…it became a rallying cry for moderate centrist Dems to put progressive activists in their place.
The phrase didn’t objectively do any harm at all. The backlash from moderate dems however, has meant billions of dollars more funding to corrupt and inept police forces around the country.
In fact, imho, if the Dems had embraced the message behind defund, they would have won the House.
I think the “blowing this up” over a relatively benign tweet does more hurt than anything AOC will ever do. She has her audience. That audience isn’t just in her district. Millions of people are crying out for progressive leadership that they aren’t getting from the centre. What she said is fine.
I just watched bit of that third video, but it opens with thirty seconds of people dancing on the stage? Mussolini picking wheat on a farm?
Yeah, those bits? Those casual normal everyday images of people doing casual normal everyday things? That’s still facist propaganda.
You apparently dont get GOP mailers or see the ads. Not moderate Dems, GOPers using that term to scare their voters into thinking the Dems will get rid of the cops, and crime will run rampant.
…yeah, but what the heck are you going to do about that? This is what they do. They take everything. And twist everything. They literally have talking-point factories, that distribute daily talking points far and wide so that everybody sings from the same hymn-book every day. Its why their messaging is so consistent.
One of the goals here is to force the dems to change their behaviour. It’s a strategy. They’ll fling shit out there to see what sticks. And when something sticks they double down on that.
Defund became what it did not because of what the GOP did, but because the moderate establishment decided to fight it. They blew it up. They kept it in the news cycles. Then President Biden put the nail in the coffin at the SOTU. BILLIONS more in funding. The NYPD are over $800 million over budget just in overtime this year.
You can’t put the blame for this on a slogan. People made these decisions.
…in case anyone doesn’t think this is happening, here’s a random example I found through a quick search. Compare it if you can to what was being said on the talk shows, etc at the time.
Fascist propaganda promotes a fascist idea while putting a positive spin on it. Usually that idea is only lightly fascist, and thus sounds more reasonable at first.
These ads do not appear to do that. In fact, they appear to be calling out the politically conservative version of Christianity, saying that you can be a Christian without being a bigot.
The logic that these ads are somehow supposed to push people towards fascism just don’t make sense. It’s like saying that an ad that says “trans rights are human rights” is secretly being used to convince people to be TERFs. Fascist propaganda doesn’t undermine itself.
She didn’t say anything about it being a fascist organization backing it. She said, and I quote:
Something tells me Jesus would not spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign
That says that she’s accusing the ads of being fascist, but putting a positive spin on it. It’s not saying “the ad has a good message, but is put out by bad people.”
What it does is make it seem like promoting a tolerate Jesus is actually a front of fascism. It does not tell people to look at who made the ad.
…bolding mine. That’s what I get when I watched those videos.
Of course: I live in a country where nearly half of us state we have no religious affiliation, and outside the church any sort of outward displays of religion are generally given the side-eye.
So for me, who has been watching the American decline into Authoritarianism with a detached but morbid fascination, the adverts are so horrifically dogmatic in terms of how bad they are I forget that this kind of this dangerous rhetoric for a large number of Americans is entirely normal.
Its why you don’t have universal healthcare. Why you have the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Its why unions are demonised. You are subjected to relentless waves of propaganda like this to the point that you just can’t see it.
None of what you put in bold is in the ad. Literally the argument being made in this thread is that the ads themselves aren’t fascist at all, and that the issue is who made the ads, and how they might have a fascist agenda.
The argument is that they may be promoting positive things, only to do a bait and switch later to promote fascist things once they have a captive audience.
…that isn’t how advertising or propaganda works. One of the most successful ad campaigns here in NZ was the Fernleaf butter ads. It barely featured the product, in fact later ads never mentioned the product at all. It was story. Music. Vibe.
The adverts were all about vibe.
Are you imagining that one day this Christian organization is going to suddenly reveal “SURPRISE! WE WERE FACISTS ALL ALONG!!! Click the link to find out more!”
