Greedy Billionaires are Screwing You!

A Potent Long Term Theme to Counter the Right Wing Propaganda Machine

By Jim Shelton, 31st Street Swing Left

If we learned anything from the 2024 election, we learned that our episodic campaign ads were no match for the Right Wing’s 365/24/7 pervasive propaganda platform and techniques. Largely using social media, their machine relentlessly bombarded susceptible voters with emotion-laden propaganda, fostering resentment, anger, and outrage, amplified through their echo chamber. Their biggest bogus theme: immigrants are evil and taking your jobs.

But we have the ability to build up our own social-media-based communication megaphone — call it “Blue Media” — where trusted, creative, and synchronous voices espouse our messages. And within that platform, we have amazing ammunition to fight back - exploiting the greedy billionaire theme.

Greedy Billionaires - MAGA’s Achilles Heel

Fortunately, MAGA greed is so flagrant, it’s a ready target for repeated, ubiquitous, long term assault. And vital to effective, long term messaging, their greed manifests itself in so many ways, each a “sub-theme” that can be exposed and then tied back to the overall theme of greedy billionaires.

Here’s why MAGA greed offers so much opportunity for messaging:

• It’s the truth. It’s clear that Trump, Musk, Murdoch, and Koch head a long list of greedy billionaires, all acting egregiously in their selfish interests at the expense of the rest of us.

• It embraces the Number One voter issue - inflation and the economy. Thus it hits head on, exposing price-gouging and unfair billionaire tax cuts.

• It stokes strong emotions. Evidence strongly supports the potency of emotions like resentment, outrage, anger, etc. to mobilize voters. Republicans have successfully evoked such emotions against immigrants and welfare recipients, for example. We don’t need to stoop to their level, but we can direct powerful emotions against the proper villains - greedy billionaires.

• It hits home with working class voters. We know we are losing this hugely important segment. Now we can strengthen their basic affinity for salient economic populism. Dan Osborn’s Senate race showed this can gather red votes, even in Nebraska.

• Voters get it and are receptive. Evidence from focus groups, but also my own experience from many hundred of voters I talked to in 2024, clearly indicate that voters easily understand and get roused by the outrages of greedy billionaires.

• It’s trending. The billionaires have gotten so blatant, there is plenty of visible ammunition of their abuses to go after.

• There’s a strong set of reinforcing sub-themes. We focus on each billionaire individually, then connect vigorously and repeatedly link back to the overall theme - greedy billionaires as the root of the problem.

How to Engage - Focus on Persuasive Pro-Democracy Blue Media

We are in an information war. Social media is used by a majority of Americans to get at least some of their news. So we must battle in key platforms such as: Podcasts, Substack, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and BlueSky.

But we need to focus specifically on the pro-democracy “Blue Media” arena of social media, and get beyond the “just the facts” mentality. Facts are, of course, important, but it takes more to win. Going aggressively after greedy billionaires is a prime example.

The good news is that our side’s pro-democracy media efforts are underway. These include:

• Competent and effective social media pro-democracy content creators/influencers already at work. We can support them through organizations, such as Chorus and the Better Internet Initiative, as well as broader organizations like Courier Newsroom

• Leadership of organizations like DemCast where we can dispatch our own social media messaging, both individually and collectively to synergize such efforts.

With volume and coordination, these efforts can go viral and flood the zone, effectively exposing the abuses of the greedy billionaires, over and over. That’s why 31st Street Swing Left plans to support both of these Blue Media efforts vigorously. With better balance in social media, we will win more elections.

Grassroots Groups are strong and battle-tested. We must step up now and vigorously combat the Right Wing Propaganda Machine. It’s imperative for us to build the blue infrastructure and expose these greedy billionaires.