James Freeman’s Tuesday Wall Street Journal column on the Los Angeles mayoral primary is built on a single concession that is also the entire trick. “One could argue,” he writes, “that Los Angeles voters made a wise choice in a primary mayoral election where they elevated the candidate championing a fresh approach to the city’s stubborn homelessness challenge.” The column then spends the next thousand words turning that concession into the cover for the non-choice the primary actually produced. The “fresh approach” is housing-first orthodoxy — the same policy package that built the encampments Freeman finds depressing — rebadged and rerun against itself in the general. This column walks through how the trick is built and why it lands with the readers it was built for.
I drafted copy of this kind for two decades. The “fresh approach” is a phrase I used to build my Tuesday around. The cable greenroom I came up in loved it because it conceded nothing — the failed policy got to keep failing, the operators got to claim the high ground of reform, and the columnist who passed it through got the readership that wanted a respectable version of the same complaint. So when I read Freeman’s lede I do not see analysis. I see the move I used to run, dressed up for the page I used to ghost for.
One could argue that Los Angeles voters made a wise choice in a primary mayoral election where they elevated the candidate championing a fresh approach to the city’s stubborn homelessness challenge. On the other hand, more comprehensive reporting on the progress already underway might have cemented what was already a clear mandate. Either way, it’s almost as if the city’s working, taxpaying residents are now being offered real choices between ambitious proposals that take the homelessness crisis seriously.
It’s hard to imagine a more depressing electoral outcome.
The lede and the pivot land in adjacent paragraphs, which is the trick. The first paragraph builds the frame: a “wise choice,” a “fresh approach,” “real choices between ambitious proposals.” The second paragraph yanks the floor out: the general is “depressing.” The reader is asked to hold both at once and to feel the depression as the reader’s own recognition that the “real choices” are not real. WSJ Appendix A.1’s frame-engineered relabeling (frame_engineered_relabeling) is the operative entry — same housing-first policy, three brand names inside four sentences. The reader who absorbs the vocabulary absorbs the frame; the reader who absorbs the frame believes they reasoned to it. I have sat through focus-group debriefs on the exact move, flagged as retained-memory because the documents are not in the public record. Operators call it the “fresh-paint concession,” and it tests the way these things always test when the brand is new and the failure has not yet shown up in the next quarter’s data.
Karen Bass and Nithya Raman now face each other in a general election — both firmly on the progressive left, both committed to versions of the same failed policies that have turned once-beautiful neighborhoods into open-air encampments. Voters weren’t offered a meaningful choice. The two candidates’ approaches to the city’s central challenge differ in branding more than substance.
This is the trick named, in Freeman’s own words. “Differ in branding more than substance” is what an honest reading of the two candidacies delivers. Bass runs Inside Safe, the mayoral housing-first program. Raman runs a voucher proposal to let homeless residents obtain housing. On the surface, two competing approaches. Underneath, the same orthodoxy: housing first, treatment optional, accountability absent, the public pays. The Bad-Faith Catalog’s false_dichotomy is the structural fallacy — two labels presented as a substantive choice when they are cosmetically different deliveries of the same policy package. The brand is the difference. The outcome on the sidewalk is the same outcome.
The consequence is what the column walks through next: “Both ask enormous sacrifices from taxpayers while expecting little from those being ‘housed.’” That sentence is the closest the column comes to saying what the brand is actually for. The scare quotes around “housed” do the dirty work. The reader is told the program is producing shelter; the program is producing encampments with case-manager caseloads. The column knows. The column does not name the gap. The reader is left to do the work the column will not.
As Noah Goldberg reports in the Los Angeles Times, the shared progressive values lead both candidates to claim credit for the same meager accomplishments.
Receipt. Noah Goldberg’s Los Angeles Times reporting is the citation the column hangs its finding on; the byline provides the institutional weight. The technique is WSJ Appendix A.7’s technocratic-credential ledger — cite the local paper of record, attribute the finding, ride the institutional cover without examining whether the local paper of record has documented the alternative (a candidate who would treat housing as contingent on treatment and accountability). The asymmetric coverage is the work. Goldberg’s byline is the receipt for a finding the page wanted circulated.
The all-party jungle primary system that produced this race is now guaranteeing that the city’s working residents have no real advocate in the mayoral contest. The voters deserve better than a choice between competing versions of the same expensive failure.
