Forensic Research Archive of Manipulation and Exploitation
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Techniques · Classical

Name-calling

Name-calling is a propaganda technique that attaches a loaded label to a person, group or idea. The label is meant to make the audience reject the target without checking the claim, and evidence is optional or arrives later as decoration. It is one of the seven devices the Institute for Propaganda Analysis named in 1937.

See 951 name-calling examples in the archive

Illustration, not an archive object

Also called Ad hominem labeling, Loaded label

Attach a loaded label so the audience rejects the target without checking the claim.

How to spot Name-calling: the tell

The insult does the work; evidence is optional or arrives later as decoration.

What Name-calling is not

Accurate naming of a documented crime or office.

History and effect of Name-calling propaganda

One of the seven devices the Institute for Propaganda Analysis named in 1937 to teach American students to recognize domestic and Axis propaganda alike. The move itself is far older — Roman political invective ran on the same logic — but the IPA gave it a teachable name.

It triggers immediate social rejection of the target: the audience discharges contempt or disgust before it ever gets to the underlying claim.

Lineage: IPA 1937

How Name-calling propaganda works

Name-calling starts with a choice of word. The sender picks a label that already carries a strong verdict in the audience's vocabulary ("traitor", "enemy of the people", "vermin", "criminal", a wartime epithet for a nation) and attaches it to a person, group or idea. The label does not describe a specific act that can be checked. It assigns the target to a category the audience has already learned to reject, so the verdict arrives with the word.

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The second step is substitution. Where an argument would normally set out what the target did and why it matters, the label stands in for that whole chain. A poster that calls an army "the Hun" does not need to show what that army did in a particular town; a hashtag that calls a party "criminals" does not need to name a charge. If evidence appears at all, it tends to arrive afterwards and is selected to fit the label that has already been applied. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis described the device in exactly these terms: a bad name is given so that the audience condemns without examining the evidence (Lee and Lee 1939).

The third step is repetition and spread. A label becomes most effective once it is short enough to be repeated by people other than the sender: a slogan, a nickname, a chant, a hashtag. Each repetition makes the category feel more established, and the people repeating it do much of the distribution. The Matryoshka clips described in Matryoshka's midterm clips: borrowed faces and a borrowed logo show the modern version: a single hashtag sorting a whole party into a criminal category, pushed across many short videos, with no specific charge attached to any of the people named.

What the message depends on is a shared vocabulary of contempt. The label only works if the audience already treats the category as bad. That is why name-calling often borrows from existing fears (disease, dirt, animals, betrayal) and why the same word can be ineffective or even flattering with a different audience.

Why Name-calling propaganda works

The first mechanism is categorization. Gordon Allport, in The Nature of Prejudice (1954), argued that some labels act as "labels of primary potency": once a person is named by a category word, that word crowds out every other thing that is true about them. Social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979) adds the group dimension. People sort others into in-groups and out-groups quickly and favor their own group even on trivial grounds, so a label that places the target in an out-group lets the audience reject them as a matter of group loyalty rather than judgment. FRAME's Learn library covers this in Social identity and In-group favoritism.

Illustration: an empty speaker's podium with a cluster of vintage microphones and rows of empty chairs.
Illustration, not an archive object
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The second mechanism is dehumanization. Nick Haslam's review (2006) distinguishes labels that deny people uniquely human traits (likening them to animals) from labels that deny them warmth and feeling (likening them to machines or objects). Kteily and colleagues (2015) found that people willing to rate an out-group as less "evolved" on a simple scale were also more likely to support hostile policies toward that group. This research is correlational at its core, and whether dehumanizing language causes hostility or mainly expresses hostility that already exists is still debated. Yanagizawa-Drott (2014) estimated that reception of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) in Rwanda increased participation in the 1994 killings, but estimates of that kind depend on modeling assumptions about radio coverage and should be read as an estimate, not a settled count.

