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It is a basic principle of psychological warfare and propaganda that the assignment of a name that sticks to somebody or something can make or break that person or entity. A fictional example from the Game of Thrones series exemplifies this. If you’re a slave in Meereen, and somebody called the “Mother of Dragons” and “Breaker of Chains” is outside your masters’ walls with an army, you’ll probably pick up anything you can use as a weapon to join a slave revolt. If we look at a real historical example, serfs who had previously been willing to do almost anything to avoid service in the Russian Army, including knocking out their front teeth so they could not bite open musket cartridges, were eager to follow Aleksandr V. Suvorov, also known as “The Russian Hannibal.” He took good care of his soldiers and tended to win lopsided victories with minimal losses to his own side.
Suppose instead that you’re a German soldier during the Second World War, and the Allies have named your general, Fedor von Bock, “Der Sterber” (“Let’s go get killed”) because he said the greatest thing a German soldier could do is die for Germany. You’d probably want to surrender at the earliest opportunity, especially if you also learned that General Patton had meanwhile told his soldiers that the idea of war is to make the enemy (i.e., you) die for his country. When your general and the opposing general have the same agenda, you have a real problem.
“Tricky Dick” stuck similarly to Richard Nixon, but not enough to keep him from becoming president in 1968. We now have “Krazy Kamala” Harris, and “President Houseplant” (courtesy of conservative talk show host Ben Shapiro) Biden. I came up, meanwhile, with “Hamas-American Bund” to equate the entire anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement to Hitler’s useful idiots of the late 1930s.
Call Them Firearm Quacks or Anti-Gun Quacks
Supporters of the Second Amendment have depicted their adversaries as “gun-grabbers,” but swing voters who do not own guns, much less hoplophobes who would probably like all the guns to be grabbed, do not care about “our” Second Amendment rights. Everybody, however, has nothing but contempt for medical quacks — fake doctors who take desperate patients’ money and deliver worse than useless remedies in return. A quack is worse than a fraud, who merely steals money; the quack’s remedies are harmful and divert the patient from life-saving medical treatment until it is too late.
