The Cult of Jasmine Crockett Shows Democrats are Still Trapped in the Dumbest Form of Identity Politics

Comedians Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers were right to tell people not to waste money on her campaign. But they had to apologize anyway.

Dear readers,

I got myself into a bit of a monkey’s paw situation when I wrote a few months ago that Texas Democrats shouldn’t nominate State Rep. James Talarico for U.S. Senate. Talarico, I wrote, is too far to the left — he holds all the usual orthodox liberal positions, and what makes him stand out in the crowd is his choir boy/seminarian persona. In theory, that’s supposed to help win over Texas swing voters, but as we saw with Tim Walz’s supposed advantage of being able to “code talk” to rural whites, these theories of crossover-appeal-through-persona don’t work. To win voters in the center, you need a candidate who is actually closer to the center himself or herself, not one who knows how to argue that gendered grammar in ancient Hebrew counsels in favor of trans participation in girls’ sports.

So naturally, after my warning, we’ve ended up with a primary between Talarico and a candidate who would be even more ill-suited than Talarico: Rep. Jasmine Crockett.

Crockett is a partisan bomb thrower who delights the kind of Democrats who watch a lot of MSNBC and share a lot of memes on Facebook. You may have seen her refer to Marjorie Taylor Greene at a House committee hearing as a “bleach-blond bad-built butch-body” — whatever that means — and if you want, you can buy a t-shirt declaring that phrase a “Crockett Clapback.” There are more clapbacks where that came from: she stood up at the Human Rights Campaign gala and called wheelchair-using Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “Hot Wheels”;¹ she said Hispanics who voted for Trump have a “slave mentality”; she called detractors of DEI programs “mediocre white boys”.

U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), and then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) spoke during the hearing on “Unfair Play: Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports" held by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Subcommittee at the U.S. Capitol on May 07, 2025 in Washington, DC. This confrontation came approximately one year after Crockett termed Greene a “bleach-blond bad-built butch-body.” (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Or, consider what Crockett said when Republicans sought to censure Stacey Plaskett, the non-voting delegate representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, for her ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein. Crockett went to the House floor with a list of Republicans who had taken donations from “Jeffrey Epstein,” including Lee Zeldin, the former congressman from Long Island who now serves as EPA Administrator. But there was a problem — the Jeffrey Epstein who donated to Zeldin is a Long Island neurosurgeon who made his donations in 2020, after the notorious Manhattan financier Epstein had died. Did Crockett apologize? Of course not. Here’s what she told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, with a straight face:

Listen, I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein. Just so that people understand, when you make a donation, your picture is not there…² unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies. Because, it was not the same one — that’s fine. But when Lee Zeldin had something to say, all he had to say was ‘it was a different Jeffrey Epstein.’ He admitted that he did receive donations from a Jeffrey Epstein, so at least I wasn’t trying to mislead people. Now, have I dug in to find out who this doctor is? I have not. So I will trust and take what he says, is that it wasn’t that Jeffrey Epstein.

You get the idea — she’s a loudmouth who talks a lot of shit in a way that’s neither smart nor strategic. She appeals to the sort of voter who is so partisan that he or she thinks “I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein” is a good argument. How this is supposed to appeal to Texas voters who aren’t already predisposed to hate Republicans is beyond me, and Texas isn’t Massachusetts — if she’s going to win, she’s going to need a lot of voters who aren’t already nodding along to MSNBC.

So, because they can read an electoral map, the liberal comedians Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers urged listeners on their podcast last week not to waste their money by donating to her. And boy, did some people on the internet get angry. Tim Miller flags one representative TikTok post, from black trans activist Hope Giselle, who called Yang and Rogers “twinks” with “gaping rosebuds”³ and said it was “structurally violent” for them to “tell black people, or people in general, not to financially support a black woman who is running for office.” Giselle’s post has gotten more than 220,000 likes.

