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Marjorie Taylor Greene and the invisible propaganda of "national divorce" and other lost-boy gambits [1]

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Date: 2022-08-03

I want to talk about the unseen propaganda—the translucent messaging. If I’m right, then there is an entirely subterranean method to MAGA/QAnon/GOP recruiting tactics that perhaps hasn’t been recognized. As much as the GOP embodies Lord of the Flies with regards to an ethos but especially its recruitment model, I think it instructive to consider some of these niche populations MAGA is trying to reach.

Because propaganda employs an indirect psychological appeal, it can be said that propaganda has an indirect audience. For some time now, it has seemed to me that the propaganda of the extremists as probably doing double duty. Not only did it have a surface-level message, such as pedophilia is evil, but also an underlying emotional base, in this case fear of a predator, especially one who preys upon children. And that’s a very specific type of terror that these propagandists mean to manipulate in order to spur its targets into action. That’s a very specific fear. So when it’s especially mobilizing as a mover of thought and deed, that is a particular susceptibility in those members of a target audience.

This laser focus on boogeyman groomers also works along those lines, this time the fear displaced or broadcast onto members of the LGBTQ+ community. In this propaganda campaign, that community is being entirely scapegoated; in fact, they are being targeted for explicitly transgressing against gender norms but that rationale is cloaked behind this moral panic about illicit solicitation. This last absurdity in turn is a distortion of the underhanded and deceitful recruitment practices performed upon the audience member by the propagandists themselves. The convert knows that someone is being taken advantage of; instead of suspecting him- or herself to be the victim, the convert is convinced to blame conspicuous others for leading innocents astray.

Another aspect of the MAGA/QAnon ideology, as expressed by Marjorie Taylor Greene, is this idea of a “national divorce.”

Just this phrase alone can operate as translucent propaganda, that type you don’t see, and I would argue it does. The mention of divorce would serve as a cue, a keyword (or buzzword, or catch-word) that would by its mere mention call up an essential aspect of a target audience’s biography or current identity. ‘Divorced’ is a specific beacon that serves as a siren to those who are Gen X and younger who either have been raised in a household affected by divorce, or are now someone going through a divorce, either as the spouse or as a child of divorcing parents.

These relate back to the lives of despair noted as of late by social scientists and especially by the former iteration of J.D. Vance: the lives of people whose standard of living is worse than their parents; those of people who are caught in cycles of poverty, addiction or abuse; people who have grown disillusioned on a fundamental, almost developmental level.

"Something is making life worse, especially for less educated whites," [Anne] Case and [Angus] Deaton write [in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism]. Much of the decline stems from higher rates of suicide, opioid overdoses and alcohol-related illnesses — the "deaths of despair" that Case and Deaton refer to. Americans "are drinking themselves to death, or poisoning themselves with drugs, or shooting or hanging themselves."1

That’s the beacon. And these people of this target audience are being primed by all of the negative feelings massed just around the term ‘divorce’. One theme associated with divorce is abandonment. A lot of this target audience will have felt abandonment issues during any divorce they may have been party to. Many of these people will also have suffered attachment issues if they were children affected by divorce, especially those who were young children, so they may in a knee-jerk fashion be primed to want a strongman/superhero figure to swoop in and make everything all right. These are very ancient, intrinsic fears being tapped here.

One of the target audiences for this fascist movement is the middle class; that’s standard. Another is Whites; another is males. So right now, a sweet spot meets in middle-class White males, especially those who are vulnerable on this emotional axis. You’re going to end up with a lot of victims of divorce who are bitter and who are ready to launch into their abandonment issues, even if those issues are ultimately displaced onto another target altogether, the State as surrogate parent/authority figure. It’s possible to transform resentment at divorced parents into rebellion against the state—this is an enormous potential that revolutionaries cannot afford to pass up. This is a market for their ideas, a market for their manipulation.

Hence we see Tucker Carlson as one of the main Pied Pipers of this movement of White males into pockets of extremism. Carlson himself is a victim of divorce, primed to take his resentments out on his mother especially (and this is played out by overt hostility toward women, extreme sexism, and misogyny). He’s whistling the tune of these sour, damaged men. Carlson knows the tune by heart.

Then you also have Josh Hawley, whose main line of anguish propaganda is that of making his audience feel guilty for indulging in things Hawley is crusading against. So Hawley calls out the viewing of pornography (an obvious euphemism for masturbation), the playing of video games (ostensibly about laziness and wallowing in non-goal-oriented pleasure but also a critique about the corruptive effects of technology and science) and the general lack or loss of masculinity (which will work as a siren to all of those who actively, perhaps obsessively, patrol the path of gender conformity). Tucker, too, bemoans the crisis of masculinity. Thus those insecure in their gender performance are attracted to the movement; and they are enticed to project their own insecurity of performance upon those who are altering their gender presentation. Transgender people become these followers’ scapegoats for the followers’ own need for external, rigid reinforcement of gender norms.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/3/2114257/-Marjorie-Taylor-Greene-and-the-invisible-propaganda-of-national-divorce-and-other-lost-boy-gambits

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