Selling the Myth of Scarcity
Nobody would believe that “The Former Guy” won the election (that he clearly and provably did not) without five years of little or no pushback against The Former Guy's astroturf “Populism” (A word we have to do away with, more later).
After a month of constant hyping, “Stop the Steal” drew about 30,000 people and 8,000 lunatics willing to storm the capital. Take a listen to The Former Guys rebranding of his Jan 6th shitshow:
TFG
“That rally was massive. The press doesn't like to talk about it but the real number was much, much bigger in terms of the people that were at the location. It went all the way back to the Washington monument. It was tremendous numbers of people.”
...
“I said this rally is going to be bigger than anyone thinks. Cause everyone I’d see would say ‘we’re gonna be at the rally, we’re gonna be at the rally’ and it was, I think the largest rally I’ve ever spoken before, and I’ve spoken to very big crowds. Hundreds of thousands of people and more than that., but hundreds of thousands of people.”
Now we know Steve Hilton is not going to push back against this clear lie, but largely the MSM for 5 years has failed to push back against the former guy's fake crowd numbers in any meaningful way. The only way the GQP survives to rebrand the Jan 6th sedition as a “popular uprising” of hundreds of thousands. A revolt of the “Silent majority”. If January 6th is recorded (as it rightly should be) as a complete and utter failure by The Former Guy (TFG from here out) to get the show of force he needed, then he’s done as a political force. His lame “stop the steal” rally billed as the last chance for his supporters to “save the country”, hyped for a solid month, drew 1/20 the number of people as “The Women’s March” or the “March For Our Lives”. Those rallies actually drew nearly a million people. This is the reality, but I’ve yet to see any reporter effectively stop TFG in is tracks when he’s selling these fake crowd totals and say “Wait, wait wait, hold up, I can’t let you get away with saying that”
Now the media and historians writ large have largely dismissed TFG’s crowd braggadocio as childish ego-stroking of little consequence, but it matters… A LOT.
For a million years of evolution, we’ve been conditioned to react to scarcity. As hunter-gatherers, if we saw a fruit tree on the plains that seemed to be scarce of fruit, a deep survival instinct would trigger inside us. We would gather what fruit we could, while there still was some to get. Hunter-gatherers that did not respond proactively to scarcity quickly died. As we developed language, that reptilian survival response to scarcity got tied to popularity.
Sitting around the campfire if a few of our clan started talking about collecting figs, we’d learn that figs would soon be scarce. If we did not get up early to get our share, we could expect that the grove of fig trees would be picked clean. Hunter-gatherers who failed to understand the connection of popularity to scarcity were selected out by evolution by dying of starvation. So it is ingrained deep in our brains to respond to messages that tell us of a current or impending scarcity.
It is this ingrained reptilian brain response that makes us act to buy when we see a product in high demand. There is a reason the stores love to show images of customers fighting their way into their stores on Black Friday. Toymakers love to show images of crowds fight to get at the latest Cabbage Patch Kid, Elmo, PS4, or whatever the “must-have” item of the year is.
TFG is provably a moron, but he and to a larger extent his handlers understand this basic premise above all;
Images/messages of popularity →
Triggers Scarcity response (desire for) →
Triggers action (to buy or vote).
This is why TFG hired 50 paid actors to watch him descend the escalator.
This is why TFG’s campaign team demanded that the media not push back on his crowd totals after the disastrous Alabama rally (that should have hobbled his campaign), if they wanted future interviews and exclusive content with TFG.
Full discloser: I’m a media producer in the NYC market and have friends in production at several cable news outlets. Off record, they will tell you that, in playing the “access journalism” game, the top demand of TFG’s team would be not pushing back on the rally totals (at least until Bernie was out of the way). It was vital that Trump appeared to be beating Bernie Sanders in drawing crowds(he wasn’t), and that TFG seize the “populist” (which people hear and internalize as “popular” BTW) mantle. I’ve broken down the media culpability in creating Trump in previous diaries. You can read them here : www.dailykos.com/...
Think for a moment about how many health insurance company ads you see on CNN or even MSNBC much less Fox….
How many ads do you see for banking and financial services? You’ll understand then why they were willing to give TFG any crowd total he wanted if it meant an excuse to continue not covering the actually huge Bernie rallies where people were screaming and applauding medicare for all, and a 15 dollar minimum wage.
Sadly, this moment in August 2015 was when Trump could have been stopped... if the media would have reported it for what it was… a complete failure. As Noam Chomsky pointed out in Manufactured Consent, even the bastions of what the right defines as the “Liberal Media” (NYT, CNN, MSNBC) are not at their heart “liberal” they are corporate and sensationalist defenders of the system as it is..
This is the same reason all the cable news shows will drone on endlessly about how divided a nation we are, but won’t dedicate a single block to talking about solutions to reduce partisanship, like Ranked Choice Voting. They have a vested interest in the established Blue vs Red narratives they’ve spent decades cultivating. Anything that threatens the two-party system is to be discouraged. Their corporate sponsors have established channels of influence in both parties. Ranked Choice Voting is dangerous and scary to the beltway intelligentsia…. but I digress
I don’t know what will become of “The Former Guy” but if we don’t make sure that all in our orbit understand his marketing techniques and psychological manipulation, then he might just reemerge as “The Returning Guy” and the nation can not afford that. I have little faith that the MSM won’t go along for the ride again if the ratings are high enough.
What to do;
1) Be on the lookout for TFG or his surrogates rebranding Jan 6th as a “Popular Uprising” of hundreds of thousands it is the first step to his resurrection.
2) For the love of god stop calling TFG a “Populist”. His ideas are not popular nor does he have popular majority support. “Populist” is an academic label that historians and reporters allow anyone to claim by branding themselves “for the common man”. It’s a damaging label to use though as what people hear is “Popular” and that just feeds the demand response I described above.
3) Fight for systemic voting changes to increase voter turnout and stop voter suppression. Trump would have never won in a Ranked Choice System.
Learn more about the Reptilian/Hunter-Gatherer human responses in “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari
Additionally, I recommend the frontline docuseries “The Persuaders” from 2004 to understand the psychology of persuasion. www.pbs.org/… At 39 minutes a young Frank Luntz is featured talking about the psychology behind rebranding the estate tax the “death tax”.
On the lighter side :
The funniest tweeter you’re not following →
