You Will Never Catch Me Saying What Pete Is Saying in His Latest Video

There is a style of political communication that mistakes emotional management for strategy. It responds to brutality by offering uplift: the suggestion that “the ground is shifting,” that “glimmers” are appearing, that hope is rising because the audience has been “making your voice heard.”

I reject that style outright. Not because people are wrong to want relief, and not because organizing cannot produce results, but because this framing, laundered through hope, becomes a soft form of compliance. It trains citizens to treat marginal motion as meaning, to misread elite theater as accountability, and to accept consolation where the moment demands consequences.

I will never credit hope as a political force. Hope is private. Hope can be a coping mechanism. But hope is not leverage. Hope does not bind a regime’s hands. Hope does not restrain an enforcement apparatus. Hope does not prosecute anyone. Hope does not rebuild what was broken.

Hope is an emotion, and emotions can be weaponized against the public as effectively as any lie. When a leader tells you to take heart because “pressure works” while the machine continues to grind, you are being handed a mood in exchange for your standards.

In this latest video, Pete Buttigieg argues that public pressure is already causing meaningful movement: congressional Republicans “changing their behavior,” calls for hearings and investigations, a top commander of Customs and Border Protection “sidelined,” and even signs that President Trump might “back down.”

The rhetorical intent is understandable. People are frightened. People are exhausted. People want to feel less alone. But the political content is thinner than it sounds, and the strategic implications are worse than most listeners realize.

The central problem is that the speech treats responsiveness as evidence of vulnerability rather than as evidence of adaptation. In an asymmetric environment, regimes adapt precisely to avoid accountability, defuse outrage, and buy time. A sidelined commander can be a scapegoat, not a concession. A hearing can be a pressure-release valve, not a constraint. “Signs of backing down” can be tactical retreat, not strategic reversal.

If you apply minimax, you do not begin by asking what the regime says it is doing; you begin by asking what the move enables. The most dangerous interpretation is often the most operationally accurate: visible micro-defections may be deployed to demobilize the public by offering the feeling of progress in exchange for the surrender of urgency.

If you want to understand what you are seeing, stop listening for reassurance and start tracking incentives. The governing question is not, “Are they backing down?” It is: what cost did they perceive, what risk did they detect, and what maneuver reduces that risk while preserving the core project?

That is the regime-security lens, and it is not optional. A regime driven by self-preservation concedes at the edges to protect the center. It spends scapegoats to protect chains of command. It stages oversight to control the narrative. It tolerates selective dissent to prevent widening fractures that endanger coalition cohesion.

None of that is change. It is insulation.

This is why I do not praise marginal victories. Marginal victories are not nothing; they can be useful. But they are also the regime’s preferred currency for buying your patience. They are what you are offered when the regime cannot yet afford to ignore you—but can afford to stall you. They are the political version of a coupon: just enough to keep you shopping in a store that should be shut down.

Pete’s framing also smuggles in a moral psychology that does not serve the moment. It implies that the appropriate public stance is hope, and that hope is proof that action is working. That is backwards. The public does not owe leadership hope. The public owes itself honesty. The public owes itself standards.

And the public owes justice its full moral weight, including anger. Anger is not a defect in a citizenry confronting state abuse. Anger is rational. Anger is clarity. Anger is the mind recognizing that a line has been crossed, that harm is being imposed, and that perpetrators believe they will never pay for it.

There are truthtellers who understand the proper division of labor in a democracy: it is up to the people to feel joy where they can, to grieve what they must, and to rage when justice is on the line. It is up to leaders to speak in reason, to name reality without soothing it, and to demand consequences without bargaining them down into symbolism.

When leaders substitute hope-talk for consequence-talk, they are not elevating the public; they are disciplining it. They are asking citizens to become emotionally manageable at the exact moment when emotional manageability is how the regime survives.

The deeper error is epistemic. Hope rhetoric tends to treat movement as measurement. A sidelined commander becomes “proof.” A promised investigation becomes “proof.” A few dissenting statements become “proof.” But proof of what, exactly? Proof that the regime is failing? Or proof that the regime has learned what it must do to keep going?

