You've undoubtedly seen them by now. You wake up, pour some coffee, open your email and discover that one of your conservative relatives or friends has gleefully forwarded you a rainbow-colored, indignant screed in ALL CAPS with unnecessary punctuation throughout!!!! Right-wing chain emails are a dime a dozen these days and most of them are so outrageously over-the-top that it's a small wonder anyone bothers to forward them, much less believe the claims.
If you're lucky enough to have somehow avoided these, here's an actual email I received just today:
Please Vote NO on FOX to banning the flag in America . .
Vote "NO" on FOX to banning the American flag in America
VOTE !!!
This is disgusting, to put it politely.
Your help is needed.
This is just sickening. Only 56% have voted on the FOX poll to NOT ban the flag in school and something like 36%voted YES, to ban it (Note: Latest count, at 1:30 PM on Friday, is 72% NO and 21% Yes, which is still unthinkable).
What is going on in this country?? Read below.
Fox is running a poll about whether the flag should be banned in schools in order not to inflame Hispanic students.
The poll is being sandbagged by SEIU and we should mount a counter action if you agree with me that the flag should be taken down for no one.
Moveon.org, funded by George Soros, Organizing for America , and SEIU, "Service Employee International UNION", have been twittering today to go to Fox Poll and vote to BAN the Flag and right now it is still working (21%).
It's time to SHOW THEM WHAT TRUE PATRIOTS (True Americans) BELIEVE!!!
GO HERE NOW and VOTE:
http://www.foxnews.com/...
VOTE.........then pass it along to all the Americans you know!
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Here's the article that spawned all this misinformation. Just in these few paragraphs (and it's hard to tell exactly how many given the formatting issues) we have paranoia, scapegoating of liberal organizations and personalities, blinding nationalism and a big, steaming serving of sanctimony. It goes without saying that the liberal groups listed haven't even mentioned this non-story. Agitprop at its finest.
Sure, you could hit delete or maybe even search the web for about two minutes and find an obviously simple debunking at Snopes.com to reply with if you're feeling frisky. But have you ever considered starting your own right-wing meme and having a little fun with the gullible bastards?
"But, staticzero, how can I possibly emulate the fevered dreams of a madman?" you ask. It's surprisingly easy. All you need is a little time and a cursory knowledge of the things that get conservatives positively fuming.
Things That Enrage Conservatives
The most effective topics are the ones that play on their emotions, specifically anger. The idea is to have them so outraged by what they've just read that the thought of actually confirming the story independently doesn't even occur before they forward it to their entire address book.
Some good examples include: invasion of privacy (except if a conservative does it in the name of national security), minorities getting special rights or favoritism, their children being "indoctrinated" at school, on TV or in movies, confiscation of personal property (especially guns), liberals doing unpatriotic things, liberals controlling their lives, liberals breathing, or really anything that you might think would offend a real 'Merican. Emails that touch on more than one of these hot-button issues are so much the better. If you're looking for ideas, just hang around on Free Republic for a little while and you'll have all the fodder you need. And possibly a migraine.
A Tenuous Grip On Reality
It's good to have at least one link in the email to "prove" that this is real. But wait -- hold on there, Breitbart. This link can't be from just anywhere and it certainly can't be from a "known" liberal publication (unless you're bashing them) like the New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, Boston Globe, New York Post...ahh screw it. Just don't link to a national newspaper unless it's the Wall Street Journal. Local papers are generally acceptable and English-language foreign papers work in certain situations (see below) but make sure that they're either neutral or have a rightward slant. We don't want to set off anyone's epistemic closure alarm.
Mainstream magazines are suspect, too, but there's a cottage industry of right-wing noise mags like National Review, The Weekly Standard, Reason, and Human Events. Cable news outlets have websites as well but, like newspapers, they're part of the "liberal media" and are immediately suspect. Fox is an obvious exception and if you manage to use their website it'll instantly give you extra credibility.
Now, someone might suggest the vast fever swamp that is far-right websites like World Net Daily, Infowars or Prison Planet. These sites specialize in fostering the Birther set, conspiracy theories about an international, collectivist New World Order and how the government plotted 9/11. They sell personal seed banks, water purification and survival kits for the inevitable dystopian future where all peoples are rounded up into FEMA camps. Seriously. These could work if you pick one of their somewhat-less-dubious claims (like that the HPV vaccine is dangerous and will kill you) but they still have all kinds of links to more obviously unbelievable stories and we don't want to scare the more mainstream conservatives. They're probably best to avoid.
Now What?
Whew...that was a lot of information. It takes a lot of doing to get yourself into a full-blown reactionary mindset. So you have a topic prone to conservative indignation, you've found a suitable article or scrap of unsubstantiated rumor that relates to it and you're ready to start distorting reality and spinning those half-truths. Let's create an example.
I'm going to use this story from Daily Mail and this list from a tech site I just found and use them to tear at the very fabric of truth. Behold:
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS AT IT AGAIN!
DO YOU WANT STRANGERS TO SEE NAKED PICTURES OF YOUR KIDS?!?!!!!!!
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In about a week millions of AMERICANS will fly to see their loved ones for Thanksgiving and going through the screening procedure at the airport. But thsi holiday airports ALL OVER THE COUNTRY will be using new FULLY NAKED BODY SCANNERS!!!
These machines create images of YOUR NAKED BODY and YOUR CHILDREN'S NAKED BODIES so that OBAMA'S TSA can be sure that OUR OWN PEOPLE aren't terrorists. They banned them for children in england where newspapers called them a "virtual STRIP SEARCH"!!
These machiens are in OVER 60 airports:
http://www.geekosystem.com/...
First the DEMOCRAT congress made is buy SOCIALIST HEALTH CARE and now this!!
if you want to protect your kids from perverted TSA goons write the white house and find out why they're taking PICTURES of OUR CHILDREN NAKED and pass this on to everyone you know...
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9/11 - Never Forget
Wasn't that easy? We took a legitimate concern about privacy (that, frankly, I share), substituted hyperbolic language and pinned it on Democrats and Obama in the most incendiary way possible. I feel dirty.
Note the misspellings, the use of loaded terms, frequent and unnecessary capitalization, jarring symbols to delineate sections and the extraneous punctuation plus bonus points for adding in a fetishized 9/11 reminder. All this adds to the effect and, if you do it well, it's damn near impossible to tell the difference between a "real" chain and yours.
The Sell
Ideally, the person you send it to won't bother to wonder why their friend with the liberal sensibilities is sending them a hysterical right-wing chain email. To minimize this possibility, you'll probably want to wait a day or two after receiving one before sending it to them. Be sure your subject line has three or more forward indicators (FW:FW:FW:) and it's best to send it to at least a handful of conservatives at once. If you don't have a handful of conservative friends (a likely scenario), consider sending it to the one or two you have plus a collection of fake email addresses you just made up. You'll get a bunch of 'failed to send' notifications but it's only a matter of deleting them.
So go on. Don't be shy. Start filling their little heads with rage about imagined demons and overblown reactions to completely reasonable events. If you do it well and often enough, you may just see your own creation forwarded to you. Have fun!