people hate insincerity! they hate corpspeak, they hate nakedly cynical pandering, they often find it appealing when a politician sincerely holds a belief they don’t agree with because it means that politician won’t back down on the ones they do
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That is a brief yet meaty chunk of thinking right there
aug 27, 2025, 10:03 am • 0 0 • view
you can’t sincerely stand on an unpopular principle, you have to cynically embrace unpopular culture war talking points from the right
aug 26, 2025, 2:50 pm • 12 0 • view
I for one would love for people who represent me in zero-sum games in which it seems like the stakes could increasingly include my life to demonstrate a total commitment to always trying to not play the zero-sum game against their opponents
aug 26, 2025, 3:07 pm • 4 0 • view
this is why the center pivots don't work. they lose the very same "center" voters they are trying to reach because they inevitably sacrifice candor. the mean voter theory assumption, that similarity always increases support, is false. Undecided voters don't want undecided candidates.
aug 26, 2025, 2:54 pm • 15 0 • view
It’s no coincidence the earnest Nazis have a higher approval rating than the Dems atm. All the Nazis in the country trust the Nazi party to do Nazi things. Meanwhile, no one trusts Dems to do anything.
aug 26, 2025, 3:26 pm • 4 1 • view
I keep going back to the VP debate. Vance was a smarmy corporate douche in a suit trying to sell me a lemon. Walz, instead of the charismatic grandpa we had seen on the campaign trail, tried to present himself as something he clearly was not & missed a golden chance to bury couch fucker.
aug 27, 2025, 1:01 pm • 0 0 • view
I mean youtu.be/wdhAUHMm5-0?...
aug 27, 2025, 8:59 am • 0 0 • view
Jason Kander's famous 2016 ad where he assembled an assault rifle blindfolded, as a way of establishing his credentials to talk about gun control, and challenged his opponent to do the same... Think someone suggested Walz ask the "hillbilly" couchfucker to name the steps needed to change your oil
aug 26, 2025, 3:25 pm • 4 0 • view
People like believing you’re not one consultant meeting away from completely changing your values
aug 26, 2025, 2:50 pm • 13 0 • view
'Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos,' if you will.
aug 27, 2025, 9:07 am • 1 0 • view
like, you could tell me you'd behead my enemies and give me a free house and a blowjob, but if you say it in corporatese there's a 70% chance I won't hear it.
aug 26, 2025, 2:53 pm • 15 2 • view
I am interested in this platform
aug 27, 2025, 10:05 am • 0 0 • view
I sometimes think it's not even active hatred of corp-speak, so much as, everyone, all their life, learns to tune that shit out whenever they can, so politicians using it are sort of using the opposite of a dogwhistle; something everyone is trained to ignore.
aug 26, 2025, 2:52 pm • 33 0 • view
Oh yeah for sure. When your candidate uses the same tone, cadence, and vocab as your CEO when you're ignoring him during the quarterly company-wide jerk off session, what's that gonna do for your candidate?
aug 26, 2025, 4:40 pm • 19 0 • view
yeah, you can instantly recognize these types of people as climbers who don’t believe in anything at all, who will happily throw you to the wolves the moment the winds shift
aug 26, 2025, 8:30 pm • 13 0 • view
There's a reason wellstone kept winning
aug 26, 2025, 3:54 pm • 3 0 • view
people have lost their minds over and over trying to discern Trump’s appeal to voters but a not insignificant part of it actually is the fact that he will go on insane rants on the internet and ramble madly into a camera no other politician talks like that and it comes across as “authentic”
aug 26, 2025, 2:50 pm • 286 20 • view
Every election since 2014 has been a change election ‘cuz end stage capitalism sucks for everyone. Democrats gaslight us that the status quo is Fantastic, really. Trump offered something different. Horrible. But different. He validated their rage and bigotry. That’s All they ever wanted.
aug 26, 2025, 3:11 pm • 2 0 • view
One of Hair Furor’s actual skills is reading his audience and feeding them back their own rage. There are people who have waited generations for somebody to tell them that their racism and bigotry and hate is socially acceptable again. Welcome to the Kakistocracy.
aug 26, 2025, 3:14 pm • 2 0 • view
This is also why Walz was so great, and why reining him in was such a fatal mistake
aug 26, 2025, 3:11 pm • 8 0 • view
A fucking slim sliver of around "weird", and they muzzled him and sent the fucking Cheneys out there. The DNC wants to lose.
aug 26, 2025, 4:37 pm • 5 0 • view
I have had successful and otherwise intelligent people tell me they trust Trump *because* he says the crazy things so he cannot be the shifty type that will manipulate them with clever words like the standard politicians (as he directly lies to their faces and they gobble up the blunt lies).
