Player Of The Week
Whoever wins the RNC Chairmanship today inherits a party heading for more of the same mediocre midterm-ish results, unless the party gets a malwords strategy.
Given what it's taken for the GOP to look beyond the ends of their highly-principled noses and behold how badly they got played by early voting/ballot harvesting in 2022, we are not holding out much hope.
Results speak for themselves. Out of the hundreds of malwords we’ve tracked over the past two years, only one term with which Republicans can reliably cudgel their opponents—INFLATION (226.42 WPM)— has made its way into Primary Tier.
In the Secondaries, they have fared no better. VARIANT (43.48 WPM) and JANUARY 6 (20.41 WPM) are on the ascent as ENERGY PRICES (11.83 WPM) and GAS PRICES (9.5 WPM) wilt.
DEBT CEILING (11.57 WPM) and POWER OUTAGES (7.45 WPM) are consistently gaining in the Tertiaries, highly weaponizable, but rarely deployed in battle.
Kind of like the guns and ammo those obstreperous 2A advocates keep threatening to break out like a can of whoop-ass, but keep carefully locked away… just in case our democracy really turns into tyranny.
Which we all know will never happen.
Even if you don’t own the media, you can still drive the narrative if your troops stay on message. Which requires discipline, and there’s no better discipline like a well-run compensation plan:
Get with the program, you get three square meals. Get out of line, you get to starve.
Shrinking Money Pool
But discipline breaks down when a shrinking pool of donors serves an increasingly desperate pool of politicians.
Why does the donor pool shrink? Simple: fewer people want to donate.
Why do fewer people want to donate? Simple: fewer people trust you with their money.
Why do fewer people trust you with their money? Simple: you don’t keep your promises.
Why don’t you keep your promises? Simple: you made the exact opposite commitment to donors who care less what you stand for, but keep the lights on.
Why could they care less? Simple: because they know you can be bought.
Why can you be bought? Simple: because the donor pool is shrinking.
And so the tailspin continues. Small donors do not trust Republicans to do anything they say. The circle of willing donors grows smaller. The pool of money dries up.
Down To A Single Bullet
The picture is starker when you look at the Global Malwords Index. Volume-weighted, the only term significantly overperforming is DEBT CEILING (30D: +1313%; 180D: +7910%).
Aside from JANUARY 6 (30D: +45%; 180D: -37%), everything else— even INFLATION (30D: -17%; 180D: -48%)— is in the red or flat.
Meaning these terms have entered Post-Curve phase, or their momentum has been blunted by the Big Red Ripple.
Bullet In Chamber, Target Point Blank, Won’t Pull Trigger
This is not a promising picture for whoever takes the helm at the GOP. The new chair must aggressively broaden the donor base so that the dollars that s/he controls are competing for candidates, and not the other way around.
The way that gets done is by creating a grassroots organization that efficiently transacts small donations at volume.
This is antithetical to how the Republican Party has operated. But the willing dollars are now with incomes under $100,000, and those are MAGA dollars. Economies of scale may favor whales, but what you give away for keeping the lights on this month with a single stroke of a sugar daddy check makes it only that much harder to wash, rinse and repeat next month.
And it keeps you from designing, implementing, and enforcing messaging strategies that grow and strengthen the donor base by neutralizing enemy malwords campaigns, or leveraging them to create an anti-malwords initiatives.
More on this as we move forward in 2023. The groundwork was laid in this post that predicted what we’d be regretting this spring… almost a year ago.
It was all in the numbers, not in our heads. Just needed to do a little math.
Analysis /Call to Action
At some point, the oligarchs must be voted out of office. Or thrown from windows. Or down the stairs.
Because they are killing the rest of us.
The Republican messaging strategy reminds us of companies that buy anti-malware solutions but never implement them because they’re too busy chasing the next deal. They get hacked just as easily as organizations that never bought any cybersecurity. And they never seem to learn from the experience. Or want to.
Ronna’s time on the stage has run out. She just needs to be encouraged to follow the sun. Republicans need to replace her with a rabble-rouser with a head for math.
Our concern is that the lawyerly Harmeet will get played by the cadres. She did not impress in Arizona—too focused on filing the perfect lawsuit we all knew was going nowhere, when people needed to get in the streets and keep Hobbs and her henchmen from consolidating power.
We’re leaning to Mike, but our other concern is how he finds time, focus and discipline to run this thing like a bull in a china shop.
In the midst of a famine, we’re always open to suggestions… particularly from the numbers. Your thoughts?
About Malwords
Malwords are keywords weaponized for information warfare. They function within public discourse as intellectual malware, verbal viruses designed to spread quickly for the purposes of a) silencing dissent through control of language, narrative, and speech, b) increasing public tolerance for government-sanctioned atrocity and c) emboldening officials to commit acts of atrocity.
Malword strength is measured by their frequency of appearance in the published body of language (corpus), and expressed in words per million (WPM) linguistic units (words, numbers, symbols, acronyms, etc).
Malword WPM’s typically follow a three-phase lifecycle: Pre-Curve test-markets the new term and puts up the store front; Curve, is launch phase, characterized by a rapid, exponential liftoff and sudden plunge; Post-Curve is a long, asymptotic tail and is the period in which primary-objective atrocities are implemented.
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Harvey Oxenhorn, is a cybersecurity consultant, founder of Malwords Weekly, and author of the upcoming book, The Atrocity Algorithm, How The Media Became The Enemy of The People. He writes The Five Stages of Unf*ck, Red Pill Journey to January 2.0. , also on Substack. Follow him on Gettr, Gab, and MeWe @HarveyOxenhorn