The reason why you're so toxic is because you have become [music] the party of no common sense. That line hurts because this is bigger than one bad slogan or one failed campaign. Mar is talking about a trust problem.
Once voters decide a political party can't recognize the obvious. Every policy it proposes starts sounding suspicious. People will forgive a plan that misses the mark.
What they won't forgive is being told their own eyes are lying. And that's the thread running through this entire takedown. the gap between what activists say people should care about and what families actually deal with every day.
He said, "First, start by not using the term Latinex, which the vast majority of Latinos have never heard of, and when they do, don't like it. " Who likes it? Pandering white politicians who mistake Twitter for real people.
And don't get it that Latinex is like fetch. You can try to make it happen, but it's never going to. This is what happens when politics becomes a branding workshop run by people who never leave the group chat.
A community didn't ask for the label, barely used the label, and in many cases openly rejected the label, yet politicians kept repeating it because it sounded enlightened inside their own bubble. That isn't inclusion. That's a focus group trying to rename the customers.
The larger lesson is brutal. When your language requires a seminar before ordinary people understand it, you're not communicating. You're performing.
Democrats run for office as if the voters don't live here as if they don't go to the grocery store and Starbucks and the [music] office, but they do. They live here and they actually see women and people of [music] color. And it doesn't look like some patriarchal racist nightmare.
Do problems remain pertaining to racism and sexism? Of course. But a poll last year asked if America is the greatest country in the world.
More blacks than Hispanic Americans agreed with that than the white progressives. It asked if racism is built into our society. White progressives agreed with that at higher levels than black and Hispanic people.
Here's the mistake Mar is exposing. Treating minority voters like supporting characters in somebody else's ideological movie. Latino voters aren't one issue.
Black voters aren't one world view. working-class families can believe discrimination exists and still love the country. They can support immigration and still want a border.
They can want police reform and still expect police to show up. None of that is contradictory outside the activist bubble. It's just normal life where people hold several ideas at once and don't organize their beliefs around whatever phrase is trending that afternoon.
There's a lot to not like already about the new regime, but maybe take one week to ask what you did wrong. The basis for Democratic campaigns has become [music] we're the smart people. That we know from the get-go.
No need to look into that. We know that a priori, which is a Latin phrase the red hat people wouldn't have a clue about. But they don't need to.
Have you seen my in this house we believe lawn sign? See, it says right on it, we believe in science. Right.
Which is why you demanded no one even debate whether CO [music] could have escaped from the one lab in the one city where they were studying it. How far-fetched. Nothing makes voters reach for the mute button faster than a lecture from someone who thinks credentials are a substitute for curiosity.
Being educated doesn't make you infallible. Real intelligence should make you more willing to question assumptions, update your view, and admit when the evidence is incomplete. But politics turned uncertainty into weakness.
Suddenly asking a question was treated like joining the enemy. That posture did enormous damage because people weren't only told what to believe. They were told that doubting the approved answer made them stupid, selfish, or dangerous.
Normal people read that San Francisco has basically legalized shoplifting. They think Democrats have gone nuts. They think, you know, that Ted G Cruz guy seems like a real stiff, but at least he believes in the concept of shopping with money.
[laughter] [applause] That joke lands because public order isn't an abstract debate when you own a store, work the closing shift, or watch basic products get locked behind plexiglass. Voters don't need a white paper to understand disorder. They can see it.
And when leaders answer visible chaos with technical language, jurisdictional excuses, and a reminder that the statistics are complicated, it sounds like evasions. People aren't demanding perfection. They're asking for a society where rules still mean something and where paying for toothpaste doesn't make you the sucker in the room.
It's not It's not my fault that the party of FDR and JFK is turning into the party of LOL and WTF. [applause] members of Congress tweeting things like, "Cancel rent, cancel mortgage, [music] and no more policing or incarceration. " Declaring that capitalism is slavery, cancelling Lincoln and Dr Seuss, teaching children they're oppressors and math is racist, making Mr Potato Head.
Gender neutral. And now an emoji for pregnant men. [laughter] Real.
I'm not making it up. California just passed a law requiring large retailers to have a non-gendered toy section. A non-gendered toy section.
Isn't Ken enough? [laughter] [applause] We need a law for that. Now, not every item in that list carries the same weight.
A toy aisle isn't the same thing as policing, and an emoji isn't an economic program. But that's exactly how political branding works. The public doesn't experience controversies one at a time.
