The Outsider Perspective Issue 490 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Pope Leo XIV got hung up on by American customer service this week.

Two months into his papacy, the American Pope — born Robert Prevost, raised on the South Side of Chicago — called his Chicago bank’s customer service line to update the phone number and address on his personal account. He answered every verification question correctly. The bank representative told him that to change his information, he would need to come in to the branch in person.

The Pope, who apparently does his own banking the way the rest of us do — at the end of a long day, on hold, wishing the human on the other end of the line had any flexibility at all — asked the question every American has wanted to ask at some point in their life: “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?”

She hung up on him. She thought it was a prank.

It took a priest threatening to close the account and move it to another bank to get the situation sorted. The branch president called back. The information was updated. Two takeaways from one phone call. First, even the Pope cannot beat the customer service phone tree without escalating to a manager. Second, the global authority of the papacy bends, in the end, to the same lever that works at any American bank: threaten to take your business across the street.

While we’re on the subject of institutions that can’t tell the prank from the real thing — let me tell you about the four men the modern Democratic Party is taking seriously in 2026 — links to follow.

Quick Hits:

I may have triggered a national storyline this week. A few days after the Callais decision, the Supreme Court dropped an order saying the ruling went into effect immediately (this is not true of all SCOTUS opinions, for technical reasons I won’t get into here). That order, bizarrely, got a dissent from Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson, who in turn triggered a concurrence from Alito, co-signed by Gorsuch and Thomas. One of the interesting points of the Alito concurrence, I noted on Twitter, was a footnote where Alito pointed out the case had been decided 7 months ago in conference, and there was no reason to delay any more (I’m paraphrasing). That tweet went viral, with Mollie Hemingway agreeing with it, saying it matched her reporting from her new book on Alito. The next day, I read a piece by the WSJ Editorial Board making a similar observation. I ended up writing my Wednesday column about that same point. Can I prove I kicked off a national discussion? Nope. But I can say I was the viral one to point out that footnote. And also I think Alito is 100% tipping his hand and blaming the liberals on the court for how this went down.
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Where you can find me this week

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Biden and the Democrats Killed Spirit Airlines. Now They’re Blaming Trump. – Conservative Institute
The Liberal Justices Slow-Walked the Court. They Got Caught. – Conservative Institute
An American Original: Ted Turner Built Atlanta, Cable News, and an Empire – Conservative Institute

How Bad Is the Democratic Primary Base in 2026? It Made Gavin Newsom Look Moderate.

Eighteen months after losing the country to Donald Trump, the Democratic Party platformed a Marine with an SS tattoo, a streamer who defended a CEO assassination, a Holocaust denier who just joined the team, and the ex-cable host who is publicly courting the Marine. And these are just the highlights.

The standard thing for a political party to do after losing the country is moderate.

After George McGovern got blown out in 1972, the party that wanted to win again produced the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton. After Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, the party that wanted to win again ran Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, and Tim Ryan in Ohio. The pattern is older than I am. After a loss, you find the warehouse worker, the suburban mother, the Hispanic small-business owner. You drop the language that lost you the election. You repudiate the figures who alienated the voters you need. You move toward where the country has decided it wants to be.

Eighteen months ago, Donald Trump won the popular vote. He won every swing state. He won the working class. The Democratic margin among Hispanic voters dropped sixteen points between 2020 and 2024. Hispanic men swung twenty points. The non-white working-class margin — sixty-four points for Obama in 2012 — was thirty-two points for Kamala Harris in 2024. The 2024 result was the kind of election that triggers a reset.

The Democratic Party is not resetting. It is doing the opposite.

The new figures the party is platforming are not Conor Lamb. They are not Joe Manchin. They are a Marine running for the Senate in Maine with an SS skull tattooed on his chest. A Twitch streamer with three million followers who said the assassination of a healthcare CEO was understandable because the CEO had committed “social murder.” A Holocaust denier who has just announced — in his own words, on his own livestream — that he is “a moderate Democrat now.” And around them, gathering at the same gravitational pull, are the people who ought to know better: a sitting United States senator inventing a clinical defense for the SS tattoo, a former Fox primetime host inviting the New York Times to his Maine house to praise the Marine, and a magazine that bills itself center-right running focus-group rehabilitation pieces on the same Marine.

