State of Wednesday: JAMES FISHBACK AND THE EXTREMISM IMBALANCE

One kind of extremism is winning, and it ain’t ours

Aug 19, 2026

Shannon Finney/Getty Images for Semafor; Joshua Lott/Getty Images

Greetings, Dear Reader,

Well the Florida primaries made news yesterday.

As usual, here at State of the Day, I strip the euphemism and misdirection off the day’s news and give it to you straight. No ice, and definitely no mixer.

Let’s get after it …

JAMES FISHBACK AND THE EXTREMISM IMBALANCE

If there’s a lesson conservatives can learn from the left, it’s that the James Fishbacks of the world might have lost today, but that doesn’t mean they’ll lose tomorrow.

While I don’t personally find Fishback all that extreme (at least on policy), his loss in last night’s GOP gubernatorial primary highlights what I’m calling the “extremism imbalance” in national politics today. It goes like this, in short: Their crazies are more numerous and measurably more bonafide than ours.

This isn’t a new concept; Florida’s primaries simply offer up yet another example of it. The doughy, bespectacled Army dork Alexander Vindman got absolutely trounced by a no-name DSA candidate, losing by a whopping 9% points. In Florida! Where for many hispanics militant communism is not merely a concept, but a once-lived experience.

Vindman, famous among too-online hashtag #resistance hags and bloviating media cretins for tattling on Donald Trump’s “perfect phone call,” outspent Angie Nixon 13:1, had overwhelming name ID advantage and still lost.

The contest wasn’t fair for a number of reasons. First, Vindman is just an aging lefty meme who mostly wants to drop more bombs. His economic proposals were lukewarm at best. Ultimately, Dem voters had a choice between A.) forever war and squishy domestic paralysis and B.) ending support for Israel and “rent freezes.”

Also, he flatly refused to debate Nixon. No wonder he lost. People now more than ever want fighters.

The flip side is that Nixon is as extreme as the rest of her DSA cohort. Her economic policy is tantamount to wealth and asset seizure. She wants to dismantle both federal and domestic policing. These two together are funny in that even botched lobotomy patients have enough foresight to know that if you intend to seize assets, you might need a few loyal police brigades.

While this wave of far-left extremism overtakes the Democratic Party, goofy journos and media personalities vacillate between drooling, doe-eyed support and brain-dead re-contextualizing of reality.

Have you ever seen Nick Fuentes on the cover of any magazines?

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Coverage at Rolling Stone, The Guardian, GQ and multiple New York Times spreads have dedicated themselves to “swooning” over the likes of Hasan Piker, a man who calls for violence and assassination much more routinely than I ever did (that one time … okay, okay with two follow-ups).

The guy might have my parents summarily executed and my property seized and my kids enslaved, but, oh, if he doesn’t make me feel all tingly inside!

The coverage in some ways follows the same pathology that led to a Boston Bomber gracing the cover of Rolling Stone, to hundreds of women professing their love for Luigi Mangione, to thousands more, including people in charge of educating kids, donating to the defense of kid-slaughtering mother Lindsay Clancy.

They can’t help themselves.

In an episode after he hosted and glazed Piker, perennial debate-loser and smoothbrained moron Mehdi Hasan put it this way: “Yes, there’s a far right and a far left. The far right wants Nazism and ethnic cleansing. The far left wants Medicare for all. That is not the same thing.”

If there are two things Mehdi is good at, it’s sounding smart and lying. Technically that’s one thing, because both are lying.

There’s likewise a vacillation in institutional journalism when it comes to their coverage of the right. They either trump up the influence of fringe individuals like Fuentes, or they call the current GOP “Nazis.”

Make no mistake, however, there are some key differences between right and left in this regard.

First, our revolution already happened 10 years ago. Between Marco and JD, I don’t see MAGA-style national conservatism or post liberalism or whatever you want to call it going anywhere. We’re not due for another one any time soon. In fact, we’re still eating some of the old guys. For now, as the current ascendance remains ascendant, folks like Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes will remain locked in a status of somewhat amusing jesterism.

The party, in the meantime, could easily adopt some of Fishback’s more aggressive positions – H1B ban versus H1B skepticism – without all the edgelording.

Second, despite cooked political violence studies from CATO that don’t include attempts on Trump’s life, and despite the PR sheen applied by goons like Hasan and outlets like Variety and GQ and The New York Times, we all know who the violent revolutionaries are.

They might point to spasms like J6 or the Charlottesville riot, but otherwise, the people consistently taking over city blocks, burning down police precincts, threatening summary violence, engaging in summary violence are almost always of the political left.

One thing you’d never see at Hillsdale or Grove City or any number of conservative campuses is a liberal speaker who requires armed security.

There are tens of thousands of left-wing militants. There are enough of them to get Mamdani and his three socialist congressional pets elected. The party is being subsumed by them. And no matter what slathering they apply to the pig, it’s still a pig.

If there’s one takeaway we can make from all this, it’s that we can’t count on Democrats or their media allies to do anything about it.

Now more than ever, the right must win.