This could be explicitly positioned propaganda. Or it could be something else, like copaganda. But the “bait and switch” here isn’t going to be anything explicit. Its essentially about vibes. Positive association with that message. Capture people into the ecosystem. Send them down a rabbithole of ticktok videos and facebook groups that gradually preach increasing levels of evangelism.
Let’s say the Nazis put out an ad with puppies and rainbows and said, “National Socialism, we’re about puppies and rainbows.”
And then AOC, or her 1940s German equivalent said, “Something tells me puppies and rainbows would not spend millions of marks on World Cup ads to make fascism look benign.” Get it?
Now imagine that I am somewhat of a bigot, but still consider myself a christian. And suppose I just watched 30 seconds, of pictures of extremely angry black men, veins popping out of the sides of their necks, along with some pictures of similarly angry white men, followed by a little bit of text telling me to love my enemy. Is that going to make me feel well disposed towards to other side? Or will it rather reinforce my belief that black men are angry and dangerous, but make me resolve to tell myself not to hate them for they know not what they do. The same way I shouldn’t hate a rabid dog.
Images, particularly violent ones are much more influential than words. If you want to promote peace and understanding, you show images of your “enemies” that break the stereotype, not ones that reinforce it.
Under this definition, Hitler’s Brown Shirts before 1933 wouldn’t have been considered fascist because they weren’t a government, and Hitler wasn’t in elected office. Under your definition of fascism we can’t talk about it until it’s already too late, so it’s not a very useful definition. (Well, it’s useful to fascists, who favor that same definition, because helps ensure we don’t call them what they are until it’s too late to do anything about it).
It’s much more useful to refer to the characteristics of fascism so we can identify trends in the direction of fascism, before they actually take power.
There seem to be two or three questions here, both of which have clear answers to me:
Did AOC call the ads themselves fascist? No, she said that they essentially candy coating in order to make fascism look benign. I can sort of see how one could misread what she said to claim this, but I find it a really odd interpretation.
Did AOC say the ads are worse than the Nazis? No, that’s just a total misread of what she said.
Does AOC think the people behind the ads are fascist? Yes, that much is clear to me.
People here are arguing all of these at once (or, at least 1 and 3. Only the OP seems to think 2), and it’s confusing to my little brain.
It’s the interpretation that allows Christians to feel persecuted by her, so there’s a lot of motivated reasoning that goes into getting to that interpretation.
It’s an interpretation that gives people who hate AOC ammunition to use against her, even more motivated reasoning there.
Yes, and that is what she was trying to make clear to the public. Which is needed, as even in this thread, people just aren’t getting it, claiming to not understand how a fascist organization could make ads that don’t involve genocide.
Let’s say there’s an ad that shows a bunch of scenes of boys being coached in basketball, going on camping trips and bike rides. It shows the boys looking up to the men who are teaching and mentoring them.
It has a tagline, “A boy needs a man in his life.”
A bit paternalistic, but possibly wholesome, right?
Then you find out it’s funded by NAMBLA. Does that change your perspective on the ad at all?
I like AOC, but this is not the hill to die on. The ads told people to love as Jesus did. True that it was paid by some people with whom we disagree and may well be terrible people, but the message of the ads was fine. This is not a good look for her or the party, so I wish she’d drop it. The last thing we need is to give ammunition to the right wing culture shock troops.
If you are into that sort of religiosity, sure, the message of the ad was fine. If you aren’t into that sort of thing, it’s preachy and sanctimonious, but that’s not what the problem is.
But, just so we are clear, you would support a wholesome ad about men and boys playing and learning together that was funded by NAMBLA? You’d tell people to drop it if they raised objections to it?
If someone said that it made pedophilia look benign, you’d counter by saying that there was no sexual abuse depicted in that ad?
What’s not a good look for the party is people in the party levying such ridiculous accusations against others in their party. Anyone that buys into the misrepresentations of what she said as the OP has are the ones handing out ammo.
