Today, I stumbled across an opinion article on the Boston Herald by right-wing Massachusetts commentator Howie Carr about a person who punched a cop during a protest. The Boston Police report detailing the event tells the story in 235 words. So, how did Howie Carr stretch that to 871?
Carr doesn’t just retell the story in his article; his goal is not to simply inform readers. From beginning to end, the language used in the article is intentionally selected to draw the most outraged reaction possible from his intended audience.
Mock their appearance
Attacking how people look instead of what they’ve done is always the lowest form of criticism, but it’s prevalent in this article:
even a pampered Beautiful Person with a fashionable neck tattoo can still suffer adverse consequences for a violent, unprovoked assault on working people
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And now you might say this low-IQ blonde (of course she goes to Emerson) is experiencing a FAFO moment.
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Notice the tattoo on the little debutante’s neck
Carr knows his audience; the caricature of the arrogant hairdyed leftist barista-esque character is neither novel nor relevant, but it’s a mainstay of right-wing propaganda, and he knows to draw upon a collective hatred of a known concept to bolster his rhetoric.
Attack their gender
As before, the qualities of the person are less relevant than the crime they committed, but the article is rife with cheap shots anyway:
the judge had just slapped a $7,500 bail on Little Miss Muffet for her sinister role in fomenting that far-left riot
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Apparently the judge didn’t realize that on social media, Styx brags that she, er they, is, or is it are, non-binary?
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In his prophetic novel, 1984, George Orwell perfectly described Haley, Styx and all the rest of these female fascists
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It’s about damn time the local laws started doing something about these antifa types, or shall we now start calling them “trantifa,” which seems more appropriate with this latest rabble of tiptoe-through-the-tulips they/them types.
Macintyre punched a cop in the nose during a scuffle their group allegedly started. It’s bad. It’s actually really easy to condemn, too, like Mayor Wu did. Punching cops is not a partisan crime, though—and in fact, it’s one that the GOP has issued pardons for. Perhaps that’s why this article focuses on the gender identity of the perpetrator, and not the fact that they punched a cop.
Play the victim card
Carr forgets what the article is about roughly halfway through and starts regurgitating wholly unrelated talking points:
Oddly, though, in 2020, during the Red Chinese-created COVID Panic, the Globe saluted Gov. Charlie Baker for wrecking the state’s economy “under a Cold War-era state law to protect the public.”
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If it enables “ballot harvesting” of millions of alleged mail-in votes by Democrats to defeat Trump, it must be good.
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Masks? For trantifa defendants in court — good! But for ICE agents rounding up pedophile cholos in the Healey hotels — bad!
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Leticia James going after Trump for non-existent mortgage fraud — good! Trump’s DOJ indicting Leticia for actual bank fraud — bad!
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James Comey engineers the greatest political scandal in American history — the Russian collusion hoax, and regime-controlled media describes him as the second coming of Honest Abe Lincoln.
And so on. None of this has anything to do with the story itself. It’s just a crash course of Trump victimization talking points from the past decade sloppily thrown together. I surmise that Carr wants readers to feel targeted by “the left” to justify whatever actions are used against anyone on the left.
The takeaway
Carr’s writing quality is poor, his arguments are poor, and he expects that his readers have the attention span of a gnat and won’t notice these tricks—maybe they won’t. He hopes that by stringing together a series of things his readers will identify as “bad” that it will all blend together in the reader’s mind and save him the heavy lifting of constructing a cohesive, well-evidenced point.
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