The political-science vocabulary for what is happening is horseshoe theory. The far-left and the far-right, traveling along their own arcs, have a tendency to bend around to meet each other. The ends of the spectrum end up sharing more with one another than either does with the middle.

In 2026, the meeting place has a name. The four men in this essay arrived at it from four different directions. Their politics and their biographies have nothing in common. Their landing spot does. And the Democratic Party — eighteen months after losing the country — is the platform that has agreed to host them.

The Four People You Need to Know

The four men in this essay are some where most readers will recognize one or two of the names. The point of this section is to establish who they actually are before quoting what they have actually said.

Graham Platner is a Marine Corps veteran who served three combat tours in Iraq and a deployment in Afghanistan with the Maryland National Guard. He is now an oyster farmer in Sullivan, Maine, the harbormaster of a coastal town, and the chair of his local planning board. He has never run for elected office before. On April 30, the establishment Democratic candidate in the Maine Senate primary — sitting Governor Janet Mills — suspended her campaign after polling showed her losing to Platner sixty-four to twenty-six. Platner is the presumptive Democratic nominee to face Republican Senator Susan Collins in November. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand have announced that the Senate Democratic apparatus will now help him win.

Hasan Piker is the most-watched political streamer on Twitch, the Amazon-owned live-video platform that started as a video-game broadcasting service and now hosts a sizable political-commentary audience. He has more than three million followers — overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly online. He is the nephew of Cenk Uygur, the founder of The Young Turks, the largest progressive online-news operation of the early 2010s. Piker’s politics is roughly that of the Democratic Socialists of America, the political-organizing wing inside the broader Democratic coalition that produced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and the new mayor of New York City.

His foreign-policy posture has become impossible for the Democratic House caucus to ignore. In April, former Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush, who lost her St. Louis seat in the 2024 Democratic primary to a more moderate challenger named Wesley Bell, flew Piker in to relaunch her House rematch campaign. Bush lost the 2024 race in part because of pro-Israel donor backing for Bell; Piker is the counter-investment for the rematch. Abdul El-Sayed, a former Michigan public-health director and Bernie Sanders-endorsed candidate for the Michigan Senate seat, has campaigned with Piker repeatedly. Piker has become the validating figure of choice for Democratic primary candidates running to the left of the party’s establishment.

Nick Fuentes is the host of a livestream called America First. He attended the white-nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017. He founded a conference called AFPAC, organized as the white-nationalist alternative to CPAC. He has been banned from most major social-media platforms for content the platforms classified as Holocaust denial. He has a substantial audience on Telegram and Rumble — and a larger audience now, post-bans, than he had before them. This week, on his own stream, he announced he is “a moderate Democrat now.” He wants Donald Trump impeached. He wants the Republican Party destroyed.

Tucker Carlson was Fox News’s primetime anchor until April 2023, when the network fired him during the settlement of the Dominion defamation lawsuit. He launched an independent operation on X, then a podcast, and now lives part-time in a village of seven hundred people in western Maine. The New York Times went there last week to interview him at his house. He praised Graham Platner’s foreign-policy views, said he plans to meet him, and announced his disappointment with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio.

What follows is what these four men have actually said and done — on tape, on transcript, in posts they wrote themselves.

The Marine With the SS Skull and the Hamas Praise

In 2014, Graham Platner watched a video of a Hamas raid that killed five Israeli soldiers. He posted on Reddit under the username P-Hustle. He wrote:

“Looks like an all around well executed and successful small unit raid to me.”

A user objected. Platner wrote back:

“From a strictly professional standpoint, this was a damn fine looking and successful raid against a superior opponent, I dig it.”

And:

“I’ll certainly give credit where credit is due, no matter who they are fighting for.”

This is the man Bernie Sanders endorsed in August 2025. Elizabeth Warren has rallied with him. Robert Reich has endorsed him. Senator Ruben Gallego, Senator Martin Heinrich, and Representative Ro Khanna have endorsed him. The DSA-aligned Working Families Party has endorsed him. Tim Walz has stumped for him in Maine. Senator Chris Van Hollen — Maryland Democrat, former Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chair, sitting member of the United States Senate — went on television last week and defended a different Platner artifact: the Totenkopf SS skull-and-crossbones tattoo Platner has on his chest (and recently covered up).