It experiences a non-stop montage of weirdness, moral scolding, and officials insisting each new fight is urgently important. Eventually, the details blur together, and one impression remains. These people have unlimited energy for symbolic battles, and very little urgency for rent, crime, schools, wages, or infrastructure.
Perception becomes the platform. Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger said after the election, "If we are classifying Tuesday as a success, we will get torn apart in 2022. " That's a congresswoman.
She was urging members not to talk about defunding the police. James Clyburn agreed. "Defund the police [music] is killing our party," he said.
Pennsylvania Democrat Connor Lamb says Democratic rhetoric needs to be dialed back. It needs to be rooted in common sense. Thank you.
Thank you. There, in my opinion, is the crux of the problem. Democrats too often don't come across as having common sense to a huge swath of Americans.
The warning didn't come from right-wing talk radio. It came from Democrats who had to win actual voters instead of applause from activists. That distinction matters.
Safe seat politicians can treat politics like performance art because their biggest risk is losing a social media argument. Swing district politicians have to explain themselves to the nurse, the contractor, the teacher, and the small business owner who may vote for either party. Those voters here defund the police and don't imagine a graduate seminar about reallocating resources.
They imagine calling 911 and hearing hold music. But as I've said before, politics in this country is binary. You have to wear everything anyone on your side does.
Republicans are the party of don't wear masks, kids in cages, lock her up. And Democrats [music] are the party of every hyper sensitive social justice warrior woke story in the news. [music] They're the party that disappears.
people or tries to make them apologize for ridiculous things. Anne Hathaway apologized last week because in her new movie she plays a witch, a fictional character that has three clawlike fingers, and that's offensive to people with limb differences. [snorts] The week before, the NHL's Arizona Coyotes dropped a player after it came out in the press that when he was in eighth grade, he bullied a disabled kid.
Yes, that's a bad thing to do, but are we really going after people for what they did in middle school? Now, this is one of Mar's strongest points because elections aren't graded on nuance. Parties inherit the reputation of their loudest supporters, whether that's fair or not.
Republicans get stuck answering for conspiracy theorists. Democrats get stuck answering for cancellation campaigns that treat a bad joke, a fictional costume, an actual abuse like they belong on the same moral spreadsheet. A culture with no sense of proportion eventually loses credibility.
Accountability matters, but accountability without context becomes ritual humiliation. Most people don't want cruelty excused. They also don't want a permanent criminal record for being 14.
and then admit that in 2020 the left got a little carried away. Carried away like most of the merch at this shoe store. Get it?
Carried away. [applause] Once in a while they need a looting was rebranded as justice shopping. We stopped arresting shoplifterss.
anti-racist baby [music] was a bestseller. Corporations took DEI to ludicrous lengths. We opened our hearts to all who wanted to come here and then also our borders.
[snorts] Portland decriminalized all drugs and [music] Seattle set up a no cop zone until they had to reverse course on both. Standardized testing was dropped until schools saw how dumb that was. And yet the head of the teachers union in Chicago still maintains that testing is quote junk science rooted in white supremacy.
This is the confession voters rarely hear. The pendulum swung too far. Not every reform was wrong and not every protester endorsed the most extreme outcome.
But leaders became terrified of saying one simple sentence. This has gone too far. So the public watched temporary emergency thinking harden into policy.
watched corporations turn moral language into human resources theater and watch basic standards get treated as suspicious. The silence from moderates made the fringe look like management. That's the political cost of refusing to police your own side.
Somebody else gets to define it for you. And her union tweeted during CO when many Americans felt we could have gotten back to normal sooner that the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny. No, it was rooted in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Teaching of which is apparently job none in Chicago because only about one in four students in the city are proficient in either math or English. And absenteeism is off the charts. The teachers there want a raise now.
And look, I'm always all four all teachers always getting a raise everywhere. I hate kids. I can't imagine being around them all day.
[applause] But I also think Kla Harris could have a moment if she trotted out her favorite phrase and said, "Let me be very clear. Our schools need to do better. Our kids need to be in school and when they're there, they need to have the phones off and the brains on learning the basic things we used to teach.
" This is where culture war language collides with a kitchen table reality. Parents didn't need a political theory of school closures. They saw their children falling behind, losing routines, and disappearing into screens.
