The worst problem in politics is not external corruption but internal corruption. Working in local politics, the person I have worked the most for is a man I have zero respect for, see as evil to his core, and see as breathtakingly stupid. He doesn’t belong in a state legislature, he belongs in a mental institution to never be released on account of his malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder. There are few people, as a Christian, who I suspect may have made a literal Faustian Bargain but he is one of them. Many people tell their bosses to “go to hell” but I have told mine on multiple occasions that he is literally “going to Hell”. He is too dim to digest theological complexity so I keep the eternal warnings simple. His brain needs stuff at the level of white clouds and orange fires, not things like philosophical teleology which would be a better illustration of Heaven and Hell.
He is like Al Capone in the sense that Al Capone had neurodegenerative syphilis and was not smart but the main thing his brain did do well was con people. Lee Atwater, my home state of South Carolina’s possibly most sociopathic sociopath, learned early on that if you slip a lie into a conversation people assume it is true without question. He also has a good taste in ghostwriters, like me, so despite his profound ignorance, since people assume state legislators are too local to use ghostwriters, people think he is smarter than he is. Working for him was an eye-opening experience because one assumes corruption is mostly external. And yet, the man very early in my working for him was so deluded he thought he would he HUD secretary by age 40. A man who didn’t know about the Syrian Civil War, the 14th amendment, didn’t know global warming caused hurricanes, who didn’t know about the Northern Ireland conflict, who expressed anti-vaxx and 9/11 truther beliefs, who sent me death threats under a pseudonym as a part of a prank, and who refused to have a written contract with me to avoid labor laws. Yeah, he ain’t going to be HUD secretary because if he gets famous enough, this shit will bring him down in flames.
So, how does a man with obviously no morals or intelligence make it in politics? He is a Democrat in a red state so he isn’t expected to accomplish anything. That doesn’t mean he can’t because he can. However, he can pretend to do things and blame his lack of results on being in the minority party. One may inquire as to why he doesn’t do anything. Well, he makes more money doing his day job than he does doing policy so he doesn’t do policy because it would cost him time he could otherwise devote to making money. He compensates for his lack of results by pretending he is trying when he isn’t. Another reason is his ADHD because when he does work actual worky work, he isn’t terribly focussed and would spend a large portion of his day watching sports, doing social media, and watching music videos. The last one is interesting since he neither had an iTunes account (what I use) or a streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music and to listen to the music he wanted to, he would use Youtube videos during which time he obviously couldn’t do work but when I suggested, more than once, that he get a music account so he could listen to songs and work, he ignored me.
When he went on the local press, he would, usually using a speech he didn’t write, talk about how he was concerned with the issues of things like housing and crime and would emphasize he was from the area. He was a grassroots local who saw crime and housing costs as an issue according to the avatar he had in the media. When he did do this, he didn’t talk about specifics and no one in the press bothered to ask him about the details of his plans and what progress he was making, if any. I did, as his ghostwriter, include specifics in stuff that came out of his avatar in hopes that would shame him into action. It didn’t. It did get him lots of praise for promising to do things but that was not followed up by him being held accountable. I use him as an example about how Dark Triad personality disorders can navigate politics. The press didn’t even ask him “What’s in the bill?” Or “What are the details of exactly what you are doing?”. The press never asked him hard questions, he spoke to them on his own terms and usually with vague statements in the direction of being a moderate liberal.
It never dawned on the press or the people that he might just be a charlatan and they never asked him the questions that would prove he was a charlatan. He was not a “swamp creature” from a sordid machine, he was an ADHD lifelong frat boy with Narcissistic Personality Disorder who got ahead by duping people too obtuse to ask obvious questions and so gullibale they took his vague statements as evidence of genuine goodwill. He is the politician I refer to in the article on this website entitled “Cheap Gaslighting”. He is a simple con man but the system is so obtuse and stupid, it can be duped by a man who doesn’t know global warm causes hurricanes and doesn’t earnestly try to pass legislation.
The Autistic Resistance 