On Saturday, Rogers and Yang issued groveling apologies on Instagram. Rogers declared his “great respect and admiration” for Crockett while Yang said he should not have weighed in “cursorily” and will use his platform “more responsibly” in the future. The apologies are preposterous, not only because their original comments were correct, but also because candidates are fair game: a core part of our political process is assessing which candidates can win and which ones can use donated funds effectively. This is something we’re all supposed to be arguing about. But the chorus of arguments like Giselle’s — that you can’t tell people not to give money to a black woman, simply because she is a black woman — was good enough to induce an apology anyway.

We have these arguments because a lot of Democratic voters have developed deeply dysfunctional relationships to black women as political candidates. They have extrapolated from the statistical observation that black women are an essential part of the Democratic Party coalition — they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, and their votes are needed to win elections — to a view that there is inherent moral authority that arises from being a black female Democrat. This is why we see hero-worship of Stacey Abrams, who literally got cast on the “Star Trek: Discovery” series as “president of Earth” in between her two losing campaigns for governor of Georgia.⁴ And it’s how you got die-hard Stans for Fulton County DA Fani Willis, even as she disastrously mismanaged the RICO prosecution of Donald Trump, including by appointing her lover as a special prosecutor.

Of course, the grant of inherent moral authority does not extend to all black women, but only to black women who agree with the person issuing the grant — as Steve Morris noted on this week’s Central Air (see link below), a liberal who worships Crockett or Abrams is unlikely to extend the same reverence to a socialist like Nina Turner or a moderate like Lauren Underwood, let alone to a Republican like Winsome Earle-Sears. But the idea that moral authority arises from black female identity is what makes Crockett so popular as a meme: liberals, even if they are not themselves black or female, can share her “clapbacks” online and see them as final-boss slams that win arguments, even if what she is saying is false (Zeldin accepted money from Epstein) or politically damaging (Hispanic voters have a “slave mentality”) or contentless (Greene has a “bleach-blond bad-built butch-body”).⁵ Crockett is allowed to dish it out, as are her supporters — note that Bowen Yang is “white-adjacent” in addition to having that “gaping rosebud” — but if you dish back, then you’re racist.

Jay Powell's Emergency Podcast

Among the problems with this identity-obsessed insanity is that it short-circuits the process by which you’re supposed to figure out if a candidate is any good. Candidates of all races and genders are good and bad at politics, and candidates of all races and genders are good or bad matches for different electorates. It is the electorate’s job to decide which candidates are the most adept and the best fit for a constituency. But Democrats pollute that process with all sorts of identity-based rules, such as the (conditional) irreproachability of black women. But there are others, including the projects of liberal folk-science that try to identify the exact right white guy with the right white guy folkways to win back white guys, which, you might notice, never work.

The biggest practical problem for the Crockett candidacy, though, is that the circa-2020 reign-of-terror racial politics that still pervade liberal milieus like the gay bubble in which Yang and Rogers are trying desperately not to lose podcast audience are alien to the rest of the electorate. Maybe Crockett will win the Democratic nomination on a wave of accusations that anyone who criticizes her is racist and sexist. But what is the strategy for the general election? To tell the broader Texas electorate that they, too, are racist if they are unimpressed with her name-calling? Nobody outside the Democratic base is going to go for that, and she is not going to be a U.S. senator.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Pressed about whether this was an appropriate thing to say about someone in a wheelchair, Crockett told an obvious lie: her comments were a reference not to Abbott’s wheelchair but to his policy of busing migrants northward to cities in blue states. Never mind that she’d been liking Facebook comments calling him “Hot Wheels” as far back as 2021, before he’d ever put any migrants on any buses.

2. It’s true that Federal Election Commission filings about political donations don’t include photographs of the donor. But the record for the donation Jeffrey Epstein gave to Lee Zeldin lists his occupation (“physician”) and place of residence (Manhasset, New York) and indicates that he was alive in 2020 — all good clues that he’s a different Jeffrey Epstein from the one who died in federal custody in 2019.

3. If you don’t know what this means, do not Google it — just know it constitutes an allegation that they’ve gotten fucked so much that it’s undermined the effectiveness of their sphincters.

4. Note that there are several Democrats who have won statewide elections in Georgia in the last decade, and Abrams is not one of them.

5. Incidentally, this mascot-like use of black female politicians is itself pretty racist.