I've just posted the first version of the introduction to this post on the first dispatch from the epistemic swamp, but I thought I'd open up the discussion again on a new thread. The tweet above surely highlights different ideas of truth and authenticity. Of course, Trump is the most 'dishonest' presidential candidate there's ever been as measured by the literal meaning of what he says - by a considerable margin.

On the other hand, he's less manipulative of the press. Of course, I can hear the guffaws of those who are thinking that he's spent his whole life making himself news. But that's a little different. It's been obvious that it's not in Trump's interests to traduce his accusers - for instance, the women whose 'pussies' he's been groping and the gold star family he defamed. He responds to every slight and gives his audience at his rallies a stream of his own consciousness. In that sense he's not 'on message' and his every word is NOT a manipulation. [1. It may well be that this is because he is so undisciplined and so narcissistic, so thin-skinned that he can't help himself, but that's beside my point here. Trump's rallies are an authentic window on what the guy is thinking, what's on his mind.]

And it's precisely the sense that most politicians are on message all the time that people hate. It's one of the things that they hate about Hilary (and why they didn't hate Bill because he was so good at dressing up his being on message as actual heartfelt communication). What I'm suggesting was implicitly (and ineptly) acknowledged by the Gillard campaign in 2010 when it said that we would now see the 'real Julia'. People had a viscerally negative reaction to the inauthenticity of Julia who had mysteriously morphed from a feisty, forensically intelligent Deputy Leader with authentiness to a talking points zombie.

People want out of the talking points and the manipulation and particularly I suspect 'political correctness'. That's particularly true of the relatively less educated who bear the brunt of the middle class's war on the working class. Islamic terrorists are blowing stuff up and ripping people's heads off and, while only a tiny minority of Muslims are sympathetic to this, a much wider class of Muslims have an understanding of women that is archaic in our culture and thus, deeply unnerving.

If you're not thinking things through carefully - that is if you don't try to carefully think through the logical consequences of doing so, the idea of not letting Muslims immigrate to your country seems pretty commonsensical - particularly given that all countries ration the number of immigrants they take.[2. All of those to which immigrants are attracted that is.] But you're not allowed to say it, or perhaps float it to discuss or you're attacked for being a racist. But let's say this was France and every few months there was some horrendous atrocity. At some point, people will, as they should, take action which offends finer ideological sentiments. To be clear, I'm not by the way arguing that we or France should ban Muslim immigration or that that would be a particularly effective response to the problem.

But people don't like being bullied and, as the Brexit vote showed, and as the rise of Trump has already shown, whether or not he becomes president, they're prepared to take some big risks to register their unhappiness about it all.