Make drinking game of "yeah, that applies to current events".

https://twitter.com/jhb0034/status/1119376632723193866

As promised, Image for the Twitter-incompatible:

Republican campaign consultants. Conservative media hosts. Republican speech writers. Conservative pundits.

They have all spent their careers in Republican messaging and conservative media. They've spent decades wooing, building, and feeding a base that has become Trump's base.

They scare-mongered and scandal-mongered and played to all the bigotries and pet peeves, and called it "playing hardball". They wanted to get conservative Republicans elected, and there was no part of that job that involved "dialing it back." They painted Democrats as supervillains: utterly-corrupt, moral degenerates out to destroy the nation and all that's good and holy to get their voters all hot-blooded and into the voting booth.

But the drawback is: When you paint the story that way, it's supposed to end with you bringing the bad guys to justice. They rot in jail, or better yet get hanged or fried. Blow up the Death Star. Drop the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The Enemy surrenders unconditionally and their symbols get blown up.

Your audience wants this:

But they never get it.


When you tell that story for decades, continually amping it up to keep the audience's blood at a rolling boil, you create an expectation that you can never really deliver on. You can justify decades of investigations and re-investigations and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-investigations, but that's not going turn up anything that will hold up in court. So you put yourself into the position of portraying the other side as unbearably evil and an active threat, and then don't do anything about it. The base still has their hot buttons pushed, still believes every word of it, they just start thinking you're ineffectual at best, or more likely are part of the problem.

Conservatives have purposely whipped up this extremist frenzy to give them the margin of victory. They've been punishing any Republican who didn't fall in line since the 70s when they started ousting Rockefeller Republicans. It started decades ago, but they've been on a precise trajectory to Trump since they hailed Rush Limbaugh as the "majority maker" of the 1994 election and Newt Gingrich accused Democrats of being "the enemy of normal Americans".

Every NeverTrumper who gets air time or page space helped make this happen. Yet we're supposed to pay attention to people who devoted their professional lives to political vandalism and willful blindness. Unless their excuse is that they're just f***ing idiots.

It drags the conversation in their direction, so win-win, for them.




A reminder: I'm posting something on this every day, because it needs to be pushed back every day.
Don't quibble over fine points and definitions, go right at them and their bullshit.

Repeat it they way they repeated "tax and spend" and "soft on crime". They weren't true, but repetition made those themes stick in peoples' minds.

Any time a Republican cries "socialism", I want this phrase to be what pops into peoples' heads.

Whatever you think of AOC, reallocating her office's staff budget so that the lowest-rung people are able to have an income they can live on without being trust-fund babies is not "socialism and communism on display."

But the pResident's most trusted advisors call it that anyway.


https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1100018209690923008

I'm not a socialist, but I get called one anyway -- by Republicans. The same is true for nearly all of you.

They call everything that puts checks and balances on the power and abuses of wealth 'socialism'. But checks and balances are not 'socialist', they're as American as apple pie.

They do it to cause a stampede, to get people running the way the want. The boy who cried wolf, the elephant who cried 'socialism'.

Don't get bogged down splitting hairs over definitions. No matter what we do they're going to call us that. Don't hem and haw and duck and weave. Deny their very premise.

Face it head on and swat it down. Every day, all the time.

Or they'll just keep doing it.

Needs to be said every day. Need a bumper sticker argument? Here it is.

I'm resigned to the fact that most Americans don't "do" nuance about the word "socialism." I'm not out to educate people about what it is and isn't or what varieties of it there are. I'm not one, but I get called that by Republicans. I'm normally up for interesting debates, but this one is pointless. It's debating a brick wall, and the only thing to do is pry the bricks apart.

I'm just out to remind people that if you believe what Republicans today say counts as 'socialism' then we spent at least half of the 20th century as a 'socialist' nation. That's nuts, and it needs to be said over and over again.

The Movement Conservatism that became the Republicans' ruling ideology always hated social programs, but had particular venom for ones that worked. After all, successful ones argued for more, which to them was an abomination.

To them, it was all 'socialism' and 'communism'.

It hasn't changed much. If anything it's gotten worse as they've come closer to grabbing all the marbles: doing away with the last remnants of the New Deal and packing the courts with operatives who will make conservatively correct rulings.

They'll rail against "European socialism" as if they were talking about Warsaw Pact police states and not the same industrialized democracies that constitute the Free World that we used to be 'leader' of.

They invoked 'socialism' when Obama proposed a small increase in income taxes for people way up on the income scale. Taxes were higher for 6 of Reagan's 8 years, with a top rate of 50%, but somehow a change from 35% to 39.6% for taxable income above $400,000 counted as raising the red flag of revolution.

They can't win with their policies, so they scare. That's why the cultivated the base they did.

Anything that helps ordinary people is called 'socialist', conjuring the spectre of an alien ideology from a foreign land.


But checks and balances on the power of money and wealth aren't socialism. They are just that, checks and balances, and are as American as apple pie.


I don't have a cable news network. I don't have a radio show. I don't have Wingnut Welfare funding. But observing those over the years drove in the power of repetition.

So repeat:
They call everything they don't like 'socialism'
They call everything they don't like 'socialism'
They call everything they don't like 'socialism'

They call everything they don't like 'socialism'



and nobody, but nobody, is exempt from being accused of being a weak-kneed backslider. Everything they don't like is 'socialism'.



1976 book, from Reagan's bid to get Republican nomination instead of Ford

A new recurring series. 'Recurring' as in every day, because it needs to be said. Every day.
Don't let them call the tune, don't let their framing stand.

https://www.thefader.com/2019/02/06/new-boondocks-comics-2019-trump-hillary-michael-jackson-r-kelly-charlamagne