Are people really still convincing themselves this is a 5D chess move.

After everything else, are we still doing that?

For the homophobic insult thing, just want to point out we still do it.

Stuff like saying “Trump is Putin’s bitch” or using pictures of them kissing to gross people out for instance. The insult purpose is to alternate you from Trump not from gay people, but it can also do that, and it taps into a knee jerk revulsion to effect those with that specific disgust response.

This isn’t about personally susceptiblity to bigotry. It’s about what the words are doing and achieving socially. There are different things that effect everyone on this level. The aggragate impact is what is relavent.

It sounds like you already have values that align you against him, which makes you not the target of the rhetoric. When people characterize others using ad hominem it’s usually with a subtext of alienating then from empathy.

Calling Musk a Boomer Karen buffoon for example, is much more effective than calling him a hateful fascist to people who aren’t politically opposed to him. Same with posting ugly pictures of him at the beach or calling him super divorced. All of these things are participating in stigmatizing things that should be fine. But they click with people brains and turn society against people sometimes more than accurate descriptors like calling him a fascist.

This same principle applies to the association with reptiles which is stigmatizing neurodivergence.

That doesn’t make all of them the same of course, because people have different priorities and make different judgements on what stigmatizing is too far in different situations. So your assessment of the language accepting a degree of stigma is accurate. Just also want to be clear its a messy layered decision that can’t be reduced to black and white in all context for all stigmatizing, without a lot of tradeoffs.

You’re also right that using rhetoric that throws certain groups under the bus also alienates those groups, and comes with downsides. It can even plant seeds that can evolve into actual bigotry in movements (a lot of the “boomer” talk for example has basically evolved into general ageism against the elderly, and Karen has transformed into something you can call any women who annoys you or is complaining about something).

So there’s a lot of good reason to push back on this stuff. But it can also be effective, particularly with fascists who loath feeling humiliated and form cult of personalities around being charismatic. But also in just turning neutral people into psudo allies. Sometimes. It’s complicated, is all I’m saying.

A weakness of inclusive leftist language is it removes most of the rhetorical shorthand insults that are useful for negative propaganda. What is rhetorically sticky is insulting people looks, behaviors, etc. But it also participates in the stigma of that stuff. Explaining the real reasons your political enemies are bad takes more work, which makes it lose out in comparison to your opponents who don’t have this limit.

There are ways to walk this line, but it’s very difficult. Stigmatizing language is the norm with stuff like “stupid” and “crazy” which are ableist. There often aren’t better alternatives that are equally effective rhetorically.

I don’t really have a point here, just acknowledging that this is an issue that arrives from a conflict that isn’t as easy to solve as it seems at first.