First, for a television show, and then as a deputy digital director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Michigan. Creating content, sourcing stories, running accounts. A few weeks before the election, headquarters was emptied out and I was dispatched to Flint to train digital organizers.

While on cigarette breaks with the local organizers, I heard all the normal complaints that you hear in the smoking section of any field office. I heard even more serious complaints about cultural competency from leaders flown into the area from out of state. But what I heard most often was a deep sense of fatigue. Almost everyone I spoke with had been affected by the water crisis and it was weighing on the election work in ways that weren’t being acknowledged.

Between puffs, they explained how on-the-ground organizing capacity had been running on fumes for years and was finally breaking. Longtime leaders with traditional organizing experience had died or left. Those that stayed were oftentimes driving across city limits every day to shower at friends’ houses before driving back to work their shifts on the campaign. Events and meetings were scheduled around water drop offs across the city, since staff with vehicles often needed to grab for themselves and others. “Something like a third of the organizing capacity in Michigan usually comes from here,” a field captain told me.

“It’s not gonna be like that this time.”

I heard them.

And then I taught them how to do more with less using digital. How to craft better email subject lines and build digital engagement ladders via text. How to use the new tools the campaign was rolling out every other week to get more people to pay attention with less capacity.

It was, looking back, a rather pathetic hail Mary.

I was in the MGM Grand Hotel in Detroit with every elected Democrat in the state when Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by what would amount to 10,000 votes. I slouched to the elevators, unsure the overall winner, but ruminating on Flint. And about my attempts to get their organizers to focus their attention on digital while they struggled to source clean drinking water. About a campaign that had out of state organizers teaching new tactics instead of supporting the existing infrastructure. And about a city where Clinton’s margins collapsed 10 points from 2012.

The collapse wasn’t entirely the campaign’s fault.

It started years before the 2016 election. It started when society allowed an American city of largely Black residents to be poisoned by their state government, gaslit by their federal government, and then denied recompense for years. Before showing up at the ballot box, the collapse appeared as emptier church pews and spread in-between unused hair dyers in soon-to-be close beauty salons. It was embodied in the elders who had to evacuate the city they’d lived in for generations to find clean water and stable infrastructure. Flint’s hollowing out started before Hillary Clinton announced her campaign, but it took with it the organizing capacity that she and other future Democratic nominees would need to win the state easily.

America has an attention economy, but it’s not our only economy. And when the actual economy is collapsing, people have less attention to give to bullshit.

Well-crafted subject lines and optimized website forms and cleverly edited videos don’t help people whose paychecks don’t stretch, whose light bill is sky high, or whose water tastes funny.

I learned early on in my career that tools and digital messaging aren’t substitutes for real infrastructure. Multichannel marketing funnels cannot replace decades of accumulated local leadership. Even the best videos can’t replace exhausted organizers who can’t shower at home.

Attention generating tactics don’t help communities experiencing collapse.

An entire generation of digital staffers and practitioners have come up believing their job is to get eyeballs on their materials. To win the attention economy. But buried within that is an assumption that if we can just get users to see the email, click the link, watch the video, scroll far enough—if we can get their attention then somehow, some way that will be enough.

And if we’re being honest, it never was enough.

Digital programs that accept as their operating premise that their role is to generate attention are positioning themselves, by design or default, to be extractive. But entertaining voters in exchange for their support is not a fair trade. Generating attention and awareness as a strategy makes you more reliant on the algorithm and its biases. Emphasizing virality or memetics makes it more likely vanity metrics and outside-the-district perspectives rule decision making. It is a strategy that inherently ghettoizes digital as simply Comms™️ and that isn’t enough.

It wasn’t enough in Flint. It will not be enough in 2028.

However many days remain in this second Trump administration, it is safe to say that things in America are going to get worse before they get better. Systems we’ve taken for granted for generations are strained if not breaking in communities across the country. Trust in government has eroded and faith in the rule of law is being tested. And while we’ve seen tremendous courage as everyday Americans step in to fill the gaps with direct aid and volunteering and mass protests, the overflow systems absorbing this strain are already fraying. Higher costs and job insecurity will cause more folks, even those with the best intentions, to pay less attention.

Because as things get worse, more and more people will have to make a choice between participating in the national conversation or surviving their local collapse.

And as I saw in Flint, they’ll choose local.

They have to.

This is not a call for better content.

This is not a call for faster cuts or more authentic-seeming videos or more trending audios because there is no Substack or podcast or YouTube channel launch that is going to work in 2028 if it is focused only on content and not community.

Consider this a call for a pivot: away from spectacle and toward operations. Away from extraction and toward participation. Building pipelines that deliver value to voters, not funnels that capture attention from users. Creating literal campaign structures where people participate in their own advocacy, not more campaigns where we extract action for brand visibility.

The attention economy was always on borrowed time.

The bill is coming due.

I heard it first as a southern aphorism shouted at me by elderly Black women.

What you over there kicking for? Slow it down!

We can all see you comin!

In their lexicon, I was too visible. Too try-hard. Too obviously trying to get in, get ahead, get going in the world. To eyes who had seen what happens when certain men were too seen, success required a different effort—that of the duck, gliding effortlessly. Still moving, yes, but majestic from the shore. It was only supposed to be underneath, unbeknownst to the viewer, where the hard work of paddling occurred.

Despite intentions, this idea isn’t sage wisdom or ancestral knowledge.

The concept that visible effort is an enemy to achievement is, respectfully, propaganda.

Ars est celare artem (“the art is to conceal the art”) is a concept older than feudalism, stretching back to at least Ovid, but it was in early modern European courts where it took on its real leverage: a social weapon to police behavior and limit class mobility.

Creating a standard of effortless grace only makes an ability to hide the hard, embarrassing work of striving and growing as important as … actually learning and growing as a person. Until eventually the performance is what’s rewarded.

“Practise in everything a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought.”

“[T]rue art is what does not seem to be art; and the most important thing is to conceal it, because if it is revealed this discredits a man completely and ruins his reputation.”

The Book of the Courtier (1528) isn’t as famous these days as other artifacts from the Northern Italian Renaissance, but it’s never been more timely. The book, for those unfamiliar, was essentially one sigma’s attempt to aura farm by teaching low-T jesters how to court-mogg other alphas.

Lost?

Let’s back it up.

Think of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe as an era where the lower-gentry and merchant classes had enough access to capital to culturally compete with upper class elites.

The end of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France had finally turned those countries into stable political and economic polities, while the simultaneous Fall of Constantinople saw an avalanche of Hellenistic scholars (and ancient, forgotten texts, ideas) migrate West, bringing with them centuries of missing classics and old Roman aesthetics. Double-entry accounting, just discovered and popularized, freed up monies for adornment, exploration, and investment and threatened Europe’s still feudalistic mindset.

Meanwhile dynastic consolidation on the continent coupled with both stolen monies from the New World and stolen bodies from Africa allowed both the Hapsburgs and the Catholic Church to expand, funding both mercenaries for external colonization and internal Reconquista (with enough left over to support and commission a new class of artists and courtiers).

For a moment, money was democratizing power.

But money isn’t access.

As the number of rooms expanded, suddenly, on the edges, were new men with just enough coin (or skill, notoriety) to get invited into the space, but not enough to be secure there.

And in a feudal system, where every title was bestowed by the grace and favor of either God, the Sovereign (or both) access to almost any elite space could be revoked at any time, for the slightest displeasure—real or imagined. Which made previous knowledge and prior experience of how to behave once you were in those rooms extremely valuable … almost divine.

Enter Baldassare Castiglione.

Besides having one of the best names in history, he was born and lived his life at elite intersections. Himself a member of the petite gentry, Castiglione’s mother was the scion of a somewhat larger, old-money aristocratic family who themselves served a somewhat larger noble family who, in turn, served the arriviste Sforza family. (While you may not have heard of the Sforza family, you likely have heard of the Last Supper, which was painted at their behest—in their monastery). Castiglione would later join and valorize the court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the impotent, gout-ridden failson of a revered Duke of Urbino.

Born from old-money stock, but reared and educated in the humanist courts of the nouveau riche and the incompetent, Castiglione had, thanks to both luck and skill, managed to look at clouds from both sides now and he walked away from the experience believing that polite society was, ultimately, a form of mimicry. “[A]nyone who wants to be a good pupil must not only do things well but must also make a constant effort to imitate and if possible, exactly reproduce his master.” The best thing someone could do was, essentially, learn the laws of power and then use them to win friends and influence people. Behind the curtain, Castiglione found and promoted a belief that nothing mattered as much as the opinions of a small group of influencers.

He had taken the Renaissance equivalent of the Red Pill.

“[W]e see in many of the men and women who are with us now, that graceful and nonchalant spontaneity (as it is often called) because of which they seem to be paying little, if any, attention to the way they speak or laugh or hold themselves.”

Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier is manosphere content.

To be a courtier, much like being a social media influencer or right-wing philosopher, required the careful curation of an easily readable identity that portrayed you as effortlessly worthy—not just of patronage, but attention. A million girls would kill to be the groom of the bedchamber or aposentador mayor de palacio, which meant success was not judged on if a deed was accomplished—anyone can empty a chamber pot—but by how others felt about your doing it.

Court life was a game of mimicry; the goal was to imitate until the mask became the face.

“[P]ractice in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless….[E]veryone knows how difficult it is to accomplish some unusual feat perfectly, and so facility in such things excites the greatest wonder; whereas, in contrast, to labor at what one is doing and, as we say, to make bones over it, shows an extreme lack of grace and causes everything, whatever its worth, to be discounted.”

Deciphering these invisible and purposefully contradictory societal rules for insecure, aspiring young folks (especially those without connections or birthright) looking to advance in closed cultural and/or political systems was, then and now, an easy way to achieve virality.