A defensible standard is simple: accountability is not a feeling. Accountability is an outcome. The difference is visible. Accountability looks like enforceable constraints, not performative concern. It looks like findings with teeth, not open-ended “investigations.” It looks like officials losing power in ways that cannot be reversed quietly in six weeks. It looks like legal exposure, career ruin, institutional dismantling, and durable loss of legitimacy. It looks like a regime that cannot operate normally because the cost of operating normally has become intolerable.

Anything else is motion without consequence—what authoritarians feed on.

At this point I state my position without euphemism. I do not want marginal victories. I want change. And when I say change, I do not mean the polite, incremental kind that leaves the underlying machinery intact. I mean collapse: the loss of power by enemy regimes, the disintegration of their enforcement capacity, the fracturing of their coalition, and the end of their ability to govern through fear and impunity. Not because I am intoxicated by catastrophe, but because regimes that normalize abuse do not “learn their lesson.” They learn only what they can get away with. They interpret soft resistance as permission. They interpret symbolic concessions as an effective tactic. They interpret your hope as a resource to be harvested.

This is also where the video’s premise becomes strategically inadequate on its own terms. If you are going to make a video with this register—if you are going to tell people they are not powerless, that pressure works, that the ground is shifting—then you do not get to stop at “call your member of Congress” and “keep protesting.” That is the safe version of pressure: the version that can be tolerated, absorbed, and redirected.

The least you should be doing is naming the next rung on the ladder: a general strike, or a coordinated labor stoppage, or a sustained economic disruption that forces decision-makers to choose between immediate material damage and continued impunity.

If the claim is that ordinary people can shift power dynamics in days, then the credible mechanism is not feels; it is withdrawal. It is the deliberate refusal to keep feeding the machine with labor, compliance, and normalcy. Without that escalation path, the speech becomes a morale loop: encourage people to feel empowered by small signals, then send them back to the same instruments the regime has already learned to manage.

A general strike is not a slogan. It is a recognition that regimes do not fear your feelings; they fear your capacity to impose cost. They fear the point at which the public stops pleading inside the system and starts withdrawing the system’s inputs. If you are going to speak about leverage, you have to speak about leverage.

“Collapse,” in this sense, is not a tantrum. It is the appropriate strategic objective when the thing you are facing is not a policy disagreement but an asymmetric power project. If the regime’s prime directive is self-preservation, then your objective cannot be to persuade it to behave. Your objective must be to make its continued operation impossible—politically, legally, institutionally, and economically. If the regime survives, it learns. If it learns, it hardens. If it hardens, the next abuse is easier.

Pete’s “house of cards” metaphor is revealing here. A house of cards does not fall because people wish it down. It falls when supports are removed—when adhesion fails, when incentives invert, when participants no longer believe they will be protected. Regimes collapse when collaborators fear the future more than they fear the leader, when enforcement fractures, when lies stop buying compliance, and when institutions stop covering for abuse. That is not hope. That is mechanics.

There is a way to salvage the useful core of what Pete is trying to do without the hope varnish. It is this: pressure is not inspiration; it is coercion. Pressure works when it creates credible threat—of exposure, of career loss, of legal jeopardy, of mass desertion, of institutional paralysis, of economic disruption. Protest is not therapy. It is force. Calling members of Congress is not catharsis. It is cost imposition. Speaking up online is not self-expression. It is narrative warfare.

If the moment is as dire as he says, then the public does not need to be encouraged into hope. The public needs to be told the truth: partial movement is not victory, scapegoats are not justice, hearings are not constraints, investigations without consequences are delays, and “backing down” in a single moment is often repositioning for the next strike.

I demand the end of the entire dastardly project. I demand collapse of enemy regimes because only collapse ends their capacity to repeat the harm. Everything else is just bargaining for time.

The public’s joy is their own. The public’s rage is justified. Leadership must not ask citizens to trade rage for hope; leadership must ask citizens to convert rage into discipline, discipline into leverage, and leverage into outcomes.

And outcomes, in this fight, are not measured in glimmers. They are measured in the dismantling of impunity itself.

---

https://bsky.app/profile/johnrraymond.bsky.social