The Totenkopf is not a coincidence. Platner has been talking about the tattoo publicly since 2019 — long before any Senate campaign, long before Janet Mills suspended her primary bid. He knew what the symbol was the night he got it in Croatia in 2007. He knew what it was when he discussed it in 2019. He knows what it is now. The “drinking night” framing and the cover-up tattoo and Senator Van Hollen’s “PTSD / second chances” speech are all the product of one fact: the political cost of the tattoo went up the moment Platner became the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee. The meaning of the symbol did not change. The audience changed.

Then there are the additional Reddit posts. The ones where Platner called Jesus a “zombie” and the Virgin Mary a “skank.” The ones in which he made comments minimizing sexual assault in the military, which his then-primary-opponent Smith-Rodriguez cited at her withdrawal.

The party did not push him out when the Reddit posts surfaced. The party did not push him out when the Hamas raid praise surfaced. The party watched the establishment candidate run out of money in a primary she was losing two to one, then deployed a sitting senator to defend the candidate’s Nazi tattoo on national television. The Bulwark — the supposedly center-right magazine founded by anti-Trump Republicans — has published two friendly profiles of Platner this spring. One is an interview titled “Exclusive: Graham Platner Makes the Case for Doing ‘Something Different.’” The other, by Sarah Longwell, is a focus-group piece called “The Man Behind the Tattoo,” in which Maine Democratic primary voters explain why they have made peace with the SS skull and the rest of the country should follow. The Hill is now describing Platner as a possible Democratic presidential candidate for 2028, alongside Kamala Harris.

This is what “post-2024 reset” looks like when the people running the reset have decided the loss happened because the party was not progressive enough.

The Streamer Who Defended an Assassination

In December 2024, a man named Luigi Mangione walked up behind UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk and shot him in the back. Thompson was on his way to a healthcare conference. He left a wife and two children.

Hasan Piker, on his livestream: Brian Thompson committed “a tremendous amount of social murder.”

Americans, Piker explained, “understand” why Thompson was killed.

The phrase “social murder” comes from Friedrich Engels’ 1845 work The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels used it to describe what he believed the British capitalist class was doing to industrial workers. Piker is big on Marx, Lenin, and Mao – literally. Piker, on a stream watched by an audience the size of a midsize American city, used it to characterize a sitting CEO of a publicly traded company as the appropriate target for assassination. The Mangione merchandise was online by the end of the week.

This week, the United States House of Representatives is preparing to vote on a bipartisan resolution introduced by Representative Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat, and Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican. The resolution condemns Piker by name. The text quotes him:

“Hamas over Israel every single time.”

Hamas is “a thousand times better than Israel.”

Orthodox Jews are “inbred.”

“America deserved 9/11.”

On the documented sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7: “It doesn’t matter if f-ing rapes happened on October 7th, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”

Salon — Salon — published a piece on May 2 titled “Democrats’ Hasan Piker problem is a boon for Fox News.” The argument was structural: the Democratic Party’s primary candidates need Piker. They cannot wave him off without alienating the base they need to win primaries. Jacobin, the DSA-aligned magazine, ran a defense of Piker against the Democratic establishment for trying to “cancel” him.

Cori Bush, who is trying to win her old House seat back, brought him to her May Day rally. Abdul El-Sayed, who is trying to win the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan, has campaigned with him repeatedly. Whether to be associated with the streamer who said the country deserved 9/11 and called the assassination of a healthcare CEO “understandable” is, in the 2026 Democratic primary, no longer a serious question. The answer is yes.

The Holocaust Denier Who Joined the Team

In October 2019, Nick Fuentes appeared in a video in which he attempted to question the documented six million Jewish death toll of the Holocaust. He proposed an analogy. He compared Holocaust victims to cookies.

“6 million batches of cookies in 15 ovens, each taking an hour to bake, cooking 24 hours a day every day for 5 years…”

“It just kinda doesn’t really make sense, this crazy cookie analogy… So 6 million cookies? Eh, eh, I don’t buy it…”

He was speaking about the crematoria at Auschwitz. He was speaking about the human ashes which, on aerial reconnaissance, he claimed could not have produced the smoke pattern the historical record describes. He referred to those ashes as “cookie crumbs.”

This is the man who, on Tuesday, announced on his own stream that he is “a moderate Democrat now.” He said, in a sentence captured before it could be edited out, that “my war against Israel is the only thing keeping me going.” He wants Donald Trump impeached. He wants the Republican Party destroyed.

