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The weaponization of language: Discourses of rising right-wing authoritarianism

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Celine-Marie Pascale considers the discursive strategies currently deployed by rising far-right movements around the globe by examining the weaponization of language – the rapid acceleration of signifying practices that lay the essential cornerstones of material violence.

Image courtesy of interviewee. June 18, 2024

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This video discusses the current global rise of authoritarian politics, marked by increasing violence, profound inequality, climate crises, and the manipulation of language to undermine public information. The speaker notes that political leaders are weaponizing language to create chaos, deepen social divisions, and delegitimize expertise, ultimately aiming to establish their authority as unaccountable.

The phenomenon of weaponized language is described as a systematic effort involving key elements like an elite shaping narratives, the use of slogans, charismatic leaders, and a nationalistic approach. The speaker emphasizes how language precedes and contributes to physical violence, drawing parallels with historical instances of genocide where propaganda was used to dehumanize victims.

Disinformation and propaganda form critical parts of this language manipulation, obscuring true intentions and confusing the public. Examples include techniques used by tobacco and oil companies to distort truths for profit and political leverage. The speaker highlights the normalization of hate through mundane discourse, particularly how terminology influences perceptions of marginalized groups.

Censorship, both by authoritarian regimes and corporations, is portrayed as a tool for controlling narratives that threaten power. The speaker argues for the importance of critical analysis of language and propaganda by scholars to counter rising authoritarianism.

This video concludes that the power of language is pervasive and shapes our worldview, making it imperative for individuals to become critical consumers of information and mindful of the discourses they engage with to resist violence from right-wing movements.

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The world right now is facing a violent intensification

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of authoritarian politics,

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and it's at one of the most precarious

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times in global history.

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We've got profound inequality.

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Climate, catastrophes

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and public figures are weaponizing language

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and destroying the integrity of public information spaces.

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And they do this by deriding expertise,

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disputing known facts.

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They exalt opinion as fact,

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and they undermine any version of equality, of, sorry,

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any version of reality that doesn't align

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with their agendas.

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So essentially, by weaponizing language, the right wing

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campaigns create cycles of communicative chaos.

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And this chaos serves to deepen social divisions

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and exhaust public desires for information,

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for clarity, and for debate.

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So in addition to deepening these divisions,

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the authoritarian movements, are attempting

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to establish their own authority

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and actions as unaccountable to public institutions.

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So it's important to emphasize that part of this context is

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that the weaponization of language is a concerted

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and systematic effort.

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Um, it's not random, although it might appear that way.

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And weaponized language, unlike other forms of aggressive

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or misleading language, always involves four conditions.

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One, an elite that shapes the narrative.

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Two, a barrage of slogans.

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Three, a person or persons who serve

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as the charismatic face of a movement.

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And then an insular relationship to nationalism,

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which you know, includes kind

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of isolationism on a world scale as a sociologist

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who studies language, I've watched how

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frame, how we frame people

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and issues in ways that create additional violence.

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And so, as I've seen the rise of right wing movements

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around the globe, most particularly in the US

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I was really caught by the way that,

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language comes always as a forerunner to physical violence.

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The relationship between symbolic

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and material practices are really, you know,

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there's one kind of one and the same.

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You can't separate them.

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And the work that others have done in this area

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also really inspired me to think about not just

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what we see now, but what it portends for the future.

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Throughout history, collective violence has always been

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preceded by weaponized language.

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And I think Jason Stanley illustrates this really well.

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Um, in Nazi Germany, Rwanda,

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and Myanmar, that victims of ethnic cleansing were subjected

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to attacks in the press by,

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Political leaders and in the public for months or years

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before the regimes turned genocidal.

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And we can see this also in Victor Klepper's work, his

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as a personal account of the Rise of the Third Reich.

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And he looks at the language that preceded

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and accompanied that rise.

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My own scholarship draws from that work,

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but also from Bodu, Goffman

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and Hall to kind of expand upon the ways in which symbolic

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practices are inseparable from material realities.