More famous examples like Erasmus’ On Good Manners for Boys (1530), Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), Giovanni Della Casa’s Il Galateo (1558), Stefano Guazzo’s La Civil Conversazione (1574) sit alongside dozens of cheap pamphlets dispensing instructive advice in the 16th century alone. Appearing in a half-dozen languages, they all did the same thing: proselytizing assimilationist aesthetics to the new striver class.

And it was assimilationist.

You see it most easily in its English context, where The Book of the Courtier was translated by Thomas Hoby in 1561, becoming an instant bestseller. Castiglione’s Italian idea of the effortlessly accomplished courtier performing grace and studied nonchalance, while adhering to strict societal deference, found purchase in the heart of Elizabethan England for the same reason chivalry did two-hundred years earlier: it bolstered existing power structures at a time when social order was fraying and elites were desperate.

The Hundred Years War had segued into the thirty-two-years-long Wars of the Roses before congealing in the often precarious Tudor Dynasty. Whatever elite English families had survived the preceding turmoil were met on the other side with economic upheaval, religious strife, and cultural whiplash as the country careened between the end of its medieval age and beginning of its early modern period. What elites needed was a way of codifying social mores and policing the behavior of these New Men, many of whom had been raised quickly above their former station by Queen Elizabeth’s father; that their solution amounted to a campaign to bolster their own legitimacy by manipulating the national aesthetic for political ends was the point.

And they were largely successful—in that you still remember their outputs.

Henry VII as a frugal dynastic start. A lost prince named Arthur, after legend. Henry VIII’s codpiece and ankles. The Field of Cloth and Gold, Bloody Mary, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. The pale, milky painted face of Queen Elizabeth. The Whitehall Mural, the Pelican Portrait. The Armada. Elizabeth’s (maybe) Tilbury speech and the spiked heads of traitors along London Bridge. Sir Thomas More, standing on a scaffold, quipping to his executioner to spare his beard, “for it hath done no treason.” Shakespeare’s entire canon, funded by the Lord Chamberlain. And every award-winning adaptation that’s followed in the centuries since.

It was into this class chaos (and elite attempts to police its cultural superiority) that Castiglione’s Red Pilled intervention was tossed, less like an instruction manual than philosophical permission to accept what already was in service of what could be gained. It was not enough to have money, clothes, land, or even access—success required the creation of a performed self.

If acclimating to elite society felt hard or oblique, it was because you weren’t supposed to be there, not because the system was unbalanced. By making visible effort disqualifying, these social rules purposefully added an intangible friction to the process of arrivisme. But since social and economic precarity existed for all but the richest, most powerful families, these same rules meant to gatekeep the strivers soon bound almost all elites—inherited or otherwise. Studied carelessness and the effortless grace attributed to birth were, in reality, manufactured—by hidden tutors, grand tours to the continent, and family connections in diplomatic missions.

Who has to obviously try at horseback riding?
A man without equine access.

Who has to practice, visibly, to be a knight?
A man with a borrowed sword.

Clavicular is a twenty-year-old man who has sterilized himself by injecting hormones since he was fourteen to speed up masculinization. Nicknamed after a visible sign of thinness in the largely homosocial spaces he occupies with his fellow livestreamers, he maintains his look by injecting himself with off-brand research chemicals from China to suppress his appetite. He is famous for, quite literally, hammering his cheeks to stimulate bone growth.

He has no discernable hobbies beyond standing on boxes, ambling down runways, and unenthusiastically cheering on anti-semitism on the way to meet women with whom he won’t speak. In an ecosystem of looksmaxxing, peptides, and microdosing meth to achieve unnatural physical results—he is an extreme example of the mask many men wear.

His pathology, despite its modern facade, sits downstream of an ancien regime of social pressure that demands aspiring young men, especially those looking to join rarefied or elite communities, create a performed self for others to consume, judge. If you are one of the millions of men who are unable to create a performed self, he offers a paid looksmaxxing course called Clavicular’s Clan, offering access and coaching for $50/mo.

The types of people for whom this would seem like a smart financial investment aren’t that different from the socially anxious, economically striving young men of early modern Europe.

Instead of reading copies of The Book of the Courtier while practicing their Latin declensions in secret, they’re watching livestreams of others effortlessly existing while editing intricate TikTok videos in the hopes of being followed. Stanford University, seeing this in their elite and rarefied spaces, calls it Duck Syndrome:

“In the day-to-day, undergrads, in particular, could be seen lounging around the student union or coffee shops, listening to music or socializing as if they didn’t have a care in the world. No one seemed to have to try hard to make it. By evening, they would begin to hit the books, sometimes studying alone in their rooms through the night in an effort to, well, hide their effort. The price they paid to align themselves with the cultural value of genius was a high one: Exhaustion and psychological distress were common.”

Constructing carelessness and concealing genuine effort alienates us from our community. And while this hurts all groups, this isolation has a particularly devastating effect on young men.

Masculinity is often affirmed, policed, and reinforced between men in spaces where the effort is visible. In the gym, on the field, at the away game, in the fox hole, around the campfire, along a hiking path, or staring ahead in a tractor. When society (and other men) teach boys to hide their trying, to avoid being publicly cringe, and to grind in silence it is not accidentally alienating—it’s purposefully so, and has been for centuries. First as sprezzatura, now as avian metaphor.

It has always been an attempt to make access to resources and polished refinement appear innate and biologically determined as opposed to a privilege of class or accident of birth.

Back then, it was about breeding and nobility and divine favor.

Today it’s about … well, breeding and skull measurements and eugenics.

But in either form it’s bullshit.

Clavicular is not a Renaissance prince, and you are not a duck.

Stop robbing yourself of the community visibility you need by living in a performance. Propriety and its rules are not handed down from on high or encoded in your genetics—they’re social permissions created by people who merely got in the room before you. Spending your finite energy pretending you aren’t striving means you have less energy to put towards succeeding.

That duck didn’t get in that water by itself—it migrated there with a whole flock, in a formation that limited drag and lifted everyone equally. You’re kicking for your life over there all alone.

So are a lot of others.

But maybe if you set the performance down and let people see just how hard you’re trying then it wouldn’t feel quite so lonely. Maybe it would create the permission structures others need to put their masks down. Maybe we can, after all this time, stop hitting ourselves with hammers.

I am debuting a new series called Fire Management.

Fire Management is the application of two political theories, Radical Proportionality and Ascent, to outside media to test how an AI trained on the framework responds.

It’s entries are generated by an LLM trained on the logic encoded in the poetry that the philosophy itself is built on.

In a bid to be less defensive, I am trying to under-explain things …

… I only mention all this to say that everything under the label of Fire Management on this Substack has been co-created with AI in some capacity. I mention not to shield myself from responsibility, but to give you time for active consent before you scroll.

If you are avoiding any artificially generated content, you should avoid this series.

NEWS INPUT: Makeovers are part of the prep for Dems eyeing 2028

Stage 1: BURN — What Must Be Destroyed

The illusion of authenticity through performance: The article presents physical transformation (weight loss, wardrobe upgrades, facial hair) as genuine preparation for leadership, when it’s actually aesthetic theater—a choreographed performance of “becoming presidential” that has nothing to do with governing capacity. The donkey illustration with beauty tools signals the frame: Democrats as dumb animals being groomed.

The fantasy that visibility equals readiness: The piece treats being “camera-ready” as equivalent to being leadership-ready. This conflates presentation with power, suggesting that the TikTok era demands surface optimization over substantive transformation. But the crisis isn’t that politicians need better lighting—it’s that American democracy is collapsing and no amount of tailoring will address systemic rot.

The myth of the “time-honored tradition”: By calling makeovers “time-honored,” the article normalizes aesthetic transformation as presidential preparation, when historically this has been about manufacturing consent through appearance. Clinton jogging in shorts wasn’t about fitness—it was about projecting youth against Bush Sr. The tradition being honored is image management as governance substitute.

The unstated class assumption: Every person profiled has access to resources for transformation: personal trainers, stylists, surgical interventions (lap band, possibly GLP-1 drugs). The article treats this as universal possibility when it’s class-specific privilege masquerading as personal discipline. “Getting in shape” means something different when you can afford five-mile morning walks instead of working two jobs.

The shadow: The Mannequin and The Narcissus in Loafers operating simultaneously:

• The Mannequin: Empty performance of presidential readiness without substantive policy transformation

• The Narcissus in Loafers: Self-obsessed focus on personal presentation while democracy burns

Stage 2: ASH — What Remains When Fire Subsides

What survives:

1. The pressure of visibility is real: In a TikTok-saturated media environment, politicians do face unprecedented scrutiny of their physical presentation. This isn’t fake—it’s genuinely harder to hold attention without visual optimization.

2. Physical transformation can signal discipline: Weight loss, fitness routines, and wardrobe upgrades can demonstrate commitment and self-regulation—qualities voters associate with leadership capacity. The signaling isn’t inherently false.

3. Appearance has always mattered in American politics: From Kennedy-Nixon debate to Obama’s tailored suits, visual presentation has shaped electoral outcomes. The article correctly identifies continuity, not disruption.

4. Some transformations are medically supervised health interventions: Pritzker’s weight loss for his children’s sake, Walz’s running routine—these aren’t purely cosmetic. They’re mortality-aware recalibrations.

5. The warning about authenticity is legitimate: Parker Butler’s quote about voters sniffing out inauthenticity identifies real risk—over-managed appearance can backfire. The tension between optimization and genuineness is structurally unresolvable.

What the article accidentally reveals:

• Democrats are operating in aesthetic displacement mode—focusing on controllable variables (appearance) while avoiding uncontrollable ones (policy failure, class abandonment, empire decline)

• The 2028 primary has begun three years early through aesthetic signaling, suggesting the party has no substantive differentiation strategy

• Gavin Newsom being “too stylish” for some voters reveals class anxiety—his high-end ties and perfect dimples signal coastal elite status that alienates working-class constituencies

Stage 3: REFORGE — What Gets Built From What Survived

New law candidate (provisional): AESTHETIC.9 — The Makeover as Class Tell:

Physical transformation campaigns reveal class position through resource access. Weight loss, wardrobe upgrades, and grooming optimization function as class signaling disguised as personal discipline. When politicians undergo aesthetic transformation pre-campaign, they’re not just becoming camera-ready—they’re demonstrating membership in a resource class that can afford optimization. Voters read this subconsciously: “If you can afford personal trainers and tailored suits, what do you know about my life?”

