Glossary: Key memes, dog-whistles, canards, euphemisms, fake outrages, and obsessions in the Wall Street Journal and other GOP language factories, January 12-18, 2016

abusers: Bill and Hillary. Trump clearly is not interested in justice, truth, or any sort of linguistic precision. In feminist theory, abuse is much more widely defined than being sexual. Rather, even physical abuse is a manifestation of much wider patterns and practices of misogyny,  inequality, the bullying use of power dynamics, social privilege, etc. Even though  Hillary’s political positions work to counter these deeper forms and drivers of abuse, whereas Trump’s perpetuate them, Trump can still benefit from playing the “abuse” card.

American flag: a symbol of hate to Dems hellbent on historical revisionism.

diversity: white genocide

ethnic identity: has replaced character as the predominant emotion and social strategy among unlawful immigrants.

illegal immigrant champions: well-connected urban elites using poor and illegal immigrants to boost their own careers.

lawless: The Obama presidency, from start to finish. The GOP strategy to delegitimize Obama from the very beginning of his presidency by never voting for any of his policies.

political correctness: is killing us, according to Ted Cruz.

political issues: any discussion of Black Lives Matter or income inequality. Dismissively and reflexively reducing inequality and poverty to mere “political issues” denigrates and undercuts them. When someone characterizes dissent as “just political,” they are in effect saying that it is one-sided, distorted, and essentially disingenuous.

the poverty-industrial complex: education in America, and all the self-serving bureaucrats and teachers’ unions that have destroyed American education and perpetuated poverty and inequality.

racial issue: any charge–or any conversation–about so-called police violence. Charges of police misbehavior are always about race, never about policing.

salad bowl: has replaced the multiracial melting pot as the dominant immigrant narrative in the US because the current generation of immigrants refuses to be part of American culture or American values and insists on “multiculturalism,” aka “diversity:”see above.” Resentment has replaced assimilation, a sense of entitlement has replaced gratitude.

unapologetic: a key feature of a robust US foreign policy. Apologies are a sign of weakness and retreat.

ungracious: Obama’s general attitude toward anyone who disagrees with him. In Tea Party logic, “graciousness” means surrendering to their positions–everything else is truculence and shows a general lack of “dignity” and “class.” Calling Obama ungracious carries the subtext that he is uncivilized–Kenyan, in fact.

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 )

Facebook photo

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

Connecting to %s