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If we think about propaganda as sort of the construction

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of particular kinds of information, at its most basic level,

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propaganda is more than just a rhetoric, rhetoric

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of persuasion.

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It's always a strategic mix of selective, selective facts

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and fiction that are blended

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to promote a particular point of view.

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And so in this sense,

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propaganda is always a persuasive project

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that's based on some level of deception.

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It uses simplistic repetitious,

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and easily understood slogans

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and symbols that mani are used to manipulate public emotion.

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I think, two excellent examples of this

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are the strategies adopted by tobacco companies

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to negate health risks

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and later by oil companies to negate climate science.

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And both of those industries manipulated public sentiment

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to preserve profits over human life,

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and certainly in the case of oil companies at the expense

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of a global future.

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But I think that, the propaganda

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of right wing movements really

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leverages widely held ideals to obscure their goals.

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So for instance, you'll hear in the United States,

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there's a lot of propaganda about

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how the right wing is going

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to help the so-called working class

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and the middle class, yet there

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actually undermining the interests of those groups.

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Essentially, they use the right wing, uses propaganda

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to overwhelm public discernment.

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And more recently, groups

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and governments around the world have been using

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what's called computational propaganda.

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And it is using algorithms

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and artificial intelligence

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to search social media accounts, online search histories,

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gaming platforms, any online presence that you might have.

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They analyze the user profiles

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and then target, you said, information is target audiences

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that are vulnerable to particular messaging.

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So when we think about the tailor made content

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that you can create through this kind

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of computational propaganda, it's overwhelming.

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And I think we saw that quite a lot with, the way

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that,

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the politics have shifted in the United States, right?

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Where you can, you go online

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and you're not sure what you're seeing anymore

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because it's been created for you based on what,

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what the analysis,

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how the analysis identifies your political leanings.

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And I think Kleer really astutely described propaganda as

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language that thinks for you

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because really effective propaganda becomes the

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way we see the world.

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For me, I think of disinformation as a subset of propaganda,

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and it's designed to consolidate power

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and it takes many forms, one of which is

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provoking reactionary responses

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and sustaining social unrest.

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Another piece of disinformation

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that's really important is this right wing charge

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of fake news, which is used to discredit people

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and information, and it functions as a signifier

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that's very much like other forms of,

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disinformation, right, to deny what's actually out there.

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Probably. You remember a young man carried an assault rifle

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into a pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC

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because he thought that there was a

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pedophilia ring being run by Hillary Clinton

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and her campaign advisor at that time.

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And so he was charging into the pizzeria

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to liberate the children.

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And of course, you know, it was false.

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But the Paul polls found that even afterward,

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that nearly half

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of all the Trump supporters they interviewed,

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like this young man, gave some credence to rumors

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that there was a pedophilia ring being run

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out of the pizzeria.

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So, you know, I think about Voltaire who said that a,

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if you can make people believe absurdities,

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you can make them commit atrocities,

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and disinformation is a way of

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creating a reality that's less objectively real,

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more contingent, more emotional,

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and creates a public that's much more reactionary.

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Censorship is one of the oldest ways of,

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weaponizing language.

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It's a very blunt edge strategy,

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and it can be traced back to 4 43 BCE in Rome

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and 300 CE in China.

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Uh, as you likely know,

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it's fundamentally prohibiting a language

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that threatens hegemonic power.

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And while media censorship is kind of the hallmark

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of authoritarian regimes, it's also associated

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with corporate capitalism.

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For instance, you know, historically in the US

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and I suspect as well and the UK

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and other countries, news media's censor information

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that would deductively affect the interests

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of their advertisers and owners.

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So traditional forms of surveillance

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and punishment around censorship have been expanded

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and now include vast numbers of internet sensors as well

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as media outlets that redact

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and reframe repackage information as news.

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Uh, because censorship seeks to control information,

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journalists become quite vulnerable to acts of repression.

