For those unaware, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines is a famous maxim of media interpretation that posits that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It’s a pretty useful heuristic, and I’ll confess it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw my colleague Noah Rothman ask “Has Contrived Coarseness Jumped the Shark?” Answer: No! Of course not! In fact, we’ll only get more of it as primary season heats up (and beyond that, as we head into 2028). Why, contrived hysteria is practically the coin of the realm by this point.

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Noah is referring in this specific case to the appallingly vulgar primary advertisement that dropped today from Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, running for Senate to replace the retiring Dick Durbin — so this touches on me quite personally, as I get to observe the form of the destructor Illinois is about to choose. Anyway, her big ad is literally just a parade of people shouting “F*** Trump!” That’s it. That’s the ad. No particular arguments — though slogans like “ABOLISH ICE” flash on-screen silently as a legion of Chicagoans all incant the same slogan. (On Twitter, her account writes “someone had to say it” — okay, but this many people, all in a row?)

Noah rather reasonably asks: Are we not better than this? Aren’t people tired of this ridiculous pantomime of anger and vulgarity? Absolutely not. Your average working stiff doesn’t care about any of this rhetoric; then again your average working stiff isn’t surfing the internet for Juliana Stratton campaign ads. This is directed at the base, and in the context of a primary.

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And it will work. This is what the left wants to hear right now, especially in ultra-blue Illinois, where the only defense that Democrats have left for their own disastrous mismanagement of every level of state government is to point to Trump as a shiny distraction. However dishonest a strategy that might be, it works in Illinois. Stratton is running on a predictably ultra-left platform (“ABOLISH ICE” is right there in the advertisement) with the explicit endorsement of Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois Democratic establishment. And she will win. Both of her races — the primary and the general alike — might as well be over already, in fact. (Forget it, Jake — it’s Chinatown.)

So no, contrived coarseness has not hit its sell-by date just yet. In fact, I predict we will see new lows in the months to come, as we head toward November.

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