It’s Not All About the Optics, Stupid

And even if it is, you are obsessed with the optics of the past.

One of the things that distinguishes MAGA and Populists from RINOs, Country Club Republicans and British Tories (of the weak kind that Thatcher used to call ‘Wets’) is not just that we actually want to win, but that we know how to.

Again and again when I’ve disagreed with people who, on paper, should be on my side it’s often centred on something called ‘the optics’.

Again and again they have told me that I should oppose a thing or be upset about a thing because ‘it looks bad’.

The 24/7 news cycle and the vast bias and corruption of mainstream media didn’t just make Democrats and the British Labour Party, or Canadian Liberals or progressives anywhere, rabid howling lunatics unable to distinguish between men and women.

It made mainstream and Establishment parties and representatives, supposedly, of the Right into abject cowards constantly kowtowing to the things they were supposed to oppose, peppering their language with Marxist phrases and assumptions, happily repeating leftist and progressive tropes, and policing themselves for wrongthink.

Before oppression censures the Right, cowardice does. Before corruption pays a supposed conservative to talk and think exactly like a progressive, being outraged by the same things and the same people that outrage a radical Democrat, cowardice does.

This cowardice is called ‘the optics’. It’s entirely devoted to the Media mandated surface of things, and leaves the Conservative worried about ‘the optics’ an empty vessel, unable to conserve anything, and unable to fight for anything worthwhile either.

In Britain of course we had the famous example of the security guard at the Manchester Arena Islamic bombing in 2017, a bombing which killed 22 people, including many children, and injured 1,017 others. One of the security guards at the Manchester Arena spotted the terrorist acting suspiciously prior to the bombing, but was afraid of intervening (doing his job to protect innocents) because the suspect was a stereotypical exact match of what you might assume an Islamic terrorist would look like.

The security guard didn’t want to be accused of racism, so he did nothing.

Mainstream parties of the Right have been that security guard. As have institutions like the Churches. Even before they themselves became Marxists, radical progressives and virtue signalling lunatics, they became abject cowards more worried about being accused of racism than about saving lives, more worried about what it would look like to say or do something than what their silence and inaction risked.

They had the task of defending us, that was supposed to be their entire purpose, but they were more worried about how it would look and how it would be described by the radical, insane, mainstream media.

That, in a nutshell, is what worrying about the optics is.

You sacrifice substance and the things that matter, like actually defending your people or actually doing something positive for their existence, the good policies that make sense, out of fear of the response.

Populists are tired of the fear, tired of the optics, and tired of their representatives doing nothing good for them.

Hence Donald Trump.

Fast forward to yesterday, and Trump’s speech to Congress. There’s a superb short take on it by Sasha Stone here, that I recommend you read:

Congratulations, Democrats. You Disgusted the Entire Country.

This follows of course hot on the heels of a crushing Democrat electoral loss, and widespread media pearl clutching and condemnation of Trump’s heated meeting with Zelenskyy. What do the Congress speech, the Zelenskky meeting and the Democrat electoral loss all have in common, other than soy voices raised in high pitched protest as the Trump Tank crushes their dreams?

The optics.

Every time we are told, by all the usual failures including ‘on our side’, that the optics are terrible for Trump.

We were told that Trump was too rude, too crude, too white, too old, too loud, too boastful, too brutal, too orange, too petty, too vindictive, too this, too that, to win. There’s no way he can get the middle ground voter. He’s too mean and too ‘divisive’ (another weasel word that means the Right are never allowed to fight back).

I lost track of the number of times people told me De Santis was smoother and therefore better. I told them De Santis would be crushed, and he was. I lost track of the number of times people told me Trump was too hated to have a chance of winning. I told them that so long as the fraud was dealt with well enough this time, there were more people who love him than hate him, and I was right. I also said that the people who hate Trump with that burning TDS passion are NEVER going to vote for ANY Republican anyway, so it’s no loss.

