherished me, a sister who was additionally an in depth pal, and within the safety that nothing may shake our bond.
My Sunday column took a take a look at what we are able to be taught from two of the silliest controversies of 2025 — the weeks of right-wing outrage that just a few on-line leftists objected to a Sydney Sweeney advert marketing campaign and the volcanic anger that erupted when Cracker Barrel, a regional restaurant chain, adopted a brand new, “woke” company brand:
On one hand, it feels ridiculous to put in writing about Sweeney and Cracker Barrel — in spite of everything, I’m scripting this column on the identical time that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is waging a reckless war towards the foundations of our nation’s public well being. However these incidents are vital as a result of they’re illustrative of the best way the correct sees the world, and so they show the brand new proper’s concept of energy.
In case you needed to sum up the mission of right-wing media in a sentence, it could be: Democrats are bizarre, humorless and evil, and so they need to destroy your lifestyle. No distinction could be made between the Democrats and the far left — something that any far-left activist does is mechanically attributed to the Democratic Get together — and so the Democratic Get together has to reply for something the far left does.
Typically right-wing media can spotlight genuinely troubling extremism and intolerance. It has intently lined antisemitism on faculty campuses, for instance, and there have been a number of genuinely disturbing and intolerable incidents.
But when there’s a battle between telling the reality and stoking outrage, repeatedly, the correct chooses outrage.
The cardinal instance, after all, is collaborating in Trump’s basically dishonest marketing campaign to overturn the 2020 election, however there’s one thing profoundly dishonest about even the Sweeney and Cracker Barrel tales. There was no precise groundswell of opposition to Sweeney. There was no proof that Cracker Barrel’s redesign was “woke.”
It’s additionally fantastical to say that the restaurant is one way or the other dedicated to “homosexual race communism” (an odd place for a personal firm that’s clearly attempting to repair its declining stock price and reverse its diminishing net income).
The method of stoking outrage has one other impact: It crowds out the information cycle. Most Democrats I do know could be shocked at how little the common Republican is aware of about Trump’s precise conduct and his precise wrongdoing. Republicans can, nonetheless, cite chapter and verse about left-wing outrages and left-wing overreactions to Trump.
That creates a actuality the place they merely can’t conceive of how any cheap, rational individual would vote Democratic or oppose the president and his insurance policies.
