upon a platform of lies

the very model of modern majoritarian mendacity

"if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit" is a time honored tradition among charlatans and politicians, but this commonplace political pokémon sometimes evolves into a far more pernicious final form:

“when what you want is too odious and calamitous to be popular (or even tolerable), lie until you get power and then once you have it, ram whatever you wanted down everyone’s throats.”

this far surpasses the general expectation that politicos standing for office will fudge and exaggerate a bit, overpromising that which they would, at least, like to deliver but have overstated their ability to actually accomplish.

this is something qualitatively different.

this is the “leopards eating people’s faces party” running on a platform of “facial security for everyone! you’ll be safe with kitty in office!” then going right back to “visages as victuals” the day after they get sworn in.

new york city is becoming acutely hilarious in this regard.

this has got to be some kind of all time record for going from “piles of socialist promises for free stuff” to “we need you in the work gangs because our infrastructure is borked.”

yes, the culpepper is satire, but the rest of this is all too real.

it seems this gang cannot even keep its manifold mendacities straight and the irony of “you needed no ID to vote yourself into this but you need extreme amounts of ID to shovel yourself out” (in the new york collective work gangs, mo less) is thick enough to block a snowplow.

(yes, these are actual requirements)

mamdani ran on “rent control, free buses, universal free childcare, public safety, and government supermarkets.” he ran on pluralism and moderate reasonableness pledging to “govern expansively” for “abundance.”

instead credulous new yorkers got “gaping budget holes, threats of big property tax hikes that will cascade through to rental prices and violate the “tax the rich, not you” promises, uncollected garbage, bus prices going up, and the prospect of rainy day and retirement health funds getting plundered unless he can “tax the rich” who are obviously going to flee in droves if he tries, making the whole exercise self-defeating.

“housing vouchers?” nope, not doing that. parks? libraries? nah. subway costs went up though. and apparently we cannot plow snow. things will really get exciting as the police shortages start to bite.

but hey, elections have consequences and like so many things (like insider trading) that are illegal when we the people do it, bait and switch that would land any private business owner in sing sing is just “business as usual” from gracie mansion to the swamps of the district columbian.

one might be tempted to simply snicker a bit at mankind’s incapacity to manage its affairs and move on.

but i think this might be unwise because a new sort of game seems to be afoot as a political emanation arising from the rat-bag of squabbling coalitions DBA “the swamp donkeys” as they seek to find some way to pass off the festering corpse of their political platform as palatable.

it’s the last ditch attack of ideologies with nothing to offer, an admission that what one wants has fallen from favor and that only by the political praxis of “lying one’s weaselly little face off” may one ascend to power.

consider the near instant buyer’s remorse that so many have expressed about abigail spanberger as she took over the governorship of virginia. she campaigned as a “moderate” but now governs as something quite different.

she ran on “tough on crime” but immediately blocked any aid to ICE in deporting criminal non-citizens. she’s for sanctuary cities and catch and release cashless bail and shorter sentences.

she ran on “cost reductions” and “affordability” but immediately proposed 50 new taxes on everything from services to investments to firearms and landscaping equipment.

she proposed gun control, a 10 round mag limit, “assault weapon” bans, and gun taxes.

she imposed a rapid, widespread reimposition of DEI in education and elsewhere.

she’s putting boys in dresses back on girls’ sports fields and in their locker rooms.

“I have no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
— Abigail Spanberger, August 25, 2025

and yet gerrymandering and “redistricting” were immediate policies.

on february 20, 2026, she signed HB 29 (a budget bill) including a new map that would favor dems in 10 of 11 districts (vs current 6-5)

like biden, she ran on responsibility and moderation but immediately governed as tax and woke, moved to rig votes and voting, and came for the guns and the kids.

this seems to be the party’s primary praxis and it’s rapidly heating up again in california where, let’s face it, despite having pretty much every advantage possible, the golden stategovernamnce is managing to turn to lead.

but perhaps there is hope embedded here. let’s look:

this is from the california democratic party convention. former rep and CA gubenatorial hopefull (and one time front runner) katie porter is speaking.

it's desperately sad that this woman has become such an avatar of the democratic party, but she has.

it’s also emblematic.

it's like this whole party had been boiled down to sociopathic kindergarten teachers talking down to infantilized toddlers.

i suspect there's a lesson in there.

is their core voter the kid who needed a safe space with crayons and stuffed animals in college because snowstorms were scary?

in all seriousness, who else could tolerate this tone?

her speech continues the fine tradition of stepford-scold gwen walz and the hyena-hectoring cringe collage of kamala, she addresses the listeners in her awful, sing-songy condensending childcare no one would wish upon any kid on earth voice and cadence while giving vent to the only unifier still holding the misaligned morass of team donkey together:

hatred of trump.

but that is not a platform.

she is at once vulgar and vapid, a sort of demented and deranged cartoon of politics that reaches past mere negative campaigning and deep into self-indictment as a bereft and barren movement seeking nothing, no principle, no real aim outside of its own self-perpetuation.