I had the Populist understanding that the depth of the hate is a signal that you are doing something right. Because the other side aren’t used to us hitting back. They are used to us being scared or corrupt, frightened of their response or paid off to look the other way as a Marxist Mafia enterprise takes over the country.

What does Trump say in that Congress speech? I can do anything good, and those Democrats will never smile, never applaud, never recognise the good.

Ordinary people understand this now, just like Trump does. You cannot worry about the optics. You cannot be frightened of what the media will say and what the Democrats will howl. They are nuts. They are evil. Do anything good, anything that genuinely helps the majority, the economy, the country, and they will scream and hiss and piss their pants about it.

And the kind of Establishment Right figures that have failed for decades will do the same. Because they long ago stopped serving the people and things they claim to serve, and long ago decided that optics (how the mainstream media respond) matters more than substance.

But the reality is that kind of optics doesn’t dominate the debate anymore, at least in America which has a strong alternative media, an alternative media with more support and more ratings than mainstream media. What Joe Rogan says genuinely matters more than what The New York Times says. What Tucker Carlson says reaches ten times more people now than what Fox News says.

The mainstream Establishment reaction to the Zelenskyy meeting was to blame Trump and Vance, howl at their alleged rudeness to the War Hero Zelenskyy, scream about how disgraceful and disgusting it was to see an American President and Vice President arguing back when a guest demands more money and the risk of US lives in a pointless war while rejecting the offer of progress towards peace.

Every Atlantic hack, every news room circuit failed neocon Republican, did the Outrage Dance. Like the most insane Democrat voters, they were all “I’ve never been so ashamed to be an American” and “this was disgraceful”. And the same armchair strategists who told us in 2022 that Trump was finished and could never win told us this year that the ‘optics’ on the Zelenskky meeting were terrible and a disaster for Trump.

And here is what the non-screeching public actually thought:

Trumps approval rating on Ukraine went UP after the Zelenskyy meeting. It’s miles ahead of what people thought of the Biden administration approach. Trump’s policies are in several areas getting 70% approval ratings in polling specific to those issues. Even CNN is having to show the stark difference in what people felt about the Biden approach and what people actually feel about the Trump approach.

The howling and screaming doesn’t work anymore. People see the Trump adninistration delivering the things they said they would deliver, doing what they said they would do, and arguing strongly for the case that American interests come before foreign interests. And it’s not just long term MAGA fans who like this. It’s everyone bored of the screeching theatrics.

It’s a little difficult to say that arguing back against a rude guest is itself unacceptably rude and undignified, when you are running around painting swastikas on Teslas and screaming that Elon Musk is a Nazi, or when everyone can remember Pelosi ripping up a State of the Union address.

You are the side of dignity and good manners? Really?

But the dignity and good manners argument, the politeness argument, the optics argument that comes from the Establishment Right, doesn’t work anymore either.

The European, British and American opponents of Trump who claim to be conservative and offended by the Zelenskyy meeting have put themselves in the patently insane position of genuinely, sincerely arguing that being polite to Zelenskky is more important than ending a war and saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

Ordinary people who aren’t in the Establishment bubble most concerned about etiquette and rules, or the Democrat and progressive bubble most concerned about worshipping Zelenskky and hating Trump, are quite rightly turned off not by Trump and Vance delivering the pragmatism and old fashioned patriotism they were elected to deliver, but by the histrionics of continued opposition to that policy platform.

The American people voted for peace and budgetary restraint, and they really don’t give a shit about whether you consider that polite or not.

Both opponents on the Right horrified by rudeness and opponents on the Left horrified by sanity can scream all they like and that doesn’t mean that their surface analysis, ignoring the nature of a war, the nature of the Ukrainian regime, the nature of the US interests not being served by endless and unlimited spending on someone else’s war, is going to win just because it’s all that’s in mainstream media.

Those kind of optics are done.

