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Notes -
Did you know that Karine Jean-Pierre was a Black LGBTQ Woman? Of course you didn't.
The above link is to KJP's "interview" with the New Yorker. It's exceptionally horrible. I don't usually get too wrapped up in "bad interviews" because journalists routinely use them to get the other party tied up in knots with impossible to answer questions.
The thing about this interview is that Isaac Chotiner isn't even really asking questions. He's mostly politely asking KJP "what do you mean?" and she keeps answering it worse and worse. I'm having a hard time thinking of a worse written interview.
The culture war angles are too obvious. DEI, rejection of reality, identity politics. They're all here. What stuck me those most was the word salad. Trump is always ridiculed for his own word salad but the left, yet, this is the White House press secretary struggling to build cohesive thoughts.
I've held an unprovable theory for many years now that people who routinely hold demonstrably untrue ideas in their head do some sort of literal brain damage to themselves. A sort cognitive self-harm wherein an emotional appeal is so strong that it dulls the synapses. Again, unprovable, but this interview makes me hold that faith just a little more.
She fried her brain by too much time as Press Secretary, so her habits of deny, deflect, redirect, pretend to be "clear" are too strong when talking to journalists. Kind of fascinating from a psych perspective. I've said this before but most people don't appreciate how much politicians often end up ideologically captured by their own roles. Lots of people have this idea that every politician is a spineless weasel who will say anything to win if it matches their lane, but this is just wrong. Politicians often have silver tongues, but that's because it's an adaptive benefit on average. It doesn't have much to do with their core beliefs. Many, many politicians end up playing a role so long they come to believe it.
Part of me wonders if this is another puzzle piece behind why the Senate and Congress has been having so much trouble recently. Too much time talking to the media, and not nearly enough time locked in a room with each other. Older more historical Congresses, where you literally do need to sit your butt in a seat and listen to the speeches, had some kind of built in incentive to talk with each other, if not compromise. But nowadays, it seems like even if you do meet across the aisle, half the time it has to be in secret. Which is why that blowup a few years back about policing who could show up at certain DC restaurants was actually a big deal.
(Also, Chotiner definitely knew what he was doing posting this, as you can tell by the technically-accurate but definitely-throwing-shade summary line "Karine Jean-Pierre feels that Democrats were so mean to Biden that she is becoming an Independent.")
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