Quote:
Originally Posted by aarono2690
One thing that REALLY pisses off deplorables is supporting ANTIFA. Try it the next time you get into a debate over civility and it eventually gets to the topic of ANTIFA vs Nazis. A lot of Trump supporters connect with this issue at a visceral level and it seems to trigger a strong emotional response that pointing out Trump's corruption can never do to them.
I recall one guy trying to get me to admit ANTIFA was bad and on the same level as Nazis because they use violence. I pointed out that I LOVE watching Masterlock padlocks connecting with Nazi domes and it short-circuited him. Just yuck it up and don't give them an inch in the conversation. They want you to say violence is NEVER okay and that both sides are bad actors - do NOT do this.
Their only counter is to further push that both sides are equally bad or eventually admit they side more with Nazis. When this debate occurs in front of an audience it can produce some interesting results as Billy slowly reveals he's a Nazi sympathizer.
I'm a little wary of the narrative that Fox News drives the right-wing into fits of sputtering rage. I've long argued that it's kind of the other way around, that there's a huge market demand for sputtering rage among right-wingers that Fox News and AM radio simply provides and that Fox's role is often to corral the herd into mainstream Republican Party interests. Sometimes blaming Fox News for deplorables is like blaming Subway for people being hungry.
But this is one case where I'm pretty confident the average deplorable is being whipped into frothy rage about Antifa due precisely to right-wing propaganda and agitprop coming mostly from Fox News. Fox and Friends and their nightly people just play random videos of anyone in a black mask lighting fires and chucking rocks and battling cops or whatever, Antifa or not, on infinite loop as they editorialize and display chyrons that present Antifa as anarchists bent on cop murder or whatever. Deplorables have no first hand knowledge of Antifa, the average mainstream Democrat and media outlet is going to stand meekly opposed to them and finger wag in Antifa's direction that there's no place for street violence, and not really give them much coverage since they're more inconvenient to conventional Democrats than anything.
It leaves the entire narrative for defining them open to Fox News, scary videos, and right-wing pundits.
Plumb around the average deplorable's mind about what they know about Antifa and if they're over say 50 years old, it's straight rote repetition from whatever Fox's pundits are saying, they have no frame or knowledge about Antifa outside of that. Contrast that with other elements of our political culture (e.g., the welfare state apparatus, race relations, the drug war, whatever) where there's a whole informal cottage industry of right-winger communication like chain emails and country club or water cooler chatter, cultural institutions (e.g., right-wing or conservative churches, ingrained southern racism) or personal experience that is informing them. Antifa is different and all they know is what they learned from the Fox and Friends and Tucker and Laura Ingrham.
Last edited by DVaut1; 08-16-2018 at 02:14 AM.