The third mechanism is repetition. Hasher, Goldstein and Toppino (1977) showed that statements heard more than once are rated as more likely to be true, and Fazio and colleagues (2015) found that the effect persists even when people know the correct answer. A label repeated often enough starts to feel like a description. FRAME's Learn library covers this in Illusory truth effect.

Finally, name-calling works because it is fast. A label asks for no effort, while checking what it implies asks for a lot. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986) predicts that when attention or motivation is low, people lean on simple cues rather than weighing arguments, and a label is one of the simplest cues there is.

Name-calling propaganda examples across eras and sides

  • "The Hun" (United States and Allied powers, 1914 to 1918). Allied propaganda in the First World War used "the Hun" as the standard epithet for German forces, an echo of Kaiser Wilhelm II's 1900 speech urging troops bound for China to fight like the Huns of old. The U.S. Treasury poster Beat Back the Hun with Liberty Bonds puts the single label over a bloodied, ape-like figure and asks for bond purchases on the strength of the name alone. Lasswell's study of wartime propaganda treated this kind of enemy labeling as a central tool of all the belligerents, not one side (Sources: Lasswell 1927).
  • "Enemy of the people" (Soviet Union, 1930s). During the purges of 1936 to 1938 the phrase vrag naroda was applied to officials, officers and ordinary citizens before and during their trials, and families of those labeled could be punished in turn. In his 1956 closed speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev criticized the term, saying it removed the need to demonstrate the ideological errors of the person so labelled (Sources: Conquest 1990).
  • "Ox demons and snake spirits" (China, 1966). On 1 June 1966 the People's Daily published an editorial calling for a sweep against "ox demons and snake spirits", a phrase from Buddhist and folk imagery that became a catch-all label for people targeted in the early Cultural Revolution. Teachers, officials and others were paraded under such labels at struggle sessions (Sources: MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2006).
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  • "Inyenzi" (Rwanda, 1990 to 1994). The extremist paper Kangura and the station RTLM repeatedly called Tutsi "inyenzi" (cockroaches) and linked them to the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda examined this broadcasting and publishing in the "Media case" (Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza and Ngeze, judgment 2003). This is genocide-scale use of the technique and is not comparable in scale or consequence to the electoral examples below (Sources: Des Forges 1999; ICTR 2003).
  • GOPAC's word list (United States, Republican, 1990). A memo distributed by GOPAC, the political action committee then associated with Newt Gingrich, titled Language: A Key Mechanism of Control, advised Republican candidates to describe opponents with a list of "contrasting words" that included terms such as "sick", "pathetic", "corrupt" and "traitors". The memo said to apply them "to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party" and to memorize the list, without tying any word to a specific charge (Sources: GOPAC 1990).
  • "Basket of deplorables" (United States, Democratic, 2016). At a New York fundraiser on 9 September 2016, Hillary Clinton said that half of Donald Trump's supporters could be put in "the basket of deplorables", listing traits such as racism and sexism. She expressed regret for the "half" the next day and later wrote about the remark as a mistake. The phrase assigned a large group of voters to a single disqualifying category (Sources: Clinton 2017).
  • "Traitors abroad" (Iran, 2026). Iranian state media promoted the Alaj portal, which asked citizens to send in names of Iranians abroad it described as "anti-homeland", "separatist" and traitors, with penalties attached. The labels came before any named act or charge (see Alaj: the portal Iranian state media promoted for reporting 'traitors abroad').
