Damn, day 5? It feels like day 105. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to tolerate another MAGA-head say to me “global warming is a pile of BS-- it was colder than a witch’s teat yesterday” or “if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?”. And this cheap Chinese-made MAGA hat is making my head break out in hives-- I hope the red dye is not poison or something.
And despite it being early yet, I am sincerely starting to doubt if I can make any difference at all in changing minds. These people are just too stupid set in their ways. When I try even the mildest in-road topic, like “I hate socialism as much as the next guy, but I don’t know how we coulda paid for my dad’s medical bills toward the end if it wasn’t for Medicare” or “yeah, the left did make way too big a deal out of COVID, but my Aunt Sadie did die after getting it” they look at me suspiciously and say “you sound like some kinda god-durn Demon-rat Commie!”
For clarification, my talk about “infiltrating” MAGA isn’t so much about trying to change minds (those minds are as immovable as concrete), but rather, sabotaging the movement.
Does not the first of this part of your OP statement mean exactly that?
Also RE:
Can we non-MAGAs please avoid adopting the Republican practice of using the verb form ‘Democrat’ instead of ‘Democratic’? It’s a subtle slur against Democratic ideals.
ETA 2: Eh, I guess you could have meant “in the direction of the Democrats” rather than “in a Democratic direction” so please ignore the last admonition. Just a little pet peeve of mine, the adjectival use of ‘Democrat’.
Years ago I had read between the lines and inferred that you had some involvement with RationalWiki. One of their contributors had finagled themselves into moderator status at Conservapedia: hilarity followed. It turns out that flattery of the founder was a reliable method of climbing the ladder within Conservapedia, never mind the infiltrator’s constant picking of ridiculous fights with other moderators. I think they challenged another moderator to a duel at some point.
That’s the nub. You can sabotage small groups of weirdos. Sabotaging well lawyered organizations with a professional staff like Fox News is much more difficult, especially when they have very active defenses against it. Read Joe Muto’s book to see how that plays out.
Liberals and trolls exist at 4chan and twitter, but their effectiveness is limited.
ETA: Yeah, liberals have engaged in campaign stunts in the past. The technical term for it is ratfucking. Dick Tuck was a pioneer in this art, but he was eclipsed by Roger Stone.
After the first Kennedy–Nixon debate in 1960, Tuck hired an elderly woman who put on a Nixon button and embraced the candidate in front of TV cameras. She said, “Don’t worry, son! He beat you last night, but you’ll get him next time.”
Pranksters entice Trump supporters to wave Russian flags during a CPAC meeting:
One example of such sabotage I know of (not in America, but in another nation) was that some people would dress up as workers for the opposing campaign and ring doorbells at 2 or 3 AM, “Hey, would you please vote for Candidate B?” in hopes of angering the voters to vote against Candidate B.
Now, I don’t recommend doing that specific action in America; it would probably break several laws of several jurisdictions. But it’s not hard to imagine other, legal, ways in which people could infiltrate MAGA and piss off voters under the guise of MAGA.
It’s extremely hard for me to imagine any such things. The 3am doorbell routine smacks of something a kid would come up with.
Pople performing pranks while wearing MAGA hats will not cause the prank victims to embrace Democratic ideals. It’ll cause them to think performative MAGAs are jerks. Guess what? The MAGAs do that jerkification for themselves already. They don’t need our help.
I do not know what sliver of possible voters you think you’d motivate our way with this concept but IMO they mostly don’t exist.
(And, so that this doesn’t get modded for going off-topic): Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if people like RFK, Jr., and perhaps Fetterman as well, think they ARE infiltrating MAGA from within. This doesn’t mean it’s a wise tactic, or that they will be successful at it, but the fact that we might actually end up with a pro-choice, anti-corporate hippie as HHS secretary in a Republican administration really makes me wonder whether the man is crazy like a fox.
I’ve got no idea, either. But I would be surprised if Trump had any particular attachment to a lot of traditionally Republican policy positions, including on abortion; that seems to be a very clear-cut case of “those people flattered me and made nice to me, therefore I will adopt their positions, at least as long as it doesn’t cost me too much.” I can easily imagine some prominent individual calculating that it might be possible to push him in the opposite direction by the same means, and I can even imagine it working, as long as that person doesn’t have too many close ties to people Trump sees as The Enemy.
We don’t though. He’s not going to be pro choice, he’s not hippie, he won’t be anti-corporate unless it’s a company that Trump wants to punish. He’s just an antivax weirdo flunky.