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And in just the first two months of 2024, globally,

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548 journalists

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and media workers were detained by governments

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and journalist daily re risk, death,

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kidnapping, physical assaults and doxing.

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So Clamper characterized the use

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of mundane discourse similar to administering tiny doses

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of arsenic, which initially appeared to have no effect.

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But over time, they're highly toxic.

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And here it's helpful to consider how

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outright lies become inserted into mundane discourse.

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For example, the Washington Post found that

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by the time President Trump left office, he had made

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over 30,000 false claims.

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And while Trump seems to draw from lenin's old aphorism

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that a lie told, often enough becomes the truth, I have

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to say that Publix are persuaded not so much by facts,

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but by the constancy of information.

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So common sense tells us

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that if we hear the same information from three

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or four different sources, it must be true.

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And certainly media outlets have amplified the lies

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that Trump has told, but it's not just the number of lies.

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Um, ordinarily when we lie

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and basically everyone lies now

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or then in their life, we want our lies to be seen as true.

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So it's the nature of deceit.

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Ordinary people craft lies with an eye to

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preventing ourselves from being exposed, for having lied.

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But that's not the case for Donald Trump

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who openly bragged about having lied

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to the Canadian Prime Minister about trade deficits.

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So you have to think about Trump as not trying to get away

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with a lie, but rather using lies to convey an impression

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that he wields unconstrained power.

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And to the extent that he seems to have impunity, it's not

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because he does, but because he,

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because he doesn't stand alone, he's part

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of a comprehensive system that brought him to power

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and ensures his survival.

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So mundane discourse is also deployed

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by right wing movements

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to normalize hate groups and hate speech.

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So if you think about the way that immigrants

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around the globe have been targeted in the us, people

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who are legally seeking asylum are often referred to

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as illegal aliens or as illegals.

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And political and media discourses will refer

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to chain migration when they're really talking about

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family reunification.

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So these metaphors

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and linguistic frames seep into the way

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that we speak every day,

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and they become part of our worldview.

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We end up seeing the world the way we've learned to name it,

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and sometimes we learn to name it in these ways, not

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because we hold hard feelings or harsh feelings, but simply

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because we can't think of another language that

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that fits in there, right?

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So people don't think about family reunification,

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they'll use chain migration

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because that's what they're familiar with.

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And in that process, we become complicit

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with normalizing hate.

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It's how these marginalizing discourses

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can seep into our language, and then they get leveraged

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because they increase our willingness to ignore people

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who are being harmed, those who are marginalized,

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when they're harmed, it's not so important anymore

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because we have them already at a distance.

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And then to disregard the willingness to inflict harm,

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that harm is rationalized as a kind of necessary

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for self-protection.

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And throughout history, you could see this logic

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that's been used to justify hate crimes, including murder.

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So mundane discourse is also weaponized by,

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hate groups that rebrand themselves.

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So through much of the world,

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white supremacists now call themselves the alt-right?

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As if they are an alternate political party with a platform

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that goes beyond white supremacy.

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And we can see hate being mainstreamed by groups who adopt

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religious labels to justify their hatred.

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So public discourse is always significant, always strategic,

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even if we don't fully understand it.

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And I think that sociologists have so much to offer.

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So, you know, at this moment where we have right wing,

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authoritarian, authoritarian movements on the rise,

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I think scholars are really positioned

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to help shape a different future.

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And that's part

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of why right wing movements attack the academy.

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Disciplines that teach critical thinking,

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including sociology, gender studies, critical race studies,

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social sciences more broadly are being defunded and reshaped

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and in some cases eliminated.

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So you might think that

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because language is being weaponized through censorship,

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propaganda, disinformation, mundane discourse

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that you would want to have scholars fight back by insist,

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insisting on objective facts.

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This is real, but that's pretty much inadequate.

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Montag, reminds us that falsehood is not the opposite

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of truth, right?

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Unbound by logic.

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In fact, those who are willing to weaponize language

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of boundless possibilities.

