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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2513 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 6, 2023

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Has anyone tracked down the origin of the odd phrases that liberal news outlets and institutions like to use? I'm thinking of terms like "racial reckoning," "Christian Nationalism," "the Big Lie," and "national conversation about race;" they're stilted and people don't seem to use them IRL but are nevertheless quite common on places like the front page of Reddit. "Christian Nationalism" in particular looked especially astroturfed, it was all over the news last summer with no apparent trigger and then disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. (Google Trends can confirm this.)

I suspect the spread of catchphrases like this are coordinated through something like JournoList or a foundation. If anyone has information about this I'd be interested to read it.

It’s more exciting if there’s a coordinated effort, but within publications via Slack and industry wide via Twitter, the media is now more connected to one another than they were, before. It’s a lot easier for this terminology to spread, and does not necessarily require a premeditated, coordinated effort.

"National conversation about race" dates to the Clinton Administration, when he called for just that.

"Christian nationalism" is a standard term for, well, Christian nationalism, just as Kurdish nationalism is the standard term for Kurdish nationalism and Zionism is the term for Jewish nationalism. As for why it was in the news, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene explicitly said this summer that she is a Christian nationalist, and several other candidates, including Doug Mastriano made campaign statements which seemed to be geared to appealing to Christian nationalists, such as criticizing the separation of church and state. So it is not too surprising that interest in the term surged in the summer of an election year.

It's conspiracy theory territory. I mean this approvingly, but that means you're not going to see much evidence of it barring some extremely unlikely circumstances, like a JournoList leak that you cite, Twitter Files, and orgs telling on themselves in an attempt to advertise.

I get the whiff of neurolinguistic programming from this. Calling Trump’s electoral fraud claims “the big lie” covers up for the variety of Big Lies the media proliferated: the pee tape, the dossier, the Russian connection. These were lies so flagrant and absurd, who would ever think to make up such a lie? This is the way the term was used by Hitler, and is not actually applicable to Trump’s electoral claims (in which it’s a reasonable thing to lie about). The idea is that the phrase acts as a linguistic revision in the viewer’s mind.

“Racial reckoning” is similar: it’s not about actually reckoning who owes what — there’s no calculation, no doing the math. The phrase is used to prevent the viewer’s mind from actually thinking about reckoning on race (tax input/output, productivity, who is owed what). So they say “racial reckoning”, then the media quickly points this phrase at emotional stories. This prevents the viewer from considering the actual avenue of thought regarding making a judgment on race.

The national conversation on race is similar. There is no such conversation, and they don’t want one. They don’t want you as a white person actually conversing nationally about your race. So they say “national conversation”, then they use this cue to point to what’s actually the passive listening to whatever these handpicked coastal pundits are saying. Again, the strategy is just to prevent you from considering what the phrase means divorced from what the pundits associate it with repetitively in their monologues.

So I don’t know, I’d look at the ADL and SPLC

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