Victim shaming, projection and distraction are all ways to shift blame away from your own actions onto someone else. (Trump is a master of this, if master of nothing else).
Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, nails it:
“This is the ideology of our age captured in a single tweet. Systemic problems recast as individual problems. Corporate greed recast as personal failure. A bank claiming to ‘motivate’ its customers by mocking them for structural economic problems the bank is complicit in causing.”
We see conservative strategists regularly shift blame from systems to individuals (unless the system is the government). This is why it is so important in the Stop phase of Stop, Drop and Roll that you identify the players, the messages and the frames.
Getting the Stop phase of Stop, Drop and Roll right makes sure your final message won’t be wrong! In the Drop phase you’ll know what frames to stay out of and in the Roll phase your message becomes an illuminating mirror; to stretch our kid-taunt metaphor, ”Whatever you say about me bounces back on you”.
