Tornado Alley (PROG)

[oldberkeley]

Limbaugh doesn't just call people names. He promotes language that deliberately dehumanizes his targets. Like the sophisticated propagandist Josef Goebbels, he creates rhetorical frames -- and the bigger the lie, the more effective -- inciting listeners to view people they disagree with as sub-humans. His longtime favorite term for women, "femi-Nazi," doesn't even raise eyebrows anymore, an example of how rhetoric spreads when unchallenged by coarsened cultural norms.

This is the key concept to understand and appreciate.

Assume that your target group is not too bright or sophisticated and keep telling them a very big lie.

It has worked all through recorded history, it still works now.