I agree with all of this but I’m not quite sure what to do with it. I suppose it complicates naming and describing it. Perhaps description of it needs to be broken down into a simplified version and then fully-explored in detail afterwards? I’m not sure as I’m quite tired now.

I think your main point seems to be that they’re preying on pre-loaded information in a way that compacts several different pre-loaded pieces of information that a person has already accepted into a larger thing that then becomes larger than the sum of parts. For example a “tankie” could be broken down into several pieces (authoritarian + marxist-leninist + supports bad country + Etc) where the person falling for the “tankie” thought-terminator is expected to have already fallen for each individual component of the overall sum that makes up “tankie”. When someone has fallen for all the components already you can then combine them together along with ML and associate them to take your existing propaganda and elevate it to a level that is greater than the various parts.

Another factor here is that by giving someone a name, you define a group. If tankies are bad then there also must be an opposing good. The person joins the group of opposing good and all the values of the opposing “good” then become soaked up. You don’t even have to name the opposing side, simply naming the “tankie” is enough for everyone defining themselves as not-tankie to fall into the opposition group. If this opposition group includes nazis, the values of nazis get soaked up by members of the group in small ways.