Republicans are often very good at converting an event into a scandal, even when there is none to be found. They keenly understand the basic mechanics of a contemporary political media that rewards conflict. The modern conservative machine often operates in unison to manufacture a reality-TV confrontation designed to thrill the GOP base. 

First, a Republican makes a dramatic accusation. Then, conservative influencers and right-wing media outlets duly amplify the charge until it becomes a viral “gotcha” moment. GOP politicians and operatives then go on podcasts and Fox News to repeat the accusation. By the time anyone checks the underlying evidence, the original allegation has become canon to conservatives. 

That was plainly the ambition behind Missouri Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt’s performance on Tuesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with former special counsel Jack Smith. It was even there in the hearing’s title: “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters.” Convened by 93-year-old committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, it aimed to recast Smith, the prosecutor who indicted Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and alleged mishandling of classified documents, as the villain of a weaponized Justice Department. Smith, for his part, stood behind his case, stating emphatically, “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.”

But with the midterm elections barely a month away, Republican senators made the calculated decision to relitigate Jan. 6 by fishing through Smith’s records in a desperate bid to find something — anything — to excite their base. What they found was confusion about a basketball game.

Before Tuesday’s hearing started, Schmitt looked like a man whose plan was coming together. Earlier that morning, Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei published a flattering bulletin placing Schmitt atop the speculative short list to be Vice President JD Vance’s 2028 running mate, quoting admirers of the senator. “We hear the VP views Schmitt as trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator,” VandeHei wrote. The rollout appeared designed to elevate Schmitt’s national profile just as a splashy televised grilling of MAGA’s public enemy No. 1 was set to unfold. What happened instead was one of the most embarrassing misfires of any recent Senate hearing.

Near the end of his questioning, Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on Feb. 3, 2024. Smith looked genuinely confused and asked what city that would be in. Atlanta, Schmitt said. No, Smith replied. Schmitt then supplied the innuendo, noting that the day before, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had acknowledged her intimate relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who was helping lead her Georgia racketeering case against Trump. The unstated suggestion was that Smith had slipped into Georgia under the cover of a basketball game to coordinate with Willis. 

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Schmitt said he had a series of text messages from Smith’s team placing the prosecutor at the game, then he gave the former special counsel a beat to think it over: “I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.” A staffer hoisted a poster board showing purported texts alongside images of Smith, Willis and Wade and a photo of State Farm Arena, then yanked it back down with remarkable speed. Schmitt declared Smith had probably already perjured himself and blasted him as a “total dirtbag.”

The texts did not mention Atlanta at all. They mentioned a Hawks game. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., circled back later in the hearing and methodically dismantled the exchange. The whole thing collapsed because Schmitt, or someone working for him, apparently never considered the possibility that Smith might have attended a women’s basketball game, and only found one corresponding men’s game for the date in question. The game Smith attended was, in fact, a women’s college basketball game in College Park, Maryland between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes, the team then led by Caitlin Clark. Schmitt’s entire conspiracy theory was built on basic factual incompetence. 

It’s tempting to treat this episode as merely humorous. There is something inherently ridiculous about a United States senator arriving at a televised hearing convinced he has caught a former special counsel in perjury, only to learn that the central clue in his conspiracy theory was just a shared bird mascot. The speed with which the poster was yanked down by Schmitt’s staffers told the entire story before the cameras. Realizing in real-time that they had walked straight into a trap, the senator’s team tried to bury the evidence and move on before anyone noticed. 

But an apparently pre-planned chorus of right-wing influencers had their talking points ready to deploy the second Schmitt’s gotcha dropped. Fox News’ Sean Hannity initially applauded Schmitt before deleting his post on X. Benny Johnson declared that Schmitt had caught Smith perjuring himself. Other conservative commentators circulated the clip as proof that Smith had been caught in a lie — and then quietly abandoned the claim. 

Instead of owning the blunder, Schmitt doubled down. Appearing afterward on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” where the hosts, Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff, prompted him with the fiction intact, the senator continued to insist that he had been justified in asking the question. When confronted later by TMZ with the fact that Smith had actually been at the Iowa-Maryland game, Schmitt responded: “My job is to ask the question.” 

It was an extraordinary accusation to make on the strength of material that was, according to a report by MS NOW, explicitly described by Republican Judiciary Committee staff as “unvetted.” The political editor of KSDK-TV in St. Louis, Schmitt’s home market, mocked him openly for the mistake. 

