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Both of those things are being done. I think what Trump has to do instead is go all-in on videographic propaganda. His opponents are cherrypicking the most emotionally-potent videos of death they can find and then exaggerating the details. So he needs to find the most emotionally-potent video of death he can find and then exaggerate the details. I’m sure his team can find a high fidelity video of an innocent American crying in a pitiable way while gruesomely slain by an illegal alien. He just needs to martyr-maxx these videos constantly, as no human has infinite mental bandwidth for tragedy. It’s literally been more than a decade of Democrats leaning into martyr-maxxing, Trayvon and Floyd etc. The best they could find was a
busgrainy video of aRussianUkrainian woman being killed, which isn’t really effective. They need to study how martyrs function in social ecosystems and then have their own, because it’s like a zero-day vulnerability on the public’s psyche at this point, just easy mode for Democrat persuasion.I'm pretty sure this happened during Biden's run. Part of the reason it probably worked is that there was no counter-narrative of dead American citizens.
The other thing is: the border is no longer as relevant now that Biden isn't actively paroling people. Stories of recent migrants showing up and wrecking things are naturally going to drop in number and salience.
My impression is, for better or worse, Americans don't have coherent ideas about immigration enforcement. Or not enough of them do to form a coherent policy. His approval on his strongest issue has been dropping, it just seems like people didn't like chaos at the border but once that was resolved the urgency just dropped off.
Trump using ICE to go after what are almost certainly populations of citizens (take it up with past Presidents!) in a hostile city because of topical scandals is a high-risk, low-reward strategy if you assume that a lot of people simultaneously don't like border chaos but also don't want to be mean or deal with random ICE raids.
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If you mean Iryna Zarutska, she was a Ukrainian refugee of the Russian invasion, and it was a light rail line, not a bus.
Right. The issues: not a memorable name like “Good”; you don’t hear her agony; you don’t get a close up of her; you don’t see her dying out; the aggressor is inadvertently sympathetic (as she is insane); and most importantly, we don’t experience the event through the vicarious social learning of mourner. The reason you had wealthy professional mourners in ancient Babylonia, and paid wailers mentioned in the Old Testament, is the same reason a weeping Mary is often depicted in crucifixion scenes — it introduces the targetted social response to the subject, for you to imitate through peer pressure or social learning, like a director playing weepy music in a movie.
It’s all very sociopathic to think like this, but I feel that someone in the DNC is plotting this out behind a bunch of excel sheets. The strategy is just way too predictable, they do it every cycle. It honestly feels like like wallhacking at this point. Wailhacking, if you will.
To don a tinfoil hat, they also de-martyred Charlie Kirk. They created the most viral meme of the month called “Kirkification” where the youth would blend Charlie Kirk’s face with a bunch of random faces, so that the memory of his face made you laugh, and millions of young people did this. Massive trend. Then they launched the “we are Charlie Kirk” trend, where the emotional memory of name was blotted out as well; and at the same time the idea of mourning him became the focus of derision and laughter. This sound was used in maybe 500,000 discrete videos across social media. Possibly people just organically stumbled on the best way to blot out the memory strength of Charlie Kirk, but I find it more probable that there are dark forces doing this sort of thing behind the scenes. Look at what they can do against ICE for free with activists, now imagine the tools at their disposal among the people they actually pay.
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