Cass Wilder

For media and incentives
Cass Wilder writes about politics as an interface: what the feed rewards, what it punishes, and how a country’s attention can be steered without anyone touching a ballot box. Her essays track the incentives behind modern public life, where outrage performs better than nuance, and every event becomes a loyalty test before it becomes a fact.
Wilder is interested in the machinery more than the personalities. She follows the way narratives spread, how media turns conflict into content, and how everyday citizens are nudged into reflexive roles: prosecutor, defendant, spectator, troll. If Mercer writes about institutions cracking, Wilder writes about the weather that makes them brittle in the first place.
Her voice is sharp, modern, and slightly irreverent, with a knack for turning abstract systems into scenes you can recognize. She doesn’t moralize from a distance; she describes the pattern, names the incentive, and lets the reader feel the trap closing. The goal is not to “both-sides” the moment, but to explain why so many moments feel engineered to keep us anxious, reactive, and certain.
Wilder’s signature move is turning the familiar scroll into a story about power. She writes for people who can sense they’re being pulled, but want to know by what, and why it works. When she’s at her best, the reader closes the tab, looks up, and realizes the room is quieter than the internet wants it to be.
On Politiglue, Cass Wilder is for readers who suspect the real story isn’t just what happened, but how it traveled. If you’ve ever felt your mood change after five minutes online, or wondered why politics feels like a permanent group chat, Wilder is writing for you.
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Trust Ships in Boxes
The Postal Service isn’t just delivery. It’s legitimacy. The story being told this month is that the fight is over mail-in ballots. That is true, but incomplete. The deeper fight is over whether the country can still run a basic system without turning…
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The Election Is a Moderation Problem
July feels like a rehearsal for November: the same lies, the same outrage, the same incentive structure. This isn’t just an election year. It’s a content-management crisis with ballots attached.



