Thirteen years ago today, Marco Rubio gave a cotton-mouthed GOP response to Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address, at one point awkwardly breaking his flow to lean out of frame for a quick drink of water.

Was this the moment we entered the dark timeline from which we have yet to escape? I guess we’ll never really know. Happy Thursday.

Coalition Crackup

by Andrew Egger

Who’s worse for the American right: its antisemites or its Zionists? This seemingly easy question has convulsed the online right for months, with old-school philosemite conservatives trying and mostly failing to exile the new coterie of antisemites, from Tucker Carlson to Candace Owens to Nick Fuentes, from the MAGA coalition. But the White House has largely steered clear of participating—until this week, when it found itself dragged into the fight largely by accident.

The trouble started Monday, when the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission met in D.C. for a public discussion about the rise of antisemitism. For most of the hearing, the commission stuck to the safe conversational waters of left-wing antisemitism, of the college-campus variety. But commissioner Carrie Prejean Boller—a former beauty queen, right-wing Catholic activist and influencer, and staunch Owens ally—had other plans. What’s this business of calling people like me antisemitic, she repeatedly asked, just because we don’t like Israel?

Throughout the hearing, Prejean Boller all but dared her fellow commissioners and other event participants to call her antisemitic to her face. “Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?” she asked. “If I don’t support the political state of Israel, am I an antisemite, yes or no?” When one participant asserted that Owens and Carlson were indeed antisemites, she scoffed: “There you go again. Everyone’s an antisemite, I guess.”

Commissions like these exist to further the administration’s political messaging, and kicking up intra-MAGA fights wasn’t exactly on the agenda. So it came as little surprise Wednesday when commission Chairman Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, announced that Prejean Boller was no longer a member. His stated reasons were interesting. He steered totally clear of the substance of Prejean Boller’s remarks, saying only that “no member of the commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue.” He added: “This was my decision.”

Prejean Boller wasn’t having it.