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Dems are FM, Reps are AM: Communication in the Land of the Free [1]

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Date: 2022-10-27

The United States is a land of AM/FM communication, but not in the way you might think.

Democrats use FM: Fairness Modulation. A Democrat signals fitness by emphasizing her commitment to fairness when making political statements. Things should be more fair. How could you disagree with that?

It turns out Republicans do. Modern Republicans use AM: Asshole Modulation. A Republican signifies his fitness by emphasizing his commitment, not to American Fairness, but rather to exploiting government power to be the greatest possible asshole to anyone not like him. It is all about preventing fairness, not creating more. And if you didn't just think of either Trump or DeSantis just then, I cannot fathom what is wrong with you, no matter your politics.

There are many, many exemplary FM utterances from the D side, but Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech might be considered the archetype of the modern FM utterance, at least in US politics. Exemplary utterances do not make policy, but this is not the place to litigate that complaint against Homo Democratus Flaccidus Maximus.

The R side developed Asshole Modulation over a long period of evolution (well-funded by the Russians, actually, and you can quote me) to find vulnerable points in what passes for political discourse in the United States.

The front line in the development of Asshole Modulation was daily 24/7 frontal attacks on decency like Limbaugh, but let us not forget that, in the periphery of this direct and evident evil, every shock jock like Imus and Stern was training people to laugh at a daily dose of intolerant punch-down classist and racist humor on drive-time radio (ironically, often on Amplitude Modulation radio stations).

Imus finally went over the edge right out loud on the air by calling the North Carolina University female basketball team "nappy-headed ho's" but that is the only statement in decades of punching down and race hate for which he ever voiced regret. And he's considered the tame one. One imagines he ended up with Limbaugh in Hell, talking about other people's ho-ness in between visits from the Legion of Fang-Wombed Hags.

The corrosive influence of Gingrich cannot be ignored, but is too large to include here because Hell is still constructing the inter-galactic containment environment required to hold both his toxic ego and all the results of his Russian-funded and traitorous duplicity. There is also the unfortunate and difficult matter of funding enough Fang-Wombed Hags.

In modern days, although Trump pioneered the Digital Asshole Modulation industry by hijacking Twitter back in 2016 and turning it into an All-Assholes-All-the-Time global threat to sanity, Tucker Carlson's "I May Be A White Incel Twat But I Have Money From Daddy's Fish Stick Empire So Fuck All Y'all" is today's archetype of the Asshole Modulated channel.

You have to admire DeSantis and Abbott for exploiting and accelerating the AM game plan and showing us all EXACTLY what it means on the ground, and their efforts in this axis are all breathtakingly obvious about explicitly hurting certain people who they identify by their color.

The Dems face a difficult communication burden: Calling out the assholes without being assholes themselves. The only reason this is difficult, of course, is because the Democrats are not an organized political party. They are a wool suit stuffed with money-grubbing weasels.

Long way of saying: we had better hope the aliens are mostly listening on FM.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/27/2131761/-AM-FM-Communication-in-the-Land-of-the-Free

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