Glossary: Key memes, dog-whistles, canards, euphemisms, fake outrages, and obsessions in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, October 20-26, 2015

agenda: the Left’s political positions and ultimate aims. Note that having an “agenda” is stigmatized: the Tea Party instead has a principled platform or set of principles.

Christian dominionism: God’s laws supersede secular laws. Does Ben Carson’s Seventh Day Adventism fall into this category?

climate change research: “the heavy-handed use of taxpayer-funded leftist totalitarianism in the institutional bureaucracies of academia, whose sole purpose is to propagandize the gullible with specious reasoning, with the heavy stamp of “Official Science.” 

Common Core: Mass compulsory schooling is first and foremost a tool for promoting government-friendly attitudes of various sorts; increased nationalization of school curricula, goals, and methods makes the classroom an increasingly effective arena for the undermining of constitutionalist feelings in general, and the promotion of anti-gun sentiments in particular.

the Constitution: Leftists’ great pet peeve. They would rather fight for social justice than for the US Constitution.

contrary to the will of the American people: gun control, government health care, environmental and financial regulation, social safety net programs, etc. This is a master trope of Tea Party strategists: make the voters believe that these radical ideas came from them, and not from the NRA, Wall Street, The National Review, The Family Research Council, GOP think tanks, etc. They got this idea from Dale Carnegie. The Tea Party acts as if almost all Americans–certainly all real Americans–share these values, even if poll after poll shows the opposite.

coronation: Hillary’s so-far successful campaign. Trump, on the other hand, is just called the “front runner.”

glib hindsight: criticizing our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (aka, “MSNBC cliches.”) Failed Tea Party policies are inoculated against criticism, as if we can’t learn from the past.

gun confiscation: the greatest threat to modern civilization

Islamist empowerment: Obama’s foreign policy.

political lies: the Left’s moral imperative as a way to further their “agenda.”

punishing the military: any cuts in the Pentagon budget. Tea Party program cuts are seen as punitive, whereas Dem program cuts are characterized as national redemption.

rape culture: an urban legend, especially in regard to colleges. As mythic as racial profiling, climate change, or the gender pay gap.

very nice: any Dem idealism when it comes to human rights, tolerance, openness, peace, economic equality, etc. In other words, idealism=childish and naive utopianism.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s