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The NA Beer of Social Media

Dec 9, 2025

Kamala Harris had a great social media team, posting under the handle KamalaHQ. After she lost, institutional Dems made the right mouth noises about continuing to post in the Kamala HQ vein, and I believe they hired some of the team to continue it.

I follow the account on BlueSky, but, to me, it’s a demotivator. It repeats the same four or five ideas over and over, with almost zero fun quotient. This one above, for example, is the “Trump is hurting his own voters” theme, which is a favorite. But, you know what, those voters are going to vote for Trump again. Perhaps if we solved that puzzle, we might get somewhere.

Here’s the thing about farmers — they’re mostly millionaire corporate farmers, and they’ll vote for Trump because he’ll bail them out (which he just did, again, so maybe don’t post a sick burn about farmers the day after the bailout was announced). One of their earlier posts today was a farmer saying farmers don’t like bailouts. As someone who grew up in farm country, I’m here to say that pretty much every farmer talks out of both sides of their mouth on this — they happily take government funding while telling everyone who listens that they don’t want it.

Basically, FactPost combs mainstream and right-wing media to look for negative stories about Trump policies. It’s all so cautious. I mean, there’s a place for it, but for an account billed as “rapid response” there’s no response. It’s all “Trump bad” not “here’s what Democrats would do, and here’s one of our stars telling you what we’d do.” That’s because — I’m guessing but I think I’m right — it would be bad to feature a Democrat because it would appear that the “official” account is favoring one Dem over another.

This is how the Democratic establishment wastes money. Hiring staffers who aren’t allowed to use their imagination, to appeal to an imagined audience that is already highly motivated to hate Trump, in a way calculated to be inoffensive. It’s no surprise that DougJ, NYT Pitchbot, has almost 10x more followers on BlueSky.

Edited to add:

Same energy as FactPost, and useless to boot.

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r po11 months ago

If you want an acerbic and apparently correct deeper dive on rural politics extending what MM says here, you could not do better than to read Sarah Taber: https://bsky.app/profile/sarahtaber.bsky.social

mister mixAuthor11 months ago

She's really good!

C P11 months ago

Seconded. She's amazing. There's no better voice on our side about what life in farm country is really like.

Kay W.11 months ago

I’m convinced the genre of political content you’re referencing exists not to persuade “farmers” (or anyone else who doesnt already vote for us) but instead exists to make liberals feel good and superior about being liberals. We can really be insufferable with this, going on and on about how good we are. It’s off putting to normal people and also doesn’t achieve any real objective.

Sepideh M11 months ago

What did you think of the "Bernie goes to West Virginia" video? I thought that was directed at breaking down the us v them mentality.

Kay W.11 months ago

I haven’t seen it. I’ll google.

John S.11 months ago

It was excellent. I’m not a Bernie bro, but his approach was perfect. He’s not condescending, he doesn’t confront people to tell them they are wrong. He meets them where they are, addresses the issues that are important to them, and wins them over by not mocking them.

mister mixAuthor11 months ago

You know I'm not a Bernie Bro either, but he's a talented retail politician. I watched that video a while ago and thought he did a great job.

All of the energy spent hating his guts by a group of commenters at Balloon-Juice was part of what soured me on that "community" there. So stupid and counterproductive. I voted for Bernie in the NY primary in 2016 which was an unforgivable sin to those morons. I stopped writing on the front page there for a while because a couple idiots there would just pollute the comments by pointing out my unforgivable sin of voting for Bernie, no matter the topic. A few of those idiots are still around and they just machine gun the comments whenever Bernie comes up. They hated AOC at first, too -- her sin was primarying a lazy Democrat.

They hated him more than Trump, no exaggeration.

Sepideh M11 months ago

They really needed an out-group to bully.

It started with the anti-Bernie stuff when Hillary ran and just got worse.

If it had been like that when John Cole started the blog, it would have eventually become a MAGA blog.

Scott H11 months ago

Just a couple?

Busted Knee11 months ago

I grew up in the upper middle class. Both parents elite educations, Harvard MBA being one of them and not the most impressive.

