Grab bag: Gaslighting, groceries, Greene, and the Great War

If you didn’t take my advice the other week and ended up talking politics over the Thanksgiving table, you might have been caught off guard by your lefty family members’ quick dismissal of political events. For years, we’ve simply called this a “bubble” — the comfortable space where liberals digest and regurgitate CNN soundbites to the nodding approval of like-minded partisans.

But, the issue — especially as we head into 2026 — is a serious one for Republicans if they hope to engage midterm voters with effective messaging.

The fact is, the Democratic Party pursues a policy so radical that it sounds like fiction, and when Republicans point it out, the media treats the accusation as a conspiracy theory. Park MacDougald, writing in Tablet last year, coined the perfect term for this dynamic: “The Insanity Defense.”

The strategy relies on the average voter’s healthy skepticism. Most Americans are normal, pragmatic people. When they hear a claim that sounds utterly insane — for example, that the government wants to socially transition children behind parents’ backs or that major cities should nationalize grocery stores — their instinct is to say, “That can’t be true. No one would do that.”

We experienced this during last September’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. When Trump claimed Harris wanted to perform “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” the media class erupted in mockery. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser cited it as proof of Trump’s derangement. The problem, as MacDougald points out, is that Trump was telling the truth. Harris had explicitly supported that policy in 2019. But because the policy itself was so far outside the Overton Window of sanity, the media could successfully frame the mention of the policy as the crazy part.

Thanks in part to our fractured and failing media, this dynamic now presents a strategic hurdle for the GOP already on their heels from November’s wipeout. While well-informed voters may see through the gaslighting, many less engaged voters — and certainly dyed-in-the-wool Democrats — still view many legitimate issues as “beyond the pale” exaggerations. To them, the Republican description of Democratic governance sounds too hysterical to be real.

This presents a serious danger. Democrats know they cannot win on their cultural record, so they are pivoting hard to an “affordability” agenda to mask their actual views and actions when in power. They want the 2026 election to be about cost of living and economic anxiety (despite having no plans to address these challenges beyond pumping more money into bloated government programs and NGOs) so they can quietly obfuscate their record of radical social engineering that 80% of the country opposes.

The challenge for the GOP is messaging these 80/20 issues — where the vast majority of Americans agree with the conservative position — without sounding like cranks. Republicans must find a way to peel back the mask and show low-information voters the reality of the Left’s agenda, preventing them from hiding their radicalism behind a newfound concern for the working class. If the GOP fails to do this, the Insanity Defense will work again.

Fitzpatrick’s CNN interview highlights the health care trap

In an interview with CNN this past weekend, U.S. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-1) sounded the alarm on a calculated political ambush he sees coming for the Republican Party. While the House conference remains focused on its legislative agenda, Fitzpatrick used the national platform to issue a crucial strategic warning: The expiration of enhanced Obamacare subsidies at the end of this year is a “ticking time bomb” that Democrats have intentionally left behind to blow up on the GOP’s watch.

“Doing nothing is not an option,” Fitzpatrick told the network. His warning isn’t a criticism of conservative principles, but a recognition of the trap the Left has successfully engineered. Democrats have spent the last few months on a strategic tear — shutting down the government, weaponizing health care narratives, and then reopening Washington without offering a single solution. They have effectively boxed the majority into a corner.

The nature of the trap is simple but deadly. Democrats broke health care with the partisan passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2009, put billions of dollars into bandaids during Covid, and are pushing for a blind extension of “temporary” pandemic-era subsidies to keep the system afloat (if not effective). They know these subsidies are fiscally irresponsible (read: riddled with fraud and funneling taxpayer cash to households earning up to $500,000), but they are betting that Republicans will refuse to extend them. If that happens, Democrats will wash their hands of the inevitable price hikes and blame the “GOP cuts” for a crisis that is actually the result of their own broken policy design.

This is where Fitzpatrick offers the escape route. He argues that the party cannot simply vote “no”” and allow the collision to happen, nor can they capitulate and extend a wasteful system. The only way out of the trap is to pivot immediately to a viable replacement plan.

Fitzpatrick looks at the current House schedule — featuring votes to “condemn socialism” and regulate college sports — and argues that while well-intentioned, these moves fail to disarm the immediate threat. “Why are we focusing on that?” he asked in the interview. “That’s not what our constituents care about.”

The solution, Fitzpatrick suggests, is to redirect that political capital toward neutralizing the health care cliff. “Angry people vote; happy people don’t,” he reminded the audience. To escape the trap, the GOP must demonstrate a “tough spine” by refusing to rubber-stamp the fraud-laden subsidies, but they must also provide the “safety net” that prevents a premium spike for working families. By solving the economic anxiety directly, Republicans can dismantle the Democrats’ leverage and clear the path for the administration’s larger agenda beyond 2026.

Another Republican finds “strange  new respect” from the Left

There is perhaps no clearer indicator of the media’s cynicism than the sudden reverence of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). For years, outlets like ABC News and The New York Times have portrayed Greene as the face of the “insurrectionist” right — a dangerous conspiracy theorist obsessed with QAnon and “Jewish space lasers.”

Now? Since announcing her resignation amid a public tiff with Trump, she is being treated to glowing profiles and softer headlines. The Times has seemingly discovered a “strange new respect” for the Georgia congresswoman.

Jeffrey Blehar at National Review diagnoses this shift perfectly. The media hasn’t changed its mind about Greene’s sanity; they have simply realized she is currently useful to them. Why? Because Greene has positioned herself to the left of Donald Trump on foreign policy. By opposing the administration’s aggressive stance on Iran and attacking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she has become the most prominent legislative critic of the new Trump agenda.

The liberal media operates on a simple heuristic: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. We’ve seen this “strange new respect” play out time and time again — from John McCain and George Bush, to Jeff Flake and Liz Cheney. They are elevating Greene not because they respect her “independence,” but because her posturing divides the Republican Caucus and causes headaches for the White House.

It is the same old song. Conservatives should see this for what it is: a temporary alliance of convenience between a chaos agent and a media establishment desperate to damage the party and the president.

From the bookshelf: Castles of Steel

If you need a break from the Christmas chaos of 2025, I highly recommend Robert K. Massie’s monumental Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea.

Massie, who passed away a few years ago, was a master of narrative history, and this volume is perhaps his finest. It chronicles the naval arms race between the British Empire and a rising Germany that culminated in World War I. It is a story of titanic egos — Churchill, Fisher, Tirpitz — and titanic machines.

For the modern conservative, the book is a haunting study in deterrence and the fragility of peace. The dreadnought battleships were the nuclear weapons of their day; nations bankrupted themselves to build them, convinced that their sheer power would prevent war. Instead, they became the instruments of a conflict that destroyed the old world order.

Massie’s prose is effortless, turning logistical memos into gripping drama. But the underlying lesson is somber: Technology changes, but the hubris of leaders and the miscalculations of empire remain constant. As we watch the current naval posturing in our hemisphere and the drone wars in the Black Sea, Castles of Steel is an engaging read.

Publius Pax is a tenth-generation Bucks Countian, political consultant, and author.