23 August

How do you prick the populist balloon dominating politics? You target the trick populists use. Don’t get involved in the details or content of what they say, it’s irrelevant. Their shtick is - make people ANGRY. OUTRAGED. Angry and outraged people are open to easy suggestion to overthrow things. These emotions are used to destroy trust in institutions. Basically populists start fights. Endless fights, a new one every day if they can. To make people feel angry, and then cynically redirecting that anger towards trust in the populist, rather than the institution. ‘Down with the elites’, ‘incompetence’ etc. etc. All the classic hits. If you engage in the specifics of whatever fake fight they’ve engineered, you’ve already lost. They want that, it feeds their followers, you become their fresh meat. Instead just target the anger or outrage. Ask ‘oh, so you’re angry again? You’re always very angry, I’m concerned about you.’ Or ‘toddlers get angry all the time, but they grow out of it’. Or whatever. Target their shtick, their strategy. Not the content.