Here’s a cartoon that cleverly illustrates how right-wing extremism gets mainstreamed by ostensibly liberal pundits:

New comic: Pundit Bro Doom Loop www.dailykos.com/stories/2025…

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— Jen Sorensen (@jensorensen.bsky.social) October 1, 2025 at 10:21 PM

That’s definitely a thing, liberal pundits bonding with right-wing extremists over their shared experience of people being mean to them on the internet. And people ARE mean to each other on the internet, and it really sucks to be on the receiving end of a dumb, self-righteous pile-on.

But the proper response isn’t to assume the ideas or actions that attracted the pile-on deserve a mainstream platform because they’re “out there.” It’s to examine the ideas or actions on their own merit.

Charlie Kirk’s murder is a recent and extreme example of how this plays out. It’s possible to condemn the shooting without implying Kirk had anything worthwhile to contribute. The latter mainstreams extremism.

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A Bluesky post by commenter Sister Golden Bear a while back highlighted a related phenomenon. She reposted a cite from a Prospect article about how “reactionary centrists” are driving politics in the UK to the right, with disastrous results for trans people in that country.

“In 2012, 60 trans-related articles were published by Britain’s media. By 2022, it was more than 7,500, according to figures from Trans Media Watch. The media is not responding to public rage against vulnerable minorities; it is helping to create it.” www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/709…

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— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper.com) October 1, 2025 at 9:52 AM

In her post, SGB points out that the NYT is playing the same role here in the U.S. Other oligarch-owned platforms and news outlets are also all-in on the effort. Now that an oligarch family has put Bari Weiss is in charge of CBS News, we can expect that formerly venerable source to double down on its reactionary narratives too in the guise of centrism and objectivity.

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Trans rights are a major focus of reactionary centrism, and so is immigration. A couple of excerpts from the Prospect piece:

(Reactionary centrists) are people who—while not exactly supportive of the political right—tend to view it as without agency, as if the radicalisation of US conservatism is the result of people responding to the excesses of social justice, incivility from the left or cultural disrespect. So-called reactionary centrists both blamed the victims of the populist right, and spent a lot of time humanising the perpetrators.

If only liberals could understand what drove Maga voters. Reactionary centrists admonished liberals to be very careful in their language, to not call very obvious fascists fascist, lest they be further provoked. The solution was to give ground; if democrats made appeals to the centre, particularly if they moved right on immigration and trans rights, they could regain votes lost to Trump. …

This desire to meet the hard right halfway, to find a middle point, is hopelessly exploitable. In an age of radicalisation, you simply get pulled further and further to the right, while tacitly validating those values at every step…

Emphasis mine: it’s a form of Murc’s Law, i.e., only Democrats have agency, in action. The article’s author, Toby Buckle, borrows the U.S. term “reactionary centrist” to describe what’s happened to Labour in the UK under PM Kier Starmer:

The motivation for this move against LGBT rights seems to have been to take the issue off the table for voters. Morgan McSweeney, the Starmer aide most associated with the government’s political strategy, operates on classic reactionary centrist logic: we need to meet the public where it’s at and understand the concerns of defectors to Reform (while aggressively ignoring the concerns of the, much more numerous, defectors to the Lib Dems or Greens).

To put it mildly, this has not worked. The theory was that feeding the wolf would starve it. But, somehow, the beast is stronger than ever. Reactionary centrists simply cannot account for this outcome. All they can think to do is keep throwing more meat.

The only thing I know about Labour is what I read about it here from Tony Jay and Rose, but we see the same impulse described above in U.S. politics. The phrase “meeting voters where they are” isn’t inherently bad, IMO — you have to show up were voters can hear your message.

But tacitly validating existing  prejudices is fatal; it inexorably moves the framing to the right and throws vulnerable people under the bus. It also doesn’t work to take issues off the table for voters.

Ten years ago, there wasn’t widespread hysteria about trans people in the U.S. Remember in 2016 when Trump said Caitlyn Jenner could use any bathroom she chose? The right deliberately manufactured anti-trans hysteria, which implies that it can be dismantled too. The same goes for immigration and reproductive rights and other issues Dems are urged to “moderate” on to win elections.

The article notes that while the Democratic Party has some members who could be described that way, reactionary centrists don’t dominate the party like they do in the UK. I think that’s true and hope and trust we can keep it that way.

Open thread.