Wow. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Here’s a guy I have never heard of (and don’t particularly want to know more about) claiming that silly Democrats (his pals and ideological colleagues, obviously) need to learn to talk to dumb, ignorant Americans—you know, like the ones they thought they could fool for four years with a fake President and could convince that Donald Trump was really a new Hitler—by communicating with them like and through other morons.

That’s what the New York Times deems worthy of an op-ed.

Here’s a gift link to the essay, though trust me, it isn’t worth your time to read all of it: I read it so you wouldn’t have to. Michael Hirschorn, a Hollywood progressive, really and truly thinks that it isn’t the Left’s batshit crazy extreme and unethical policies that alienate so much of the public, but their way of explaining them. But that isn’t a new (stupid) theory at all: throughout the “Biden” administration, Democrats kept telling anyone who would listen that things were really, really great, and the problem was “messaging.” Which meant “We need more believable liars.” Which meant “These idiots will believe anything as long as we know how to fool them.”

No. The problem was and is that the whole party and the progressive radicals who occupy it suck. But Hirschorn obviously doesn’t know that, because he’s one of them. It isn’t that the Democrats are wrong to try to “reach young men,” whom they have vilified, insulted (“Believe any woman who claims to have been sexually insulted, because the man she accuses probably did it!”) and discriminated against for decades, it’s that they are going about it all wrong. Hirschorn might as well be the Ringo Kid with Democrats in the role of Sheriff Bart…

Here are some tells from the piece:

—The contempt that the author has for the very commentators he recommends Democrats cultivate and exploit for their own ends is palpable. “Like Mr. Rogan, the podcasters Andrew Schulz, Tim Dillon and Theo Von all came up through the comedy circuit. They have no coherent political agenda, no detailed policy analysis, no claim to expertise of any kind. In fact, it’s the opposite. Mr. Schulz and Mr. Von recently shared their amazement at discovering that 27 million Soviets died during World War II — “That’s unbelievable! You don’t ever hear about that,” Mr. Von marveled.”

Ah, I see. They are ignoramuses, just like the men his party is trying to convince. In fact, Schultz and Von are ignoramuses, and yes, their reasons for voting in any election is a mess of emotions, misconceptions and lazy thinking. But basing your strategy for gaining power on confounding the lowest common denominator is not a new idea for Democrats, or totalitraians. That was the party’s entire strategy for the last decade, as EA had noted so many times I’m bored with saying so. “It Isn’t What It Is!” has been the theme, and the desired response is, “Oh, it isn’t? Gee, I thought it was what it is! Oh thank-you, thank-you for enlightening me!”

—More contempt: “They’re [Hirschhorn, derisively, calls them “bro-casters”] frankly, weirder than that. The ideas they articulate can seem 10,000-monkeys-level random, ranging from half-baked libertarianism to late-stage lib-owning to just-asking-questions ramblings about how maybe we need a Nayib Bukele-type dictator here in the United States. Mr. Dillon, a frequent guest of Mr. Rogan’s, last year endorsed his “friend” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president: “He’s out there just going: This is my truth.” Mr. Rogan is prone to “innumerable stoner overreaches that, without fail, continue to land him in ludicrously incoherent political territory,” Luke Winkie recently noted in Slate, including going on record as supporting both universal health care and the idea that Hitler has gotten a bad rap.”

This is the reason that I don’t listen to Rogan or most podcasters: they literally don’t know what they are talking about. I know Althouse is addicted to him and podcasts generally–go figure. Hirchorn’s tunnel-vision theory is that the Left doesn’t have the equivalent of these opinionated fools, but in fact they do: Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher, and Jon Oliver, and the ladies of “The View” among others are all Leftist partisan hacks. With the exception of Maher and occasionally “The View,” none of these allow Republicans on their shows. Late Night TV and cable comedy cover the same ground as Rogan-style podcasts, they are just snottier about it, and this: they have a partisan agenda, and like most progressives in the entertainment industry, they are convinced they are smarter than they are.

—“But if the bro-casters lack a coherent policy agenda, what they do have is a well of knowledge, honed from years of touring the country from one chuckle hut to another, about how to talk to people without talking down to them. And in a world where authority of all kinds (medical, professorial, journalistic, political) is in decline, where information from top-down media is losing ground to an infinitude of bottom-up sources, this precise kind of realness matters. Authenticity, it seems, is what fills the void when authority dies.”

Where to start? The “bro-casters” have a “well of knowledge” but they don’t know that Russia had by far the highest casualties among the Allies, which is how Stain was able to guilt Churchill and FDR into turning Eastern Europeans over to brutal Communism? Funny, I don’t look to ignorant people for my political analysis. Heck, deli-owners and cabbies have the common touch too: why don’t Democrats recruit them for their podcasts? I just listened to an old routine by Jim Gaffigan where he had his audience laughing as he mocked the public for not paying enough attention to Greta Thunberg…and he’s considered one of the smarter stand-ups. That routine didn’t age well, did it?

“[I]n a world where authority of all kinds (medical, professorial, journalistic, political) is in decline…” Hirschorn, again like his party, doesn’t comprehend why those “authorities” can’t convince the public any more: they are overwhelmingly left-biased, dishonest and untrustworthy. (He left out “legal” and “judicial.”) So his solution is to replace intelligent and educated biased “experts” with ignorant failed stand-up comics who know how to lie to the public without “talking down” to them.

—One last one, and then I have to have a stiff drink: “Democrats long since forgot how to communicate that way. They operate on the assumption that ideas and governance are the primary things that move people.” Ideas and governance still matter a great deal to people, you dolt: the problem for your party is that insane ideas and deceptive, conspiratorial, incompetent governance—you know, like we have been getting from Democrats for so, so long?—move people to oppose them, because “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

There is no way to communicate ideas and policies—-like open borders, biological men in women’s sports, DEI, enabling terrorism, racial reparations, censoring speech, propping up puppet Presidents and spending trillions on foreign nations’ problems while major issues go unaddressed at home—-that will convince enough of even the most gullible members of the public to salvage what’s left of the Democratic Party. Democrats need better policies and better people administering them.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, friends, Romans and countrymen, is the real “Achingly Simple Lesson That Democrats Seem Determined Not to Learn.”