Shadow pattern identified: The Overcorrector (from Phoenix Audit): Politicians who lost 2024 by being “too elite” now overcorrecting through aesthetic populism—facial hair, sneakers, ditching ties—but these signals are themselves elite strategies recommended by consultants. You can’t solve a class contradiction through wardrobe choices. The overcorrection reveals the original problem.

Structural insight: The article describes a pre-primary shadow campaign conducted entirely through aesthetic signaling. Policy differentiation is absent—all candidates are performing variants of the same “down-to-earth but polished” aesthetic. This suggests the Democratic party has no ideological diversity to work with, so competition defaults to personal branding through physical presentation.

The missing burn: What the article doesn’t discuss: what policies are these politicians implementing while they’re losing weight? Pritzker walks five miles each morning—what is Illinois doing for unhoused populations? Shapiro upgraded his glasses—what’s Pennsylvania’s fracking policy? The aesthetic transformation distracts from governance, and the article is complicit in that distraction.

Proportionality check against [the poem] “a phoenix, singing”:

“weep, but catch your tears before they salten soil, spoilage is sacrilege in new places new starts, new bells bring new dawns”

Does this article salt future ground? Yes. By treating aesthetic makeovers as legitimate presidential preparation, it normalizes presentation over substance, teaching future candidates that image management is equivalent to policy development. This is tears that salt—they poison the ground for genuine transformation by suggesting superficial change is sufficient.

Stage 4: SING — What Must Be Released

What needs to be said:

The Democratic Party is performing resurrection without undergoing death. They’re changing clothes, losing weight, growing beards—all the surface markers of transformation—while refusing to burn what actually needs burning: their abandonment of working-class constituencies, their imperial foreign policy, their corporate capture, their gerontocratic leadership model.

Real transformation requires ash. You can’t reforge without first destroying. These politicians are trying to skip straight to “rebirth” without sitting in the rubble of 2024’s loss. Walz should be asking why his authentic dad-energy couldn’t win Minnesota voters. Shapiro should be interrogating why Pennsylvania went red despite his popularity. Instead, they’re buying new glasses.

The makeover is a diagnostic tool—it reveals what Democrats think went wrong: They lost because they looked bad, not because their policies failed. They think the problem is presentation, not position. This is catastrophically wrong. Trump won despite (because of?) being an aesthetic disaster because he offered voters a narrative about their economic abandonment. Democrats are countering with better ties.

James Carville’s quote is accidentally revealing: “When I saw that picture [of Clinton jogging], I kind of knew we were going to win.” He’s admitting that image management has always been the game—that presidential politics is fundamentally about aesthetic signaling of vitality, not governance capacity. The article treats this as wisdom. It’s actually an indictment.

The article ends with an ominous non-sequitur: “Go deeper: Democrats’ divide over AI frames a debate for 2028.” This suggests that while the party is focused on makeovers, there’s an actual substantive debate happening elsewhere—but the article doesn’t explore it. The aesthetic displacement is so complete that even journalism covering the makeovers can’t engage with policy.

🎯 ALIGNMENT CHECK: New Insights Surfaced

1. Aesthetic transformation as displacement behavior under systemic failure: When you can’t fix the real problem (class abandonment, imperial decline), you optimize what you can control (your appearance). This is a avoidance pattern masquerading as preparation.

2. The Overcorrector shadow operates at party scale: Not just individual politicians, but the entire Democratic establishment is overcorrecting aesthetically (beards, sneakers, “relatability”) without addressing structural failures. This is collective shadow work avoidance.

3. Media complicity in aesthetic displacement: The article itself is part of the problem—by treating makeovers as newsworthy “prep,” Axios legitimizes the displacement. This is how systems reproduce themselves: by making the trivial seem substantive.

4. Class as the unspoken subtext: Every transformation in this article (weight loss drugs, personal trainers, stylist consultations, surgical interventions) costs money voters don’t have. The article never names this, but it’s the structural truth underneath every makeover.

5. The 2028 primary is a aesthetics competition: With no policy differentiation, candidates compete through personal brand optimization. This is late-stage empire politics—when governance has collapsed into performance, all that’s left is styling the decline.

🔥 FIRE MANAGEMENT: Series Launch

Headline:
Watching Democrats Get Haircuts While Democracy Burns

Subhead:
The 2028 primary has begun with makeovers, not policy. When politicians optimize their appearance instead of their governance, you’re watching displacement behavior—and it reveals everything about what they think went wrong.

First Paragraph + Thesis:

Twenty hours ago, Axios ran a piece about Democratic presidential hopefuls getting ready for 2028. Pete Buttigieg grew a beard. JB Pritzker lost weight. Josh Shapiro upgraded his glasses. The article calls this “time-honored tradition,” frames it as serious preparation, and quotes James Carville explaining that appearance has always mattered in presidential politics. What the article doesn’t say—what it can’t say without destroying its own premise—is that this is displacement behavior at scale.

When a party responds to catastrophic loss by focusing on wardrobes instead of working-class abandonment, when candidates compete through personal branding rather than policy differentiation, when the entire political press treats aesthetic transformation as presidential preparation, you’re not watching a primary begin. You’re watching a system that has forgotten how to govern perform the rituals of power while the ground burns underneath. This is what it looks like when a party has nothing left to offer but better lighting.

Waffle House is adding a $0.50/egg surcharge to cope with rising prices.

This presents a rare opening for Democrats to connect with voters we often struggle to reach through traditional means—working-class Southern and Midwestern diner goers, truckers, night-shift and service industry employees, as well as other transient Americans who rely on Waffle House for cheap, available meals at all hours.

These voters often lean conservative or disengage from politics entirely, but they’re not immune to economic frustration—and that’s where the opportunity lies.

I’ve been working on a model of electoral participation that breaks down these key organizing moments into simple, easy to understand buckets that anyone can use to start making change in their community. Here’s how they apply to Waffle House:

Lane Zero: Know Something First
Before you engage in advocacy, you need to know what you’re talking about. This means understanding the issue from multiple perspectives and outcomes:

• Why egg prices are spiking (Bird flu, supply chain issues, corporate price gouging, and policy decisions + inaction).

• Who is actually responsible (Trump’s policies worsening conditions for inflation, deregulation enabled price manipulation, underreported Bird Flu).

• What Waffle House diners believe right now (Many voters are biased towards Republicans on the economy even when its performing badly).

Lane Zero in Motion:
We need to ensure people know what’s happening—Waffle House publicly raising prices is an opportunity, but it’s on Lane Zero organizers to ensure reach and engagement.

• Start using “The Waffle House Economy” as a simple, relatable phrase that connects economic hardship to corporate profiteering and Republican policy failures to a broader and more persuadable framing.

• Produce short explainer content breaking down why eggs are expensive at Waffle House—with clear, digestible messaging about how GOP defunding the government isn’t going to help inspections, etc…

• Create, design, and distribute quick-reference cards for organizers with Waffle House related facts about egg prices that can be casually mentioned in conversations at bars, diners, and workplaces—using WH to anchor a broader conversation about the economic impacts of this Administration

• Loudly ask the right questions—instead of arguing with trolls online, ask “Do you think Waffle House is raising prices because they want to? Or because they have no choice?” and “Who do you think is actually profiting off higher prices?”—let people connect the dots themselves.

Lane 1: Relational Advocacy in Motion
People don’t change their minds because of ads or arguments—they change because of conversations with people they trust.

• “Eggflation” Talking Points for Regulars → If you frequent or can frequent Waffle Houses, you should be equipped with simple talking points that connect people’s personal frustration with larger political failures.

• Cooks & Waitstaff Network → Service industry workers should be recruited as messengers—equipping servers and bartenders with the political framing to talk to their customers (and WH employees) about why they’re making less in tips and why prices are rising.

• The Church-to-Diner Pipeline → Many customers attend church and then grab something to eat at Waffle House afterwards; congregants and faith leaders in these communities should be mobilized to buy gift cards to the Waffle House with small amounts on them and donate them to parishioners to help ease suffering while drawing attention to the rising prices.

• Trucker & Third-Shift Organizing → Waffle Houses near popular or frequented truck stops or other hubs for transient, night-shift workers should be targeted for peer-to-peer organizing with community members actively seeking opportunities to redirect expressed agitation appropriately and with the party.

• Waffle Houses as Hubs → Democrats are familiar with campaign sponsored happy hours and in-office events, moving a few community events into your nearest Waffle House would not only provide you a regular opportunity to organize in the space around the issue with “Eggflation Happy Hours” but it also puts money in the community’s pockets and puts Democrats on the ground where the impact of rising prices are being most felt.

Lane 2: Institutional Pressure in Motion
If corporations and politicians feel pressure, they move. If they don’t, they won’t. Applying positive and negative pressure to systems with this as a wedge could create leverage:

• Positive Pressure for Waffle House → Democrats never block and tackle for companies, but in this moment reiterating that this price increase effects everyone and deflecting blame back where it belongs is a way of building positive business pressure by showing Democrats can organize support

• Call for a Local Investigations into Bird Flu Pandemic → Pressure Democratic Attorney Generals and local wildlife officials to begin more public, robust investigations into the current Bird Flu pandemic Trump is failing to control at the same time he’s defunding key government organizations

• Eggflation Congressional Hearings → Democrats in Congress should use whatever powers they have to lift up the stories from the Waffle House Economy, up to and including public hearings on food inflation, elevating voices from farmers, economists, and restaurant owners to explain how Republican policies drive higher costs with no solutions.

