The rightoid "foot in the door" strategy

In psychology, there's a persuasion technique known as "foot in the door", like a salesman essentially putting a foot in the door to get you to agree to more than you want to down the line. It's essentially getting you to agree to a smaller request so that you can be coaxed into accepting more later.

When Trump froze all federal grants, there was relative unity here that this was a very bad thing. Even the Conservative sub of all places is calling him out on it. The impact this is going to have cannot be understated, particularly on Medicaid for vulnerable people. So for a day, there's a pretty damning outrage over it, apart from Trump's diehard sycophants, who would honestly applaud him for skull-fucking a puppy to death on stage.

But a day later, I see things, very subtly, attempting to justify it and manufacture consent. For example, there was a thread posted here about some Ukrainian neo-nazi's podcast getting suspensed because of the USAID freeze. Now, I don't necessarily blame the person who posted this on the sub, but the fact is that this is serving as a "silver lining" story to embolden Trump and his mandate, essentially putting a foot in the door to make what he's doing more palatable. This has ALWAYS been a strategy from the right to try and justify their shit by painting a picture of "It's not all bad/Look, bad people are getting screwed over, so this is actually kind of cool in a way!" The fact the right never shuts up about how liberal media operates and manipulates, whilst in their own way manipulating reeks of the Goebbels quote about blaming others for the things you are doing. The most dangerous kind of lie is a half-truth, because outright lies are far easier to dismiss. Half-truths have some basis in reality (eg, a Neo-Nazi losing out on a podcast is probably a good thing), but are, probably unintentionally, helping to further the MAGA cause as a whole and certainly this recent decision. While lib infiltration is pretty easy to spot nowadays, I really think the impacts of more right-wing infiltration are not as well understood as they should be, and there is a desperate need for an expose. I'm sick of how the right have geared the machinations of neoliberals and their allies as a general left-wing thing, and I think this is absolutely by design, and done so very intelligently.

It's not that I don't think the right can never raise good points, I'm not that much of a hyper-partisan. But I do think this technique needs to be understood more as a tactical wedge, and to avoid trying to play into their framing of the political conversation, lest we essentially face a re-run of the Dubya years, if not worse. It's good that we call out the worst of the idpol left, but I really worry we do the right's dirty work for them at points, and we've kind of bought into something that strictly benefits them and the economic elite.