They’re good dogs, Brent!

“Get below ground lev–”

Oh, right, Florida…

“Get to the ground level.”

Coming from the Midwest, I miss my basement…

Not so loud! RFK Jr will hear you!

I understand the appeal of this, but it’s definitely not healthy or helpful. I have to assume that most of these “swindled” people were low-information voters. Generally, people have more important things to do than keep track of what their representatives are doing. I assume they saw nothing more than, “democrats are in charge, and inflation is a huge issue.”, and conservative news was happy to play up that angle without discussing why inflation is a problem. The democrats’ message of “it’s not as bad as you think it is/look at how much we’ve accomplished/we’re still fixing it” wasn’t very cohesive and didn’t really resonate with people, either.

I don’t know what the appropriate response is. Empathy is hard. You don’t have to forgive them for electing a fascist, wanna-be dictator, but you do have to give them “an out”. No one likes to eat crow, so if they can’t find a way to save face, they’re just going to double down, no matter how much it hurts everyone. So far, “how was I supposed to know?” is the closest thing I’ve seen to a way to avoid embarrassment, so I think we’re going to have to let them have that one.

This isn’t so much “hacked” as someone walked through the door they left wide open. They just hid it behind a bush.