Jiu-Jitsu Red to Blue: Crushing MAGA Under The Weight of Their Own Arguments

To look at the mainstream media — let alone the right-wing media machine — there isn’t a college in America that isn’t being torn apart by pro-Palestinian demonstrations and the anti-semitism they are said to feed and feed upon.  Host Tish Durkin suspects that the truth of these protests is much more complicated. In part one of an ongoing look at the academic wars, she visits the encampment in her own backyard: Princeton.

Everyone knows: MAGA has made it easier and easier to buy guns, carry guns, transport guns. Everyone needs to know: MAGA has also made it easier and easier to steal guns. Along with the steep rise in the number of Americans who own guns has come a steep rise in the number of Americans who leave guns lying around, unsecured in their cars or trucks — and, therefore, a steep rise in the number of criminals who just break in and help themselves. Every year, a conservatively-estimated 40,000 firearms are stolen from unattended vehicles, which are now the nation’s number one-source of stolen weapons. Whether sold on the black market or repurposed right away, these weapons are clearly used to commit further crimes. This has become a huge problem for — and danger to — law enforcement. But for all their anti-crime, pro-police screaming and shouting, MAGA politicians refuse to do a thing about this. In a number of state legislatures across the country, Democrats have proposed the most basic, common-sense measures to promote safe gun storage in vehicles, by imposing very mild penalties for failing to do so — and Republicans have resisted. Clearly, they think the right to bear arms extends to not just to Americans, but to Americans’ cars and trucks, even when there’s nobody inside who could possibly need protecting. Host Tish Durkin is not surprised. But on behalf of the thousands of people who inevitably become victims of this MAGA malfeasance, she is appalled.

OK, host Tish Durkin is never really going to defend Alabama senator Katie Britt, who would be scary with or without her weird and widely-panned response to Joe Biden’s State of The Union address. But she does think it’s worth attacking some of Britt’s attackers.

In the giant funhouse mirror that is American politics today, this may be the weirdest distortion of all: by any objective measure, Joe Biden has created one of the most successful administrations in modern U.S. history — and members of his own party are palpably, if not openly, wishing they could get rid of him.

Jobs and wages are up. Crime and inflation are down. Crumbling roads, bridges and ports are being pulled back from the brink of collapse. Thanks to Donald Trump’s blocking of a hard-won bipartisan deal on border security, even immigration is packing less of a political punch for the Republicans. Yes, Gaza is a catastrophe — but, for those who care about the Palestinians, there is no reason to believe that any Republican would handle it any better, and every reason to believe that the top Republican would handle it much worse.

Meanwhile, Democrats nationwide have been over-performing in one election after another for years now. And yet, many of those who claim to support the Biden agenda can be heard in every corner, all but echoing Fox News talking points about the fitness of Biden himself. This is uniquely driven by polls which, terrifyingly, do show Biden trailing Trump. But polls, as host Tish Durkin points out, are intrinsically flawed snapshots, not divine prophecies…unless, of course, Biden’s “supporters” keep working overtime to fulfill them. 

Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court handed down a decision which stated that embryos frozen for purposes of in vitro fertilization count as full human children, and the GOP had a massive collective heart attack. This is bizarre because, for purposes of forbidding abortion, this same GOP has put infinite money and muscle into legislation, jurisprudence, field operations and propaganda fiercely dedicated to its supposed conviction that embryos — and zygotes and blastocysts and just about everything past a gleam in Daddy’s eye  — count as full human children. Could it be that “pro-life” Republicans are far less interested in the absolute value of unborn life than in the comparative political appeal of women who desperately want children versus women who desperately don’t? Host Tish Durkin is just asking...

 In 2019, the New York State legislature passed significant bail reform. In 2020, crime spiked nationwide. The MAGA-mired GOP raced to connect the two — and a number of big-name Democrats ran right along. Fast forward to today: Bail reform, albeit amended, remains largely in place — but in New York as elsewhere, crime is on the decline. Host Tish Durkin welcomes Michael Gianaris, Deputy Majority Leader of the New York State Senate and author of the Bail Elimination Act, to take a deep breath and a clear look at what turns out to be the not-remotely-awful truth about ensuring that, as a rule, the unconvicted should also be the unincarcerated.

Fox News hyped its recent Ron-DeSantis-vs-Gavin-Newsom smackdown as a great debate between red and blue. Of course, it was really just a chance for the two governors to bash each other by drawing the supposedly-great contrast between their two states. Notwithstanding her impulse to side with Newsom over the dark lord of book bans, reproductive surveillance and fossil fuels, Tish Durkin finds it’s the whole boxing-match premise that really needs to be knocked out. After all, Florida actually is California, just at an earlier stage of its economic miracle. Instead of jeering California for its population losses, DeSantis should be working to protect Florida from the downsides inherent in its population gains — the same downsides with which California is now being forced to come to terms. Instead, for reasons known only to the man who would out-Trump Trump, he’s doing the exact opposite. God help the Sunshine State.

The whole point of Jiu-Jitsu Red to Blue is to leave the usual (if well-taken) lefty talking points to the usual (if wisely-spoken) suspects, and focus on the myriad of ways in which the MAGA-mired GOP is actually weak on every one of its alleged strong suits. Every now and then, however, an exception must be made. In light of the unexpectedly strong Democratic showing in the most recent round of elections, everybody noted that the post-Dobbs abortion outlook has, yet again, turned out to be very bad for Republicans.

In this reboot of regularly scheduled episodes, host Tish Durkin can’t resist delving into the less-noted ways in which, going forward, it stands to get so much worse.

If the U.S. House of Representatives go dark for an indeterminate period of time to figure out who its leader is, this podcast can go quiet for a few weeks, quite literally to hear its new voices. Host Tish Durkin signs off until mid-November, one year before the all-important election of 2024. The Halloween candy will likely be gone, but the turkey won’t yet be gobbled,  when JiuJitsu Red to Blue comes back,  with new and intriguing partners in political conversation. 

The stunning indictment of Democratic senator Robert Menendez might not seem like a great counterpoint to MAGA — but if you ask host Tish Durkin, it is. Three reasons why: It refutes the GOP gripe that the Department of Justice does not go after Democrats. It leaves plenty of time for New Jersey’s Democratic primary voters to pick a fresh, clean candidate. And, given the calls from state and local co-partisans for Menendez to resign, it shows that Democrats, unlike MAGA Republicans, have their limits in terms of how far they will go to preserve, protect and defend the crooked characters in their midst.