She Said What the “Nice Democrats” Won’t

She called the hate playbook, the cowardice, and the “plain Jane” script in one breath.

Some of y’all keep asking for “nice” like nice is a strategy.

Like if we speak softer, if we pick cleaner words, if we say it the way the consultants like it, the people who built their whole identity on hate are going to suddenly have a change of heart. Like Pharaoh is going to stop the whip because your tone was respectful. Like the wolf is going to apologize because the sheep wrote a thoughtful thread.

Listen. Politics ain’t debate club. It’s football. And on Sundays, you don’t win by sounding righteous. You win by knowing the play, calling the audible, and blocking like your life depends on it, because sometimes it does.

That’s why I’m bringing you to the film room today.

Because Reecie Colbert got on a livestream and did what a whole lot of “nice Democrats” refuse to do. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t soften it. She named the hate playbook, she named the cowardice, and she named that “plain Jane Democrat” script in one breath. Not to be cute. Not to go viral. To tell the truth about why we keep losing ground while we keep winning arguments.

And the reason her clip hit me the way it did is simple. She wasn’t just talking about MAGA. She was talking about us. About the reflex to police tone instead of confronting power. About how quick people get to “be civil” when the target is a Black woman with fire in her throat. About how we keep treating halftime like the game and then acting shocked when the scoreboard says otherwise.

So no, this post isn’t a debate. It’s a diagnosis.

And if you’re already feeling defensive, if your fingers are warming up to type “well actually,” just pause and ask yourself a question. Why does honesty feel like an attack when it’s aimed at the habits that keep us losing?

TL;DR

• Reecie Colbert said what “nice Democrats” won’t: the hate playbook works because we flinch.

• The Bad Bunny backlash wasn’t about music. It was about who gets to belong on the stage.

• Democrats keep turning moral clarity into a tone issue. That’s ear-covering dressed up as “strategy.”

• Black women candidates get trapped in a double-bind: fire is “too much,” restraint is “plain Jane.”

• If we want power, we have to stop living at halftime and start doing the boring work that compounds.

Before you scroll, help me move this through the bloodstream.

Restack this.

Not because it makes me feel good. Because it makes the algorithm do its job and puts this in front of readers who will never find it on their own.

If you want to do it with a little extra force, do it like this:

• Restack it with one sentence of your own. Tell people why it hit.

• Share it to one friend who keeps saying “we just need better messaging.”

• Drop a quick comment. One line. Let the room know you’re here.

That’s how independent work travels. Quiet clicks, loud impact.

And if you can, go paid. Not because I’m trying to build a gated community, but because keeping this work independent and free for folks who can’t pay requires somebody to cover the tab.

Who The Hell Is Reecie Colbert?

Reecie Colbert is one of those voices you hear and immediately know she’s not auditioning for approval.

She comes out of talk radio and political commentary, the lane where you don’t get to hide behind “both sides” because the callers will drag you back to reality. She’s sharp, impatient with cowardice, and allergic to consultant-speak, which is why her clips travel. She’ll praise you, but she’ll also tell you when you’re playing yourself, especially when Democrats start treating racism like a messaging problem instead of a power problem.

So when I say “Reecie ran the film room,” I mean she did what your group chat does when the game is on. She stopped narrating feelings and started naming the plays.

Reecie Colbert hosts a SiriusXM show, which matters less as a résumé line and more as a format.

Satellite radio is where the conversation is live, blunt, and messy in a useful way. People call in with their real anxieties, their bad information, their half-formed takes, and you don’t get the luxury of polishing your response into a press release. You have to think on your feet and tell the truth in public, while the clock is running. That environment produces a certain kind of voice: less “let me phrase this carefully,” more “let me name what’s happening.”

That’s the Reecie you’re hearing in this clip. The Sirius lane trained her to talk like the stakes are real, because for the people dialing in, they are.

Why This Clip, Why Now

Last time I told you the truth I wish somebody had left in my locker: politics ain’t debate club, it’s football. And once you accept that, you start craving a different kind of commentary. Not the polite stuff. Not the “here are both sides” stuff. You start wanting film study. You start wanting somebody to name the play that keeps getting run on us while we’re busy arguing about the announcers.

That’s why this Reecie Colbert clip matters.

