The Public Insult Playbook

Book excerpt: "The rules of the public discourse game have changed, and this book argues that the political left needs to account for the power of vitriol in crafting their theories for social and political change. Ruth Colker offers insights into how public insults have come to infect contemporary public discourse (a technique not invented by but certainly refined by Donald Trump) and, importantly, highlights lessons learned and tools for fighting back. Public insults act as a headwind and dead weight to structural reform. By showcasing the power of insults across a number of civil rights battlegrounds, Colker uncovers the structural nature of personal attacks, and offers a blueprint for a legal and political strategy that anticipates the profound but poorly understood damage they can inflict to whole movements. The book catalogues how public insults have been used against people with disabilities, immigrants, pregnant women, women seeking abortions, women who are sexually harassed, members of the LGBTQ community and, of course, Black Americans. These examples demonstrate both the pervasiveness of the deployment of insults by the political right and the ways in which the left has been caught flat-footed by this tactic. She then uses the Black Lives Matter movement as a case study to consider how to effectively counter these insults and maintain an emphasis on structural reform"--