By Tom Luongo - July 11, 2024

Having now done literally hundreds of interviews/livestreams/podcast over the past seven years, I’ve learned a few things about media. The first is that this is a lot harder than it looks.

I’ve done it the very hard way, limited success through repetitive failure.

It’s who I am. I’m neither a book nor ear learner. Learning is a kinetic process for me.

For those who aren’t natural public speakers it’s even harder than that. They have to take lessons and shit. And practice. Practice. Practice. I got a small amount of training back when I ran as a Libertarian in 2002. How to dress, reactively listening (Still no clue how to do that), etc.

So, while I’m no expert public speaker, I have become pretty aware of a few things about it: Long form is better than short. Not all media is good media. You have to be willing to ‘get into character.’

Just Be Yourself, Kinda.

Crafting a version of yourself to fit the format is the key to being both a good host and a good guest, both of which I’m still working on. That version/character you craft has a lifespan.

This isn’t to say that the character is artifice necessarily. It isn’t. It is the essence of the lines by T.S. Eliot from The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

It’s not artifice to be a gracious host or a respectful guest, in common parlance it’s called “manners.”

And mine, despite my best intentions, are just barely adequate on the best of days.

How well you prepare that face and greet the opportunities to meet new faces with humility, will ultimately determine how far you go. We all have that choice in front of us every day.

It’s why Prufrock is one of my favorite poems in the English language, it so thoroughly captures the embedded schizophrenia of post-modern society.

You can have your script, practice your character, and maintain the lie for a certain amount of time. But eventually, no matter what you say, there you are.

The bigger the deviation that character is from the real you, the more exhausting maintaining that character is, the shorter the lifespan.

And because anyone can fool another person if they only have to put on the corporatist/globalist feedbag for a 2-5 minute fawning media segment, short form media is itself nothing but a potential lie-generation engine.

It is the height of artifice.

Podcast Campaigning

Podcasting, on the other hand, is just conversation. And conversations have their own vibe.

You still, however, have to craft a version of yourself for any conversation, because manners. But ultimately the inverse time function of maintaining a facade rules.

I can hold it together for about an hour, after that fatigue sets in and the persona, however slight it may be, begins to slip.

So, pro tip, podcasters, if you want controlled, normie-friendly Luongo, keep it under an hour. If you want That Mr. Hyde guy, just keep the tape rolling an extra 20 to 30 minutes.

This is why podcasting has taken off the way it has. It’s why Joe Rogan found the magic by accident.

Eventually everyone lets their guard down. Everyone is laid bare for us to truly see. And since we are all desperately crying out for authenticity in a sea of smarm, we gravitate towards the format which gives us the highest probability of getting the truth and the people who bring that to the table consistently.

I keep going back to one of the first blogs I posted on this site, The Authenticity Gap, detailing why Hillary Clinton’s credibility gap was her Achilles’ heel against Donald Trump.

The Democrats have been lying to us about literally everything while the GOPe led by Yertle the Turtle ran cover for them to…

… gin up World War III before Trump takes office to avoid being thrown in jail. This is how sick these people are.

Because, all that matters in the end is their maintaining power, no matter who it hurts or what it costs.

I wrote those words in 2016, before Trump won. They are just as accurate today.

This is why we’ve only seen Joah Bii-DEN! in public here and there, in sound bites and short clips, creating the fiction that he was anything other than a mushroom sporifying in the White House, feeding him a steady diet of bullshit-flavored ice cream.

That piece is still relevant today, just replace The Hildabeast with Joe Biden. Trump and Putin are still ‘literally Hitler.” And the Democrats are self-immolating on the altar of their own tenuous relationship with common decency.

Watching Gabbard Gab

Having watched/listened to hundreds of hours of Tulsi Gabbard over the years, I’ve noticed a few things.

First, she’s not a natural public speaker, nor is she really comfortable in front of the camera. So, she has worked very hard on crafting a public persona which is not easy for her to slip into but which is also authentically her.

Because she is uncomfortable, that face begins to slip after a while…. about an hour. I always get the sense that there is a ‘macho military’ version of Gabbard lurking just below the surface, that swears like a mafia don and prays like a priest. And every once in a while it leaks out.

But it will never do so in a six-minute segment on Fox News.

You’ve got to get past that fatigue barrier. The reason I bring all of this up is because Gabbard was recently on the Keep Hammering Collective podcast with Cameron Hanes for nearly two hours.

She did that podcast after spending the day with him doing his triathalon he calls Lift, Run, Shoot which I suggest you watch the video of, especially if your name is Donald Trump.

Why? You know why. I’ve already made my case for why I thought Gabbard is the ‘box-ticking’ favorite to be Trump’s running mate this fall. I think, however, in retrospect, that was a little unfair to Tulsi Gabbard.

I, like the Davosian, who tried to groom her into their perfect barista of globalism, made the mistake of not really getting past the character she plays. There’s a fiery person underneath that calm face she wears in front of the camera. Her book, which I’ve read, makes this point ad infinitum.

And the rounds she’s making supporting the book is showing us a Tulsi Gabbard hinted at, but she hasn’t really shown us before.

What’s, uh, the VP deal?

Dexter White’s recent post reminded us about why Joe Biden was selected to be Barack Obama’s VP, “the life insurance policy for the first black president…”

Obama thought “…I sure don’t want to get shot, who could I pick for VP that would make even an assassin think twice? Oh, I know, Joe Biden. No one wants that dumbass in charge!”

Over the years, we’ve gotten so caught up in the political game that is choosing a vice-president we forgot what the actual job description is… to be the person to step into the role should the President not be there, physically, mentally, or otherwise.

I say this to remind the ghost of Al Haig that we still don’t want him in charge.

It is precisely because Kamala Harris was picked to be Biden’s veep for every other reason than the job description that the Democrats and Davos are in the bind they are in as I write this.

It was never about Harris’ competence, capability, or commitment that landed her in the Naval Observatory. It was the boxes she ticked, the perception of her moral fluidity, and her solidification of the black female vote at a time when black men were drifting into Der Trumpenfuhrer’s orbit that made her the center of their Venn Diagram.

Notice how she was never a person to them… just a series of attributes.

For Trump, who has held back his choice for vice-president for months, the big question has been, if he wins the election will the blob/Deep State/Davos/etc. just kill him off before the inauguration?

It’s a real conundrum.

So, I say, turn about is fair play. Biden was Obama’s insurance policy, make Gabbard Trump’s. Because, if there is one person of all the people on the short list to be Trump’s VP that Davos et.al. do not want to see on the ticket it is Tulsi Gabbard.

Because she really is that person who walked away from power, has a strong moral center, and is authentically motivated by service.

This is why every trial balloon imaginable has gone up in the past three months for the usual suspects like Skeletor Scott, his separated at birth brotha Tim, Little Marco, Tom Cotton Pickin’ Neocon, etc… They are trying to move Trump to tick boxes rather than choose the whole person.

The only person other than Gabbard that gets their globalist goat more is . . .

[SNIP]