The point is not that the Democratic Party officially welcomed him. It did not. Senator Chuck Schumer introduced a Senate resolution this week condemning antisemitism and white supremacy “following the right’s embrace of Nick Fuentes.” Every Senate Democrat plus Senator Sanders and Senator Angus King co-sponsored. The resolution is on the floor.

The point is what the resolution does not name. It names Fuentes — the inbound right-flank Holocaust denier who has decided, this week, that the Democratic Party is now his political home. It does not name New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who used the phrase “globalize the intifada.” It does not name Hasan Piker. It does not name Graham Platner’s Totenkopf. It does not name the Reddit posts praising the Hamas raid. It does not name Abdul El-Sayed’s pro-Maduro associations. It does not name Rashida Tlaib, whom the same caucus restored to her committee assignments after her own censure for statements about Israel. The resolution names the antisemite knocking on the front door. It does not name the antisemites the party has been seating at the dinner table for two cycles.

Fuentes is doing the sorting himself. He has noticed which party is most aligned with him on everything. The Democratic establishment is condemning him by name and letting the figures with similar views remain on the team. Both of those things are happening at the same time. They tell you the same thing.

Tucker’s Migration

Tucker Carlson got fired from Fox News in April 2023. The reasons have been litigated. The result is that within eighteen months he had launched an X-based talk show, then a podcast, and turned — in the words of a recent academic survey of his post-Fox media output — “sharply against Israel,” beginning to interview “any anti-Semitic crackpot he could find.”

In February 2024 he flew to Moscow and recorded a two-hour interview with Vladimir Putin, in which Putin presented a long historical narrative of Russian grievances against Ukraine. Tucker did not push back. The Russian state press celebrated the interview for weeks.

In September 2024, Tucker hosted on his podcast a man named Darryl Cooper. Cooper presented himself as a popular historian. Tucker introduced him as “the United States’s most important popular historian” and “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” During the interview, Cooper:

Called Winston Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War.”
Argued that Hitler had attempted to broker peace and Churchill had refused.
Framed the Holocaust as “an inadvertent consequence of poor German war planning” — millions of people simply “ended up dead.”

Again, these are just the highlights. Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project published a point-by-point rebuttal of the interview’s historical claims. The interview is still up. Tucker’s introduction of Cooper is still up. Tucker has not retracted, apologized, or modified his framing.

Last week the New York Times sent an interviewer named Lulu Garcia-Navarro to Tucker’s house in Bryant Pond, Maine. The piece is titled “What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe? I Went to Maine to Find Out.” During the interview, Tucker praised Graham Platner — the Marine with the SS-skull tattoo running for the Senate seat 200 miles away — for his foreign-policy views. The verbatim quote: “I appreciate how different his foreign policy views are from everybody else in his party.” Tucker said he plans to meet Platner. Platner, asked by a progressive journalist, said he is “struggling” with the question of whether to accept.

The American Thinker described the convergence as Tucker finding a “kindred spirit” in “Graham ‘the Totenkopf’ Platner.” The political journalist Mark Halperin observed that the New York Times had made Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene its new heroes. And Rahm Emanuel — Bill Clinton’s senior White House aide, Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, Joe Biden’s ambassador to Japan, and as close to the embodiment of the Democratic establishment as American politics has produced in three decades — has separately offered positive remarks about Platner. Different men, different paths, the same gravitational pull.

Tucker has not joined the Democratic Party. Fuentes has, by his own statement. The two of them are at different stages of the same migration. Tucker is at the right-fringe arc that has finished bending to meet the left-fringe arc. The destination is not partisan. It is the part of the political map where antisemitism is no longer disqualifying and where opposition to Israel is presented as a sophisticated foreign-policy position.

The Audiences Are the Disease

The four men in this essay are not fringe in audience size. They are fringe in views. When the Democratic Party’s institutions stop pushing back on the figures their primary base is elevating, the institutional failure becomes the story. We are now in that part of the curve.

These are not weird kids in a basement. These are media businesses operating at scale. The audience for this material is not, in the way commentators sometimes describe, a “pocket.” It is a mass audience. It is the size of the audience for cable news at its peak. And the part of that audience that votes — or that funds candidates, or that turns out at primary rallies — is now disproportionately concentrated inside the Democratic Party’s primary base.

