Denatured

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.