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And I think that speaks to the need for multiple strategies.

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Clampers analysis of weaponized language

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during the third rech demonstrates that conditions for peace

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and violence are created

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and made meaningful through systems of signification.

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So critical analysis

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of authoritarian discourses will give us a roadmap of

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where those right wing movements intend to take us

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and how they intend to do it.

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And those analyses can also offer insights

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that will interrupt rising far right movements

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before they become fully entrenched, as well as show us how

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to deconstruct them when they are entrenched.

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So I think for myself, I have to say

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that critical sociological analyses of weaponized language

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provide really effective ways to reframe public discourse

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because it's through these systems of significant

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that we create, locate,

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or abdicate our responsibilities for action.

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I think our work as scholars is more important than ever

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in post-industrial societies.

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Material violence is rarely the first choice,

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but it's always a justifiable option,

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and it's an option that's made reasonable

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and apparently necessary through the preceding development

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of weaponized language.

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So the power of language is pervasive,

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kind of where we started.

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Even our most intimate thoughts are formed

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through a language that comes to us through our culture,

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through public discourse.

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And those cultural linguistic formations are central to

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how we see ourselves, our relationships,

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our responsibilities, and our values.

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So if we want to refuse the violence

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of right-wing authoritarian movements, it's imperative

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that we begin by learning to be critical consumers

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of information, to be attentive to linguistic framing,

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and to be thoughtful about the discourses we adopt.

00:00 - The world right now is facing a violent intensification of authoritarian politics, and it's at one of the most precarious times in global history. We've got profound inequality. Climate, catastrophes

00:14 - and public figures are weaponizing language and destroying the integrity of public information spaces. And they do this by deriding expertise, disputing known facts. They exalt opinion as fact, and they undermine any version of equality, of, sorry, any version of reality that doesn't align with their agendas. So essentially, by weaponizing language, the right wing campaigns create cycles of communicative chaos.

00:44 - And this chaos serves to deepen social divisions and exhaust public desires for information, for clarity, and for debate. So in addition to deepening these divisions, the authoritarian movements, are attempting to establish their own authority and actions as unaccountable to public institutions. So it's important to emphasize that part of this context is that the weaponization of language is a concerted and systematic effort.

01:16 - it's not random, although it might appear that way. And weaponized language, unlike other forms of aggressive or misleading language, always involves four conditions. One, an elite that shapes the narrative. Two, a barrage of slogans. Three, a person or persons who serve as the charismatic face of a movement. And then an insular relationship to nationalism, which you know, includes kind of isolationism on a world scale as a sociologist

01:48 - who studies language, I've watched how frame, how we frame people and issues in ways that create additional violence. And so, as I've seen the rise of right wing movements around the globe, most particularly in the US I was really caught by the way that, language comes always as a forerunner to physical violence. The relationship between symbolic and material practices are really, you know, there's one kind of one and the same.

02:24 - You can't separate them. And the work that others have done in this area also really inspired me to think about not just what we see now, but what it portends for the future. Throughout history, collective violence has always been preceded by weaponized language. And I think Jason Stanley illustrates this really well. in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and Myanmar, that victims of ethnic cleansing were subjected to attacks in the press by,

02:59 - Political leaders and in the public for months or years before the regimes turned genocidal. And we can see this also in Victor Klepper's work, his as a personal account of the Rise of the Third Reich. And he looks at the language that preceded and accompanied that rise. My own scholarship draws from that work, but also from Bodu, Goffman and Hall to kind of expand upon the ways in which symbolic practices are inseparable from material realities.

03:34 - If we think about propaganda as sort of the construction of particular kinds of information, at its most basic level, propaganda is more than just a rhetoric, rhetoric of persuasion. It's always a strategic mix of selective, selective facts and fiction that are blended to promote a particular point of view. And so in this sense, propaganda is always a persuasive project that's based on some level of deception.

