Shaming Ocasio-Cortez for her clothes is a classic ruse to deflect attention from real issues

The right-wing disinfotainment machine is making a big push to shame New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for not dressing in rags as befits a person of modest means. The purpose of the smear campaign is to take attention away from the issues Ocasio-Cortez is dedicated to: Medicare for everyone, ending the student debt catastrophe, justice reform, ending global warming.

By relentlessly pumping out tweets and stories about what she wears, the coordinated propagandists get to control the topic of the conversation so that even the people who know it's bullshit get sucked in and join the debate. (Yes, I know I'm guilty just by writing this post.)

I'm reading Scott Adams' new book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter, and he goes into detail how Trump and his friends at Fox and Breitbart use the same trick all the time. "Master Persuaders," he writes, "move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason."

Fortunately, Ocasio-Cortez's comebacks on Twitter are awesome, and seemed to have shut up some of the propagandists. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Image: By Corey Torpie, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link