i'm not sure there is really anything left here that can stand as a simple positive. as they stand in the ruins of DEI, socialist takings, taxes, eco-lunacy and energy destruction, damaged children, deficits, and systemic failures, unable to chart a new course or defend what they have wrought in the golden state, they seek any message they can at least get some sort of cheer from, the desperate overreach of a failing comedian whose jokes have turned decidedly dark.

as the audience heads for the exits, the shrillery of the collapsing echo chamber grows ever more intense and ever less meaningful.

this seems like a group in the final stages of eating itself.

will the last donkey out please turn out the lights...

and the more about her that surfaces, the worse it gets.

like kam and gwen, she’s just an awful person wearing empathy like an ill fitting mask and wielding an us/them dichotomy like a mace.

and it’s telling that this is what the party keeps pushing to the fore.

in response to my missive on this woman, a commenter posted this on twitter:

and i suspect there is actually quite a lot of truth here from which one can extrapolate.

this has become the party of cancel culture and rabid protection of “safe space,” the party of “we get to do whatever we want without consequence” that conjures reality wholesale to prop up narrative over outcome, vibes over viability.

they do not learn because they cannot learn. what have they to learn from? they have erected about themselves a world of punch no punchbacks in which no one ever gets to tell them off or stop them because that would be sexist, racist, classist, 6 kinds of phobic, and probably 11 other offenses against marginalized crybullies that have not even been coined yet.

no one likes these people.

no one ever did.

they were never competent nor sagacious, never ethical or wise, they just gamed the aggrievement gradient until they rose to the top, not cream, but scum.

this has been a downslide for 2 decades. obama gets credit for being charismatic or some kind of leader, but he wasn’t. he was a vain and nasty empty suit propped up to stand for a bunch of ideas that had gained currency. hilary is just awful and biden an actual potato. governor hairgel, who is getting termed out, has all the sincerity of crocodile tears wept over billions in stolen high speed rail money.

this party leadership seems to have hollowed out horrendously. where are the real people? are there any? even as tony thurmond criticizes her, he cannot state anything as a positive. the goal is “stand up to trump.”

has a party catering to safe space hothouse flower voters become incapable of elevating a real leader? it seems very possible.

has california become so lost and mismanaged that the dems might actually lose control of the governorship?

this too seems possible.

california has an unusual primary structure. june 2, they vote. all the candidates are on one ballot. the top two advance to the general election. there is no guarantee of each party getting a candidate and in a year like this with a wide open field and no clear leader, all kinds of things are possible.

porter has been dropping as people get to know her and hilton (R) and steyer (D) surging. at this point, no one can officially remove their name from the ballot, but they can suspend and recommend, so who knows what kingmaker games are to come. there are 5 dems and 2 GOP. with all 7 in the race, you could well get 2 GOP candidates if the ball bounces the right way, but i have to assume some of the dems (who seem to be noticing this) will drop out to clear a path. or perhaps not. it’s a fractious bunch and ill aligned.

that will get interesting.

• steyer is a climate activist billionaire running on “home and electricity affordability.” that seems likely to be a 3 stooges level trojan horse supported by gobs of his personal money to buy a cacophony of ads.

• swalwell is running on “orange man and immigration control bad”

• and porter on an implausible miasma of mamdani-like pretense to be able to control prices while taxing “corporations” who will somehow stick around and pay.

it’s not obvious to me where the bargain is between them or who would drop out and endorse.

• meanwhile, on team elephant we have bianco running on “law and order, crime enforcement, and aggressive acts to clean up the homeless situation instead of funding its perpetuation”

• and hilton running on “make california golden again” with tax cuts, regulatory reduction, and ensuring students hit educational standards.

those two look like they could form a coalition that neither would dislike and of which many voters might approve.

such an alliance/merger would be tough in a setup like this where bianco might make the final though and 21% undecided means a lot of game remains to play.

but it is interesting that california may, at long last, be dreaming of something other than the empty promises of high costs and dropping services. “business as usual” seems to have lost palatability and “TDS as platform” seems on the wane as well. that rallying cry has been about the only thing holding the otherwise badly fractured left together.

and maybe, just maybe, there is some change in the air.

i was struck by how SF felt like it might be turning a corner and starting to come back when i was there in january, but i was also struck by how bad the surface of the 101 highway had become and how run down a lot of it looked.

and i think people are tired of feeling like they are managing a decline.

i think people are ready for optimism, ready for the next morning in america, ready to wise up and stop falling for candidates whose policy slogans might as well be “rugpull, but at least it’s our rugpull!”

there’s an old adage in politics:

“you can’t beat something with nothing.”

i’m not going to lie.

AOC, jasmine, president puddinhead, and walz had me starting to worry that “maybe you can” but increasingly, this idea looks like it’s on the run.

funny business as usual has fallen from favor. they are not even trying to run on what were their core ideas. many of the donkeys getting elected are doing it by pretending to be moderate and then lurching hard once in power. but that trick only works a few times before the trojans stop wheeling large wooden equids into the city.

you can only take the “we swear, no leopards eating anyone’s faces. just kidding! face eating!” playbook so far.

we’re at a very interesting time in that regard.