04:07 - It uses simplistic repetitious, and easily understood slogans and symbols that mani are used to manipulate public emotion. I think, two excellent examples of this are the strategies adopted by tobacco companies to negate health risks and later by oil companies to negate climate science. And both of those industries manipulated public sentiment to preserve profits over human life, and certainly in the case of oil companies at the expense

04:42 - of a global future. But I think that, the propaganda of right wing movements really leverages widely held ideals to obscure their goals. So for instance, you'll hear in the United States, there's a lot of propaganda about how the right wing is going to help the so-called working class and the middle class, yet there actually undermining the interests of those groups.

05:12 - Essentially, they use the right wing, uses propaganda to overwhelm public discernment. And more recently, groups and governments around the world have been using what's called computational propaganda. And it is using algorithms and artificial intelligence to search social media accounts, online search histories, gaming platforms, any online presence that you might have. They analyze the user profiles

05:45 - and then target, you said, information is target audiences that are vulnerable to particular messaging. So when we think about the tailor made content that you can create through this kind of computational propaganda, it's overwhelming. And I think we saw that quite a lot with, the way that, the politics have shifted in the United States, right? Where you can, you go online and you're not sure what you're seeing anymore

06:20 - because it's been created for you based on what, what the analysis, how the analysis identifies your political leanings. And I think Kleer really astutely described propaganda as language that thinks for you because really effective propaganda becomes the way we see the world. For me, I think of disinformation as a subset of propaganda, and it's designed to consolidate power and it takes many forms, one of which is

06:53 - provoking reactionary responses and sustaining social unrest. Another piece of disinformation that's really important is this right wing charge of fake news, which is used to discredit people and information, and it functions as a signifier that's very much like other forms of, disinformation, right, to deny what's actually out there. Probably. You remember a young man carried an assault rifle into a pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC

07:26 - because he thought that there was a pedophilia ring being run by Hillary Clinton and her campaign advisor at that time. And so he was charging into the pizzeria to liberate the children. And of course, you know, it was false. But the Paul polls found that even afterward, that nearly half of all the Trump supporters they interviewed, like this young man, gave some credence to rumors

07:57 - that there was a pedophilia ring being run out of the pizzeria. So, you know, I think about Voltaire who said that a, if you can make people believe absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities, and disinformation is a way of creating a reality that's less objectively real, more contingent, more emotional, and creates a public that's much more reactionary. Censorship is one of the oldest ways of,

08:31 - weaponizing language. It's a very blunt edge strategy, and it can be traced back to 4 43 BCE in Rome and 300 CE in China. as you likely know, it's fundamentally prohibiting a language that threatens hegemonic power. And while media censorship is kind of the hallmark of authoritarian regimes, it's also associated with corporate capitalism.

09:00 - For instance, you know, historically in the US and I suspect as well and the UK and other countries, news media's censor information that would deductively affect the interests of their advertisers and owners. So traditional forms of surveillance and punishment around censorship have been expanded and now include vast numbers of internet sensors as well as media outlets that redact and reframe repackage information as news.

09:31 - because censorship seeks to control information, journalists become quite vulnerable to acts of repression. And in just the first two months of 2024, globally, 548 journalists and media workers were detained by governments and journalist daily re risk, death, kidnapping, physical assaults and doxing. So Clamper characterized the use of mundane discourse similar to administering tiny doses of arsenic, which initially appeared to have no effect.

10:08 - But over time, they're highly toxic. And here it's helpful to consider how outright lies become inserted into mundane discourse. For example, the Washington Post found that by the time President Trump left office, he had made over 30,000 false claims. And while Trump seems to draw from lenin's old aphorism that a lie told, often enough becomes the truth, I have to say that Publix are persuaded not so much by facts, but by the constancy of information.

