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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24010 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Recently one of the Pod Save America hosts interviewed DNC chair Ken Martin about this report.

It's quite the train wreck. Ken kept asserting that the report was free and the host kept cutting in to question how that's possible. I guess this is how. Your incompetent buddy does it for free. Not literally free since people supposedly traveled to every state to interview voters and the effort took more than a year. But free-ish compared to actually paying for a well made report.

Your incompetent buddy does it for free.

Hard to know if it was incompetence or if Martin kept a leash on him. Probably "¿Por qué no los dos?" The only sense I can make of this débacle is that Martin had a fair idea an autopsy of how they done fudged up in 2024 would lead to an entire battery hens farm worth of egg on face for the party, including Big Senior Figures, and he tried stalling and throttling it as much as he could:

Martin called for an autopsy only after former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley made an issue of it in his own long-shot race for DNC chair. Once he did, Martin locked in, even ripping in private conversations former chair Tom Perez’s decision to withhold an autopsy of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss.

He asked Rivera, a longtime but low-profile Democratic hand based now in Texas, to be in charge. They were close, which helped, but Martin also liked that Rivera hadn’t been involved with the DNC or the Harris campaign, so he could be independent.

The problem, others involved argued then and now, is that Rivera hadn’t worked on any presidential bid since an inglorious turn on John Kerry’s campaign in 2004. Many who know Rivera describe him as having a savvy yet unconventional point of view, but say he also comes into conversations with a preset viewpoint.

Though he’d set the autopsy as a priority, Martin decided to have Rivera in charge as a part-time volunteer while juggling other clients. Rivera would sometimes say he was available to conduct interviews only before 9 a.m., after 7 p.m. or on weekends. Martin kept him so siloed that the most senior staff could do was occasionally chip in with suggestions of people he should consider contacting.

...Not until September, several months into his review, did Rivera try to reach out to key Harris campaign aides. He has told people since that he always meant for the Harris team to be his last stop since he wanted to gather other information first. But holding out that long made campaign aides suspicious.

Rivera ultimately blew past several deadlines last year in finishing the autopsy, according to people familiar with the matter. It wasn’t until after Thanksgiving that Martin got a document that multiple people say was at best unfinished.

Who Rivera reached out to, and who he didn’t, tells part of the story of what he was producing. While the DNC has said Rivera and others conducted “hundreds of interviews” with “sources from all 50 states,” he didn’t start to talk to the people who ran the Biden and Harris campaigns until September, according to multiple people involved.

Among those not included in interviews: Biden, Harris or Walz. Top strategists, including Biden aides Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, and top Harris decision-makers like Jen O’Malley Dillon, Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe, weren’t interviewed either. Neither were close Harris aides Sheila Nix, Kirsten Allen, Erin Wilson, Brian Fallon and Jalisa Washington-Price, or Sam Cornale, the Walz traveling chief of staff who had also been executive director of the DNC.

...Some say underlying research, including notes and transcripts of interviews, was deleted from DNC servers. But a DNC source familiar with the process told CNN that Rivera didn’t provide even a list of names of people he spoke to, notes or recordings. Nor, the source said, did he provide some of the data that he was given to him by senior campaign leadership.

...“The notion that any of this was nefarious or by design…” sighed one former DNC official. “It’s much more Keystone Kops than that.”

"Keystone Kops" is not reassuring for a party asking the nation "put the fate of the economy, your jobs, oil prices, peace or war, and dealing with the rollout and regulation (or not) of AI in our competent, assured, well-qualified hands!"

Hold on did they seriously just open with "I was so happy to see you at the grindr party the other night!" and "I wish they hadn't run out of alcohol before I arrived".

...what? Grindr like the gay hookup app? What the fuck are these people talking about? Is the one guy making fun of the other guy for being gay? It sounds like he's talking about meeting him at a gay hookup party, and the other person is lamenting that they ran out of booze before he got there so he didn't get to get as drunk as he had hoped.

Yeah, I had to rub my eyes at that part in the CNN story.

The Dems attending a party sponsored by Grindr, the gay hook-up/casual sex/promiscuity app. Well, definitely avoiding all the stereotypes assigned to you by your political rivals there!

Meanwhile, with public demands to see the autopsy growing, Martin booked himself onto “Pod Save America” to defend his decision not to release it, in an interview that immediately went viral.

Sapping faith in him even further among Democratic operatives inside and outside party headquarters: The interview only happened because he agreed to it after confronting the hosts at a Grindr-sponsored party the night before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, annoyed they were giving him too hard of a time over the autopsy.

Guys, maybe if you want to reach out to the Latino/rural voters, you should try having stories about you read more like "Chair Marty Martin was interviewed after leaving the Rosary cenacle/Bible study group late Thursday evening" and not "why yes we met at the gay orgy party"?

Yes: Grindr the gay hookup app hosted a private White House Correspondents' Association party in DC attended by the head of the DNC and some (or all?) Pod Save America hosts. He means this in the most literal sense. I just googled this and confirmed.

Presumably this was a Grindr hosted political event rather than a literal gay orgy. News articles don't specifically state the level of drunkenness or gay sex.

I was being tongue-in-cheek there, but yeah. Grindr now respectable? Or just that journalists will attend anything provided the lure of free drink is dangled before them?

Grindr is just gay Tinder (or rather, the other way around), and Tinder is just online dating, and online dating is respectable now, and gay things are equally as respectable as straight things (or perhaps more equal, but never less), so Grindr is now respectable and has been for a while, QED.

I just googled this and confirmed.

I thought you were doing a bit lol

Presumably this was a Grindr hosted political event rather than a literal gay orgy.

Porque no los dos? Even the CPAC confererence has a reputation for being a depraved pit of debauchery, what chance does a liberal event organized by Grindr have?

And of course there was the Hotties For Harris event, and the Planned Parenthood mobile clinic offering free vasectomies at the same time as the 2024 DNC conference.

Kindly note in the background to this, posters about the fearful monstrosity of what was contained in Project 2025 such as "families should ideally be a husband, wife and kids". The horrors of the male-female dyad!

Not really struggling with the image of being a den of debauchery, lads! For the low, low price of much less than whatever Martin slipped his pal Rivera, I can advise you on how to appeal to rural, working-class, religious in some form, non-college educated voters and Number One Recommendation will be, as even the autopsy had to point out, "Do not sound like you're trying to get on the Satanic Temple's Holiday Gift List" (especially since those frickin' eejits have no idea what Hallwoe'en is about).

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