I cannot work out what exactly plays off here.

By walking away, Bernie gave the reporter a cue that he wasn’t going to allow her to continue wasting his time by repeating a loaded question, and that if she wanted an interview, she couldn’t do that. She apparently got the message.

But I think what he does is usually used as a haggling tactic.

That’s a pretty astute observation.

I wonder where he learnt how to do this.

For what it’s worth, what he did is similar to a customer at an auto dealership who walks away when they feel a salesperson is wasting their time.

I noticed that though he raises his voice a bit when he’s getting into the more sort of territorial part of the interaction while she spouts her talking points, when he actually gets to his own point he lowers his voice a bit.

This is really clever. Not only does he know that he’ll get his point across better with less volume and stress in his voice, but he compartmentalizes the two parts of the conversation and draws a clear delineation between them. On the one hand there’s the sort of social-territorial posturing where the words aren’t really carrying factual meaning so much as being a means of claiming space. This is the arena where Fox’s reporter is comfortable, though clearly Bernie knows his way around as well.

When he starts bringing up his own substantive points, he does so at a lower volume with an even tone. It feels like a totally different interview, because the Fox reporter literally doesn’t even know how to exist in this space.

She’s trained to compete on that level of pecking at one another to vie for status. Right-wing politics has become entirely about dragging the discussion down to that level. But if you manage to bounce right off of it and bring it back to reality the way Bernie does here, they have nothing.

Literally her only move is to bring it back down into posturing, but he already beat her in that arena.

This is the way forward.

It’s called: rhetoric

Many books have been written about it in the last 3000 years, since Ancient Greece.

The reporter tries to bring down the discussion to a sentiment-based shouting match (also part of rhetoric, called “trolling” in recent times), while Bernie answers by shouting over her points (“I can shout as loud as you”), then goes back to a clear delivery of his own points.

When one party has no solid arguments, while the other does, it’s the dynamic that comes out:

• one side tries to confuse the listener
• the other tries to transmit summarized arguments

Business/politics as usual, really.