Exactly. In Umberto Eco's "A Practical List for Identifying Fascists", the one that is be being displayed here is this:

    The enemy is both weak and strong. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

https://www.faena.com/aleph/umberto-eco-a-practical-list-for...

"Libs" (or whatever the villain of the day is called) are so terrifying we're cutting off baby penises with a lawnmower in full view of our cheering public but so weak that all we need is a single person to call us out in a nasty email to completely defeat us (please send money to our campaign against lawnmowing baby penises).

Heuristics like this seem pretty useless. It's true for basically all political rhetoric. The right is made up of dumb, weak incels living in their parents basement but also are going to usher in an era of totalitarian control and fascism.

It seems pretty natural to denigrate your enemies as well as play up the fear depending on your goals at that particular moment.

I emphatically disagree with you. All arguments are not equal.

If I had to boil it down to a single line the issue with "the right" from "the left"'s side, it would be that the right is "intentionally heartless".

Not stupid or intentionally fascist, just, intentionally heartless. That's a far cry from the Right's rhetoric of "Commie loving tree hugging libs" and that "We should kill them all and let God sort them out", etc. I'm sure the reality is far more distressing than my imitation thereof.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/11/hatred-li...