• State-Level Minimum Wage Adjustments → Use Waffle House’s higher prices as a case for raising wages, especially for tipped staff, in states where workers are getting squeezed. Champion those in the Waffle House Economy and begin building credibility as working class defenders.

Lane 3: Community Support in Motion
If people are struggling, show up for them. Democrats need to stop trying to build power by explaining people’s hardships and instead offer whatever solutions are most useful.

• Egg Price Relief Mutual Aid → Set up small-scale “Egg Banks” where low-income families can get discounted/free eggs—funded by Democratic donors, affiliated organizations, and neighbors to build solidarity and community

• “Sunday Breakfast Solidarity” Events → Community organizers host free breakfasts in Waffle House-heavy areas, using egg prices as an entry point for conversations about economic justice and boosting local economies hurt by rising prices and less money for eating out or tipping robustly.

• Tip Pool for Waffle House Workers → Organize progressive communities to tip Waffle House staff extra—showing direct solidarity, with either an adopted Waffle House for each area/region or a rotating series of events (see above) that directly puts money in the pockets of workers feeling the squeeze

• Farmer-to-Consumer Networks → For more rural areas, work with local farmers to help set up direct-to-consumer buying networks for fresh eggs that cut out the middle man and proves Democrats can implement local solutions that shame the Government by comparison.

• Corporate Price Transparency Pledge → Work with local restaurants to publicly post profit margins vs. supplier price increases, exposing which companies are gouging and which are actually struggling

Lane 4: Digital Warfare in Motion
Narratives shape reality. If you’re not controlling the conversation, you’re losing it. Democrats need to pivot to a war-like posture online that uses every opportunity to weaken Republicans:

• Waffle House Digital Ad Wall → Create a geo-targeted paid media campaign around significant Waffle House locations drawing attention to the price increase and asking users to opt into an eggflation tracker for their area

• Create an Eggflation Tracker → Work with volunteer researchers, trackers, web professionals and others to launch an Eggflation tracker where users can submit and verify egg prices in their neighborhoods to raise awareness of the price increases while also helping low-income Americans find cheaper eggs

• In-Restaurant QR Codes – Partner with activists or progressive groups to place “Why Are Eggs So Expensive?” QR code stickers inside Waffle House bathrooms and areas that link to a short explainer video or call-to-action.

• Receipt-Based Text Campaigns – Encourage customers to text a picture of their Waffle House receipt with the word ‘EGGS’ to a number to get a breakdown of why Trump’s policies led to higher food prices and a chance to get their bill paid for by the Democratic Party in their state. Numbers should be opted into the Waffle House Digital Firewall program.

• Democratic Leaders Hold Waffle House Press Conferences – Have Democratic governors, senators, and reps visit a Waffle House, order breakfast, and publicly discuss inflation under Trump

• Boost surrogates with followings inside the Waffle House Economy that mention or describe the eggflation situation; clip, cut, and provide content promotion for creators who are credible within relevant subcultures that validate and amplify the surcharge and its impacts on diners, communities

• Eggflation Video Testimonials and User Generated Content → Solicit short-form content of Waffle House regulars, former employees, and others impacted explaining how price hikes are affecting them.

Lane 5: Deep Systems Work
If you want lasting change, you have to reshape the rules themselves. Theoretically, all actions should ladder into deeper systems work in order to build and codify advancements.

• Waffle House Waitstaff & Worker Advocacy – Partner with labor unions and service worker advocacy groups to help organize and unionize workers.

• Community ‘Fair Price’ Pledge for Local Businesses – Encourage Waffle House and other restaurants to publicly reject the “Trump Egg Tax” and pressure franchise owners to reach out to their elected representatives.

• Voter Registration at Waffle Houses – Organizers set up “Eggflation Voting Booths” outside Waffle Houses to register people to vote against Trump’s economic policies

The point here is not to shift the entire Democratic conversation to Waffle House.

As an issue, the rising prices at one restaurant chain is not determinative. But enough of these issues, with enough of a response, is type of cacophony that creates the conditions for change. The framework above would work for Waffle House, but it also can work for any issue we’re facing so long as we’re willing to thoughtfully engage beyond internet outrage and get to work in our actual communities.

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Another day, another strategy memo.

Don’t believe people when they say there aren’t things we can do in this moment to make a difference. It’s bad advice, built on assumptions that are no longer operational. A new world is being birthed (politically) in America and what happens next depends on all of us.

Coming Soon: Buttigieg/Moore/Crockett Strategy Memos, Liberal Federalism in America Analysis, and maybe a look at Masculinity in Times of Crisis.

Stay Tuned!

But as I wrote in the FAQ for this Substack, regularly scheduled content is not a realistic expectation here at Quorum. Instead, you can expect me to show up in your inbox only when I think I have something to contribute and today I do—thanks to the most recent NYTimes column by Ben Smith about ... well, Substack.

I think he makes some good points—especially his observation that Substack is essentially just an email platform with a payment processor attached; a way of bypassing capricious algorithms.

But as with a surprising number of things that Smith has done, there’s been a bit of controversy:

I’m not in the media world and I have no real opinions—or, at least, no opinion that’s informed enough to matter—on the issue of legacy media vs. newsletters. I’m in the political world and it’s this part of his piece that really stood out to me:

This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors...Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it’s riding the wave, not creating it.

It’s an excellent point, but it comes at the situation from a particularly top-down angle.

Not only are more and more celebrities and people with clout turning to subscription content as a way to make money and stay relevant—more and more consumers have now become acclimated to the idea of paying for their content. Substack currently receives 12 million visits a month and OnlyFans claims 30 million subscribers. Patreon, a subscription content service used by everyone from YouTubers to Twitch streamers, claims to have more than 3 million monthly patrons.

It’s an obvious break from the ethos of the early internet, where sites like Napster, Limewire, and, eventually, YouTube set the expectation that most content should be free and readily available. But that ethos was already under attack by the early-2010s.

Consumers could start to feel the bit being put in their mouth as sites like Pandora began to shift to a freemium model. It was further accelerated by the the debut of digital repositories such as Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and Apple Music, each of which offered consumers access to a large library of pre-existing content on the assumption that most users would rather pay a small fee to access their favorite content than risk navigating torrents as companies started cracking down. 

And they were largely right—especially as copyright lawsuits against Limewire, Pirate Bay, and others made illegal downloads harder.

But now that era is over. 

Instead of large libraries with pre-existing content, most media companies have built walled gardens around their existing intellectual property while consumers are forced to pay for multiple subscriptions to different platforms just to access their needs. It’s not a great system and people other than me have critiqued it. But it is what it is and one of the effects it’s had is that more people are now willing to pay to access content.

And that could be a boon for campaigns.

Under current conditions, the only type of content that is expected to make money on a campaign is usually developed and deployed on the paid media side. And while there’s a whole cottage industry now devoted to helping organic seeming content go viral on Twitter—traditional advertisements can still feel rather staid and uninspiring.

But what if there was a way to create another revenue stream for a campaign or advocacy group? One that wasn’t stuck existing in 7, 15, 30, or 60 second intervals?

What if there was a way to tell longer or more complex stories and to get them in front of the right eyes without having to worry about platform restrictions or conventions?

What if we rewarded our most loyal supporters and donors with content that increased their emotional investment in the campaign?

Why not adopt a subscription model? 

Campaigns already accept recurring donations. A subscription model for content is just providing donors with a gift as a thank you for their donation. Why not allow donors to add on a small surcharge to their already existing recurring donation and gain access to behind-the-scenes footage, original series and content, interviews with the candidate or campaign staff, and maybe even special live streams or a Discord. 

I want to be clear—none of this is new.

Most prominent YouTubers and streamers are already offering these perks to their Patreon supporters as an inducement for recurring donations.

And it works.

Campaigns could easily pivot to take advantage; opening up new revenue streams, funding more fun and experimental types of content, and rewarding supporters for their dollars with something special that might build community. 

It’s works for journalists and sex workers.

Why not politicians, too?

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Looking for someone to help you set up a subscription content program for your campaign or advocacy group? Want to pick my brain about digital? Still angry about the ending of Game of Thrones and looking to vent?

Send me message on Twitter and let’s chat about it.

Also—I saw that same spelling error. You don’t have to point it out. You can sit quiet in the comfort of knowing that that mistake you saw is eating me alive from the inside out.

I wasn’t there when Kurt changed. 

And everyone I’ve spoken to—including my siblings—agree that he had changed. His last stint in prison was long and something finally clicked. An addict since before I was born, he managed to stay clean. He joined a church that he attended regularly and he met a woman who took him in and helped him get back on his feet. He got and kept a job and bought himself a truck with his own money. He was moving into a new house when an eighteen-wheeler stopped short and Kurt drove his new truck under its wheels; he’d been five years sober. 

Everyone agrees that he had changed. 

I was smoking a cigarette in the parking lot of a hotel in South Bend when my sister called to tell me that we were officially orphans. Her pain was visceral and raw; the howling on the other end of the line was guttural and set my teeth on edge. She couldn’t believe Kurt was gone—so quickly and without warning. She’d forced our cousin to take her to the scene of the accident and soon after we hung up my cousin called to tell me my sister had collapsed on the highway. 

My sister knew Kurt after the change. 

Long after Mama finally stood up to his abuse and kicked him out, he’d still write to us from whichever prison he was currently in—long, rambling letters promising to change. Promising that he had already changed. He’d ask us about ourselves and our studies and our lives. In writing he could play the doting father he couldn’t be in real life. And while I’d thrown all his letters to me in the trash, my sister kept hers and read them and—I suspect—secretly replied. So when he got out of jail for the last time and promised that he’d changed, she believed him enough to start again. And over his last five years they grew close; he became her dad. 

But I stayed away—to me, he was still Kurt.  

