Here’s a hypothetical question I stole from the internet.

Imagine the biggest donor to the Democratic Party ran a website—a media platform, really—where users could send pictures of real-life women and girls to an artificial intelligence chatbot, and the A.I. would spit the pictures back out for them, with the women and girls stripped of their clothing. What would happen when this “feature” came online, and flooded the internet with sexual exploitation of innocents?

Would Republicans shrug? Would they insist on investigating the owner or his company, criminally, for generating child sexual-abuse material? Would they demand Democrats return his donations? Would they hound the media to cover the story, and accuse journalists who ignored it of bias?

This question stops being hypothetical when you swap the parties around. The website is X. The owner of the website is Elon Musk. He spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to elect Republicans. His artificial intelligence software, Grok, has recently flooded X with this kind of material.

And the answer to the question—what happened?—is: basically nothing, so far. The majority of national political reporters remain active on X. The mainstream news hasn’t ignored the issue, exactly, but hasn’t treated it as a scandal requiring accountability. Musk remains a welcome donor to Republicans everywhere, a close ally of the Republican president. And Democrats haven’t really tried in earnest to whip this into a crisis for X, Musk, or the GOP.

In the Democratic imagination, Republicans are beyond shaming, and the public would be unmoved by associating the GOP with CSAM purveyors. Partisan broadsides like this are thought to be unpersuasive. How do Democrats define persuasion? They ask random voters and voters representing various demographic subgroups what matters most to them in life, and then define persuasive politics as limited to words and deeds responsive to those concerns.

There are exceptions, of course. And other Democrats can—over time, through great effort—be made to care about lurid scandal (cf the Epstein Files). But for the most part, they’ve pointed their radars elsewhere.

I NEG YOUR PARDON

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you know without Googling what “Willie Horton” means, in a political context. You’ve probably heard of Laken Riley. I could make a long list like this—villains and victims Republicans use to smear Democrats and scare the public into voting GOP. When facts on the ground aren’t conducive to scapegoating any one individual, they revert to collective guilt for real and imagined crimes. Haitians, Somalians, the nebulous “they” who supposedly killed Charlie Kirk and tried to kill Donald Trump.

Now here’s a test question: ...