Even within the senator’s own party, the embarrassment was palpable. A video of Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., looking on with a mask of utter horror quickly circulated online. “There’s something to be said about the staff work, and verifying before we do something like that publicly,” Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst told Raw Story. One unnamed Republican senator suggested the bad intel came directly from the White House. Reports soon surfaced that Schmitt’s general counsel Ethan Harper, who stood behind him holding the infamous poster, saw his potential White House staff position being placed into immediate jeopardy.

But since many conservatives will never let a thing like the truth get in the way of self-promotion, Schmitt took his victory lap after standing on a rake.

There is a familiar pattern in the refusal to feel shame. When Vance was caught spreading the false claim about immigrants eating pets in Ohio, he argued he would create and repeat fiction in service of a larger truth. Schmitt’s defenders are doing the same, treating a false perjury accusation as acceptable because it aimed at exposing supposed corruption. 

Step back, and the strategic picture is bleak for the people who planned this misfire. Senate Republicans chose to relitigate Jan. 6, embarrass themselves on national television and then double down rather than move on. It was propaganda and lawfare generation. The incompetence of the execution does not change the intent.

The post Eric Schmitt’s failed Jack Smith gotcha exposes GOP propaganda appeared first on Salon.com.

When I was a kid, I was delighted by the brazenness of generic groceries. There was Dr. Thunder, a soda whose name made its ambitions extremely clear. There were chocolate sandwich cookies called Twist and Shout. Somewhere in the cereal aisle were frosted flakes fronted not by Tony the Tiger but, as I remember it, a polar bear: a perfectly respectable mascot, just not the famous one.

That was part of the charm of generic food. It was forever making a little sideways gesture toward something else. The cookie was an Oreo in community theater; the cereal was performing Kellogg’s in a cheap wig. Whether we bought the understudy depended, in my family, on whether the ingredient “mattered.” For peanut butter cookies, my mom might spring for Jif and Kerrygold, then grab store-brand flour and brown sugar. Lasagna meant Rao’s sauce and Breakstone cottage cheese layered with Kroger ricotta and noodles. Grocery shopping involved a constantly shifting private calculus of where quality lived, where branding mattered and where an extra two dollars seemed frankly ridiculous.

Lately, though, I’ve had the sense that Mariano’s is cosplaying as Trader Joe’s.

It happened gradually enough that I missed the costume change. Then, over a few trips, I started noticing things: bulgogi and birria in the freezer case; grilled mushroom and truffle-oil thin-crust pizza; bronze-cut pasta; baby potatoes with brown butter and herbs; mascarpone vodka sauce. Products that once might have seemed oddly ambitious for a supermarket house brand were simply there, scattered around the store, as though they had always belonged.

The packaging had changed its posture, too: deep, muted colors and big, self-aware type. One jar of Kroger Private Selection preserves lets the raspberry seeds show through the glass beneath a black label announcing RASP-BERRY in enormous pink letters. This is not packaging designed to disappear discreetly beside Smucker’s.

That is increasingly the odd thing about calling any of this “generic.” The word once aptly described products whose chief proposition was resemblance: essentially the same cracker, cereal or can of tomatoes, minus the famous name and a little money at checkout. Now private-label goods account for nearly a quarter of U.S. consumer packaged-goods sales, and 92% of grocery shoppers say they have private-brand products in their homes. 

Nearly half say they bought more of them over the past year, but the more revealing number may be that 94% say they would keep buying them even if grocery prices declined.

Inflation accelerated the shift, but it didn’t invent it. Retailers had already begun turning their house brands into something more particular: not just substitutes, but products with identities, aesthetics and increasingly their own little fandoms. The old question was whether the name brand mattered. Now, in some aisles, the store brand is the name that matters.

Trader Joe’s understood this early. Shopping there has always felt slightly less like provisioning a household than visiting a restaurant whose menu happens to be arranged on shelves. You enter beside buckets of colorful flowers. Products come and go with the seasons. The Fearless Flyer turns new arrivals into minor events. A cashier notices, with the attention of a veteran waiter, the frozen dumplings in your cart and tells you they are her favorite, too.

Even the freezer cases seem to anticipate the question What am I supposed to do with this? The orange chicken is near the frozen rice, which is near the vegetables with stir-fry sauce. Dinner assembles itself spatially. And the products that cannot reasonably be called dinner (Scandinavian swimmers, those ridiculous Inside Out Carrot Cookies, whatever confection has recently been enrobed in dark chocolate) seem to be there largely because someone thought they might be fun.