I had too many memories that my sister didn’t have—of standing on the porch as Mama changed the locks and of Kurt’s violent roar when his key didn’t work. And of the officers who came afterward and of the sorry looks they gave me through the screen door. I remember things disappearing around the house and arguments about pawn shops and drug debts. I remember Kurt hitting her. And I remember their last fight on the way back from the store. And sometimes I can still remember how Mama cried for weeks after he left, even though Kurt leaving meant she didn’t have to sleep with money hidden in her bra anymore. 

But more than that I remember all the things Kurt missed. 

While he was writing us letters from prison; I was running a household at thirteen. I was negotiating with bill collectors. I was teaching myself to drive so that my sister and I could get to school and avoid the truancy officer. I was memorizing my mother’s medical records and scheduling her follow-ups. I was collecting coins from the couch cushions and junk drawers and teaching myself how to cook what little food we had by watching 30 Minute Meals with Rachel Ray. He wasn’t there the nights I distracted my sister (and myself) from hunger by making imaginary grocery store lists—everything we’d buy if we ever had enough money. 

Kurt wasn’t there the nights we still went to bed hungry. 

And his absence changed me. 

His absence forced me to grow up faster. It forced me to cobble together some idea of manhood without anything to pattern it on. And while I did the best I could, the version that I built for myself was empty inside; cold and distant. He put his survival and success above everything else. He was popular, with many acquaintances, but few close friends. He cut himself off from his feelings and the feelings of others. He was the type of man who only cried in his car or the shower, because those were the only places he knew he was alone.

It took a decade—and the death of my mother—for me to eventually kill that version of manhood and birth another. And then another. And then another. I changed, too, while Kurt was in prison. But no matter how much I grew as a man, I couldn’t find a place in my heart for Kurt.  

And so I wasn’t there when he finally changed. 

Highway patrol investigating the scene of Kurt’s accident noted that there weren’t any tire marks on the road; he’d somehow driven into an eighteen-wheeler, but never tried to brake. I cynically suspected he was under the influence, that his new sobriety was a lie, but I was wrong. His toxicology report came back clean. For a while the coroner suspected a stroke, but the scans were inconclusive and the family was left to wonder. It would take a while, but eventually my sister called and told me that the eighteen wheeler didn’t have any lights or reflectors on it. 

Kurt didn’t brake because he couldn’t see the truck. 

Old friends reached out to offer me their condolences. I received cards from former employers. A group of campaign friends from Michigan sent me an orchid that I somehow managed to keep alive for months in an apartment I barely slept in. I threw myself into my work on the campaign. I received updates on the investigation sporadically and when my siblings told me they wanted to sue the truck company, I signed whatever paperwork the lawyers sent. But I also made it clear that my sister had my vote and my decision making power. I was drowning at work and I didn’t want this lawsuit and their search for closure to distract from the campaign. 

But then the campaign ended.

I could finally stop for a second to breathe. I was suddenly free to go wherever I wanted, to work for whomever wanted me. It was freedom, and I used that freedom to go back home to South Carolina for the first time since I was a teenager.

I rented a beautiful apartment in an old cotton mill and spoiled my nephews rotten and floated in my Aunt’s pool and went to socially distanced birthday parties and played Fortnite with my cousins. I reconnected with old friends and drove across the country to revisit the old cities and towns where I used to live. I traveled to the desert to watch the election results and cement new friendships. I started consulting for a criminal justice organization focused on reforming probation and parole, and I reconnected with my brother who—like Kurt before him—is currently serving time in prison.

I felt myself starting to change. 

It took a while, but the truck company decided to settle the wrongful death lawsuit. Courts weren’t open during the pandemic, but recently the paperwork was finally submitted. A few days from now Kurt’s estate will officially close, I’ll meet my siblings at the lawyer’s office, and then we’ll all leave with a check.

It’s not an insubstantial amount. Two years ago it would have been enough to completely change my life. Even now, it’s enough money to ensure I can move to D.C. and start the next phase of my career. But how is that any comfort now that I realize what I lost?

It was a missed connection.
It was a mistimed epiphany. 

I didn’t know he was waiting on me to change, and I didn’t believe that his change was genuine. I changed too late for him to apologize; he changed too late for me to forgive.

I thought I had forever to forgive him, but I was wrong. 

My sister has been filling me in on what I missed during the last five years of Kurt’s life. She’s the one who told me about the church he attended and the woman and our cousins on his side of the family. She also told me about how Kurt had signed up for Facebook in order to find and download pictures of all his kids. He’d printed them out and put them in frames and hung them around his house.

I was silent, but my sister heard the question. 

“He had a lot of pictures of you.” 

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Kurt was not my father’s actual middle name—it’s Kirt. I’d never seen it written down before I wrote this piece. I’d never seen his birth certificate or his driver’s license. He never signed a permission slip or homework assignment. Kurt was how I spelled it my entire life. It’s how I knew him. But I want to acknowledge, as a sign of respect, that that’s not how he knew himself.

Also, I saw those same spelling errors. You don’t have to point them out. You can sit quiet in the comfort of knowing that that mistake you saw is eating me alive from the inside out.

It’s Socrates opining in 470 B.C. that the young Greeks “have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise….[T]hey contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers.” It’s parents in the 1920s threatening to “interfere in the young people’s affairs and help to restore them to wholesome standards.” It’s Baby Boomers being attacked as beatniks and hippies by a Greatest Generation uncomfortable with changing social and cultural mores.

But declines in infant mortality, lengthening lifespans, and population increases over the last century have put a lot of additional stress on generational relationships. More than ever, generational cohorts are forced to vie with one another for political, cultural, and economic power and that can turn contentious. But generational conflict is not the same thing as generational warfare—the latter being a combination of Baby Boomer anxieties and lazy American rhetoric that glorifies aggressive language.

But before we travel down this road, here are some obvious statements that I’m nonetheless going to type because if I don’t people will get mad at me:

1. Generations are delineated using Pew Research Center definitions.

2. No generation is entirely one thing or another and any attempt to argue from that position is inherently faulty because it ignores human complexity.

3. Personal experience is important, but it is not a valid form of evidence against demographic or scientific data—it complements, but it does not override.

4. Pointing out that a thing exists is not a value judgement about the thing.

5. If a shoe doesn’t fit—don’t wear it.

It is hard to talk about generational politics.

Part of that is due to the generational trauma that this country inflicts on its citizens.

The Lost Generation was shaped by World War I; the Great Depression and World War II molded the Greatest Generation; the Baby Boomers were shaped by mass cultural and social revolutions; Gen Xers were a latchkey generation more likely to be raised inside and by television; Millennials watched thousands of Americans die on live television; Gen Z has been miming active shooter drills since kindergarten.

We all grew up under attack and that has put some of us on the defensive. And while that posture is understandable, it cannot be an excuse for avoiding conversation.

Especially if generational war is looming.

Generational warfare is a fairly recent creation.

To declare war on a problem or issue, in American politics, is to signal that the full weight of the government is being brought to bear. It’s President Johnson declaring a War on Poverty or President Reagan declaring a War on Drugs. It’s President Bush, less than two weeks after 9/11, declaring a new War on Terror. But like most wars, there is a tendency towards mission creep—the War on Poverty eventually became a war on the poor and the War on Terror would terrorize millions. Or, to paraphrase Tupac Shakur, America invented a war on drugs so the police can bother me.

And the same has happened with generational warfare.

It was first popularized in the 1990s by Baby Boomers—reaching the apex of their political and cultural power in society—looking for ways to verbalize their anxieties around growing old and dependent on others. Authors like Harry Dent, Ken Dychtwald, and Craig Karpel gained popularity by catastrophizing about what the world would look like when Baby Boomers began to age out of the economy. There was a real fear and uncertainty over whether or not younger generations would continue to support programs like Social Security in the coming decades or “rail against greedy geezers and raise the specter of generational warfare.”

A lot of authors at the time assumed generational conflict was inevitable and structured their arguments in two phases: how Baby Boomers could thrive during the last few good years and how they could plan for the inevitable collapse that would occur when they began to retire en masse—a collapse preceding an inevitable war.

Financiers William Sterling and Stephen Waite’s Boomernomics: The Future of Your Money in the Upcoming Generational Warfare (1998) foresaw a ten year period of low inflation and relatively high stock prices followed by a drop “as Boomers cash out their retirement accounts and real estate prices…follow suit as a rash of Baby Boomers all decide to sell their houses at the same time.” It’s a short-term future filled with massive potential rewards and a long-term outlook of hoarding and scarcity. Sterling and Waite refer to these periods as “America's Prime Time" and "The Big Chill.”

Because of course they do.

Baby Boomers imagined generational warfare as an inevitable consequence of their hard work, success, and good fortune—it was a defensive posture that assumed future generations would try to take what Baby Boomers believe they’d earned. But soon the economic prosperity of the 1990s gave way to the economic turmoil of the 2000s and anxieties about the coming generational war became less economic and more dystopic.

Futurist Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future: The Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002) imagined a future where older Americans, due to better health care and technological improvements, extend their lifespans indefinitely:

“Generational warfare will join class and ethnic conflict as a major dividing line in society. Getting older people out of the way of younger ones will become a significant struggle, and societies may have to resort to impersonal, institutionalized forms of ageism.” 

Fukuyama saw a world where higher life expectancies and decreased birth rates slow the rate of political, social, and intellectual change—creating a situation in which an elderly, conservative majority stifles the ambitions of a young, radicalized minority.

Suffice to say the more dystopian view of generational conflict proved popular in the public imagination especially during the Great Recession. When philosopher Rebecca Roache suggested last year that longer, healthier lives will spark a new generational conflict, she was pulling from a well-established vein in both fiction and nonfiction:

If the most important decisions are made by the old, then the interests of the old might edge out those of other age groups….Having each generation hang onto power for longer could make successive generations not only even poorer, but increasingly powerless. We’ll need to change the way political decisions are made to ensure that the interests of all ages are fairly represented.

Fukuyama—table for two.