I was raised a Democrat on social issues but I saw first hand how we who turned Virginia blue really do hate the working class. We look down on them. We shit on them. We don't want to pay and we sure as shit don't want their kids competing with ours. We are worse than the Republicans the moment asked to actually change shit scream "racism, sexism, trans". The moment I hear about a social issue by bi sexual Jewish ass knows it's some six figure white person who wants more power.

BJ wants to win on their issues. If they can't they want the pain to be so bad people come crawling back so they can rule over those they spit on while they laugh at and mock them. Liberals manage to be worse than the wildest right wing fever visions of them constantly.

Busted Knee11 months ago

I grew up in the upper middle class. Both parents elite educations, Harvard MBA being one of them and not the most impressive.

mister mixAuthor11 months ago

Spot on.

When I think about how consultants lard on expenses to do something simple, I'll bet that Dems are paying $500K/year for this, minimum. And that enrages me.

Kay W.11 months ago

I wonder if Dems do this stuff because it brings in small dollar donors, rather than voters - just stroking our base for $. If so, it IS enraging because we’re raising money … to raise money. It’s a closed circle that never includes new potential voters.

mister mixAuthor11 months ago

My Dad's not on the Internet but he gets a lot of fundraising mail and he writes a lot of small checks to anyone who says the right thing, which for him is good old fashioned liberalism (nothing wrong with it) -- pro-abortion, gay rights, better healthcare, etc. So, yeah, I'm sure there are plenty like him who are in the same boat, but online, not via mail.

r po11 months ago

Like we're a club and we're better than your club neener neener. Instead of focusing on universal values. Saying health insurance should be friction free and cover everybody and every health issue to the extent possible would... cast shade on our club, nope can't do that. Don't do a genocide nope that would hurt (any) Clinton's fee fees.

Scott H11 months ago

We see this constantly elsewhere and there's a massive classist and educational element to it.

Heaven forbid you talk about egalitarian policy actions that might affect somebody in a red state (or red rurl area of a blue state). You'll get "we should only spend money where the people are" which is a dog whistle for "where my people are".

It's a variation of the sparrow on a curtain rod only without the overt racism given it's directed at "dumb" people who supposedly object to education, etc.

Markos at DK of all people articulated this pretty well after the 2024 election saying that stereotyping everybody who didn't vote for "us" as "racists", "sexists" and "dumb" wasn't gonna be a compelling sales pitch the next time around.

And that kind of political reporting is a case study in that mindset.

Sepideh M11 months ago

FactPost has no cultural relevance.

KamalaHQ attached itself to culture like Charli XCX. I had no clue who Charli XCX was until the Harris campaign sent Doug Emhoff to all the record stores, and one record store recommended Charli XCX. And they played on the Charli XCX color aesthetic for their own merch.

Like come on, make fun of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's fake relationship. Hate on Taylor cause she is a billionaire. Talk about her carbon footprint.

There was that one social media account that existed to shame billionaires over their carbon footprint. I think that Taylor Swift said it was a security risk and that people would show up at airports to see her so they may not shame her anymore.

Busted Knee11 months ago

Democrats, and educated liberals, want to win off social issues and being cool and then rule over everyone else with them praising them due to how educated and cool they are. When that does not happen they demand suffering till the less well off bend the knee and then the professional class won't have to change a damn thing and consolidate power.

That's out of runway now. So either they give up all cultural, economic, and political power now or one of two things is going to happen. Pure straight up fascism for generations until a national collapse. Or the peoples razor comes back and claims them all quickly.

If you have enough money to post online about your pictures from Europe and then lecture people that the economy is fine and we need to talk about trans. You have done more to put Trump in power than anybody who voted for him. YOU OWN THIS.

John S.11 months ago

Fact Post sucks. Democrats don’t really give a shit about the poor MAGA people that keep slitting their own throats. And frankly, it seems like a blatant plug for News Nation which also sucks in exactly the same way.

It’s like Chuck Schumer created a social media account for the Baileys.

Scott H11 months ago

It’s like Chuck Schumer created a social media account for the Baileys.

You win. That's impossible to top.

mister mixAuthor11 months ago

Democrats don’t really give a shit about the poor MAGA people that keep slitting their own throats.

In fact, if you think about it the way Kay did (and I think she's right), highlighting the misery of Trump voters could be seen as making fun of them for their stupidity, which is counterproductive.

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