Calling that concern racist or misogynistic didn't answer it. It insulted it. Education is one of the clearest tests of government because the promise is simple.
Keep children safe and teach them to read, write, calculate, and think. When institutions can't deliver that, no mission statement can save them. A child who can't read doesn't need better terminology.
That child needs instruction. America is so partisan now that even when there's a disaster of any kind, so many people choose to defend their own team, even over death. A lot of Democrats in this one party state this week went right to don't blame politicians.
You can't do anything about the wind. [music] Which is exactly half true, the wind part. Yes, fire is a tough fight out here.
And yes, global warming absolutely makes it worse, but that's largely out of our control. What are we going to do? Pass a ballot measure to make sure Chinese stop burning coal?
It's also, yes, undeniably true that LA is built in a stupid place to build a city. But when it's not on fire, it's really quite lovely. And it's my home.
And stupid as its origin may be, it's not going anywhere. Axios ran a story on how getting the water out of the hydrants in Pacific Palisades was more complicated than it seems. I'm sure it is.
[music] I'm sure it's very complicated. That's why I pay 13% of my income in this state every year to people who I assumed were working on things like this. That's the difference between causing a disaster and preparing for one.
Government can't outlaw wind, drought, earthquakes, or hurricanes. It can maintain reservoirs, clear hazards, staff departments, inspect equipment, and rehearse the response. Taxes aren't charitable donations to a political brand.
They're payment for competence. So, when the emergency arrives and leaders immediately explain why nothing could have been done, taxpayers hear something very different. Your money bought excuses.
Climate change can make a fire more dangerous, and officials can still be responsible for preparation. Both things can be true at the same time. When asked why so many of the hydrants in the Palisades ran out of water, Governor Nuome said, "The local folks are trying to figure that out.
" Yeah, you got to do that before the fire. At least in the Palisades, the hydrants were still there. 300 other ones around the city are just gone, stolen for parts.
One of the three reservoirs for the Palisades was offline at the one time of year when it was most needed. LA's mayor Karen Bass, the Nero of American politics, was fiddling in Ghana while the city burned and later placed the blame on 8 months of negligible rain and winds that have not been seen in LA in at least 14 years. Yeah, that's not that long a time.
Maybe look in the history books to see how our ancestors handled it back in 2011. This is where bureaucratic language becomes political gasoline. We're trying to figure it out.
may be an honest description after a failure, but it's a terrible defense when the job was to figure it out beforehand. Preparedness is invisible right up until the moment it's missing. Nobody cheers because a reservoir was maintained or an emergency plan was updated.
But when those boring duties are neglected, suddenly every overlooked detail becomes the story. A competent government is mostly unglamorous work. That's why leaders who prefer ceremonies, messaging, and national profiles often discover that reality has terrible timing.
Crowley's official bio says Chief Crowley leads a diverse department creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity while striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the communities. Well, you didn't exceed my expectations was that the which was that the whole city wouldn't burn down. But it's telling that diversity is mentioned twice before we get to while while striving to meet expectations.
Now, can you do two things at once? Yes. But it matters where your head is.
Deputy Chief Kristen Larson said this. You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it's a medical call or a fire call [music] that looks like you, which would sound kind of racist if a southern sheriff said it. So, so, so we should be sending white firefighters to white houses and black ones to Who teaches people this No one cares what someone looks like when they're pulling you out of a burning house.
The point isn't that representation has zero value. The point is that emergency services have a brutally clear hierarchy. Arrive fast, know the job, and save the person.
Everything else comes after that. When public institutions advertise their moral identity more loudly than their measurable performance, people start wondering whether the branding has replaced the mission. In a crisis, nobody asks whether the firefighter mirrors the neighborhood.
They ask whether the hose works. That doesn't erase fairness. It puts competence first, which is exactly where competence belongs when somebody's home, health, or life is on the line.
Now, is wokeness the main reason for the fires? Of course not. But it's also not wrong to associate some of the unforced errors our government made with the things normies [music] see as hallmarks of uber progressive politics.
questionable budget priorities, high taxes that get you nothing, making everything about identity politics, virtue signaling overseas instead of tending to the nuts and bolts at home. Cali has no shortage of safety commissions and agencies and bureaucrats and regulators and of course sign language interpreters who communicate with their face. But common sense, we better get some of that back soon because wildfires in California are like jobs in a strip club.
