It’s like they wrote out the point they wanted to make and then went back and added a minimum of two scary words per sentence even if they have nothing to do with that point. Like instead of “The Democrats want to cut your social security” it’s “The fake news antifa Democrats want to cut your social security.” Or how they call corona shit like “the Wuhan Chinese Communism virus”
Do you think this is a generally effective way of communicating or does it depend on your base being a bunch of perpetually terrified white boomers
I think it’s one of those things like advertising where we think it doesn’t work, but it obviously works on some level or there wouldn’t be a whole industry of it.
I think part of it is just making the unconscious associations. Like I do often think of them as the Do-Nothing-Democrats and one of the first things I think about Liz Warren is her lying about her heritage partially because Trump hammered in Pocahontas so much.
Also crazy how Trump co-opted fake news when it initially entered the cultural lexicon as a way to talk about places like Breitbart and Republican boomer Facebook.
Trump’s childish nicknames for his political opponents were so effective because they so elegantly convey their weaknesses (or “weaknesses”, according to a chud). In 2016 we had “Lyin’ Ted” (Cruz was to the 2016 GOP primary what Buttigieg was to the 2020 primary), “Low-energy Jeb”, “Little Marco”. In 2020, in addition to “Lyin’ Liz”/“Pocahontas” we had “Sleepy Joe” and “Crazy Bernie”. Some elements of the online left have also taken up this convention because it works: “CIA Pete”/“Mayo Pete”, “It’s Klobbering time”, “Cop-mala”, etc.
It’s crazy how roastable Donald is and no one did it. Only bourgeois pricks have no roasting abilities. Like he’s the easiest target ever, and if you got him good he would have a fucking meltdown because he’s an insecure narcissist. Like the dude is so dumb and has the vocabulary of a child, and they didn’t do shit with it
Dems tried to roast Trump by pointing out the fact that he was stealing valor from billionaires who honestly extracted value from their workers instead of ripping off creditors; this obviously failed because this only makes Trump look bad to other rich people, and to the lumpen and petty-bourgie chuds this makes Trump look more badass because the criticism promotes his carefully-curated false image as some sort of crass nouveau-riche Gatsby-like figure who got rich by gaming the system and scamming the rich liberal assholes they think are all pedophiles anyway.
The Dems also tried to roast him by painting him as if he were some sort of Manchurian candidate, a de-facto puppet of Vladimir Putin. This didn’t land despite Trump’s existing business connections with Putin because Trump was easily able to fire back against Clinton for taking Saudi money and against Biden for his son making shady deals in Ukraine. “Tu quoque” has always been Trump’s best defense, and the reason why Dems and neolibs tend not to point out more obvious criticisms that make “their faves” (Clinton, Pelosi, etc.) look just as bad or worse.
The best comebacks of the childish variety they had was “Drumpf”, “Cheeto Mussolini”, “Orange man bad”, etc. “Cheeto Mussolini” is the closest one that actually sort of works to correctly pejoratively convey Trump’s proto-fascist politics, but it was often abbreviated to “The Cheeto” and robbed of any meaningful critique. Likewise, “Drumpf” was originally formulated as a direct attack on Trump’s nouveau-riche branding but most forgot about that and it too turned into an empty signifier.
Of course the Dem leadership refused to run with any of the more puerile insults directly because they didn’t want to get their hands dirty and look too uncivil, despite the Mussolini comparison actually having some potential political weight behind it that even the CNN-watching rubes can grasp.
Honestly, I don’t really mind the hootin’ chuds. They’re entertaining. Now, the hollerin’ chuds, on the other hand,
It’s like they took rhetoric lessons from the invisible SEO text at the bottom of an early '00s wordpress blog.
Channel stuffing?
Overloading with info to distract and confuse. I think Steve Bannon is known for that.
I said it a bit sarcastically but the other words are just dogwhistles to cement the manichian worldview. Look at all rightwing media and it’s all fear-based where they’re constantly being victimized.*
*Unless it’s about the stock market and it is doing well then everything with re:economy is peachy. If it’s faltering then scare tactics point viewers/listeners to gold.
