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Are Republicans shamelessly sexually-humiliating their opponents enough to win this election?
I’ve long held the belief that the opposite of slut-shaming is incel-shaming. A woman's reputation is damaged if she sleeps around, but a man's reputation is damaged if he is deemed a weird incel who can’t get laid. Recently, the Democrats launched a “weird incel" attacking strategy against JD Vance. Tim Walz alluded to a fabricated story about JD Vance fucking a couch in his first speech as VP. This is wholly fabricated: the origin is a twitter user who made up a paragraph from Vance's book, something easily checked. But the meme was astroturfed regardless, and Walz shamelessly referenced it in his first speech. Last night, 5 of the top 10 default posts on Reddit’s /r/All were references to Waltz’s remark.
The strategy is in line with the Democrat push to label Trump “weird”. But it actually seems to cross a line. It is bullying in an especially purified form. It’s the sort of thing you would hear in a middle school, where a bully ostracizes a student by making up a story wholecloth and having his friends repeat it. The bully knows the accusation is false, but the point is to say it confidently and shamelessly where others can hear it and join the ostracizion to protect their reputation. There’s talk about Trump being a “bully”, but nothing he has said has come close to the shameless slander against Vance. Calling Hillary “crooked” is par for the course of political messaging and doesn’t actually impact her reputation. Making fun of McCain for being captured as a PoW also doesn’t really affect McCain’s reputation, and if anything harms Trump’s. Trump usually exaggerates something true, but the attack against Vance is wholly false in origin.
I checked in on the incels over at 4chan to see what were saying about this. And I actually found an insightful analysis:
It can also be noted that the attack against Vance has an element of sexual harassment. What would our “cultural elites” (D) say if Republicans went all-in on a story about Kamala Harris violating the intern’s Oval Office laundry machine? Or that she used a priceless piece of White House memorabilia as a dildo without cleaning it off after? This would just be shameless sexual harassment, right? But so is the official DNC strategy against Vance. It’s harassment for the purpose of humiliating someone sexually to change voter perception via shame response.
This sort of sexual shaming tactic seems to be the standard now whenever there's a group of majority men. And that's what the Republican party is now- the "daddy party" vs the "mommy party" of the Democrats. It seems odd to "incel shame" a guy who's married and has kids, but I guess it can still work on undecided voters who look like him. It doesn't work on Trump who openly bragged about all the crazy affairs he had over the years. And I don't think it works in reverse- slut shaming is just a bad luck for anyone now. It's like chemical warfare- even if it "works," it hurts your own reputation so much that it's just not worth it.
The better attack line against Democrats now is that they're just kind of stupid. We see a lot of voters marching in mobs, chanting slogans, and Kamala Harris fits right into that "passionate suburban mom" crowd. But absolutely nothing of substance from them on any real issue. I guess the plan is for her to just be a figurehead and let the bureaucrats do their thing. You know, the grown ups in the room, not the people elected by those stupid "voters" with their crazy democracy system.
I also prefer this line. It's also impossible not to reflect on the state of rhetoric;
if it wasn't for that darn age-35 law, we could run 10 yr olds for president and have the ultimate candidate!
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