But the specter of institutionalized ageism or legalized discrimination is as much a fantasy now as earlier fears about the social safety net. It’s been more than twenty years since the publication of Sterling and Waite’s book and we are ten years into what they termed The Big Chill—and their worst dreams are still just dreams. Gen Xers and Millennials did not storm the political gates to erode Social Security or Medicare and our government has so far avoided legalized ageism against elderly Americans.

Generational warfare—as it was first imagined nearly thirty years ago—is now nothing more than linguistic shorthand; an example of the type of nebulous, ill-defined militarism that we use to convey strength. It is not used to describe our current reality; it has instead normalized a besieged and beleaguered mentality in some.

OK Boomer was a meme and song popularized on TikTok that paints Baby Boomers as jingoistic religious fanatics who judge younger generations while supporting fascism:

Staring at her piercings, staring at tattoos
Staring at her bra like the evening news
You bible thump your kids, wonder why we're pissed
Say America again, I'm gonna take a piss
Cremated to ashes, disappear like magic
When you wear that MAGA hat, lookin' like a fascist

And while research shows that older Americans are more likely to describe themselves as patriotic, are more likely to consider themselves religious, are more likely to describe themselves as evangelical, and are more likely to be conservative—the online discussion prompted by the OK Boomer meme didn’t really focus on the factual basis of the charges, or really any serious discussion of the accusations at all.

It was hyperbolized as the opening shot in a new generational war. It was called out for being both ageist and inflammatory. It was profiled in the New York Times and the Washington Post as if it were the start of an actual war. Gen Xers ran forward—not to act as mediators, but to insist that they were the first generation to ever attack Baby Boomers and we’d forgotten about them again. Eventually even the AARP stepped in.

None of this is the ageist dystopia Fukuyama anticipated.

Generational warfare is a lazy phrase.

Not just because it’s predicated on a future that has never come true, or because it relies on militaristic language that aggressively over-generalizes; it’s a lazy phrase because for the last thirty years it’s been situated first-and-foremost in the fantasy that Baby Boomers were destined to be the victims in any future generational war.

It will be their Social Security defunded.

It will be their rights politically undermined.

It will be their demographic mercilessly mocked.

Generational politics are complex and the insecurity that Baby Boomers feel about aging is real, and we should approach that with respect and empathy. But we also cannot use complexity to cloak simple truths. And the simple truth is that despite decades of doom and gloom predictions about their future oppression, their worst fears didn’t come true. Baby Boomers were not the victims of a generational war.

But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a war.

There was—and Millennials lost.

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Feeling a little called out by the above piece? No worries. Go back to the top and re-read the list of statements and clarifications.

Also, I saw those same spelling mistakes. You don’t have to point them out to me on Twitter. You can sit quiet in the comfort of knowing that that mistake you saw is eating me alive from the inside out.

Lastly, watch The Big Chill—it’s good.

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I’ve changed some of the identifying details in order to preserve others’ privacy. I’m not interested in Twitter mobs or attempts to get anyone canceled. If all you see here is gossip then you’ve missed the point.

TW: racism, racial slurs

Edit 1: These stories took place over the course of six different campaigns.

It’s 11PM and my phone buzzes on the couch.

It’s an email from a close confidant of the candidate. He’s replying to an email that I sent earlier that day with the next day’s content for approval. But he’s not approving the content—it’s already been posted. Instead, he’s attached a promotional club flyer?

The guy in the image is Black with darker skin. His hair is dyed blonde and he’s wearing large gold sunglasses, a thin gold chain, and an oversized wristwatch. Neon- colored flowers are blooming in the background and their light illuminates his dark bomber jacket. I stare at the flyer for a little bit trying to decipher the meaning—is the candidate’s advisor inviting me out clubbing?

And then I notice the subject line:

This dude looks like Stefan

I look back at the flyer and I don’t see it.

I don’t own and have never worn oversized gold sunglasses around the office. I don’t own a gold chain or a wristwatch and I’d certainly aged out of dyed blonde hair and club attire. I was living my life in khaki shorts and a hoodie in the office most days. I spent a while sitting on the edge of my bed, staring at the club flyer, trying to look for something beyond the obvious—that he was a Black man and I’m a Black man and in the eyes of one of the candidate’s closest advisors that was enough of a similarity.

And that’s when I realize that he has sent the flyer to every member of senior staff.

Our team is being split up so that we can cover more ground on Election Day.

Everyone who isn’t absolutely essential is being assigned to a staging location where canvassing and phone calls will be made until the polls close. But as people start to get assigned, I notice that the Black staffers are being assigned to the Black areas and that white staffers are being assigned white areas. I look at my Black coworker across the office and I think she’s made the same connection.

We lock eyes and chuckle.

I’m in a conference room with the whole team.

We’re trying to come up with a publicity plan for a new initiative. It was not a barnburner of a topic so the team spends the meeting brainstorming ways to make it more personal online. I’m the only Black person in the meeting and near the end I raise my hand to ask how we’re thinking about messaging this to communities of color online. So far, the ideas thrown out aren’t universal enough or tailored enough to reach them—especially if they’re not college educated.

I can see my boss tense.

“This is not about Black people.

This initiative is about [redacted]—it’s not about that.”

He says it with a slight exhale of annoyance—as if it should be obvious to me that our initiative on [redacted] wasn’t targeted to Black people. I sit there for a couple seconds trying to come up with a way to respond that won’t cost me my job and while I wait the entire rooms waits with me. I can feel their eyes. Finally a white friend from another team chimes in and boosts my concerns about messaging diversity and how it’s important to build that outreach into the messaging plan.

Her courage breaks the dam and my boss can now see that he’s on the wrong side of this issue. But I can also see that he is feeling embarrassed about what just happened. He turns and asks me to work with our stakeholders to gather the information on communities of color and then write out the content plan myself and send it to him.

I do what he asks.

None of my suggestions make it into the larger content plan. A few weeks later I get curious and check the view history for the document I sent.

He never opened it.

Our Asian-American organizer is in my office.

Our campaign manager is escorting a member of the candidate’s family down the hallway and I can hear vague exhortations from him about how he didn’t mean any offense when he referred to our Asian staffer as a chink. I go back to my office and sit with our organizer—who seems both hurt and nonchalant. I don’t think I told him about the time that same man reached out to pet my hair.

Our campaign manager comes in and mumbles something that sounds like an apology.

It takes two hours on backroads to reach the bar.

I am traveling the area with a few other staffers to meet officials and hold trainings. It’s a deeply rural area and I find the diner alongside a two-lane stretch of road. I pull in to the lot and park in front of the porch swing. I walk through the nearly empty bar to a room in the back. It wasn’t long before people arrive and we begin.

I give my usual presentation and then step outside for a cigarette while another staffer starts.

On my heels I can hear a local party official complimenting me on the way the training unfolded. He wants to ask me some follow up questions. He starts to talk and I can feel the conversation drifting in weird ways towards race—he likes how professional and put together I seem and emphasizes that he’s proud to be a Democrat because we lift up the disadvantaged.

Am I the only Black person for miles?

I’m exhausted—and the three hour drive back to my apartment looms large. All I want is to smoke a cigarette in peace and let the nicotine calm down that anxious feeling that I still get after I finish public speaking.

I try and wave him off with half-answers and polite chuckles. I stare at my phone in the hope that he would take the hint. He doesn’t take the hint. He can’t take the hint. He wants to talk about Trump and Obama and immigration.

I want to be rude—but I can’t.

Because he is an important local Democrat and it wouldn’t be smart for me politically. He wants me to affirm his goodness and praise his open mindedness. He wants me to give him a metaphorical pat on the back for not being as bad as the other side. And so—rather than have a real conversation with that man—I spend my next cigarette as a political fluffer; giving him the praise and platitudes his ego obviously needed.

You’re one of the good ones!

When it is over he goes inside the bar and I sit on the porch swing near my car and think very seriously about whether or not electoral politics is really for me.

And then I go back inside.

Our digital ads don’t have people of color in them.

It is my first week on the job and I started by performing an inclusivity audit of our digital programs—mainly centered on whether or not we were elevating people and issues from underrepresented or marginalized communities. During the audit a number of issues come up—including with our ad program. I set up a meeting with the ads consultant to talk.

Why do we need people of color in our acquisition ads? None of the other candidates have people of color in their list building ads? We don’t even have any photos of people of color to include in our digital ads. Those pictures you sent aren’t the right type to use to run ads.

It’s really not a priority right now.

Why do we need people of color in our digital ads?

I write a memo with the findings from the audit and send it to my boss, who sets up a meeting with the campaign manager to discuss it.

The meeting is canceled and never rescheduled.

He is sitting in my passenger seat.

I say something. He says something.

I say something.

He says, “I don’t really consider myself a person of color—I have too much privilege.” I spend the rest of the ride wondering why my boss said that to me.

A major report is about to be released from a prominent civil rights group and the campaign is worried about what it will say about the candidate. A conference call is put on the calendar and I listen for more than thirty minutes as a mostly white leadership team contemplates attacking the credibility of a civil rights group.

I spend the time preparing to quit in protest.

In the end, they chose not to attack.

We’re sitting in the center of a restaurant.

It’s my first one-on-one with my boss and first week on the job. It’s a pretty small team. Over lunch he walks me through who everyone is and what they do on the campaign. He also adds a little bit of color about how they measure up in his opinion. It was a great lunch and I felt happy about my decision to work here.

A few weeks later that I realize that the only people my boss gave negative reviews of during that lunch were people of color.

People of color on the campaign want a safe space to have difficult conversations.

With public support from senior leadership, a series of sessions are organized where conversations can happen and bridges can be built.

A white staffer records the second session.

And then leaks it to the NYTimes.

We’re discussing hiring at the staff meeting.

Summer is starting and the campaign is in the process of picking interns, but so far the only applications we’ve received—or interns hired—were white. None were from the surrounding community, which was majority-minority. None were Spanish fluent. And I finally find what I think is the right moment to say something obvious:

We cannot have all-white interns.

