Talking points. They’re market-tested, usually engineered to render complex topics simple to the point of being meaningless (or deceptive in the extreme), are designed not to inform or educate but to persuade and elicit an emotional and biased response, the goal being to influence public opinion and justify some action or policy or position. Then they’re deployed, dispatched to authoritative-sounding people to repeat them in print, on radio, social media, the internet, on podcasts, TV, etc. Over and over and across the media landscape (or hellscape, possibly), to create the illusion of consensus on some issue. Ideally as people process talking points, they will believe they’ve thought through some complex topic and formulated an opinion, when many have done little but determine that ‘everybody I listen to on this is saying the same thing, using the same words, in different media, so I guess they all agree and know what they’re talking about.‘ In the age of social media, where the value of information discounts quickly, the shelf life of a talking point is usually short and getting shorter. Hence the need to continually produce new ones as the old ones wear out. Whether junk food or information, many people don’t think through what’s in it or how it’s been processed before they consume it, which pleases the propagandist. Critical thinking is hard work. They’ll pretend they’re doing it for us: 

Weaponizing government—Any prosecution, investigation, impeachment proceeding, witch hunt, that targeted Trump for (to name a few) . . . .  1) soliciting campaign help from foreign governments, 2) withholding foreign aid until a certain Ukrainian president agreed to spread a conspiracy theory, 3) inciting a violent and deadly riot to stop certification of a lost election, 4) taking boxes of classified documents on his way out of the White House (and stacking them in a guest bathroom at Mar-a-Lago), 5) being impeached by numbers 2 and 3 above . . . . is unjustified and by definition ‘weaponized’. Ending the weaponization of government can be accomplished by using government to exact vengeance, real or imagined, recent or long past, against government officials doing their jobs to investigate him, against states that voted for his opponent, ‘fake’ news organizations investigating scandals, individuals saying things he didn’t like, or just randomly firing tens of thousands of select federal employees for doing their jobs under the tattered umbrella of efficiency. When we accuse them of doing it, it’s weaponization. When we do it, it’s righteousness.

Efficiency—the reason tens of thousands of federal workers must be fired: waste, fraud and abuse. Republican surrogates have squeezed impressive mileage out of this talking point. Evidence of inefficiency?  That is the product of ‘cherry-picking’ of the highest security clearance. And, really. Sometimes it is necessary to amputate feet in order to justify slashing the shoe budget. Such seems to be the philosophy of the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE).

‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE)–a team of elite efficiency experts, with no transparency, accountability, or expertise in efficiency but with access to a super-cool power tool (hoisted skyward by Elon Musk, who gave Trump $300 million in ‘campaign’ funds, no doubt used with the highest efficiency). Musk’s DOGE has summarily fired thousands of federal employees without proof that they are unproductive or inefficient at their jobs. One thing Musk seems to know something about is how to finance taxfare for the billionaire class by putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work–an apparent win-win for Trump and Musk. Mass firings of American workers to finance taxfare creates a hastily-crafted rationale for future republican campaign donations (make that a win-win-win), and taxpayer-funded unemployment compensation. Perhaps . . . a return to Elizabethan-era poorhouses would be more efficient than  receiving unemployment (or, likely next target: Social Security), which seems so . . . degrading.

Taxfare—welfare for billionaires, financed by borrowing in the trillions and by firing thousands or even millions of federal workers on account of waste, fraud and abuse.

Waste, fraud and abuse—Crooked Joe Biden Administration policy of spending money appropriated by Congress to carry out executive agency missions; replaced by dispatching Elon Musk and a team of young white techies to hack into sensitive data sets, without security clearance, to carry out their DOGE-precision ‘efficiency’ protocol, which consists of: 1) firing federal employees with great fanfare; 2) referring briefly to a ‘wall of receipts’ photo-op as unprecedented, never-been-anything-like-it-level transparency; 3) rehiring fired employees as per court order, and; 4) moving on to the next agency after the legacy media point out that there were no cost savings.

Legacy media—the cluster of ‘woke’ news organizations that let their so-called ‘journalism’ get in the way of alternative facts and narratives before a ‘merit-based’ personnel policy—which includes news media—can be fully operationalized to once and for all put an end to waste, fraud and abuse.

‘Merit-based’—government-wide affirmative action for the anti-‘woke’. ‘Merit’ in this case refers to proper skin color (duh! Look at that cabinet—at least, until the firings begin) and craven loyalty to co-Presidents Musk and Trump. Relevant qualifications a bonus (though ‘relevant’ might simply mean repeating talking points on TV), embellishments and supersonic, professional wrestling-style hyperbole welcome.

‘Woke’—people who don’t vote republican, would make fun of photo ops in front of churches, and therefore naturally support DEI. And hate America. Can you say waste, fraud and abuse?

DEI—woke elements hatching a diabolical plan to sabotage air traffic control at American airports, killing American families and small businesses (purge accomplished. Wait. Oops).

Free speech—‘Woke’ PC tyranny, which naturally demands the banning of words, books, and federal agencies that didn’t scrub their websites of every DEI reference, and implicates fired federal employees, who are violently opposed to ending waste, fraud and abuse, and who hire woke lawyers to engage in lawfare to get their inefficient jobs back. Free speech is anything that doesn’t poison the minds of our youth, the latter being anything Trump can get his culture warriors worked up about on social media.

Lawfare—like ‘welfare,’ it’s bad. Think of it as any legal proceeding or court judgment perpetrated by shadowy Deep State operatives opposed to American greatness (which seems like it will require great sacrifices in terms of reduced health, education, and welfare. Possibly even a recession).

Deep State—a group of powerful, unelected elites, funded by billionaires, controlling the levers of government to serve their unAmerican, nefarious interests (under the guise of ending waste, fraud and abuse).

unAmerican—the opposite of MAGA.

MAGA—acronym for ‘billionaire populist.’

Billionaire populism—billionaires who want to relate to working class folk from a safe distance (for instance, on their yacht in Monte Carlo), heartily cheering calls to end waste, fraud and abuse, ‘flood the zone’ or ‘drain the swamp.’

‘Flood the zone’—imagine a flash flood of raw sewage. Or a ‘culture war.’ Or overwhelming the news cycle with market-tested, authoritative nonsense, guaranteed to distract. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

‘Drain the swamp’—accuse your opponents of corruption, and replace them with unqualified loyalists who have more conflicts of interest than an aardvark dispatched to guard an ant colony.

Culture war—efficient method of campaigning and governing, hearkening back to an earlier time, informed by ‘common sense’, in lieu of actual governance.

Common sense—a phrase that market-tests well, debuted prematurely at Trump’s address to Congress (it wasn’t scheduled for deployment until Social Security cuts were announced).

To paraphrase Groucho Marx, those are their talking points. And when they go rancid, they will re-open the swill sluices.