10:45 - So common sense tells us that if we hear the same information from three or four different sources, it must be true. And certainly media outlets have amplified the lies that Trump has told, but it's not just the number of lies. ordinarily when we lie and basically everyone lies now or then in their life, we want our lies to be seen as true. So it's the nature of deceit. Ordinary people craft lies with an eye to

11:17 - preventing ourselves from being exposed, for having lied. But that's not the case for Donald Trump who openly bragged about having lied to the Canadian Prime Minister about trade deficits. So you have to think about Trump as not trying to get away with a lie, but rather using lies to convey an impression that he wields unconstrained power. And to the extent that he seems to have impunity, it's not because he does, but because he, because he doesn't stand alone, he's part

11:52 - of a comprehensive system that brought him to power and ensures his survival. So mundane discourse is also deployed by right wing movements to normalize hate groups and hate speech. So if you think about the way that immigrants around the globe have been targeted in the us, people who are legally seeking asylum are often referred to as illegal aliens or as illegals. And political and media discourses will refer

12:26 - to chain migration when they're really talking about family reunification. So these metaphors and linguistic frames seep into the way that we speak every day, and they become part of our worldview. We end up seeing the world the way we've learned to name it, and sometimes we learn to name it in these ways, not because we hold hard feelings or harsh feelings, but simply because we can't think of another language that

12:56 - that fits in there, right? So people don't think about family reunification, they'll use chain migration because that's what they're familiar with. And in that process, we become complicit with normalizing hate. It's how these marginalizing discourses can seep into our language, and then they get leveraged because they increase our willingness to ignore people who are being harmed, those who are marginalized,

13:27 - when they're harmed, it's not so important anymore because we have them already at a distance. And then to disregard the willingness to inflict harm, that harm is rationalized as a kind of necessary for self-protection. And throughout history, you could see this logic that's been used to justify hate crimes, including murder. So mundane discourse is also weaponized by, hate groups that rebrand themselves. So through much of the world,

14:04 - white supremacists now call themselves the alt-right? As if they are an alternate political party with a platform that goes beyond white supremacy. And we can see hate being mainstreamed by groups who adopt religious labels to justify their hatred. So public discourse is always significant, always strategic, even if we don't fully understand it. And I think that sociologists have so much to offer. So, you know, at this moment where we have right wing, authoritarian, authoritarian movements on the rise,

14:42 - I think scholars are really positioned to help shape a different future. And that's part of why right wing movements attack the academy. Disciplines that teach critical thinking, including sociology, gender studies, critical race studies, social sciences more broadly are being defunded and reshaped and in some cases eliminated. So you might think that because language is being weaponized through censorship,

15:14 - propaganda, disinformation, mundane discourse that you would want to have scholars fight back by insist, insisting on objective facts. This is real, but that's pretty much inadequate. Montag, reminds us that falsehood is not the opposite of truth, right? Unbound by logic. In fact, those who are willing to weaponize language of boundless possibilities. And I think that speaks to the need for multiple strategies.

15:47 - Clampers analysis of weaponized language during the third rech demonstrates that conditions for peace and violence are created and made meaningful through systems of signification. So critical analysis of authoritarian discourses will give us a roadmap of where those right wing movements intend to take us and how they intend to do it. And those analyses can also offer insights that will interrupt rising far right movements

16:18 - before they become fully entrenched, as well as show us how to deconstruct them when they are entrenched. So I think for myself, I have to say that critical sociological analyses of weaponized language provide really effective ways to reframe public discourse because it's through these systems of significant that we create, locate, or abdicate our responsibilities for action. I think our work as scholars is more important than ever in post-industrial societies.

16:52 - Material violence is rarely the first choice, but it's always a justifiable option, and it's an option that's made reasonable and apparently necessary through the preceding development of weaponized language. So the power of language is pervasive, kind of where we started. Even our most intimate thoughts are formed through a language that comes to us through our culture, through public discourse.

17:22 - And those cultural linguistic formations are central to how we see ourselves, our relationships, our responsibilities, and our values. So if we want to refuse the violence of right-wing authoritarian movements, it's imperative that we begin by learning to be critical consumers of information, to be attentive to linguistic framing, and to be thoughtful about the discourses we adopt.

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