When crazy is too crazy even for the base

Mind your own backyard!

The 2028 Democratic presidential candidates (probably).

Comedian Patton Oswalt looked genuinely stunned when he learned California law allows birth certificates to list “non-binary” as a designated sex for newborns.

The reason for the inclusion of a third category, the 2017 California law explains, is that infants “may later identify differently.”

Oswalt’s ignorance of legislation in his own state — introduced and now enforced by a party he enthusiastically supports — highlights two recent political curiosities. The first is that Democratic lawmakers keep adopting positions so demented that even their supporters refuse to believe they’re real. The second curiosity is related to the first: many Democratic voters appear to have created a cocoon of ignorance around themselves and their communities so thick as to protect them from learning what their party is doing or how it functions. (To head off the inevitable whataboutism: Yes, the Republican Party faces similar problems. The amusing and, therefore, more interesting difference is that a core tenet of the modern Democratic Party, and really its entire pitch to voters, is that it is more intelligent, better educated, and more open-minded than the GOP. The Democratic Party is the party of settled science, of experts, of rational thought! It doesn’t suffer from ignorance or insular thinking! Or does it?)

The education of Patton Oswalt happened during his recent conversation with HBO host Bill Maher, who, like Oswalt, is reliably liberal but less insensible to the insanity that has overtaken their wing of American politics.

“We stopped being a scientific people,” Maher lamented of the left.

Insisted Oswalt, “But the left certainly stayed scientific.”

“No, they didn’t,” the HBO host replied, “We started to teach: ‘Every baby is, I don’t know, let’s not even put [male or female] on the birth certificate’!”

“When were we teaching that?” asked an incredulous Oswalt, who is otherwise extremely online and opinionated about politics and the culture wars.

“Teaching it?” Maher shot back. “It was a law here in California!”

“I don’t remember that,” his guest replied, sounding genuinely surprised.

When it comes to the Democratic base, Oswalt’s reaction is not so uncommon.

During the 2024 presidential election, supporters of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris often scoffed at the allegations lobbed by Republican nominee Donald Trump. Harris’s boosters in the press and elsewhere claimed confidently that the things Trump said about Harris were merely inventions of the right-wing fever swamps.

The funny thing is: more often than not, Trump was accurately quoting Harris’s own positions back to her. It’s just that the positions themselves were too incredible for even her supporters to believe.

During a debate, Trump cited Harris’s documented support for taxpayer-funded sex-changes for illegal immigrants. This is a completely insane position for anyone to stake out, let alone a candidate hoping to win a general election. Don’t take my word for it. The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, a reliable Democratic backer, thought the same thing. After the debate, she claimed Trump fabricated the attack line from thin air.

“What the hell was he talking about?” she wrote. “No one knows.”

Well, some of us did know, because Harris had indeed taken such a position, explaining both in writing and on camera how she had worked to get taxpayer-funded sex changes for prison inmates in California.

Earlier, during the 2016 Republican primary, Democratic-aligned pundits and journalists reacted with confusion and even offense after retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson said there’s a significant overlap between the supremacist ideologies of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and the Third Reich. The truth is, Sanger was a hardcore eugenicist, and her values and beliefs very often aligned with the values and beliefs (and practices) of her peers in Nazi Germany.

Sanger published a newsletter that, for a time, bore the banner, “Birth control: to create a race of thoroughbreds.” She published submissions from prominent eugenicists, including Professor Dr. Ernst Rudin, who, during Adolf Hitler’s reign, served as the curator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics. In April 1933, Sanger also published a column by well-known eugenicist Paul Popenoe, in which he praised Nazi Germany for “proceeding towards a policy that will accord with the best thought of eugenicists in all civilized countries.”

Conservatives knew this about Sanger. They knew exactly what those Republican candidates were referring to, even if the pundits and reporters who doggedly defend Planned Parenthood were hearing it for the first time.

Then, of course, there are the indignant Democrats and members of the press who still insist that “abolish ICE” and “defund the police” are general sentiments, and not actual policy positions. This is a funny assertion, given the sheer volume of left-wing activists and candidates who state clearly they mean to “defund” and “abolish” in the most literal sense.

For good measure, let’s not forget when television host Jon Stewart discovered, much to his horror, that the federal government’s endless, labyrinthine red tape and regulations make infrastructure improvements and development nearly impossible. To borrow a cliche from one of Stewart’s many late-night copycats: “It’s the current year!” Could it be that Stewart is only now realizing the downsides to the flavor of bloated governance promoted by the party he reliably supports?

It’s one thing for Democrats to live in a bubble where they don’t know or understand what Republicans believe. But how can they not know what’s happening in their own backyard? How have they insulated themselves so well that their first reaction to learning about what Democratic politicians are doing is to assume it’s some kind of Republican dirty trick?

This phenomenon goes far beyond too-online comedians and sloppy journalists. In fact, GOP pollsters say the disconnect between what Democratic legislators support and what Democratic voters know of their own party has made it much more difficult to collect accurate survey data.

“When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” a Republican source told Park MacDougald for Tablet magazine in 2024, before the election. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”

But it is.

Pollsters have also found that voters will turn against Republicans if they describe Democratic-backed positions too accurately. For example, if a GOP lawmaker uses the term “genital mutilation” instead of the euphemism “gender-affirming care” to correctly describe certain Democratic-supported medical procedures, such as the one that consigns biological males to a lifetime of dilation “to maintain the size and shape of [his] vaginal canal and to keep it open,” voters will react strongly against the Republican, not the objectively gruesome procedure. No one wants to hear about male dilation because it’s too horrifying to believe anyone would support such a thing.

“Phrases like ‘genital mutilation’ are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans’ position,” an aide told McDougal.

In terms of the overall well-being of the republic, it’s not great that one of the two parties blindly supports whatever its chieftain says or does. Meanwhile, members of the other party seem to be completely in the dark about what their elected leaders are doing in their name.

Which is worse? Blind loyalty or cloistered insanity?

Is hemlock an option?

This article appeared originally in the Hill on Nov. 11, 2025.