aug 26, 2025, 3:03 pm • 6 0 • view
That and the generic fascist appeal to indulge the vilest impulses and call it civilization. Give the worst permission to be themselves and they’ll be full of passionate intensity.
aug 26, 2025, 2:54 pm • 4 0 • view
“I may be insane, but I’m very sincere!”
aug 26, 2025, 3:03 pm • 2 0 • view
I remember seeing a clip of one of his rallies on CNN back in 2016 and thinking “If I agreed with him, I totally get why someone would like him.”
aug 26, 2025, 3:06 pm • 1 0 • view
It comes across as “authentic”because the media coverage elevates his rants just because it’s him. Nobody pays any attention to an old man with dementia saying the same thing in a nursing home facility. Maybe we should do the same thing…
aug 26, 2025, 2:57 pm • 2 0 • view
Most babies are narcissists. We slowly learn over time to acknowledge our interconnectedness and the needs of others. Most young people don't like being "polite" and "proper" and "responsible" and careful. It is emotionally harder to be a grown up. Trump pulls people down into immaturity.
aug 26, 2025, 2:59 pm • 0 0 • view
and it’s not even that the “kitchen table issues” the focus groups push relentlessly are unpopular - they clearly aren’t - but the delivery matters there’s a difference between angry old man Bernie rants about affordability and Chuck Schumer reading off a cue card
aug 26, 2025, 3:01 pm • 202 12 • view
Wrong message, wrong messages. Next?
aug 28, 2025, 4:01 am • 0 0 • view
disagree with Bernie on a lot, but this is dead on. the dude means what he's saying. in today's nightmare, if feels like the only people left that might change their minds on anything are screaming for people to just mean what they say, and the D's need people to change their minds about them
aug 26, 2025, 3:09 pm • 31 0 • view
but but but avocados are an ingredient in [adjusts reading glasses] guacamole
aug 26, 2025, 3:22 pm • 2 0 • view
There is reason everyone like Jasmine Crockett and AOC and why no one can stand Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries doesn't even seem to care enough to get mad about the things happening around him.
aug 26, 2025, 11:00 pm • 1 0 • view
The Dems gerontocracy were traumatized by the then-new Fox News. Fox made/invented news by jumping on & exploiting any Dem gaffe, getting huge ratings and traction. Instead of telling Fox to get fuct, they tried to be as bland & boring as possible. The only thing normies respond to is authenticity!
aug 26, 2025, 5:51 pm • 1 0 • view
this is one of the things about his appeal that drives my brain mad - he’s seen as authentic even when he contradicts himself in the same sentence and my brain cannot handle this.
aug 26, 2025, 3:11 pm • 11 0 • view
The press 'sanewashing' his coverage helps a lot with this. Trump can rant for an hour, making one contradictory statement after another with every breath he takes, but all that talk is then cut down into sound bites which will appeal to whatever voters want to hear in the moment.
aug 27, 2025, 3:21 am • 0 0 • view
Agreed but people going to his rallies would come out saying he said the opposite if the words he spoke.
aug 27, 2025, 6:13 am • 1 0 • view
That's because he usually did, about three seconds after he said the first thing. 😄
aug 27, 2025, 5:31 pm • 0 0 • view
Yep. I've been saying just that. People like Bernie and Trump for the same, BASIC reasons. They're authentic, they speak simply, and they believe in what they're saying. People don't like being lied to. Trump may lie non-stop, but he believes what he's saying is true. They like the feeling.
aug 26, 2025, 5:49 pm • 3 0 • view
And when Gavin Newsome tries to mimic Trump, he doesn’t come across as authentic. It’s good for yucks for a couple of weeks, but it can’t sustain a full campaign.
aug 26, 2025, 3:18 pm • 2 0 • view
Hakeem Jeffries had been speaking that way for so long that he forgot how to be normal.
aug 26, 2025, 3:02 pm • 5 0 • view
Trump’s political *talent* is the extent to which he believes his own lies. Emotionally, we perceive authenticity based on that, not on fact-checking afterward.
aug 26, 2025, 3:13 pm • 10 0 • view
Also: very few people have fully-thought-out lists of policy positions. Most people don't even know where candidates stand on the issues. People vote on tribe and vibe. Everyone loves the vibe of a fighter. No one loves the vibe of a coward.
aug 27, 2025, 9:42 am • 0 0 • view
sorry bud, but i am trusting the democratic pollsters querying chatGPT from now on now those are some fingers on some pulses, eh boys?!?!?!
aug 26, 2025, 4:26 pm • 1 0 • view