Ever read George Lakoff’s book Don’t Think of an Elephant? It’s about how right-wing think tanks run focus groups to come up with mindworms that infiltrate the language so you always end up framing a discussion in terms favorable to them. Thus the “inheritance tax” becomes the “death tax”, “health care” turns into “death panels”, “flat-rate (non-graduated) tax” becomes “fair tax”, “sensible gun-control legislation” is framed as “gun grabbers”, “corporations” are found (after several centuries’ experience under the Bill of Rights) to have been “people” all along, just as “free spending” is now considered “free speech”, and here we see how even Lalo Alcaraz has stopped referring to “family reunification” and fallen for the jingoistic framing of “chain migration”.
When historians of the future refer to our era, they may find that the greatest crime the right wing committed was their hijacking of the language. And we’re just letting them get away with it.
Ever read George Lakoff’s book Don’t Think of an Elephant? It’s about how right-wing think tanks run focus groups to come up with mindworms that infiltrate the language so you always end up framing a discussion in terms favorable to them. Thus the “inheritance tax” becomes the “death tax”, “health care” turns into “death panels”, “flat-rate (non-graduated) tax” becomes “fair tax”, “sensible gun-control legislation” is framed as “gun grabbers”, “corporations” are found (after several centuries’ experience under the Bill of Rights) to have been “people” all along, just as “free spending” is now considered “free speech”, and here we see how even Lalo Alcaraz has stopped referring to “family reunification” and fallen for the jingoistic framing of “chain migration”.
When historians of the future refer to our era, they may find that the greatest crime the right wing committed was their hijacking of the language. And we’re just letting them get away with it.