She ain’t reacting to a headline like it’s celebrity gossip. She’s doing what the best fans do when the game gets ugly. She’s watching the line. She’s watching who’s disciplined. She’s watching who’s afraid to hit. And she’s calling out the pattern where Democrats keep confusing sounding responsible with being effective. She called the hate playbook, the cowardice, and that plain-Jane script in one breath, and what she’s really saying is that you don’t beat a power machine with vibes.

Halftime vs the Trenches

The Bad Bunny outrage is the perfect example because it’s not really about music. It’s about who gets the stage and who gets to define “normal.” For liberals, that moment feels like relief. Like proof the country is still capable of being big, mixed, and joyful. But the hard right doesn’t watch it as culture. They watch it as politics. Who belongs. Who doesn’t. Who needs to be put back in their place.

And the machine cashes checks off both reactions.

Reecie’s own language is blunt. People are “flipping out.” They’re “unhinged.” And she names the tell: when folks think this is some “iconic American halftime show” and “it gets too black or brown for you,” suddenly there is “rage.” She points right at the pattern: “Remember the outrage over Beyonce? the way she performed formation,” and she puts Kendrick in the same frame too. Then she strips the language excuse down to the bone: “If Pavarati would have been up there for the Super Bowl halftime show… doing his opera thing, they would have been good with this singing in Italian.” Even her own admission is the point: “I ain’t know a word he was saying, but I enjoyed it.”

Reecie’s point, underneath the jokes and the heat, is a warning. You can’t live on cultural relief while the other side is building structural power. You can’t keep treating representation like a win while maps, courts, and policy pipelines keep getting stacked against you. Halftime is emotional. The trenches are institutional. And if you confuse the two, you’ll keep waking up shocked by a score that was being engineered while you were applauding the show.

Black Women Candidates as the Canary

This is where she cuts deeper, and this is where the whole “nice Democrats” thing gets exposed.

Because the party’s fear shows up clearest around Black women in politics. A Black woman steps forward with fire and clarity and suddenly everybody starts clutching pearls about tone, about electability, about “how it plays in the suburbs.” But if she dulls the edge, if she refuses the identity bait, if she speaks in the safe, measured register they claim they want, then she becomes “plain Jane.” Not inspiring enough. Not special enough. Not enough juice.

That’s the double-bind. Too loud or too bland. Too angry or too robotic. Too much or not enough.

Reecie isn’t just defending specific names. She’s naming the trap: a party that wants Black women’s votes and labor, but gets skittish around Black women’s authority. And if you want to see how serious that is, watch how quickly “calling out racism” gets reframed as “identity politics.” The canary isn’t the problem. The air is bad.

And she doesn’t say it politely. She says it like a woman who’s watched the same movie too many times.

On Kamala Harris, she makes the point clean:

“Harris didn’t lean into identity politics. No. All she avoided all that. She sure did. She She avoided all that. She didn’t even say I’m a black woman. She did not even say I’m a black woman. She didn’t”

Then she turns to what happens the minute a Black woman shows up with actual heat, and she names the punishment and the excuse at the same time:
“If you look at the coverage of this um Texas Senate race, you got the whites circling the wagons around James Terrio.
James Terico is less qualified than Jasmine Crockett. James Telerico is losing to Jasmine Crockett in the pollings, most of them. And he’s also losing in the polling to the right Republicans. But there all the racism towards Jasmine Crockett and then the responses to that become identity politics.
It’s because they want us to stay in our black ass places. They want us to be in the back of the bus. This is not a new”

And then she calls out the self-sabotage that always follows:
“We, on the other hand, always shifting, always changing, one person loses, we can never have a black woman run again. All this kind of [ __ ] We’re always reacting to a loss versus ever celebrating our wins.”

So when Reecie talks, I’m listening not because she’s famous, but because she’s telling you what the tape already shows: we keep losing ground because we keep asking our best fighters to fight with one hand tied behind their back so the room can stay comfortable.

The Nice Democrat Reflex

Here’s the reflex Reecie is putting her finger on, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

A Black woman says the quiet part out loud, not to be dramatic, not to “make it about race,” but because race is already in the room. Misogyny is already in the room. The hate is already in the room. And the moment she names it, the so-called adults rush in with their favorite lullaby: tone. They don’t challenge the lie. They challenge the volume. They don’t confront the threat. They confront the messenger.

That’s the “nice Democrat” move.

