this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Yeah but see, they will write you off the moment they see some words that code as communist. But the folk singer Woodie Guthrie was an open communist, and incepted communist-friendly ideas many Americans still subconsciously hold because he had deliberately crafted and normie-resonant lyrics. I mean, they're still teaching "This Land is Your Land" in kid's classrooms!
That's why something as seemingly trivial as just word choice might determine whether some idea is palatable, and why people pay millions to PR strategists. The getting together and work shopping some talking points that travels is best done by the empire but can at least be done in some small scale and gain virality the left doesn't currently have enough of. The conservatives know that their ideas are not popular and so they fight tooth and nail to soften them while generating reflexive negative feeling toward words associated with the left. But we can thread the needle and grandfather into the public mind leftist ideas that are already popular but saddled with unpopular terms.
They do, but they leave out the verse about how private property is bullshit
Not everywhere, in the children's book my school used they retained that verse and even had complementary illustrations. I am sure some school boards have successfully gotten it removed, but it there are a not insignificant number of schools that keep the verse in.
♪ By the squares of the city
In the shadow of the steeple
By the welfare office
I found my people
As they stood there hungry
I stood there whistling
This land was made for you and me ♪
♪ This land is your land
But it once was my land
Before we sold you
Manhattan Island
You pushed our nations
To the reservations
This land was stole by you from me ♪
There's some really banger stuff in some versions of that song.
That's because PR strategists are PMC ghouls who use nepotism to get paid seven figures to write power points that explain some fucking psychology 101 crap that's often straight up wrong.
Crafting propaganda is actually quite easy, look how lazy Israel's propaganda is but settlers still lap it up like dehydrated hogs. Real issue is your message needs an audience who's in the right place to hear it. The most intelligent and charismatic communist in the world will be out performed by a nebbish, creepy, reactionary dunce if the crown they're speaking to are a bunch of petite-bourgeois and labor aristocrats.
I mean there's ton of grifting in the industry but there are two kinds of messaging, the kind that consolidates your existing adherents and the kind that gets the neutral politically uninvolved people to listen. The reason Amerifats hate public transport and slavishly promote deregulation--to the point of even saying universal device charging port requirements are government overreach--is because insanely effective propaganda ghouls workshopped and had a strategy for disseminating to people who initially didn't have a strong opinion one way or the other.
Israel itself was previously so skilled at propaganda targeting Americans who had little knowledge about the mid-east that the average left-wing view on the Levant even about 7 years ago was "there are two equally bad aggressors." During the War on Terror era Israel would make these stories and news dramatizations about pretty white women getting blown up in clubs, and astroturf the online New Atheists with anti-Muslim rhetoric, and people left and right took it as gospel that Israel was our secular and unfairly besieged sympatico country in the Middle East. These were no make-work jobs, even tens of millions in PR fees for this work paid for themselves in spades, because it facilitated decades of unprotested billion-dollar weapons exchanges.
Even though today's Israeli propaganda is dogshit because of the nepo incompetent descendants of the hasbara masters, and misspend of excess funds you mention, and even though it's now mostly effective only on rousing their existing supporters, for decades skilled torrential PR was what made us turn a blind eye to how horrific the IDF and Israeli government were. The grifting opportunities in PR came to the field because the past value it brought to people in power justified millions in cash influxes.
And to your point about the message needing people in a place to hear them, there is an untapped group of people who know the Dems are cowards who don't do enough but don't feel like they can criticize them too harshly, the overperformance of Bernie proved that.