# Ratfucking The vulgar in-craft term for covert political sabotage — the same category of operations covered in depth at [[Dirty Tricks]], which uses "ratfucking" as an alias and treats the full operational history from the Nixon-CREEP era through the contemporary digital-age descendants. ## The term's specific origin The word traces to University of Southern California campus politics in the early 1960s, where [[Donald Segretti]] and Dwight Chapin used it as fraternity slang for the pranks, dirty tricks, and cheating tactics deployed in student government elections. The term itself predates USC — it circulated in Southern California college slang from the late 1950s and has deeper roots in World War I military slang. But it was Segretti who carried the word and the practices from USC fraternity politics into national-level Republican operations as part of the Nixon administration's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) in 1971-72. [[Bob Woodward]] and [[Carl Bernstein]] brought the term to public attention through their *Washington Post* reporting on the [[Watergate Scandal]] and their 1974 book [[All the President's Men]]. Segretti was indicted in October 1972, pleaded guilty to three counts of distributing illegal campaign literature, and served four and a half months in federal prison. His Senate Watergate Committee testimony provided the detailed operational account that made "ratfucking" part of the permanent American political vocabulary. ## See the main entry For the full treatment — the Watergate-CREEP canonical case, the longer historical lineage, the Atwater-Stone-Rove modern succession, and the contemporary digital-age evolution — see [[Dirty Tricks]]. ## See Also - [[Dirty Tricks]] — the full treatment of this category - [[Donald Segretti]] — the operative who carried the term from USC to CREEP - [[Watergate Scandal]] — the constitutional crisis that exposed the operations - [[Roger Stone]] — the continuous-thread practitioner - [[All the President's Men]] — the book that popularized the term - [[Politics Lexicon]] — subject hub