It’s been a rough few days for Haley Stevens, ever since she decided to go rogue and endorse GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers after being told she was not welcome at events for Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed — pretty much entirely because she was out on the streets demanding that he apologize for an ad that his campaign did not make or promote about how people aren’t happy about their tax money going to buy Israel more bombs with which to kill Palestinians when they can barely afford groceries. You know, because, legally, the anti-war sentiments that are entirely normal and expected within the left-wing mainstream suddenly become antisemitic when applied to Israel.
Personally, I’ve always been on Team We Should Use Tax Money To Help People Instead Of Bombing Them, but I’m just an asshole like that. I find it personally vexing that no one ever says “Ha! And how do you expect to pay for that?” when it comes to blowing people up — which, while admittedly still not a thing I’d be into even if it were free, does cost a great deal of money. I’d like to live in a world where healthcare is expected and endless funding for military operations is a silly, idealistic pipe dream.
Anyway, Stevens has really been struggling to land on an answer for her actions that doesn’t make her look like an insane asshole, and the latest one is, somehow, “sexism.”
On Monday, Stevens decided to kick off her MAGA turn by doing an interview with Bush administration sweetheart Scott Jennings and somehow flailing during even that.
In Stevens’ telling, after she lost the nomination, she “did everything right” and endorsed El-Sayed, but after that she was “ignored and cut off” — probably because no one trusted her, due to her super racist and Islamophobic campaign. Then, she said, came the ads in which “Jews were blamed for everything.”
Again, the ad was not about “blaming Jews” it was about the amount of money the US is sending to Israel to aid in the killing of Palestinians, which could ostensibly be used for other, less horrible things that might make Americans’ lives better. This is the exact same argument that has been made about every war and “conflict” I’ve ever lived through. Shit, at the end of every school year when I was growing up, my mom would get my teachers the “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber” mugs that they sold in the weird hippie catalog from which she also got our requisite “Question Authority” and “You Can’t Hug Your Children With Nuclear Arms” T-shirts.
In fact, it’s so traditional that it’s the same goddamned argument that one Haley Stevens used to oppose the Iran War.
In a statement published in July, she wrote “Here in Michigan, we’re feeling the cost of this war every day: at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and on the factory floor, where higher energy costs and global turmoil are squeezing working families.”
So … funding the Iran War has led to higher costs at the grocery store but funding Israel’s attacks on Gaza is cost neutral? How does that work? Are they using different money?
It’s also very traditional, in times of war, to insist that the people who are opposed to said war are “with the terrorists” or “with the communists” or just really hate the troops. This time it’s that they’re “antisemitic.” Why? Because it obviously feels more righteous to go against terrorism-lovers than it does to go against peaceniks who just think it’s bad to bomb people across the board.
“I gave him an opportunity, the Senate nominee here in Michigan, to unite around something that everyone can agree on,” Stevens said, of disavowing the ad he had nothing to do with in the first place. “And then I got disinvited instead.”
Yeah, because it’s not your job, as the loser of the primary, to tell the winner what to do in their campaign. That’s not how this works.
“And Scott, you know this, I know this,” she said pointedly to noted feminist (checks notes) Scott Jennings. “This is what happens to women. The moment they, you know, we get, well, you know, they're like these, you know, these, OK, they got my endorsement. I brought them in for a, a hug, and, you know, a chest hug, and, you know, it's like, all right, that's it!”
Now, look. I am 100 percent the target audience for the “this is what happens to women” argument. Because in most cases, it is literally true. Even if it’s a little bit of a stretch, I’m willing to hear a woman out because, hey, as a society we are much harder on women than we are on men. Sexism is a problem not just in the wider world but in Leftist movements as well — I’ve certainly known my share of manarchists and brocialists. But in this case? It’s not any kind of pattern! There’s no “Oh, the old ‘female primary competitor excluded from the winner’s campaign’ trope!” That is not a thing. I also can’t say I’ve seen a situation in which a primary loser keeps publicly dragging the winner’s campaign and demanding they change their position on the issue that likely won them the damned election in the first place, and is then surprised to find they do not have an honored seat at the table. This is a brand new thing!
But Jennings was willing to go along with the narrative, suggesting that the criticism of Stevens has been “misogynistic” in nature.
“Ms. Stevens,” he said, “I wanna get into this a little bit because there have been some, I think, sexist attacks on you, some, misogynistic attacks on you. I saw George Conway suggest you should check yourself into a mental hospital. James Carville said something that frankly, I'm not even gonna repeat here.”