Reecie says it without the euphemisms: “I don’t think how they’re acting towards um Jasmine Crockett is nice. I don’t think how they’re acting towards those of us who point out the misogynir and the racism is nice. It’s not nice. Democrats actually aren’t as nice as they like to portray themselves to be.”

They call it responsibility. They call it being strategic. They call it not giving the other side ammunition. But what it really is, most of the time, is fear dressed up as etiquette. It’s the belief that you can negotiate with people who are not negotiating. It’s the faith that if you perform civility hard enough, the crowd that lives on cruelty will suddenly respect you. That ain’t strategy, ya’ll, that’s superstition.

Reecie’s point is that this reflex turns the coalition inward at the exact moment it should be locked in and moving forward. The right runs a hate play, the left starts arguing about whether the person who called it hate used the right adjective. The right spreads the lie, the left starts holding hearings about feelings. And by the time everybody’s done being “reasonable,” the damage is already baked into the headline, the algorithm, and the next voter’s nervous system.

This is why we keep losing ground while telling ourselves we’re the grown-ups.

Because the “nice” reflex is a kind of ear-covering too. It’s a way to avoid the discomfort of moral clarity. It’s a way to keep the room calm while the house is burning. And it always costs the same people first. The Black women who speak with command presence, immigrants who refuse to apologize for existing, and queer folks who won’t shrink to make strangers comfortable.

And when she drills down on what that niceness-mask produces, she gets even more direct, “So, you not only not nice, but then you a weak ass punk ass [expletive] on the other side, too. That’s a crazy ass combination.”

So when Reecie says Democrats aren’t as nice as they claim, she’s not being petty. She’s naming the hypocrisy which is that the party will brag about compassion and then turn around and punish the people who actually practice it as truth-telling. They’ll demand courage at the ballot box and then punish courage on the microphone. They’ll beg for fighters and then scold the fighters for fighting.

And that is how you end up with a coalition that keeps asking for “unity” when what it really wants is silence.

The Hate Playbook

Reecie keeps calling it a playbook for a reason. This isn’t random outrage. It’s a system.

And she’s not describing it like a policy memo. She’s describing it like a nervous system event. When asked how people are reacting, she doesn’t mince words, “They’re flipping out.” “They’re unhinged.” Then she names the trigger that keeps showing up in different costumes: “we have this iconic American halftime show and I guess it gets too black or brown for you.” And she reminds you this is not new tape. It’s the same rerun, “Remember the outrage over Beyonce? the way she performed formation,” and she points out how selective the language panic is, “If Pavarati would have been up there for the Super Bowl halftime show… doing his opera thing, they would have been good with this singing in Italian.”

She also clocks the DEI smear for what it is. Folks act like the stage is some charity slot, so she has to say it plain, “ain’t like they pulled Maria Lopez from Around the Way… and said, ‘Go up there, perform because you’re a DEI hire.’ Whatever [expletive] they think. This guy is a one of the biggest selling artists in the world.”

The modern right doesn’t need you to like them. They need you tired. They need you fragmented. They need you arguing with each other while they run the same set of plays over and over: make the public sphere feel crowded, make diversity feel like theft, make empathy feel like weakness, make cruelty feel like “common sense.”

So the culture-war moments aren’t side quests. They’re the drills.

A halftime show becomes a referendum on who counts as American. A pronoun becomes a national emergency. A Black woman with fire becomes “too divisive.” A migrant family becomes an “invasion.” DEI becomes a slur. They take ordinary human variety and turn it into a threat, because threat is what keeps their base disciplined. Fear is their conditioning. Outrage is their cardio.

And here’s the part liberals keep missing right here. The play isn’t designed to persuade the middle. It’s designed to keep the team emotionally synchronized. It gives them a common enemy, a shared story, and a reason to forgive anything their leaders do. You can indict a man for corruption, mock him for incompetence, expose him for cruelty, and it doesn’t matter if the audience has already been trained to believe the real danger is “them” taking the stage.

That’s the hate playbook. It makes the voter feel like a soldier. It makes the bully feel like a patriot.

Stop Treating Racism Like a Messaging Problem

This is where the “nice Democrat” reflex becomes fatal. Because if you think the problem is wording, you’ll keep searching for the perfect sentence. You’ll keep bargaining with people who aren’t bargaining. You’ll keep treating propaganda like a misunderstanding.

But this isn’t a misunderstanding. It’s a strategy.

