The Borg Directive

Nate Silver tells three million readers that resistance is futile. The mongoose disagrees.

The Frog and Mongoose • December 24, 2025

It’s Christmas Eve. I’m on my first cup of coffee, and apparently we’re defending Dr. Heather Cox Richardson from a coordinated pile-on.

This was not on my politics bingo card this morning. The mongoose doesn’t usually rally to the henhouse. But when you see who’s holding the spray paint, you pay attention.

I read FiveThirtyEight religiously during the runup to 2016. Nate Silver was the smart guy with the spreadsheet, the one who could see through the noise to the signal. I trusted his models the way you trust the pressure gauges on a boiler—not because they tell you what you want to hear, but because they’re supposed to tell you what’s actually happening.

Then Trump happened. And Silver, for all his sophisticated modeling, couldn’t see it coming—not because his data was wrong, but because Trump was outside his model’s worldview. The phenomenon didn’t fit the spreadsheet, so he dismissed it. He admitted later that his mistake was letting educated guesses override the numbers. But I’d put it differently: his narrative about how American politics worked blinded him to what was actually happening on the ground.

Now that same Nate Silver has turned his analytical apparatus on Heather Cox Richardson, and the diagnosis is devastating: she’s the Democratic Tea Party. Her millions of readers are suffering from “Richardsonism”—a pathology of moral clarity, an infection of believing that democracy is a non-negotiable principle rather than another variable to be poll-tested.

The Borg have issued their directive. Resistance is futile.

The Assimilation Protocol

Silver’s essay maps the Democratic coalition into three factions. First, there’s the Capital-L Left—Bernie, AOC, the structural change people. Silver tolerates them as a marginal irritant. Second, there’s the “Abundance Libs,” the technocratic wing he explicitly associates with his friends Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson—market-friendly, willing to find common ground with Republicans, focused on growth and feasibility. These are already assimilated. They speak the language. They comfortably inhabit the Cube.

Then there’s the third faction: Richardsonism. Older. Often female. Highly educated. Intensely anti-Trump. Treating the defense of democracy as a moral emergency.

This is the faction Silver holds in open contempt. This is the faction that gets tarred with the Tea Party brand—the rhetorical poison that associates millions of engaged citizens with irrational extremism.

But the comparison is absurd on its face. The Tea Party was a predominantly white male movement distinguished by its regressive racial views, its anti-establishment insurgency, its willingness to burn down institutions to get its way. Richardson’s readers are institution-loyal, not institution-wrecking. They show up for civic rituals. They believe norms can hold. They still think the Democratic Party is the only workable vehicle for stopping authoritarianism.

One critic put it plainly: “Silver apparently thinks there’s reasonable grounds for comparison because he finds both groups annoying. That’s not an analogy. That’s an indication of a more serious emotional problem.”

Another observed that Silver seems to think nothing is more dangerous to Democratic politics than perimenopausal women.

I’d laugh if it weren’t so revealing.

The Flashpoint and the Frame

The specific charge against Richardson centers on her September read of Tyler James Robinson, the man charged with killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Richardson wrote that Robinson “was not someone on the left” and “appears to have embraced the far right.” Subsequent reporting complicated the picture—Robinson came from a conservative household, had deep online subculture markers, and lived with a transgender partner. The motive remains murky.

Did Richardson get ahead of the evidence? Possibly. Should she have issued a clearer correction? Reasonable people can disagree. But here’s what’s being done with that one disputed call: it’s being used to stand in for her entire body of work. Years of meticulously sourced historical analysis, thousands of letters connecting American history to current events, a readership of three million people who have found coherence in a deliberately chaotic information environment—and the indictment rests on one sentence about one shooter in one letter. I’m not kidding. I read that piece. One sentence.

Meanwhile, Silver himself claimed in mid-2021 that COVID more likely than not originated in a lab leak—a position the scientific consensus still refutes. No retraction forthcoming. Apparently the standard for “unforgivable bias” is applied asymmetrically.

The same week this intramural fight flared up, CBS News pulled a 60 Minutes segment hours before airtime, after it had cleared normal editorial and legal review. The correspondent called the decision political and corporate. That’s not a five-miles-over-the-limit ticket. That’s grabbing the steering wheel in the middle of a car crash. That’s where standards either hold or fold.