Republicans who demand what they call dignity (submission to the other side while smiling about it) are losers, and Trump has proven them to be losers as well as their own actions and hysterics have. They are functioning by the shallow optics of fear or the false optics of claiming patriotism and then worrying more about Ukraine than America. At best, their optics is that of the 1950s. It doesn’t matter if I let America be raped, so long as nobody calls me McCarthy. It’s more important that we have a nice meeting where everyone smiles, than it is that we stop a war and save lives and money. At best, the outdated offer of these Republicans to the American taxpayer is that you should worry more about what people will think if they spot your bruises than you should worry about your federal husband beating you.

Similarly, the optics of Democrat opposition are as done and as archaic as the Prissy Pearl Clutchers of the Right. Because their optics are trapped in the 1960s. Totally oblivious of the existence of alternative media, except to offer ineffective sneers to ever reducing audiences of their own. They have no effective answer to alternative media, which is why they want to ban it. And when they try to stir feeling on their own side, they are pathetically repeating the placards and gestures of very old real protests about real injustice, but applying that to the defence of vast networks of fraud and corruption or to the support of pointless and unpopular wars.

Here is how Democrats thought they were going to humiliate Trump during his Congress speech:

What can you say about this? Elected representatives all holding their tiny little mass produced ping pong paddles of protest? All saying “waah, waah, that’s not true”? I means it’s coordinated. It’s an effort, I suppose. But it looks pathetic. It looks hilariously weak and ineffectual. It’s what some loon with a fringe argument who writes in green crayon does….oh, wait a minute. Why do they do this?

Because they are stuck in the optics of the 1960s. No matter how old, fat, corrupt and comfortable they have become, no matter how much in public funds and private bribes and USAID misdirection of public spending they have trousered, they still see themselves as the ‘brave’ dashing young hippies on the student march from 1963. They are still using the gestures of the powerless from comfortable seats in the halls of power and privilege. And it looks just as ridiculous as you’d expect.

But it’s also blind to MODERN optics. Here is what the modern world does instantly to pathetic gestures from the powerful who pretend to be principled:

Or how about this:

The meme world doesn’t forgive the sheer stupidity of virtue signalling gestures that mean nothing, when they come from crooks and thieves who have a laughably distorted view of themselves and the world outside their echo chambers.

The response is immediate and savage and these people, with lobbying firms, decades of political experience, years of traditional spin politics training, PR consultancy advisors, and plenty of your money to burn making their lies more palatable, haven’t an actual clue. They seriously thought their little paddle boards would embarrass Trump, rather than themselves.

The key thing that people who obsess on the optics forget is that if your idea of the optics remains fixed, the world passes you by anyway. Nobody sane is going to preference 1950s rules regarding the done thing in foreign politics being automatically respectful to guests no matter how rude they are to you over saving lives and saving billions of dollars. They aren’t even going to prioritise the postwar international rules based order over obviously good things for their own nation. Why should they? There aren’t any normal people on the street who actually love NATO with a burning passion. It’s a Cold War anachronism.

In a battle between optics and substance, when people can SEE the substance, substance wins every time. Ending a war is more important than how you hold your teacup, and you look like a fucking retard if you don’t understand that. The policy beats the mainstream media and Establishment stooge spin.

Similarly in a battle between outdated optics and modern optics, modern optics wins every time as well. The meme beats the placard. Trump understands all this (note how he said it was good that people could see the Zelenskyy argument) and none of his opponents understand it at all.

The respectable Rightists and the hysterical Marxists are the ones trapped in the past, repeating outdated loyalties that have become corrupt shibboleths or repeating outdated protests that have become embarrassingly juvenile displays of insignificant fury. Ironically, by reaching further back than them, the traditional pragmatic patriotism of MAGA becomes far less archaic than them, far more fitted to the modern world both on the surface level of ‘the optics’ (adapting to the instant meme culture) and on the deeper level of policy (reclaiming obvious and substantive approaches to national self-interest).

The past is the new future, and it’s exciting.