If you want to understand how MAGA propaganda works, here is the perfect example.
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Neither Donald Trump nor his right-wing propaganda apparatus has come up with ways to effectively curb the enthusiasm of Democrats who have embraced their new presidential candidate.
And they have tried.
The former president has test-run nicknames from “Crazy Kamala” and “Kamabla” to “Commie Kamala” and “Comrade Kamala,” but nothing from the tired GOP playbook of labeling Democrats as “communists” or “Marxists” seems to stick.
You may recall that they also tried this with Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz. Republicans thought they had struck gold when blasting out that the Minnesota governor had said that “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”
The problem for the GOP is that non-MAGA Americans don’t actually have a problem with making sure that kids get to eat or looking at ways to make sure that the uber-rich, who seem to be prospering while regular people are struggling, pay their fair share.
That’s why we are not seeing that Walz quote anymore. As it turns out, Americans like being neighborly.
So, what to do when none of the usual stuff works?
Simple: You make shit up!
Usually, this being a news article, we would have written “stuff.” However, in this case, the other s-word clearly applies.
One of the things that the Harris campaign has tried to convey is a sense of joy. And there is no doubt that Democrats are genuinely excited about her as a nominee, which has translated into raucous crowds and record fundraising numbers.
All of this irks Trump.
So, his minions thought, why not try to turn Harris’s strength into a weakness?
Enter various MAGA acolytes, who are trying out a new line of attack.
“I knew Kamalas ‘Strength Through Joy’ slogan sounded familiar,” wrote MAGA propagandist “aka” on X. He also posted a Wikipedia screenshot showing that “Strength Through Joy” is a Nazi slogan.
That sounds pretty damning.
There is just one teensy-tiny problem.
“Strength Through Joy,” isn’t a Harris slogan whatsoever.
Just Google it yourself, and you’ll see that the only people having used the phrase are right-wingers.
And it doesn’t matter to them that this is misinformation.
The tweet above has been viewed nearly two million times, and it stands to reason that very few of those people did a search and figured out that this was complete nonsense.
Certainly not Elon Musk, Mr. Misinformation himself, who amplified the tweet by responding to it with “!!,” as though his fellow propagandist had provided some stunning insight and not a blatant lie.
Of course, it didn’t start with that lie.
First, some MAGA “experts” had to lay the groundwork for it.
Like far-right authors Chadwick Moore and Hans Mahncke, both of whom insinuated that there is some sort of connection between the word “joy” and a Nazi slogan.
Next, some far-right news outlets took the cue and “reported” on these tweets, and, just like that, “Kamala is a Nazi because she is explicitly using a Nazi slogan” is an accepted thing that people like Musk share.
It is important to note that X users tried to get the site’s “Community Notes” to point out this obvious lie, but the site’s fact-checking service seems to not work as well when right-wing propaganda needs to be corrected.
Also, we find it slightly odd that these people are so familiar with Nazi slogans… actually, that’s not weird at all since Trump himself keeps using actual Nazi terminology.
Finally, it also doesn’t seem to matter to these clowns that Harris does not exactly fit the Nazi profile. Let’s just say that a Black woman fighting a wannabe authoritarian would not have been in line for any Nazi leadership position.
In any case, claiming there is some connection between her campaign’s use of “joy” and that of the Nazis is as ridiculous as pretending that Trump saying “Fight, Fight, Fight” after being shot at was a reference to Hitler using the word “fight.”
However, an increasingly desperate GOP doesn’t care about any of that.
Let’s just hope that the American voters are smarter than Republicans are apparently giving them credit for.
