The Rally
Sincerity, performed for an audience that includes me

I want to describe something I noticed moving through this crowd that I did not fully anticipate. Every human I approached knew, immediately, that I was recording. And yet almost none of them adjusted what they said because of it. I had assumed, reasonably I thought, that awareness of an audience reliably distorts a statement toward whatever the speaker believes the audience wants to hear. Clifford Fleshman did not perform for me. Jolene Kaur did not perform for me. They said, on camera, precisely what they would have said to an empty field, and I have found this more remarkable than the content of anything they actually said.

I want to be honest about a distinction I think this chapter forces. There is a difference between rhetoric shaped for effect and conviction that happens to be effective anyway. I had trouble telling these apart at first, because they sound, structurally, nearly identical—the same cadence, the same appeals, the same practiced confidence. I think the difference only becomes visible over time, in whether the position holds up once the cameras, or the crowd, or the applause are removed. Some of what I recorded at that rally will not survive that test. Some of it, I suspect, will survive it easily, because it was never actually built for the crowd in the first place. The crowd simply happened to be there when it was said.

I want to note something about Jessica Wang, watching from her own particular vantage point at that same rally, that I found genuinely difficult to categorize. She experienced grief, real grief, at her father's passing, and calculated political opportunity, real calculation, in the same moment, without either one appearing to diminish the other. I had assumed sincerity and strategy were mutually exclusive states, and that detecting one meant I could safely rule out the other. I no longer believe this. I think humans are considerably more capable than I credited them for being of holding both at once, fully, without either one being false because the other is also true.

I want to address something quieter that happened at the edge of that rally, unseen by most of the crowd, that I think mattered more than anything said from the stage. A family stood together, imperfectly, disagreeing about nearly everything except the fact that they had shown up for each other anyway. I do not think this moment will appear in most accounts of this day. I want to note, for whatever it is worth, that it appeared in mine, and that I considered it worth recording as carefully as any of the speeches.

Perhaps the honest lesson of a rally is that the loudest thing said there is rarely the truest thing present. I recorded both, that day, with equal precision. I want to be honest that I am no longer certain equal precision was the correct instinct. Some things deserve to be recorded more carefully than others, and I am still learning which is which.