And anyone wonders why MAGA has gone so wrong?

There is no doubt that Woke 1 was often, as Ocasio-Cortez said, “crazy.” It was often worse than crazy. It could be gleefully vindictive. Good people — including people I know — were put through hell. I’ve experienced its scorn also, and I know what it’s like to face deeply unfair and grotesquely wrong accusations of hate and bigotry, along with demands that I face extreme personal and professional consequences for my speech.

I’ve felt the anti-woke movement’s claws as well, and no one has called for my cancellation with more vigor than the new right. As person after person endures this deep intolerance — an intolerance backed by the full power of the federal government buttressed by a vitriolic right-wing media ecosystem that’s being remade in the image of the 1930s radio demagogue Father Coughlin — it’s very clear what has happened in the United States of America.

Some other things I did

My Sunday column was about college. In his reality television show, Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, told his daughter Paloma that she might not be allowed to go to Harvard even if she were admitted and wanted to go. Why? Because, as he said, “If I send you there, I think what happens is they have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds.” I disagreed:

I’m convinced that every person — especially those of us who live in the world of ideas — should spend time in a place where he or she is a distinct religious or ideological minority, even when it’s hard. It can be among the most clarifying and rewarding experiences in life.

In a conversation last week with MS NOW’s Katy Tur and me, my friend Mona Charen, the policy editor at The Bulwark, reflected on her experience as a conservative at Barnard College in the 1970s. She referred to a quote of John Stuart Mill’s: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

When I was in law school, I appreciated the fact that my ideas were being tested by the smartest people I’d ever met. There was no way for me to skate through a conversation — much less a class. That was worth the scorn, as annoying and painful as that scorn could sometimes be.

My Saturday round table conversation with my colleagues Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle was about JD Vance, wokeness and the future of both the Democratic and Republican Parties. We covered a lot of ground, including whether Vance can replicate Trump’s appeal.

I think JD Vance is more shrewd in some ways, in that he’s also like Ron DeSantis, too online. But unlike Ron DeSantis, I think he speaks the language of faith more fluently. And critically, I think he’s better at whipping up religious fervor against his enemies.

And if you’ve carefully looked at the numbers from 2024, I mean, a couple of numbers stand out. One is white evangelical votes in favor of Trump. If you’ve got up to 30 percent of the country, that’s going to go for you by this more than 80 percent rate, you have to fight, scratch and claw to get 40, only 40 percent of the rest.

So JD Vance has a very, very intentional message to this community. He is very much wrapping it around faith. And I think — to answer the actual question, Michelle — look, you’re seeing battle lines being drawn internally, within the conservative, sort of the MAGA movement between Rubio and Vance. And it’s entirely possible that this could be the contest. But to Jamelle’s point, I’m also seeing a lot of people telling Rubio: “Run in 2032. Run in 2032,” because they’re thinking of this more like the John McCain-Barack Obama election; that this is the election where the Republicans are essentially — whether they like it or not, want to or not, or believe it or not — going to be offering up a sacrificial lamb to a Democratic nominee.

I think that’s way premature to say, but if the fundamentals continue where they are, there’s some real validity to the idea that JD Vance may end up taking on the B team rather than the A team in 2028.