  • "Le Traître" (France, 1895, illustrated press). On 13 January 1895 the Sunday supplement of Le Petit Journal, one of the highest-circulation French papers, put the military degradation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus on its cover under the caption "Le Traître" ahead of his name (Le Traître: Dégradation d'Alfred Dreyfus (The Traitor: Degradation of Alfred Dreyfus), Le Petit Journal, 13 January 1895). The label restated a court-martial verdict of 22 December 1894. The Cour de cassation annulled that verdict on 12 July 1906, so the label was both a verdict and, later, an error; the tag describes what the cover does at the time of printing (Sources: Bredin 1983).
  • Der Stürmer (Germany, 1923 to 1945, Nazi Party publisher Julius Streicher). The weekly attached antisemitic labels and caricatures to Jews in every issue. At Nuremberg the International Military Tribunal convicted Streicher on 1 October 1946 of crimes against humanity for his incitement to persecution and extermination. The October 1939 issue shown in Die Geissel Gottes: Polnische Juden (Der Stürmer, October 1939) is one instance (Sources: IMT 1947). It is state-backed genocidal incitement and not comparable in scale to the ballot-box labels below.
  • "The Great Satan" (Iran, from 1979, revolutionary leadership). Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and officials who followed him called the United States "the Great Satan" from 1979. The label named a state by a religious category, not by a stated act (Sources: Abrahamian 2008). U.S. leaders in the same decades used their own labels for Iran, discussed in the edge cases below.
  • Nationalist China and the "traitors" label (1939). A Nationalist-government pictorial printed the collaborationist politician Wang Jingwei as an obese figure carrying four animals labelled with his associates' names (打死汪精衛，打死漢奸們！ (Beat Wang Jingwei to death, beat the traitors to death!), Kangweijun Pictorial vol. 1 no. 3). The cartoon conveys "traitor" through labels and symbols rather than an account of what each man did; Wang did head the Japanese-backed Nanjing government from March 1940, so the political dispute behind the label was real, and the technique lies in how the page argues it.
  • "Saakashvili = Hitler" (Russia, 2008, Liberal Democratic Party). On 13 August 2008, the day after the Russo-Georgian War ceasefire, party activists held placards equating Georgia's president with Hitler outside the Georgian embassy in Moscow (LDPR rally at the Georgian embassy, Moscow: 'Saakashvili = Hitler', 13 August 2008). Georgian-side material of the same weeks used strong comparisons about Russian leaders; the technique is defined the same way for both.
  • "Cong rat is dead" (United States, Vietnam War, 1969). A hand-painted sign photographed by the U.S. Marine Corps on 8 August 1969 calls the enemy a rat (Cong rat is dead (sign photographed by the U.S. Marine Corps, 8 August 1969)). It is a unit-level sign, not a campaign, and is shown because it records the label in use at the front (Sources: NARA, RG 127).
  • "Vermin" (United States, Republican, 2023). In a Veterans Day speech at Claremont, New Hampshire, on 11 November 2023, Donald Trump said he would "root out" what he called "the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country". The animal image placed political opponents outside the community, and critics read it as dehumanizing; his campaign defended it as describing criminals and radicals (Sources: Trump 2023).
  • "Garbage" (United States, Democratic, 2024). On 29 October 2024, after the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" at a Trump rally, President Joe Biden said on a Voto Latino call that "the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters". The White House and Biden then said he had meant Hinchcliffe's rhetoric about Latinos, not supporters as a group, and the White House transcript printed "supporters'" with an apostrophe. Both readings were widely reported; the remark as first heard assigned a category of voters a disqualifying label, which is why it is listed with the 2016 and 2023 cases (Sources: NBC News 2024).