I tried to explain that we need to be more intentional about outreach. Maybe we can tap our partners to amplify? Have we posted about it in more places than our social channels? Have we reached out to the party to ask if they have any leads on students who might fit the job description? Internships are the first step up the political ladder and we should do what we can to ensure that that opportunity is equally available.

The other end of the conference table disagrees.

I’m not worried about hitting some quota.

All we’ve done is pick the best people.

And I say that I resent the implication that building a campaign that looks like the people we’re trying to represent is somehow different than picking the best people.

I lost the argument that happened afterward.

I ask a Black friend to read this piece.

It’s been finished for a couple days, but I can’t decide on an ending. I can’t figure out a way to put a tidy bow on these experiences. He sends over some formatting edits and he suggests that I add a trigger warning at the top for racism.

And then he asks—What do all of these anecdotes have in common? What is the theme here?

I try to talk about the impacts of institutional racism, the broken pipeline, emotional labor, and microaggressions, but he interrupts me—I already know all of that and so do most of your readers. Tell me something they don’t know.

And so I think for a minute.

And so I take a deep breath.

And so I tell him about the smallness.

I tell him that these experiences are different, but that the feeling I had in each of them was one of immeasurable smallness. Standing in that parking lot, sitting in my office, listening on that conference call—each of these experiences felt like I was being hit with a massive wave and each time it receded it took a little bit of me with it.

Racism feels like being chipped away. It feels like a persistent erosion of the self. And I tell him that sometimes I feel so small that I may as well not exist.

He laughs heartily on the phone. And then sighs.

But you’re not small, are you?

And I pause for a second.

No—I’m not small.

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I’m asking for two reasons—the first is that my former boss seems to trigger a visceral and disproportionate reaction from people, especially a certain type of Very Online™️ person for whom he is the political equivalent of the word moist.

And the second is that it’s a hard conversation.

Politics is personal and whether or not a voter responds to a politician is dependent on so many factors—both internal and external—that it’s easy to speak too broadly. Biases around race, gender, and sexuality complicate our discussion. And we cannot forget that likability is ultimately a question of taste and sensibility—which are class proxies.

Like I said—it’s a hard conversation, requiring a lot of nuance.

We did not get a nuanced online discussion of Pete Buttigieg during the primaries.

He was a second-generation communist and he was was a closet Republican. He was too gay and he was not gay enough. He was an evil genius that rigged bread prices in Canada. He was the ineffective mayor of a college town. He was a fake polyglot. He was both hokey and manufactured; a robot, a rat, a research experiment, and a CIA operative. Too good to be true, too much of a boy scout; a liar, a cheater, and a thief.

While working on the campaign I hung out with Pete and Chasten a couple times, but I also met Pete’s friends from college and his employees in City Hall and the residents of South Bend and Pete’s mother and his high school teacher and the band that played at his wedding. His childhood best friend was our campaign manager. Staff got drinks at the bar that he frequented and we shopped in the same Target as him and if there was some secret underbelly to Pete Buttigieg we would have seen it. But there was nothing in any of those experiences that matched the man being portrayed online. It was like the internet was shadowboxing with a caricature of Pete Buttigieg.

And the internet’s dislike for the caricature that they created soon became it’s own storyline.

How the Internet Came to Loathe Pete Buttigieg. Why Young Progressives Hate Pete Buttigieg. How Pete Buttigieg has drawn the fury of the online left. Why Pete Buttigieg Enrages the Young Left. I Spent a Week Interrogating My Dislike of Pete Buttigieg and These Are My Findings. Everybody Hates Pete. Why Do Some People Dislike Pete Buttigieg So Intensely? Everyone had an opinion about Pete.

And while I know it’s late, I think I’m finally ready to throw my take on the pile.

But before we get started—here are some obvious statements that I’m nonetheless going to type because if I don’t people will get mad at me:

1. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for why you did or did not like a candidate and this post is not about shaming you for your political or policy preferences.

2. If your dislike for Pete Buttigieg was based in his policies, his experience, or some other tangible and equally applied standard than this is not about you.

3. If your dislike for Pete Buttigieg was limited to a couple of tweets and a vote for a different candidate during the primary, then, again, this is not about you.

4. Pointing out that a thing exists is not a value judgement about the thing.

Now that that is said and out of the way, allow me to get this ball rolling.

(*takes a deep drag off a menthol cigarette*)

Pete Buttigieg is a little bit cringe.

Cringe is a form of social friction.

It is that feeling you get when you remember that time you pushed instead of pulled on that glass door and ran right into it. It is the time you called your teacher Mom or that time you walked out of a restroom with your shirt tucked into your underwear. It’s spending an entire night calling someone by one name only to realize in the Uber home that that isn’t their name—not even close—and feeling mortified. Cringe is the feeling we get when we’ve accidentally brushed against an informal social boundary.

According to Melissa Dahl's book Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, cringe is

the intense and visceral reaction produced by an awkward moment, an unpleasant kind of self-recognition where you suddenly see yourself through someone else’s eyes. It’s a forced moment of self-awareness, and it usually makes you cognizant of the disappointing fact that you aren’t measuring up to your own self-concept.

In society, cringe acts as a policing mechanism based in emotion that—in order to ease or remove social friction—punishes us when we violate accepted norms.

And it’s a punishment that is just as strong in our memory as in the moment.

Remember that time you locked your car door right as someone was walking beside it and they looked at you a little hurt as if you locking your door was you saying you didn’t trust them specifically as opposed to the world more generally? Remember that feeling of cringe? It’s still as strong today as it was in that parking lot ten years ago.

And cringe is more than just internal punishment.

YouTube video essayist and entertainer Natalie Wynn, also known as ContraPoints, has perhaps the most detailed explanation of internet cringe.

Her basic argument is that internet cringe culture is complex and probably darker than most people realize. We don’t just cringe at ourselves online—in fact, there is an online ecosystem built around cringing at other people. And while sometimes our internet cringe can come from a place of empathy and mutual embarrassment, we also frequently cringe at people with contempt and misplaced anger or disappointment.

Watch her video, but for now—a chart:

Embarrassment Based Cringe can be directed at either yourself or other people, and it is a form of cringe based on empathy—because either you are doing the cringe and you’re embarrassed or because someone else is being cringeworthy and you can relate.

For instance, we all know the embarrassment of not muting a headset correctly.

Contemptuous Based Cringe can also be directed at either yourself or other people, but it has two different underlying facts—the first is that it is a form of cringe based on contempt and mockery, and the second is that the person causing the cringe is often oblivious (or seems oblivious) to the ways in which their behavior is cringeworthy.

ContraPoints uses the example of American Idol.

It is not cringeworthy to be a bad singer—when the office gathers around a cake to badly yodel Happy Birthday to a co-worker nobody calls that performance cringe because nobody expects Happy Birthday to be sung well. But if you believe yourself to be good enough to audition for American Idol and then fail spectacularly in front of Randy and Paula and Simon—well, that’s more than a little cringe.

Just like with compassionate cringe, you perceive that the person is embarrassing themselves, but instead of feeling embarrassment on their behalf you feel annoyance and disgust…and maybe even a little schadenfreude….My sense that [the singer] deserves it suppresses my compassionate response and helps remove any guilt that I may otherwise have for taking pleasure in someone's humiliation.

To return to an idea from Dahl's book Cringeworthy—the disappointment or the failure to meet the societal expectation is the source of the cringe, and then that cringe is externalized into annoyance, disgust, and schadenfreude directed at the cringeworthy.

But what happens when someone enjoys feeling contemptuous cringe?

What happens when that annoyance or disgust isn’t being yelled at a television, but is instead put on the internet? What happens when the algorithms lift that outrage into people’s feeds and it’s rewarded with the dopamine hit of likes and retweets? What happens when you do it again and again—going back to the same targets repeatedly?

What happens when cringe is weaponized against someone?

Morbid Cringe is what happens when contemptuous based cringe meets an internet always looking for the next lolcow it can milk for humilitainment. It is an obsessive fascination rooted, according to Natalie Wynn, in the need (or want) to feel superior to the cringeworthy transgressor. They’re so cRiNgE!!!! If I EVERRR did that KILL ME!

(*deep beleaguered sigh*)

Our internet is deeply broken.

It is a culture defined by a sort of post-ironic nihilism that finds if not pleasure then at least an algorithmic incentive in contemptuously cringing at people. It is a system that uses cringe as a weapon to not only police a very narrow framework of what’s cool to post on the internet, but to punish those who act outside its constraints. Divorced from any sort of personal connection, it’s much harder for compassion to restrain us.

Especially when what we’re contemptuously cringing at is political.

I should clarify that I don’t contemptuously cringe at Pete Buttigieg.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours around him or looking at videos of him or writing copy for him or reading his plans or all the little things you do when you’re on a campaign that keeps a candidate’s voice inside your head. I have a lot of empathy towards Pete and I see his occasional awkwardness with compassion even if it makes me cringe.

But why is it so easy to cringe—compassionately or contemptuously—at Pete?

It’s because so little about him fits the modern internet’s vibe. He does not conform to mass culture. He is not ironic and he is definitely not nihilistic. He is not jaded and he refuses to feign detachment in order to look cool for strangers on the internet. His self worth was not built up by the internet and because of that he can sometimes seem oblivious to the obvious ways in which he is bumping up against its social norms.

And as we’ve discussed before, those barriers are heavily policed by cringe cops.

They cringe at him for being over-earnest, having bad comedic timing, and for being an awkward dancer. It’s cringe that he has a similar speaking cadence as President Obama and it’s cringe that he has a similar speaking cadence as Vice President Pence. It’s considered cringe for him to support Notre Dame, to overzealously prepare for a debate, or to talk about things like the heartland or American values and freedom.

His celebrity supporters are cringeworthy and when he spoke ineloquently about Kobe that was totally cringe and him liking Panic! at the Disco is, like, super cringe!

Some think it’s cringe that he has a husband.

