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In January, Florida Rep. Randy Fine made a typically bigoted post on X about his colleague in the House of Representatives, Ilhan Omar. The post was in conversation with a specious right-wing conspiracy alleging that Omar’s net worth had increased, nefariously, through a variety of unspecified means—perhaps cryptically linked back to her Somali heritage. Fine asserted that to “solve all this,” Omar ought to be “denaturalized and deported.” The ugliness of the comment prompted Rick Wilson—former Republican strategist, he of the magnanimous Lincoln Project—to step forward. In earlier eras of discourse, the Lincoln Project attempted to coalesce an anti-Trump movement by appealing to our better angels; brandishing Sorkin-ish platitudes about the Soul of America. (There is a reason the organization name-checks the 16th president.) But Wilson took a much different approach here. Rather than addressing the content of Fine’s character, Wilson homed in on something else: The congressman is very, very fat.

“Hunting you with harpoons and whaleboats would solve all this,” said Wilson, parroting Fine’s diction. Among the responses threaded below Wilson’s retort, one is an edit of promotional materials for a 2011 television adaptation of Moby-Dick. In it, Fine has been photoshopped in place of the whale.

It goes without saying that for a very long time, fat-shaming a politician was previously verboten in the liberal playbook. I also do not possess the wherewithal to cast judgement on whether Fine—who has expressed some genuinely bloodthirsty sentiments about Palestinians—deserves to be bullied in such a way. But what I can say is that, right now, we are in the midst of a marked pivot in the way the Democratic Party interfaces with its opposition. The shift in attitude hasn’t been firmly diagrammed; instead, what’s going on here is mostly subconscious, like a collective unlocking of forbidden territory. There was a period of time in the late 2010s where liberal hostility toward MAGAdom was screened for all potential vectors of transgression, and a seemingly infinite number of potential -isms or -phobias. The philosophy was well-intentioned, but it also solidified the Democrats as the party of pedants (or narcs, or nerds, or rule-followers). Now in the wreckage of the post-Biden era, some liberals have started to alter their approach. If sweeping appeals to our collective empathy have failed to resonate—if the public is not moved by Randy Fine’s intersectional shortcomings—maybe we are better off getting down in the muck.

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There is no perfect name for this dynamic, but some have begun to refer to it, somewhat facetiously, as “Dark Woke.” In the most basic definition, Dark Woke is a social covenant that allows for liberals to be extra mean to conservatives, by encouraging a style of animus that deliberately crosses the red lines previously established within the progressive orthodoxy. The concept is difficult to articulate, but it’s easily felt. Dark Woke manifests when the liberal pundit Kyle Kulinski tweets out an A.I. rendering of Erika Kirk and J.D. Vance standing side by side at a wedding altar, or when the Democratic Party’s X account accuses Stephen Miller of being cuckolded by Elon Musk, or when Pete Hegseth........

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