Le Petit Journal, 13 January 1895, cover: the degradation of Captain Dreyfus under the caption "Le Traitre"

Content note: Caricature of a named political leader as an obese figure carrying animals labelled with associates' names, with a slogan calling for his death. This object is shown as it was published. Why Kangweijun Pictorial 1939: cartoon of Wang Jingwei carrying four animals labelled with his associates' names

LDPR activists with placards reading Saakashvili = Hitler outside the Georgian embassy in Moscow

Sign reading CONG RAT IS DEAD photographed by the U.S. Marine Corps, 8 August 1969

Polish poster: The Bolsheviks Murder Defenceless Women, 1920

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Le Petit Journal, Supplement illustre, 13 January 1895, cover by Henri Meyer (Paris). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The one-word caption carries the court-martial verdict as a title; the verdict was annulled in 1906.

Kangweijun Pictorial, vol. 1 no. 3 (Zhejiang, 1939), propaganda section of a Nationalist-government self-defence corps. Wikimedia Commons (National Library of China scan). Public domain (corporate author, 1939). Names are printed onto animal bodies in place of any account of conduct.

Liberal Democratic Party of Russia rally at the Georgian embassy, Moscow, 13 August 2008. ldpr.ru via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0. The equation with Hitler stands in for any stated charge.

Sign photographed by the U.S. Marine Corps, 8 August 1969 (NARA, RG 127, 127-GVB-325-A373193). Public domain (U.S. Marine Corps photograph). A front-line use of the animal label, recorded as found.

"Bolszewicy mordują bezbronne kobiety!", Polish lithograph poster, Lwow, 1920 (Polona via Wikimedia Commons). Public domain. A group label paired with an atrocity claim in the Polish-Soviet War.

How to spot Name-calling propaganda

  • The strongest word in the message is a category label, and it arrives before any specific act, date or document.
  • You cannot state what the target is accused of doing without repeating the label itself.
  • The label compares people to animals, vermin, disease or dirt, or places them outside the nation ("traitor", "enemy", "foreign").
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  • The same label is applied to many different people with very different conduct.
  • The label is short enough to chant, print on a sign or use as a hashtag, and it is repeated far more often than any supporting evidence.
  • Evidence, if it appears, is thin compared with the size of the label, or turns up only after the audience has been asked to reject the target.

Where Name-calling propaganda ends: edge cases and legitimate persuasion

Named variants include the wartime epithet ("the Hun"), the political nickname, the dehumanizing metaphor (vermin, cockroaches,…
Illustration: a vintage broadcast microphone beside torn script pages.
Illustration, not an archive object

Named variants include the wartime epithet ("the Hun"), the political nickname, the dehumanizing metaphor (vermin, cockroaches, disease), the hashtag label, and guilt by association, where the target is labeled through a group they are said to resemble. Name-calling is the mirror image of Glittering generalities: one attaches a vague bad word, the other a vague good word, and both skip the evidence. It often opens the way for Scapegoating, which assigns blame for a complex problem to a labeled group, and for Accusation in a mirror, where the label describes what the sender plans to do. Euphemism / doublespeak runs the other way, softening a label for one's own side. When a label quietly changes the meaning of an established word, it overlaps with Semantic hijacking.

Not every negative word is name-calling. Calling a person convicted of fraud a "convicted fraudster" is accurate naming of a documented fact. Calling a military force by its legal name while describing documented actions is reporting. Strong language in opinion writing is also not automatically propaganda when the writer sets out the specific conduct being condemned.

Two boundary cases show why the test matters. President Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on 8 March 1983 and President George W. Bush's "axis of evil" phrase in the State of the Union address of 29 January 2002 were labels for states, but each speech also set out stated policies and programs that could be checked, so critics and defenders disagree on whether the labels carried the argument or decorated it. Applying the test, the label counts as name-calling to the extent that the checkable claims could be removed without changing the message. A convicted fraudster named as such in a court report, or a regime named by its legal designation in a sanctions notice, is reporting.

The test a reader can apply has two parts. First, strip the label out and ask what specific, checkable claim remains; if nothing is left, the label was doing the work. Second, ask whether the sender would use the same word for someone on their own side who did the same thing. A label that is applied consistently to documented conduct is a description. A label that is applied to a category of people, before or instead of any evidence, is name-calling.