I rarely leave Trader Joe’s congratulating myself for having economized, although I usually have. Instead, I text my partner some variation of: “I got new stuff for cheap.” Novelty without financial self-reproach is a powerful drug, and it has helped produce a truly astonishing secondary culture of Trader Joe’s blogs, Instagram accounts, rankings and podcasts devoted to the contents of a grocery store.

Other chains have developed their own versions of the phenomenon.

Aldi has what shoppers affectionately call the “aisle of shame,” a rotating stretch of seasonal housewares and oddities that can make a trip for eggs end with an inflatable ottoman in the trunk. It shares Trader Joe’s combination of affordability and discovery, although perhaps with slightly more treasure hunt in its DNA: the Trader Joe’s cult in a German sweater.

The company’s advertising still suggests that not everyone has joined. One recent commercial features a woman attempting to coax her husband out of the car and into Aldi, eventually tempting him with a bag of grass-fed beef sticks. The joke isn’t really that the food is bad. It’s that Aldi is different: unfamiliar labels, quarter-operated carts, its own little set of rules — a place that can inspire evangelical loyalty among regulars and still require explaining to everyone else.

Costco offers a sturdier version of the same intimacy. My parents became Costco people years ago. They enjoy speculating about who really manufactures Kirkland products as though they are solving minor corporate mysteries. My dad owns Kirkland slides. Last Christmas, my mom bought a 500-piece Costco puzzle for us to assemble over the holiday. At a certain point, the private label has escaped the pantry entirely and begun appearing on your feet and your coffee table.

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Whole Foods, meanwhile, is still gently arguing with the ghost of the phrase “Whole Paycheck.” Its 365 line helps make the case that the store can belong to an ordinary grocery routine rather than merely a place to buy $9 yogurt. It works: I have, on multiple occasions, gone there specifically because I wanted the 365 Lemon Tahini Crunch salad.

What these stores have in common is a way of turning the supermarket itself into a brand. More than half of shoppers now say a retailer’s private-brand selection is very or extremely important when deciding where to shop. You don’t merely prefer a certain frozen pizza. You become a person who knows which frozen pizza is worth buying at which store.

Conventional supermarkets have spent years trying to manufacture some version of that attachment. Before the mascarpone vodka sauce came the Starbucks counters, sushi stations, prepared-food bars and, in some Kroger locations, literal bars — all attempts to turn grocery shopping from an errand into somewhere one might willingly linger. Private label gives them another lever. Kroger says its own-brand sales are now growing faster than national brands, with sales of its premium Private Selection line recently up more than 14%.  

Perhaps that is why Private Selection suddenly looks so much less interested in resembling anything else. Generic packaging used to practice a kind of visual ventriloquism, borrowing enough from the famous package to make the reference obvious without kicking off a lawsuit. Today, the raspberry preserves would rather be remembered for themselves. You can tell someone, “Get the jar with the black label,” instead of “Get the jar that looks like, but isn’t, Smucker’s.”

That change also suits the way a growing number of people actually eat. We have become a nation of pantry anthropologists, increasingly comfortable locating pleasure at both ends of the grocery spectrum. American cheese has its place, perhaps melted over instant noodles slicked with black-garlic oil. There are people who can rank sparkling waters with the gravity once reserved for Burgundy. Loving food does not necessarily mean buying the most expensive version of everything. Increasingly, it means knowing where the good stuff is — however you happen to define good.

My mother understood this long before grocery marketers gave it a strategy deck. For years, once it fit comfortably into the budget, she bought Horizon Organic whole milk. At night, she would pour herself a small glass and eat it with a handful of Kettle Brand chips. Those were her things. Elsewhere in the cart, she was perfectly happy to save a dollar.

I have my own version of the list now. I will buy store-brand flour without thinking twice. I will happily eat supermarket frozen dinners, private-label salad kits and whatever peculiar seasonal snack has wandered into Aldi that week. But unless money is especially tight, I get strangely stubborn about butter, jam and coffee. Those still feel like places where I want the thing I want.

Maybe that is what has changed most about the old divide between name brand and generic. The point was never that every expensive thing was better, or that every cheaper thing was a compromise. You have to know what matters to you.

My mother had her milk and kettle chips. I have my butter, jam and coffee. The rest is up for negotiation.

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