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Demagogue
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===Personal insults and ridicule=== Many demagogues have found that ridiculing or insulting opponents is a simple way to shut down reasoned deliberation of competing ideas, especially with an unsophisticated audience. "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, for example, was a master of the personal insult. He got his nickname from a speech in which he called President [[Grover Cleveland]] "an old bag of beef" and resolved to bring a pitchfork to Washington to "poke him in his old fat ribs."<ref name="Dorgan-insult" /> [[James Kimble Vardaman]] consistently referred to President [[Theodore Roosevelt]] as a "[[racial slur|coon]]-flavored [[miscegenation]]ist" and once posted an ad in a newspaper for "sixteen big, fat, mellow, rancid coons" to sleep with Roosevelt during a trip to Mississippi.<ref name=Strickland /> A common demagogic technique is to pin an insulting [[epithet]] on an opponent, by saying it repeatedly, in speech after speech, when saying the opponent's name or in place of it. For example, [[James Michael Curley|James Curley]] referred to [[Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.]], his Republican opponent for Senator, as "Little Boy Blue". [[William Hale Thompson]] called [[Anton Cermak]], his opponent for mayor of Chicago, "Tony Baloney". Huey Long called [[Joseph E. Ransdell]], his elderly opponent for Senator, "Old Feather Duster". Joe McCarthy liked to call Secretary of State [[Dean Acheson]] "The Red Dean of Fashion". The use of epithets and other humorous invective diverts followers' attention from soberly considering how to address the important public issues of the time, scoring easy laughs instead.{{r|Luthin|page=309β314}}
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