The audiences they reach share something: a willingness to listen to material that, fifteen years ago, would have ended a career. The party that has decided to staff its 2026 primary recruiting from this part of the audience is the party that lost the country in 2024. The bet is that the audience is bigger than the country. It is not. But it is large enough to win primaries. And primaries are how the party picks the people who run in general elections. Senator John Fetterman, the lone Senate Democrat to break with the party on Israel, has been treated by his caucus as a problem to be managed.

Meanwhile, the various members of the party who dabble in conspiracies and antisemitism get lauded.

How Bad? The Governor of California Now Counts as a Moderate

Eighteen months after Donald Trump won the country, the field of figures the Democratic primary base is most enthusiastic about includes a Marine with an SS tattoo, a Twitch streamer who said the country deserved 9/11, and a Holocaust denier who is on his second week of describing himself as a moderate Democrat. The validators amplifying them have audiences that exceed the cable news networks at their best.

Which is why Gavin Newsom — Gavin Newsom — is now positioned, in 2028 polling, as the moderate alternative.

Newsom is the governor of California. California’s homeless population was 108,400 in 2019, when he took office. According to the HUD 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, the count for 2024 was 161,445. That is a forty-nine percent increase under his governorship. California now accounts for roughly a quarter of the homeless population of the entire United States.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program, Los Angeles County led the nation in single-year population loss between 2024 and 2025, and California’s net domestic out-migration in the same period exceeded two hundred thousand residents. The top destination states for ex-Californians are Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Washington, and Florida, in that order. A proposed state ballot initiative on a “billionaires tax” has, before passage, triggered a preemptive flight of billions of dollars in capital out of Silicon Valley as ultra-wealthy residents reposition assets ahead of a possible vote.

The companies that have left California in recent years include Chevron, Tesla, Oracle, McKesson, Charles Schwab, CBRE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Palantir, AECOM, FICO, and SpaceX. The state faces a fifty-to-seventy-billion-dollar budget deficit for the 2025–2026 fiscal year. Its average gasoline price is the highest in the United States, routinely running more than a dollar above the national average.

Newsom launched a podcast in March 2025. His guests have included Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk. He has publicly broken with the Democratic Party on transgender athletes participating in women’s sports, calling the policy “deeply unfair.” This is the grammar of a 2028 presidential run from the center.

Kamala Harris — the woman who lost the country to Donald Trump eighteen months ago — leads the 2028 Democratic primary field at fifty percent in the May 2026 Harvard/Harris poll. That is up from thirty-nine percent in January.

Newsom and Harris look like centrists not because they have moved to the center but because the rest of the field has moved past them. The base of the Democratic Party has gotten louder than the strategists who would normally tell a presidential nominee to talk to the warehouse worker, the suburban mother, the Hispanic small-business owner. The clowns on the stage are not the disease. They are the symptom. The disease is that an audience large enough to swing primary outcomes has decided antisemitism is not disqualifying, and the party’s institutional figures have decided not to argue back.

There is one more comparison worth making, because it is the comparison the Democratic Party itself put on the table eighteen months ago. Tim Walz spent the 2024 campaign telling Americans that Donald Trump and JD Vance were “weird.” The line became the party’s signature attack. Walz delivered it on the convention stage. Senior Democrats repeated it at every microphone for the better part of three months. Now look at what the same party is platforming.

The same Tim Walz is in Maine stumping for the Marine with the SS skull on his chest. A Twitch streamer with three million followers is explaining to millions of young men why an executive’s assassination on a Manhattan sidewalk was understandable. A Holocaust denier banned from most major social-media platforms has just announced he is one of them. By comparison to any of that, JD Vance is absurdly normal. So is Donald Trump. The party that spent 2024 calling the other side weird is the party running the actual circus in 2026, and the audience for the circus is the same audience the party is now staffing its primaries from.

The country handed the Democratic Party a hammer in 2024. The hammer apparently not enough. They are getting stranger. The audiences they are playing to are getting larger. And the people you are watching this week — the Marine, the streamer, the Holocaust denier, the cable host courting the Marine — are the leading indicators. They are not getting better. They are running further into the part of the coalition that produced the 2024 loss, because they cannot hear what the country told them.

What worries is that I think they’re poised to take power in D.C., due to the usual midterm dynamics. And that’s going to embolden these factions even more.