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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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This cements my thought that the “Vance is weird” campaign is a fully enclosed propaganda ecosystem, as in, it isn’t exaggerating some aspect of Vance (eg “Trump lies”), it is just totally made up. And that’s really spooky, because there’s a section of the public that will believe whatever the DNC wants them to believe. If they can make you believe Vance is weird they can make you believe anything.

I dunno, to me it kind of makes sense that a normal guy would seem weirder as a politician than an average politician would. It's up to what people expect of a politician. Normal people don't methodically control their actions and words to make everything fit into a neatly packaged personal narrative, so it's easier to cherry-pick examples to craft a different narrative.

This description reminds me of Sarah Palin, who was a remarkably charismatic figure, except that that charisma was a very normie boomer type of charisma that's very vulnerable to attack in our modern political environment. Trump has something similar, but with an extra more unique quality that makes him the defining figure of our times.