You don’t beat a hate offense by issuing a nicer press release. You beat it by naming it early, refusing its frame, protecting your own players, and building enough structural power that the play doesn’t work the next time they run it. That means you stop obsessing over whether “DEI” polls badly and start asking why the public is being trained to hear equality as insult. You stop scolding your loudest truth-tellers and start backing them like they’re part of the plan.

Because here’s what’s happening in real time: while Democrats are still workshoping language, the right is stacking courts, controlling field position, and changing rules. That’s football. That’s clock management. That’s winning ugly in the trenches while the other side is arguing about sportsmanship.

What Winning Would Look Like

Reecie’s heat isn’t just critique. It’s a demand for a different posture. Not cruelty. Not nihilism. Not “become them.” A different kind of seriousness.

Winning would look like this:

• Stop isolating your fighters. When a Black woman names racism or misogyny plainly, don’t treat her like a PR problem. Treat her like a leader doing her job.

• Repeat moral language until it sticks. Not academic language. Not consultant language. Moral language. Simple. Memorable. True.

• Build bench, not vibes. State parties, school boards, election administration, legal defense funds, local media, and pipelines that last longer than one election cycle.

• Refuse the opponent’s question. Stop answering inside their frame. Stop explaining your way out of a cage they built.

• Make the other side carry the shame. They want you embarrassed. Flip it. Put the cruelty on the spotlight and leave it there.

• Treat attention like a resource. Spend it on the boring work that compounds, not the viral moment that evaporates.

Because the point of naming the hate playbook is not to make us feel smarter. It’s to make us harder to beat.

And if Reecie’s voice sounds “too much” to anybody reading, I want you to sit with why. The fire isn’t the problem. The fire is what you use when the house is already on fire.

Some of y’all keep begging for “unity,” but what you really mean is quiet. You want everybody to hold hands and hum while the other side is out back siphoning the gas out your car. You want “civility” while they’re rewriting the rulebook, redrawing the maps, stacking the courts, and laughing at your group text about “norms.” Norms? Baby, they’re running a blitz and you’re writing a manifesto about sportsmanship.

Reecie Colbert didn’t come to soothe you. She came to wake you up.

She said the hate playbook out loud. She named the cowardice. She called that “plain Jane” script what it is: a safety blanket for people who are scared to look mean, even when the moment demands backbone. And let me tell you something, if your strategy requires Black women to lower their voices so white comfort can stay intact, that ain’t strategy. That’s surrender with better grammar.

And yeah, the irony is thick enough to spread on toast. The party that begs Black women to save democracy every four damn years suddenly turns into the tone police the moment a Black woman speaks like she knows what time it is. “We need your turnout.” “We need your organizing.” “We need your labor.” But the minute she brings that same command presence to the microphone, folks start acting like she’s a customer service rep who forgot to smile.

Meanwhile, the other side has no such confusion. They don’t ask permission. They don’t apologize. They don’t hold internal workshops about whether their base might feel “unseen.” They pick a target, they repeat a lie, they push it through the system, and they go home satisfied. That’s why they keep gaining yardage while we keep collecting receipts.

Stop asking for nice. Stop demanding softness from people living in hard conditions. Stop treating politics like a brunch conversation when it’s a contact sport. Learn the play. Protect your players. Back the ones with fire. Build the line. Build the bench. And when somebody like Reecie puts the truth on tape, don’t critique her tone like you’re grading a dissertation. Take the note. Run the drill. Change your posture.

Because if we keep choosing halftime, we are going to keep losing the game. And then we’re going to sit around looking shocked, like the scoreboard is a surprise.

It’s not a surprise. It’s a pattern.

Now choose. Do you want to be comforted, or do you want to win?

If this post made you laugh, then made you mad, that’s your brain telling you it’s time to stop being a spectator.

I keep this newsletter open because I’m not interested in building a gated community. But let’s be real ya’ll, free doesn’t mean free to make. It means somebody else is covering the tab.

So here’s the deal. If you’ve been reading, nodding, forwarding screenshots, and whispering “damn… he’s right” to your phone, don’t make me come find you in the comments like Reecie would. Go paid. Help me keep this work independent, loud, and impossible to ignore.

And listen if you’re on the fence, ask yourself one question. Do you want more corporate takes that sound like warm milk, or do you want the kind of writing that makes you sit up and say “fuck it, I’m in?”

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