Cornelius Orange and the Marmalade Mafia

I spend a bunch of time reading what people a whole bunch smarter than I am (at least in the ways of politics) think about the current state of things in Washington. My preferred drug of choice is Substack, where all the smartest of the smart congregate. I happened upon a wonderful piece by Malcolm Nance the other day called “Five Steps to Resist the Coming Tyranny,” which I found both terrifying and also very very smart. I will link the whole thing below, because why should I be shivering alone in the corner? But for right now, I want to talk about his thing #2, and how it dovetails nicely with what I was saying the other day. Thing #2 is—

“Stop Debating Maga & Use Simpler Speech”

Now, I can hear you all the way over there saying “You? YOU stop debating MAGA? You who claims that she only debates them because she doesn’t want bystanders to even think for a second that they could be right, that she feels compelled to provide a counter point, so that anyone who happens to wander by will at least see that there are two sides to every issue? YOU are going to stop debating MAGA?“

Well…maybe.

The point that Nance makes is that debating them is not a neutral exercise—it actually helps them and hurts us. We debate them, and they ignore every well-researched point that we make, and they come back with such golden chestnuts as “MAGA! WWG1WGA!! Tick Tock!!” It’s incredibly frustrating, because we are trying to have a discussion in good faith and they are screaming like toddlers whose favorite blankie is in the dryer.

But…that’s on purpose. That’s their actual strategy. Their framing, their meta-narrative, is built around kindergarten-level discourse. Small words. Punchy phrases. When we…pontificate, it just makes us look like…well, like the winner of the national spelling bee going up against Cody Rhodes.

(Cody Rhodes is the undisputed WWE champion. I had to look that up, which should show you which side of the divide I’m inherently on.)

They use these short phrases, repeated ad nauseum, to tremendous effect. MAGA! Sleepy Joe, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Pocahontas, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted. They seem so childish but they are there to support a powerful narrative.

And we just sit here, with tape on our glasses and 3-D charts and graphs, while the audience is still chuckling. “Ha! Tampon Tim! That shit is funny!”

No, it’s not. It’s base, and it glides over and around any serious discussion of policy—because the last thing that they want is a serious discussion of policy. They have very few policies to begin with, and the ones they do have are so draconian that they would likely lose them voters if they ever bothered to explain them. So they rile up the crowd, and they send them back out to torture the nerds on the playgrounds.

So. What do we do? We flip the framing. We stop debating them. We come up with our own meta narrative and we hammer it home every chance we get. The article suggests “Trump is a Tyrant.” Full Stop. Or “Mad King Trump is a Dictator.”

Make America a Democracy Again? Stop the 4th Reich? Is America Great Yet?

I’m partial to Cornelius Orange and the Marmalade Mafia myself.

But what ultimately matters is that we say it, or things like it, over and over. We need to hashtag it, and end social media posts with acronyms of it. And like the “it’s just a question” headlines from yesterday, it will get under their skin, and it will creep into the consciousness of not only his faithful, but of the republican machine at large.

#MM. #CORNO.

For those that haven’t seen a good horror movie lately, or who like a sort of bone-chilling scare, the full article is here—https://malcolmnance.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web

Finally, IS Pete Hegseth a secret satanist?

What? It’s just a question.