Hey, Stephen Miller - hello?
…reveals? The swastikas didn’t do that?
I wonder if this is the start of another effort to defuse a term by throwing it at everything until the definition gets dulled down to ‘something I don’t like’.
I remember when all their trained seals were told to keep calling all satire “Alinsky-like tactics”. None of this made any fucking sense, but because there was a Black guy in the White House, they all completely lost their fucking minds.
I had a lot of fun asking these yo-yos if they even knew who Alinsky was. I’d ask if they read the book and if they could tell me what was so bad about it, and what does “Alinksy-like tactic” even mean to them (besides: “I don’t like a Black guy in the WH”).
I would ask them if satire pre-dated Alinsky. Blank stare IRL, or they’d typically drop out of the discussion if it was online…but yeah, a lot of them seemed to be getting messaging that satire==Alinsky==bad. Probably because conservatives are notoriously bad at satire - both in creating it and understanding it. In any case, they seem to have given up on that stupid effort.
They are so goddamn good at that, especially with the modern Internet and social media as they are
That’s talking about a literal thing that happens in your brain in real time when hearing a word every few seconds. I guess as a metaphor for this tactic it works.
But the one they’re doing is serving the same purpose as “accusation in a mirror” but by a slightly different method. Just make sure you’re talking about the other side in as dramatic and extreme terms as they’re talking about you; it doesn’t need to make sense. To anyone not really paying attention it’s all just background noise, of both sides calling each other nasty names because that’s what political people do.
Most Republicans figured out how to do a version of this when they were in kindergarten. Kick the other kid when the teacher’s not looking, then fall on the floor fake crying. Worst case, you get a “both of you, stop it!” If you’re lucky, you might even convince the teacher the other kid started it.
It is a mechanism that can be used as a propaganda technique. Although this is closer to milieu control, Vance is using the terminology to signal his affinity to a particular segment of ice.