Then and now

2 items · Then and now: national and ethnic labels for an enemy or a disease (US 1942, US 2020) —…

Sources and further reading

Sources

22 items · Abrahamian, Ervand. 2008. A History of Modern Iran . Cambridge: Cambridge University…
  • Abrahamian, Ervand. 2008. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Allport, Gordon W. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.
  • Bredin, Jean-Denis. 1983. L'Affaire. Paris: Julliard.
  • Clinton, Hillary Rodham. 2017. What Happened. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  • Conquest, Robert. 1990. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Des Forges, Alison. 1999. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch.
  • Fazio, Lisa K., Nadia M. Brashier, B. Keith Payne, and Elizabeth J. Marsh. 2015. "Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144(5): 993–1002.
  • GOPAC. 1990. Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. Memo distributed to Republican candidates.
  • Haslam, Nick. 2006. "Dehumanization: An Integrative Review." Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(3): 252–264.
  • Hasher, Lynn, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino. 1977. "Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 16(1): 107–112.
  • International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. 2003. The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze, Case No. ICTR-99-52-T, Judgement and Sentence, 3 December 2003.
  • International Military Tribunal. 1947. Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 1, Judgment of 1 October 1946 (Streicher). Nuremberg.
  • Kteily, Nour, Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill. 2015. "The Ascent of Man: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence for Blatant Dehumanization." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 109(5): 901–931.
  • Lasswell, Harold D. 1927. Propaganda Technique in the World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
  • Lee, Alfred McClung, and Elizabeth Briant Lee, eds. 1939. The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin's Speeches. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company (for the Institute for Propaganda Analysis).
  • MacFarquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. 2006. Mao's Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
  • NBC News. 2024. Reporting on President Biden's remark of 29 October 2024 and the White House clarification.
  • Petty, Richard E., and John T. Cacioppo. 1986. Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. New York: Springer-Verlag.
  • Trump, Donald J. 2023. Speech at Claremont, New Hampshire, 11 November 2023.
  • Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner. 1979. "An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict." In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, 33–47. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
  • U.S. National Archives (NARA). Record Group 127, photograph 127-GVB-325-A373193 (8 August 1969).
  • Yanagizawa-Drott, David. 2014. "Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide." Quarterly Journal of Economics 129(4): 1947–1994.

Case studies

109 items · Alaj: the portal Iranian state media promoted for reporting 'traitors abroad' — Alaj: the…

Name-calling propaganda examples in the collection

All 951 name-calling examples
Behistun (Bisotun) rock relief and trilingual inscription of Darius I: the king, two attendants and the bound rebel leaders beneath the winged figure of AhuramazdaAchaemenid EmpireBehistun (Bisotun) rock relief and trilingual inscription of Darius I: the king, two attendants and the bound rebel leaders beneath the winged figure of Ahuramazda0000 · Card stacking, Name-calling, TestimonialContent noteMcKinley's Easter Egg (Puck, 18 April 1900)United StatesMcKinley's Easter Egg (Puck, 18 April 1900)Apr 18, 1900 · Name-callingJego program (His Programme): Polish caricature posterPolandJego program (His Programme): Polish caricature poster1920 · Fear appeal, Name-callingContent noteA Bum in the BeaneryUnited StatesA Bum in the BeaneryNov 13, 1940 · Name-callingContent noteWhen You're A.W.O.L. You're Working for the AxisUnited StatesWhen You're A.W.O.L. You're Working for the Axis1942 · Name-calling, TransferThe murder of a perfectly good differential (reel-1)United StatesThe murder of a perfectly good differential (reel-1)1943 · Name-callingChildren examine collected Colorado beetles during the "American beetle" campaign, Chemnitz districtEast GermanyChildren examine collected Colorado beetles during the "American beetle" campaign, Chemnitz districtJun 10, 1950 · Scapegoating, Name-callingContent noteAnother Vietcong Crime in Dinh-TuongUnited StatesAnother Vietcong Crime in Dinh-Tuong1965 · Fear appeal, Card stacking, Name-callingContent note

Name-calling in the watch briefs

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Name-calling in campaign dossiers

Propaganda techniques related to Name-calling

Glittering generalitiesTransferScapegoatingDehumanizationAd hominemLoaded languageDemagoguery

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