And in 36 hours we’ll see the centrists have recalibrated their scales and move rightward yet again. Surely they just need to take one more step to the right before they’ve triangulated Tom Cotton into electoral doom. Republicans would never just take the validation of their messaging as a win and sign to move further right.

To be clear, this is framed as speculation about the future, but it’s a description of the past. Tom Cotton thinks calling college students pro-Hamas is good politics because centrists accommodated and shadowed their previous messaging. The Josh Gottheimers of the world will continually sabotage the party to play centrist and if he’s not made a pariah by the rest of the party calling it abhorrent, he gets to define what “the Democrats” are in the media.

Example: “Scoop: Democrats turn up the heat on Columbia University”