Name-calling discredits a person, group, or idea by attaching a negative, emotionally charged label — rather than by making an argument against them. Named as the first of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis’s seven devices in 1937, it is the oldest and cheapest attack technique in politics: instead of engaging a claim on its merits, the propagandist tags its source with a pejorative and lets contempt do the rest. It is the mirror image of glittering generalities (T23.10) — a bad word deployed to destroy where the good word is deployed to win.
The technique works through the horn effect (T8.5), the negative counterpart to the halo effect: one salient bad trait, real or asserted, bleeds outward to color everything about the target, so a single sticky label can discredit every position a person holds. Because the label is asserted rather than demonstrated, it substitutes emotion — contempt, disgust, suspicion — for evidence, and because it attacks the source rather than the claim, the actual argument is quietly left unaddressed. This overlaps with credibility attacks (T15.15), where the goal is specifically to make an audience stop listening to a target at all.
The defense is to keep person and position separate. Strip the label off and ask what the underlying argument or evidence actually is; if a label is applied, demand what specifically supports it, since an unsupported tag carries no weight. And resist the horn effect directly: even a genuine flaw in one area does not make everything a person says wrong. Attacking who said something is never the same as answering what they said — and noticing that gap is what neutralizes the smear.