Inevitable and they're only going to get bigger. That qualification is crucial. Ideology didn't strike the match.
The argument is that ideology can shape attention, hiring, budgets, and the willingness to confront failure. A government can care about inclusion and still maintain hydrants. It can address climate change and still prepare for the next fire season.
The problem begins when symbolic proof of virtue becomes easier to produce than results. A glossy initiative launches with a press conference. Maintenance happens in a spreadsheet.
One gets headlines. The other prevents catastrophe. Serious leadership has to choose the boring work even when the boring work will never trend.
figure out why so many seniors are so susceptible to fake news. Now, part of it is unlike the kids, they didn't grow up with media, [music] corporatefunded, narrative driven, and completely partisan. So, when that came along, [music] they had no immunity for it.
Boomers. We grew up with old school Time magazine and Walter Kankhite. Closest thing to fake news back then was pretending Liberace was looking for a woman.
[applause] The boomer generation never developed the antibodies for clickbait. [music] They turned on the TV one day and Lawrence Welk was gone. And in his place was some guy named Lou Dos who was telling you the reason you had a good weekend was Donald Trump.
Have a great weekend. the [music] president makes such a thing possible for us all. [laughter] How does this happen?
Well, part [clears throat] of it the left has to own the presence of an aggressively anti-common sense agenda. On the far left is a powerful magnet pulling people to the right. That magnet explains a lot of modern politics.
Many voters aren't passionately joining the other side. They're being repelled by their own. A retired union worker may dislike Trump's behavior and still move right because he thinks the left mocks his values.
A suburban parent may support abortion rights and still vote Republican because school policy feels detached from reality. Negative partisanship is powerful. People often vote less for a party than against the worldview they fear.
Mocking those voters only strengthens the poll. You don't break the magnet by calling everyone stuck to it ignorant. Yeah.
in that district that you that's why you want purple as they come. Well, right because the people they didn't want to vote for Donald Trump, but they're not out there on the far left either. No.
Right. They want balance. They want common sense.
They want people who are serious about getting the job done. For my district, my biggest issue, lifting the cap on salt and providing real tax relief to people, protecting critical services like Medicaid. and we're going through this debate and I'm fighting with leadership and [music] I'm fighting with the administration to make sure we don't gut these vital programs.
That's what people want. They just want you to do the damn job and and go home and get out the way. Get out the way.
All right. What is it? I think [applause] there's the entire swing voter strategy in one sentence.
Do the job and stop making every transaction with government feel like a loyalty test. Fix the road. Keep the school open.
Answer the emergency call. protect the benefit people paid into, then go home. Most voters aren't asking politicians to become spiritual leaders, celebrities, or therapists.
They want competent employees. The party that understands that can build a broad coalition because competence travels. It works in a city, a suburb, a farm town, and a workingclass neighborhood.
Ideological theater only works for the audience already buying tickets. The reason I'm so mad at the Democrats is because as a voter, the issues that were important to me were democracy and the environment. And now there's no one to champion or defend either of them because you with your aggressively anti-common sense agenda and exclusionary attitude.
That's what makes this more than a roast. Mah isn't attacking Democrats because he wants their goals to fail. He's furious because he thinks they sacrifice popular defensible causes to protect unpopular habits.
You can't defend democracy while treating disagreement as moral contamination. You can't sell environmental policy while making daily life more expensive and dismissing the trade-offs. And you can't rebuild trust by pretending every loss came from misinformation, prejudice, or bad voters.
Sometimes the public is sending a clear message. Change the product. The comeback isn't complicated.
Drp the language ordinary people never asked for. Stop confusing online applause with a majority. Defend equal treatment without turning every institution into an identity seminar.
Demand order without abandoning reform. Fund public services, measure results, and fire people who repeatedly fail. Most importantly, admit mistakes before the voters force the admission at the ballot box.
Common sense isn't right-wing. It isn't left-wing. It's the basic expectation that leaders notice what's happening, say what's true, and handle the job they were hired to do.
Do that, and voters may listen again. Keep lecturing them, and they'll keep walking. Do you think Democrats can rebuild around common sense, or has the activist wing become too powerful to challenge?
Drp your take in the comments. Hit like if Mah said what party leaders were too scared to say, and subscribe for more breakdowns like this. The next election won't be won by the side with the cleverest slogan.
It'll be won by the side that finally remembers voters live in the real world.
