Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:30 PM | August 04, 2024
meme

I am deeply worried that the compressed election cycle will allow the mainstream media and the brainwashing complex which includes Big Tech and social media to carry Kamala Harris to victory on their backs.

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Kamala herself is a mental midget with no political skills to speak of, but she has behind her a brainwashing machine with decades of experience and trillions of dollars of infrastructure behind it. 

But Kamala's political skills or her electoral prospects are not my focus here: there is one advantage to the compressed timeline, and that is the need for the brainwashing machine to drop all subtlety and use all its tricks in one massive push. We can see the machine work in a way that has been more difficult before. 

I didn't do any counting, but somebody else did and found that when you add up the use of the word "weird" it was used in the media hundreds of times in just two days. 

Hundreds. Two days. 

That, my friends, is how brainwashing works. You also saw it on social media when every leftist started using it simultaneously and constantly. 

Normally this sort of campaign would be ramped up over days and weeks, building until the impression is built organically in people's minds. The point would be to avoid any jarring sense of discontinuity and let the idea become settled in people's minds. 

Yesterday (and presumably today) the new brainwashing line is that Trump is "afraid" to debate Kamala. The claim is everywhere, and you might think that it is so absurd as to not be worth considering. 

But that isn't the point at all. Both of these lines of attack and their constant repetition are designed to undermine the advantages Republicans have--Democrats are undeniably weird, and Trump is undeniably courageous. The goal is to program these facts out of the brains of people who pay attention casually and don't think deeply about the issues. 

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Trump is afraid of nothing. He walks into the most hostile environments in the world with a smile on his face and a determination to win. 

The last time Trump debated a Democrat, the victim had to leave the field utterly defeated. Biden was mortally wounded. Then Trump got shot and stood up in defiance. Then he went to the Black Journalists Association to get ripped, when Kamala demurred because she won't take a single question from anybody, even friendly journalists. 

But by repeating "afraid"--and the word is everywhere right now from the Establishment--the idea is planted in people's minds in a way that precludes analysis. Nobody is thinking about these issues deeply. It's just in the air. 

For most people, politics are about vibes, not reasoned analysis. We outsource the analysis to others and choose based on a general feeling. 

Brainwashing is all about shaping those vibes and framing how people think about issues. The frame determines so much. 

Not too long ago, Kamala's bizarre inability to speak intelligently or not cackle in an irritating manner was universally seen as a political weakness; today, we are told that her idiocy is charming, her cackling is joyful, and that she is the new Jack Kennedy in Kamalot. 

Will such concentrated brainwashing work? I don't know. 

But I do know it has to be countered, and we have to think carefully about how to do it. 

One key thing is to stick to the basics and not get distracted. Kamala has incredible weaknesses, not the least of which is that nobody thinks the country is going in the right direction. We already know that the brainwashing doesn't work when concrete facts that everybody experiences every day contradict what the Establishment wants us to believe. 

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The "weird" stuff is pervasive but not deeply impacting. Concrete reality is on our side, and as we saw with the collapse of the Biden is "sharp as a tack" campaign, you can break through the brainwashing. 

But that means we shouldn't get bogged down in a "Yes, he is" "No, he isn't" argument. We need to fight on our ground. We can make fun of the "weird" or "afraid" arguments but as a brushback, not a core message.


White Dudes

You can't counter brainwashing with arguments because the people we are talking to are brainwashed. Concrete reality, though, breaks through. 

There is no point and it is unfair to have contempt for people who have been brainwashed. In general they simply haven't thought that much about the issue at hand because they have outsourced doing so to trusted, and they think reliable sources. We all do this on most issues--really, we do--and only when we get slapped in the face do we question those sources. 

I used to believe public health officials, but the pandemic response disabused me of that illusion. It also disabused a vast number of others' illusions. Doctors and public health officials have seen trust in them drop by 30-40% over the past few years for that reason. 

Reality does break through to lots of people. Arguments don't because people trust "experts" until they have a reason not to. 

That has happened with economic "experts" who keep insisting our economy is strong--we all have direct experience that says we are hurting. 

So, focus on reminding people of reality instead of telling them they are wrong. 

You keep us publishing. We get suppressed by Google. Advertisers are steered away from us. We are "unsafe" or "spreaders of disinformation," according to Big Tech. 

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