Kavanaugh, the Disgust Circuit and the Limits of “Nuts and Sluts”

Guest Post by Tom Luongo

The Ragin’ Cajun, I believe, coined the phrase “Nuts and Sluts” to succinctly describe the tactic used by the elites I call The Davos Crowd to smear and destroy someone they’ve targeted.

Brett Kavanaugh is the latest victim of this technique.  But, there have been dozens of victims I can list from Gary Hart in the 1980’s to former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Donald Trump.

“Nuts and Sluts” is easy to understand.  Simply accuse the person you want to destroy of being either crazy (the definition of which shifts with whatever is the political trigger issue of the day) or a sexual deviant.

This technique works because it triggers most people’s Disgust Circuit, a term created by Mark Schaller as part of what he calls the Behavioral Immune System and popularized by Johnathan Haidt.

The disgust circuit is easy to understand.

It is the limit at which behavior in others triggers our gut-level outrage and we recoil with disgust.

The reason “Nuts and Sluts” works so well on conservative candidates and voters is because, on average, conservatives have a much stronger disgust circuit than liberals and/or libertarians.

This is why it always seems to be that anyone who threatens the global order or the political system always turns out to have some horrible sexual deviance in their closet.

It’s why the only thing any of us remember about the infamous Trump Dossier is the image of Trump standing on a bed in a Moscow hotel room urinating on a hooker.

The technique is used to drive a wedge between Republican voters and lawmakers and make it easy for them to go along with whatever stupidity is brought forth by the press and the Democrats.

And don’t think for a second that, more often than not, GOP leadership isn’t in cahoots with the DNC on these take-downs.  Because they are.

But, here’s the problem.  As liberals and cultural Marxists break down the societal order, as they win skirmish after skirmish in the Culture War, and desensitize us to normalize ever more deviant behavior, the circumstances of a “Nuts and Sluts” accusation have to rise accordingly.

It’s behavioral heroin.  And the more tolerance we build up to it the more likely people are to see right through the lie.

It’s why Gary Hart simply had to be accused of having an affair in the 1980’s to scuttle his presidential aspirations but today Trump has to piss on a hooker.

And it’s why it was mild sexual harassment and a pubic hair on a Coke can for Clarence Thomas, but today, for Brett Kavanaugh, it has to be a gang-rape straight out of an 80’s frat party in a Brett Eaton Ellis book — whose books, by the way, are meant to be warnings not blueprints.

Trump has weathered both the Nuts side of the technique and the Sluts side.  And as he has done so The Resistance has become more and more outraged that it’s not working like it used to.

This is why they have to pay people to be outraged by Kavanaugh’s nomination.  They can’t muster up a critical mass of outrage while Trump is winning on many fronts.  Like it or not, the economy has improved.  It’s still not good, but it’s better and sentiment is higher.

So they have to pay people to protest Kavanaugh. And when that didn’t work, then the fear of his ascending to the Supreme Court and jeopardizing Roe v. Wade became acute, it doesn’t surprise me to see them pull out Christine Blasie Ford’s story to guide them through to the mid-term elections.

And that was a bridge too far for a lot of people.

The one who finally had enough of ‘Nuts and Sluts’ was, of all people, Lindsey Graham.  Graham is one of the most vile and venal people in D.C.  He is a war-mongering neoconservative-enabling praetorian of Imperial Washington’s status quo.

But even he has a disgust circuit and Brett Kavanaugh’s spirited defense of himself, shaming Diane Feinstein in the process, was enough for Graham to finally redeem himself for one brief moment.

When Lindsey Graham is the best defense we have against becoming a country ruled by men rather than laws, our society hangs by a thread.

It was important for Graham to do this.  It was a wake-up call to the ‘moderate’ GOP senators wavering on Kavanaugh.  Graham may be bucking for Senate Majority Leader or Attorney General, but whatever.  For four minutes his disgust was palpable.

The two men finally did what the ‘Right’ in this country have been screaming for for years.

Fight back.  Stop being reasonable.  Stop playing it safe.  Trump cannot do this by himself.

Fight for what this country was supposed to stand for.

Because as Graham said, this is all about regaining power and they don’t care what damage they do to get it back.

The disgust circuit can kick in a number of different ways.  And Thursday it kicked in to finally call out what was actually happening on Capitol Hill.  This was The Swamp in all its glory.

And believe me millions were outraged by what they saw.

It will destroy what is left of the Democratic Party.  I told you back in June that Kanye West and Donald Trump had won the Battle of the Bulge in the Culture War.  Graham and Kavanuagh’s honest and brutal outrage at the unfairness of this process was snuffing out of that counter-attack.

The mid-terms will be a Red Tide with the bodies washing up on the shore the leadership of the DNC and the carpet-baggers standing behind them with billions in money to buy fake opposition.

The truth is easy to support.  Lies cost money. The more outrageous the lie the more expensive it gets to maintain it.

Because the majority of this country just became thoroughly disgusted with the Democrats.  And they will have no one to blame but themselves.