This is the structural point the column half-makes and then walks away from. The jungle primary is the structural capture device. Under a closed partisan primary, the candidate who advances is the candidate the dominant coalition can produce. Under an all-party jungle, the two candidates who advance are the two candidates the largest coalitions can each clear the threshold for — and when both coalitions are progressive, the general is a choice between two progressivisms, branded. Freeman names the mechanism and then asks the question the column is too polite to finish asking: what procedure produced this, and who benefits from keeping it? The answer the column refuses: the structural arrangement that captures local politics into the coalition the page is arguing against, with the procedural mechanism preserved precisely because it produces that outcome. WSJ Appendix A.10’s common-sense-vs-elites pivot is the deeper register — the column casts the working residents as victims of an elite procedural arrangement without naming which elite, which donor class, which policy network arranged it.
The same ideological conformity has made higher education impossible to take seriously. Parents paying full tuition to send their children to elite universities might be forgiven for wondering when their kids will encounter an actual debate between competing intellectual viewpoints. As John Tomasi of Heterodox Academy and Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard have argued in the Washington Post, the modern campus has often substituted ideological conformity for the genuine search for truth.
The move here is the template-generalize. The LA housing-first orthodoxy is one instance of a broader pattern; the column lifts the pattern to the campus to widen the frame. Same trick at higher ed: a structural conformity rebranded as a diversity of viewpoints, with the actual dissenters — Tomasi, VanderWeele, the Heterodox Academy cohort — cited as the credentialed cover for the critique. The Bad-Faith Catalog’s expert-consensus / expert-deference framings is the operative technique: appeal to the credentialed dissenters as authority without naming the structural apparatus that produced the conformity in the first place. Receipts: Tomasi and VanderWeele’s Washington Post essay. Consequence: parents paying tuition get branded pluralism; students get ideological conformity; the administrators who run the conformity keep their positions. The Tomasi-and-VanderWeele citation is doing the same work the Noah Goldberg citation did a graf earlier — credentialed cover for a finding the column wants circulated.
The country is mourning the loss of Dolly Parton. The fourth of twelve children born to a Tennessee sharecropper, she grew up in a small cabin in circumstances that would have justified any amount of bitterness. Instead she carried into the world a relentless work ethic, an unfakeable faith, and a deep gratitude for the blessings that came her way. What set Parton apart from many of her peers was the absence of grievance.
Freeman’s pivot to Parton is the third leg of the same template. The “fresh approach” / “ambitious proposal” / “campus with real debate” sequence names the conformity from the policy side. The Parton passage names it from the grievance side. The two halves of the column are the same trick: there is a correct way (Bass’s “fresh approach,” Raman’s “pioneering proposal,” the heterodox campus, Parton), and there is the contemporary wrong way (the housing-first orthodoxy, the conformist campus, the cult of victimhood). Bandura’s moral justification mechanism is operative. The reader is given a moral exemplar and told that the column’s preferred politics is the politics Parton would have approved of; the column’s opponents are the politics of grievance and resentment. The mechanism’s job is to move the policy argument off the ground where it could be examined on receipts and onto the moral ground where receipts do not reach. The Parton anecdote is the column’s lever.
The Parton pivot is also the column’s most candid paragraph about its own audience. Parton grew up in a cabin and refused to let the cabin become her identity. Working and taxpaying Los Angeles residents, the column has just told us, are the ones being asked to make enormous sacrifices so the housed-by-housing-first can avoid the cabin-as-identity move. The Parton passage is the column telling its readership who the readership is supposed to be: the people who took the cabin as something to leave rather than something to leverage. The Imagination Library — books for kids whose families couldn’t afford them — is the column’s preferred policy metaphor: a hand up, not a handout, dignity-coded, family-coded, productivity-coded. The structural-program shape of Inside Safe or the voucher proposal does not survive that comparison. The comparison is the column’s payload.
So here is what the column actually is, taken together. It is a respectable version of a complaint the column wants circulated: the housing-first orthodoxy produced the encampments; the primary produced two housing-first candidates with different brand names; the general will produce a winner from one of those brands; the working-and-taxpaying residents will pay; and nothing in the branding changes the outcome. The “fresh approach” is the trick. The brand is the difference. The reader is given the feeling of having been offered a real choice so the reader will not notice that no real choice was offered. This is the operation I helped build. I dressed regulatory relief as freedom. I dressed wage suppression as labor-market flexibility. I dressed tax retention at the top as tax relief. The vocabulary was always the policy, dressed as the policy’s reform. Freeman’s “fresh approach” is the same operation, with better tailoring and a Parton eulogy at the back to soften the landing.
The editorial-page trick in 2026 is the cable-segment trick from 2016 in a better suit. The brand changes. The orthodoxy continues. The reader gets the feeling of dissent without the cost of dissent. The encampments stay where they were.
— Phukher Tarlson