Trump may be gone, but people like Josh Hawley, JD Vance, and Ted Cruz are still trying to rebrand themselves as populists.
Here’s how you, too, can get in on the action:
- Be born male.
- Have upper-middle-class parents who can pass as middle class. If this isn’t possible, have upper-class parents. (Helps in the long run. Also in the short run.)
- Go to Yale Law School and join the Federalist Society.
- After studying with the finest legal minds in the country, cash in by going into Venture Capital.
- Face fact that money can’t fix a hole inside you. Maybe attention can?
- Write a book aimed at coastal elites about the closed-mindedness of coastal elites. This will make them respect you, even though the book’s success will undermine its thesis.
- Attempt to get VC career scrubbed from your Wikipedia page.
- Get a P.O. Box in a midwestern state and use it as an official mailing address
- From your Upper East Side penthouse, launch a campaign for US Senator in Ohio or Iowa or wherever.
- Check whether it’s Ohio or Iowa. Oh, shit… Indiana. Right. Love that place. It’s so real. Go Hoosiers!
- Disavow Yale and all other academic institutions.
- Keep the financial relationship with Peter Thiel private.
- Repeatedly blame elites but never define which ones. Leave people wondering if you might be talking about Jews and non-white software engineers, because you are
- Get gradually more racist, from your starting point of “pretty racist.”
- Win election and announce GOP is no longer a Wall Street Party.
- Go to a Wall Street party. They have the best gift bags
- Brag about the multi-ethnic coalition that elected you (white and Italian Americans).
- Tweet about NYC and LA as though they aren’t part of the country and you don’t own a house in each of them. (Turn off geo-location.)
- Study egalitarian movements to appropriate their rhetoric. Like Jane Goodall, if she had no respect for her subjects.
- Put the word “big” before anything you wish to disparage.
- Beat your chest while listening to Bruce Springsteen. When the wife asks what you’re doing, respond “foreplay.”
- Ignore Bruce’s desist letter. What a man does in his own home is his business. As long as it’s not gay. (But who told? Damn you, Big Spotify.)
- Argue tax breaks for working-class parents hurt working-class parents because they are condescending and require the filling out of elitist forms.
- Agree with AOC on exactly one thing (something fashion-related?). After she “claps back” rather than commend you for being fellow populist, say she’s a know-it-all elitist but also (in the same breath) a know-nothing bartender, so too dumb to understand Real America as you do. Has she even read de Tocqueville?
- Get a deal for a book about how Big Publishing censors patriots like you.
- Lose book deal over racism or insurrection or other “dumb woke reason.”
- Release book through a right-wing publishing house, like Amazon-dot-Com.
- After the book fails to sell and Yale refuses to stock it, pull the book and say that books are dumb anyway.
- Set stack of books on fire. Do so on Earth Day, to kill two birds with one book-burning — more, if possible. (Elitist birds, always looking down on us, migrating past “flyover country,” taking our worms… They make you so mad.)
- Explain to Ben Shapiro that the real fascists are the ones that try to tell you which books you can and can’t burn. And birds, of course.
- Decry how Real Americans have been sucked dry by immigrants and globalists. (These parasites are even taking our Oscars!)
- Deny seeing how that language could be “dangerous” and ask if people even got your “Parasite” joke?
- Explain to Tucker Carlson that the real neo-Nazis are the ones calling their political opponents neo-Nazis. (But, no, that wouldn’t mean you’re a neo-Nazi too since you’re saying they are — they’re saying it, you’re just implying it.)
- Add that the term “neo-Nazi” doesn’t apply to you, since you would have been into the same stuff even if you’d been born before WWII.
- Claim you were misquoted.
- Lead violent attempt to overthrow Big Democracy. What’s more populist than mob rule?
- If this fails, take a job as a commentator on CNN.
Oh… and if Facebook is down, make sure to send this to your conservative uncle or aunt in a chain email.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.