But here we are, and the big intervention isn’t aimed at CBS. It’s aimed at the history professor in Maine.

The Pragmatism Knife

Silver’s core critique is that Richardson practices “purity politics”—a moral clarity that treats democracy as a first principle rather than a negotiable position. In his telling, this sensibility confuses the world as it ought to be with the world as it is.

I’ve heard this song before. We all have.

There’s a kind of pragmatism that only makes sense if you’ve never had your life narrowed by someone else’s rules. If you’ve never hit the concrete wall of redlining, if you’ve never watched segregation turn opportunity into a gated community, if you’ve never had to negotiate with patriarchy just to be heard in the room—pragmatism sounds like wisdom. It sounds calm. It sounds like the grown-ups are back.

But for people who didn’t get to choose the terms, pragmatism has often been the polite word for surrender.

Pragmatism is what struck the condemnation of the slave trade from the Declaration of Independence—the sensible people in the room made sure it didn’t survive. Pragmatism is what looked at the Confederacy and counseled accommodation. Pragmatism is what gave us the Compromise of 1877, ending Reconstruction and paving the road for Jim Crow.

Every major expansion of American freedom required somebody to be accused of being unrealistic. Abolition was unrealistic. Civil rights were unrealistic. The demand to end Jim Crow was treated as irresponsible provocation—until it became the country’s conscience.

So when Silver ridicules moral clarity as purity politics, the reaction isn’t just intellectual. It’s visceral. Because moral clarity is not a luxury for people who have to live under the consequences. It’s the only thing that ever moved the line.

Who Benefits

The mongoose always asks the diagnostic question: who benefits from this attack, and why now?

Richardson isn’t a structural critic. She’s not calling for the overthrow of corporate power or the dismantling of the donor class. Her frame is essentially defensive—preserve the institutions, defend the norms, understand how we got here so we can find our way forward. In that sense, she’s already inside the coalition the corporate Democrats claim to want.

So why the pile-on?

I think it’s because she’s built an audience that doesn’t need them. Three million people getting their daily political coherence from a history professor, not from the New York Times opinion page, not from Ezra Klein’s podcast, not from the official party messaging apparatus. That’s a distribution channel they don’t control. And in the attention economy, an audience you don’t control is an audience that might start asking questions you don’t want asked.

The post-2024 fight over “what went wrong” is really a fight over “who gets to define what Democrats should be.” Silver and his cohort are marking territory—trying to establish that moral clarity is naiveté, that emotional investment is liability, that the only respectable Democratic posture is technocratic pragmatism willing to find common ground with the people actively dismantling democracy.

Richardson’s crime isn’t being wrong. It’s being popular without their permission.

The Directive Refused

The Borg message is clear: Lower your shields. Your distinctiveness will be added to our coalition calculus. Your moral clarity will be assimilated into polling averages. Resistance is futile.

And three million readers are saying back: We are not data points. We are citizens. And we remember what happens when you negotiate away first principles.

Dr. Richardson has been one of the lights guiding us through these dark years. Not because she’s perfect—nobody is, and anyone demanding perfection as the price of participation is running a different game entirely. But because she does the patient work of connecting today’s chaos to yesterday’s patterns, of reminding us that we’ve faced these forces before, and of insisting that the arc of American history bends toward democracy only when people bend it.

Some of the same people who mock her readers for treating her like a deity will turn around and demand she behave like one—omniscient, incapable of a bad call, incapable of a flawed sentence on a day when the whole country is vibrating at a hundred decibels. That standard of perfection has never existed in American politics. Jefferson was imperfect. Lincoln was imperfect. King was imperfect. If perfection were the entry fee, there would be no American story at all.

So yes: correct what needs correcting. Say what changed. Tighten the language. Own the miss. Then keep moving.

But don’t pretend this pile-on is about standards when the punishment is a brand, a scarlet letter, a campaign to make one historian carry everybody’s anxiety about where the Democratic coalition is headed.

The resistance isn’t futile. It’s the only thing that ever moved the line.

And the mongoose stands with the history professor.