It’s an obsession that’s lasted long past the primaries. For instance, during a fundraiser with Cher, Pete made a joke that made some Very Online™️ people cringe loudly:

Large swaths of the internet spend an incredible amount of time engaged in a morbid cringe obsession with Pete—channeling their annoyance at his earnestness, seeming perfection, and Midwestern mentality into tweet after tweet after tweet. They feel as if Pete should be embarrassed of himself and because he isn’t their cringe turns toxic.

His refusal to tailor himself to the internet means he is a consistent source of cringe.

It’s why so many people online hate Pete Buttigieg.

And based on everything that I’ve read and explained today, I understand why he brings out those feelings in them. And I understand why they’re behaving that way.

But I’ve also seen how that authenticity and steadfast sense of self helped propel him from the mayor of the fourth largest town in Indiana into a contender. I watched how his refusal to give into the internet’s demands for conformity built him one of the strongest online fandoms. I’ve watched it build bridges across communities.

Not because fans aren’t cringing also—just ask #TeamPete and they’ll freely admit to cringing at Pete from time-to-time. But they cringe with him because they empathize with a world telling them that their passion and earnestness and nonconformity are cringeworthy. And his refusal to bend has given some of them that same strength.

It’s helped build a sense of belonging.

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Before we get started—some completely obvious statements that I’m nonetheless going to type anyway because if I don’t people will get mad at me on the internet:

1. While the ratio of toxic to non-toxic supporters vary issue by issue, there are both good and bad supporters in every online political community.

2. Toxic supporters can not wholly discredit movements and we should not let their actions necessarily speak for an entire set of policies, politics, or even politicians.

3. Internet communities have existed since at least 1991, which means none of this is particularly new and therefore nobody reading this is necessarily to blame.

4. Pointing out that a thing exists is not a value judgement about the thing.

Now let’s talk a little bit about candidate and/or issue centered online advocacy.

First—some definitions.

When I use the phrase candidate centered advocacy, I’m using it as shorthand to describe online communities that spring up around individual candidates. It is a description for a type of support that is grounded first and foremost in a person, and the issues, insofar as they might matter to supporters, are not so central as to be the overriding concern—the candidate matters more than any one policy.

When I use the phrase issue centered advocacy, I’m using it as shorthand to describe online communities that are both a) organized around a particular issue and b) exist online regardless of whether or not a particular candidate is running. Supporters under this schema are invested in a candidate only insofar as it furthers their policy aim.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both models.

For instance, very few traditional campaigns keep their grassroots supporters engaged once the campaign officially ends. Since issue centered advocacy isn’t candidate or cycle dependent, the infrastructure and institutional memory created in one campaign is often used immediately in another. Supporters are consistently engaged online around new initiatives at the local, state, and federal levels and that extra engagement means this community is often more digitally fluent and easier to mobilize.

It also means that the online activists are less dependent on the campaign.

Candidate centered advocacy online usually has to be built from scratch and while that puts it at a significant disadvantage against issue centered advocacy, when built correctly it means the entire grassroots structure can be customized to fit the exact needs of the campaign—wasting fewer resources and filling key campaign weaknesses. For a campaign struggling with scaling, this sort of structure acts as a force multiplier.

It’s important to stop for a second right here and note that these two identities are not wholly separate and that there are always exceptions and these things exist on a spectrum.

But the further you travel along that spectrum, the more the incentive structure for each type of online advocacy changes. What is good praxis online for a issue based online advocate isn’t necessarily aligned with what’s best for the candidate longterm.

And we’re seeing this dynamic play out in Massachusetts.

(loud groan from the audience)

Stick with me, I promise I have a good point.

Senator Markey’s supporters are issue centered advocates and most of them are primarily organized around climate change. And we should be clear that this is exactly the sort of support that Markey actively sought out more than a year ago as a way to blunt the expected enthusiasm that everyone expected around the younger Kennedy.

(Washington Post) Edward J. Markey’s best chance of staving off a challenge to his Senate seat from a scion of the Kennedy family may lay with emphasizing his marquee issue: climate change.

(Boston.com) Within minutes of Kennedy formally announcing his Senate campaign Saturday morning, Markey called on the Massachusetts congressman and his two other Democratic primary challengers to agree to a debate specifically focused on climate change in November.

(Boston Globe) Now, those youthful and aggressive troops — one group staged a high-profile sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office last year — could help him hold onto his Senate seat if he faces an expected primary challenge from Joseph P. Kennedy III.

Markey actively courted climate change advocates to boost his candidacy online to help counter the argument that generational change was needed—and that is not a value judgement, it’s an observation. But the Markey campaign also didn’t provide any sort of guidelines or rules of the road to govern these supporters behaviors—there are no fences separating the larger climate change movement from Markey’s campaign.

Which brings us back to the issue of toxic online communities.

I should start by saying that as both a Black person and a survivor of the great Tumblr Fandom Wars (2010-2013), I have a high bar for what I consider toxic online culture.

Tweeting death threats and assassination hopes to a Kennedy is toxic.

Replying to Kennedy tweets with a poorly drawn meme of a dinosaur saying “Fuck Joe Kennedy” is also toxic—for the record—it’s just less dramatic than death threats.

Meme-ing the memory of John F. Kennedy or Robert Kennedy and using their deaths as weapons to prod their family members does not serve an electoral aim. It is not helpful to the Markey campaign, as evidenced by the news cycles it produced, and it’s alienating to the Kennedy supporters, a lot of whom are people of color.

What it does do is use negative feedback loops online to keep supporters in engaged.

Remember how earlier we spoke about issue advocates waging continuous campaigns?

As any organizer would readily admit—it is really hard to keep supporters engaged online long-term. One way you can do that is by keep supporters’ emotions and tensions high. By making everything seem imminent and immediate. To have persistently high stakes with clearly cast villains and heroes. To make participation feel like a righteous crusade and engagement as easy as a clever tweet or sick burn.

Those dinosaur memes? They’re an inside joke from within the climate advocates that then jumped into the larger supporter pool and was then used last week to drown out the endorsement of a Black official who was switching his endorsement to Kennedy.

And I am sure that this all very fun for the supporters doing it and that it’s engaging for others to see—but this behavior does not help Markey in Massachusetts.

Disrespecting a Black male city councillor does not help Markey.

Accusing Kennedy of buying Black support does not help Markey.

But it does help keep the issue centered advocates engaged online and when this race is over none of these supporters will have to deal with whatever repercussions are left.

I don’t think the Markey campaign could stop it even if they tried.

In response to an appeal for decency, one of Markey’s online supporters tweeted:

I love this response because it is the purest example of why issue centered advocacy is more likely to turn toxic than candidate centered advocacy. If you believe that climate change is an immediate threat and is actively killing people right now then one woman crying for decency online means less than nothing. Who cares about your feelings when hurricanes are blowing and wildfires are burning and you’re running against this candidate?

You can justify a lot of toxic behavior when the stakes are literally life and death.

Candidate centered advocacy is rarely as toxic as issue centered advocacy because candidates would never purposefully build or tolerate toxicity at this level. Candidates are ultimately still people and they have to maintain relationships in their community even if they lose their elections. It matters to them if the Reverend or their banker or their city councilman thinks highly of them because they have to go back and live in those communities when the votes are counted.

Markey may very well successfully fend off Kennedy.

But regardless of the outcome there are going to be a lot of hurt feelings and burnt bridges that he and his staff are going to have to repair. Meanwhile the issue based advocates who came to his defense will be on to their next campaign.

How lovely for them.

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Most online activists there cut their teeth advocating around specific issues.

I speak from first-hand experience as the former digital director for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s re-election campaign. And while he cruised to victory, winning by 30%+ and with a wide governing mandate, it was a tough race for the campaign online.

We were smacked around by pretty much every online constituency group you could imagine. From affordable housing and infrastructure advocates to #BlackLivesMatter supporters and demonstrators against his public safety record; each online community wasn’t so much organized in support of our opponent as they were in support for their pet issues and united in opposition to the Mayor. If you’ve never been on the other side of a swarm of angry online bicycle enthusiasts, whew—it was wild.

It led to a dynamic online best described as continuous noise. 

Continuous noise is what I call the persistent background chatter, usually negative, that follows certain candidates online. It’s a low-level hum that occasionally rises to a fierce crescendo, but is almost always in the background of the internet conversation.

For Mayor Walsh, the background noise online was persistent from the day I started on the campaign and was almost always about allegations of racism, corruption, or favoritism. It made it impossible some days to post any content without it getting swarmed with hatred and bile.

And I do mean hatred and vile.

We had a spreadsheet internally that tracked online attacks and we eventually added a tab to track staffer attacks—some were rather mundane, but others were racial and/or discriminatory in nature. Some attacked our interns and trying to force them offline; some trolled and doxed senior officials on the campaign; others attacked the Mayor for his sobriety. They focused their attacks on staffers of color for supporting the Mayor.

It was a game to them—see how many staffers they could get to block them:

And while it didn’t work against the Mayor in 2017 it had worked recently.

Mayor Walsh’s attempt to host the Olympics in Boston a few years earlier had led to an early defeat in his tenure and emboldened his opponents online. “No Boston Olympics has had an out-sized effect on the public debate over the Olympics—driven largely by the group’s ability to tap into social media and its consistent presence at public meetings.” Opposition to the games grew and the coordinated attacks online helped to sway public opinion against the project and the Mayor lost to #10PeopleOnTwitter.

I say all of that to say this—those same dynamics seem at work today for Markey.

His climate work has brought him not only a passionate online army within the state but an outsized one nationally that’s helping to fuel his campaign. But these are not grassroots supporters loyal to Senator Markey or any other candidate—they are issue oriented and aren’t accustomed to playing nice with others. It’s a group that I’ve seen first hand traffic in the worst instincts of the internet. Perhaps that’s why it’s not surprising they’ve reached for the low-hanging fruit—death threats against a Kennedy.

My advice? There is no way around them—the only way is through them.

Ignore the continuous noise and keep pushing forward.

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