To be fair, the James Carville quote was gross as hell, but he’s James Carville and no one listens to him anymore anyway. It was also confusing given that he’s far more politically aligned with Stevens and has publicly said he “would rather the Republicans keep the House by five than the Democrats to win by five because if that happens, they’re hostage to the DSA.”
“Other people have suggested that your fiance, a lawyer named Jason Turkish, influenced you or caused you to do it or you were doing it at the behest of him,” Jennings continued. “I want to give you a chance to push back against what I consider to be all of these sexist and misogynistic attacks on your own agency as a person who's involved in public service and politics in her own right.”
Stevens responded by going on about noted victim of sexist and misogynistic attacks John Fetterman.
“Yeah, yeah, well, look, it's just, it's just more of the same, right, Scott?” she began. “It's just more of the same of thinking I'm being forced into what my consciousness, you know, or my conscience rather, is saying, you know, you see. A Democrat from Pennsylvania, you know, his name's a lightning rod in the party. His name's Fetterman. You know, they're, they're saying, oh my God, you know, they say the same thing about him. They use the C word, you know, mental health. I mean, what are we getting at?”
So here’s the thing. Sometimes people might make comments about someone being “crazy” in a derogatory fashion, and that sucks, but with Stevens and Fetterman, it’s clearly said more with the hope that they’re not actually as terrible as they seem to be, but are instead simply having mental health- or stroke-related issues that can’t be helped. This is, in their respective situations, actually the most character-flattering scenario. It’s like when you’re a kid and you tell yourself that the kids who bully you probably have bad home lives.
There are scenarios in which I might be willing to agree that it’s misogynistic to say that Stevens was influenced by her weird Buster Bluth-looking fiancé, except that it very much seems like Stevens was influenced by her weird Buster Bluth-looking fiancé. I’m sorry, but she’s 100 percent giving “person who gets even more intensely into the the thing their partner is into than they are, to the point where it makes everyone feel kind of uncomfortable” energy. I don’t think it was an explicit situation in which he told her what to do and she complied, but I do think that the combination of “rejection” by voters despite spending $50 million in donor money to win them over and the “rejection” from the El-Sayed campaign and the acceptance from her weird Buster Bluth-looking fiancé was a mitigating factor here. That’s not “sexism,” that’s just a human thing that some humans do, regardless of their gender. In fact, I’d actually argue that men are much more susceptible to that kind of flip than are women.
I think that Stevens very much had a narrative in her head in which El-Sayed would see the wisdom/popularity of her views on Gaza and pivot to the Right on that issue in hopes of appealing to her base and the Democrats for Mike Rogers (Who Are Actually Republicans). She thought he would bend the knee to her on that issue, and that she would then graciously accept the gesture and move on. He didn’t. He didn’t really even seem to care if he had her endorsement or not, because he’s just not the kind of person who is going to go around groveling like that.
At another point in the interview, Jennings asked her if she thought it was even possible now to be “a Democrat in good standing and still believe that we should be in an open alliance with Israel?” She didn’t seem to have an answer for that particularly ridiculous question, but instead went on to say that she’s “more pro-choice, union than anyone,” adding that “I love these values, and I believe in them,” but that she just doesn’t feel that Abdul El-Sayed is “fit” to be a US Senator.
So instead, she decided to champion a guy who recently bragged about his support for national abortion bans and who has a history of being pretty shitty on labor. Apparently she’s good with every horrid thing Mike Rogers would vote for, so long as he supports sending more bombs to Israel, because that’s all that matters.
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It’s entirely likely that Stevens is well on her way to a full MAGA conversion, with her “story” mirroring the legions of “Why I Left the Left” testimonials wherein the testifier suffered mild criticism due to a bad take or bad actions and was then forced into the warm, loving, and oh-so-accepting arms of fascism. The classic “Oh, so I’m bad forever now?” scenario.
It doesn’t work the other way, of course. There’s no amount of shitty that MAGA folks can be to people that will cause the same deep wound as a “that’s pretty racist” Facebook comment from a left-leaning friend from college. There just isn’t. Gay MAGA folks are perfectly willing to tolerate grotesque homophobia on the Right, people of color on the Right are willing to tolerate blatant racism, non-Christians are happy to be told they’re going to hell, but it’s like “Well it’s all okay because these people will tolerate MY racism/homophobia/sexism/transphobia and won’t make me feel bad about it.” That’s why Stevens doesn’t care about all of Mike Rogers’ terrible positions on things — at the very least, he doesn’t make her feel like a bad person for her bad takes.
𝗛𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘆 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗘𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗢𝗻𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗽𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗨𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗹 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗠𝗲𝘁
https://theonion.com/haley-stevens-threatens-to-endorse-one-republican-every-hour-until-demands-met/
Hayley Stevens's worst enemy is Hayley Stevens.