I've been doing this for so long that I didn't know I could still be shocked, but I am *genuinely* stunned how many people are lying about Pretti "interfering" or "obstructing," and how many 2A folks are suddenly framing the right to carry as some implicit threat. Shameful.

The last couple years of writing public about politics has affirmed for me the two most toxic kinds of behavior on the left and right. Both are purity testing, but differently. Here is how it goes: On the left, it’s a purity test of thought. I could agree 85% with a lefty on an issue like homelessness, but if I don’t agree on the final 15%, I become the enemy. Sometimes it’s the final 1%, like language around the issue. For instance, I regularly see people on the left criticizing my take on an issue related to homelessness because I don’t use activist language like “the unhoused,” even though I’ve never heard a single shelter worker or homeless person use that language in my reporting. It’s complete and utter nonsense, but it’s a purity test, and I become the enemy even when we agree on everything else I might believe. On the right, it’s a purity test of personality. You absolutely have to love and support the personalities of the Trump-right or else you are out. Even the self-evidently bad ones. For instance, my criticism of Pete Hegseth — an obviously mediocre leader who is unqualified in a million different ways to lead 3 million service members and civilians as defense secretary — is considered out of bounds. All week I’ve had pro-Trump readers in my inbox saying they were unsubscribing or now knew I was a liberal because I was too hard on a guy who made his entire living as a pundit by being a firebrand provocateur, and who has brought controversy and mismanagement to every org he’s worked at. But you aren’t allowed to say so. You can’t criticize charlatans like Vivek or Elon or Don Jr. even when they are being intentionally provocative or over the top. What is MOST interesting about this is that the inverse is totally untrue, also. For instance: Pro-Trump conservatives generally don’t care if I agree only in part with their ideas, they will invite me onto the Trump train. In fact, if I am 10% on board with something Trump says, they welcome me with open arms, and they don’t care at all about the other 90%. They especially don’t care about how I say it. At the same time, liberals don’t give a single shit about criticizing their own leaders. You can spend all day trashing Pelosi, Biden, Harris, Democrats broadly, every Democratic pundit and social media influencer, and they’ll still love you so long as you have perfect alignment with them on the issues or the language. In fact, they often enthusiastically criticize their own party leaders, and encourage others to do so too. It is such a strange, disorienting thing to live between these two political tribes in 2025. And it’s obviously impossible to make everyone happy. But I’ve realized having moderate or someone centrist politics, or even worse (in my case) feeling really strongly aligned with the right and left depending on the issue, you end up on the wrong end of a bunch of venomous, tribalistic, purity-testing partisans at all hours of the day.