‘Joy’ Rhetoric Is An Orwellian Attempt To Hide Democrats’ Hatred

“Joy” is now Democrats’ official campaign strategy. Of course, joy in the true sense resonates with people who are starving for it. But we ought to ask about the deeper purpose of the Harris-Walz presidential campaign adopting “joy” as messaging. Even The New York Times recently offered skepticism, stating “joy is not a political strategy.” No, it’s not.

But I’ll go out on a limb, and say there’s a weird trick going on here. Consider thinking of Vice President Kamala Harris’s “joy schtick” as analogous to the joystick used in aircraft and video games. The joystick is all about imposing control, dictating movements and direction. Likewise, the psychological operation behind the Democrats’ joy schtick is about controlling or “nudging” the direction of an electorate that’s profoundly miserable because of the insane amounts of inflation, crime, and social turmoil cultivated under the Democrats’ watch.

As with all such “joy” campaigns in the history of modern totalitarianism, they end up tacitly stating that “misery is joy.” It’s like being beckoned into a sado-masochistic relationship in which inflicting and receiving pain is supposed to be pleasurable. Enthusiasm becomes mandatory.

Not only is a “joy” campaign meant to distract attention from the track record of tyrants, but with media control it imposes an Orwellian anti-definition, similar to the novel 1984’s delusional slogan “freedom is slavery.” Or like the passage in Isaiah 5:20 about those who would call light darkness and darkness light, those who would call good evil and evil good.

The formula always seems to be two parts deflection, five parts hypnosis, and ten parts deception. The Democrat machine has not yet come out openly to declare that “hate is love,” but they might as well. Because getting people to hate one another (joyfully!) seems essential to their social engineering program.

‘They Hate Me Because I Won’t Hate Someone Else’

Sadly, the Democrat Party has been vigorously sowing hostilities along with misery. Hence, Kamala Harris’s “mean girl script” that calls political opponents “weird.” The idea is to implicitly tell people whom they must ridicule and hate in order to survive socially.

To divide and conquer is an old script, probably the oldest in human history. It’s also patently juvenile. But people are now beginning to notice. Popular talk show host Bill Maher got a dose of it when told that he must cease and desist his association with Elon Musk or else be cancelled. “They hate me because I won’t hate someone else,” he explained:

The intentional stoking of hatred is most obvious in today’s replay of old Nazi propaganda to get everyone to “hate the Jews” or else be shunned by society. The result is that Jewish people everywhere, especially college youth, are losing friends because of blind obedience to that Hamas-written script. An Oxford student explained it’s “as if ending a friendship with a Jew is a way of supporting the Palestinians.”

Decent people should shudder at this turn of events. And if you’re a decent person on the “other side,” such as a Palestinian man who decried the October 7, 2023 massacre, you can even find your life in danger.

Cultivating Hate Is Now an Open Globalist Psy-Op

This creepy development is just one indicator of how elites try to dictate who may speak to whom and who may associate with whom. Break their rules and they’ll sic the media on you to condemn you to social death. Author Walter Kirn recently pointed out that we are undergoing “behavioral mass-psych experiments at scale.”

Indeed. In 2008, influential “behavioral economists” Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler published their prescription to “nudge” the electorate into mass compliance by using peer pressure. Their book was a turning point. Now there are “nudge units” at the highest levels of government focused on using social pressure and propaganda to induce compliance. Thankfully, more people are now paying attention to this process.

For example, a recent study of twins concluded that shifts in political ideology are more often the result of environmental factors such as peer influences than anything else. Owen Gregorian nicely summed up that study.

Hence, if people fear losing their most important relationships over a difference of opinion, they tend to shift their ideology rather than face the isolation that comes with standing on principle. This formula is especially effective with young unmarried women.

If we don’t try harder to understand and resist this process, it can lead to bad stuff.

Blind Obedience to Social Influence Can Lead to Death

The suicide bomber is perhaps the most glaring example of the lengths to which some people will go to gain social favor and avoid social isolation. The bomber has been constantly conditioned to view “Islamic jihad” as the best path to respect from peers or family. It’s rooted in a propaganda campaign of hate that censors any other views.

Consider journalist Pierre Rehov’s interviews with failed jihadists who explain their reasons for wanting to blow themselves up to kill Jews. “I wanted to become a martyr.” Another said he’d be “certain to be beloved. . . . If I had died, my mother would have considered it a blessing.” One mother in the video announced, “To be the parents of a martyr, that is the biggest reward. It’s a big honor for the family.”

Obviously, this is a perversion of a natural human desire to be a hero. When you believe even your own mother would hope for your death, what else is left? And when no other alternatives are permitted, then what should we expect?

Americans are proving to be just as prone to the cultivation of hatred. Consider all of the hostilities our elites successfully bred among us during the Covid era. When President Biden referred to Covid as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” all the forces of government, media, and the corporate world characterized uninjected people as disease vectors responsible for murdering others. Many lost their livelihoods. Many were estranged from their families and friends.

As governor of Minnesota, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz even set up a snitch line so Minnesotans could report neighbors who were not compliant with his orders against gathering with friends at home. In such dystopias, you aren’t supposed to have any relationships the elites don’t authorize. Social trust erodes. Where does that leave us?

The Whole World Is Becoming An Insufferable Middle School

Let me offer a personal memory to illustrate how far we’ve gone in this process. As a 13-year-old, I was about to depart the prison then known as junior high school for parole in summer vacation. After boarding my school bus to depart, I watched through the window as several queen-bee girls cried and hugged each other, mascara-streaked and affecting great sadness that the school year was over.

I observed that scene with curiosity and aversion. They were such a nasty and cruel gaggle who enjoyed getting nice people shunned by calling them “weird” and worse. Good riddance.

What a relief to escape that hellhole of constant insults and humiliations those girls seemed so sad to leave behind. Such cruelties even drove one of our classmates to a grisly suicide. His death was shocking news swept under the rug by teachers and students alike.

Back then I was grateful to know there was a real world beyond the sewers of groupthink in junior high: a merit-based world where civility is expected, and people are taught to resist groupthink. That civilized world seems to be vanishing.

Today a mob of mean girl elites — like Harris, Walz, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and many more — are replacing it with a global junior high from which there is no escape. They seem to practice the politics of the “joy” that sadists feel when they inflict pain on people while teaching them to hate others.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is author of “The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.” Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Washington Examiner, American Greatness, Townhall, Public Discourse, and The Human Life Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, Morabito focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. Follow Stella on Twitter.