Thursday, July 21, 2016

How Trump Folk Talk

A political movement and its lexicon
All groups and movements develop their own lexicon: their own terms, often slurs. Take the Chinese Communist Party: They have had “running-dog capitalist,” “right-wing deviationist,” etc. In Hoxha’s Albania, they said “Titoist.” It was not a compliment.
I would like to talk about the Trump movement, the Trump army. I am not going to talk about the “alt” people. I am not going to talk about the Nazis or the fascists or the racists or the “identitarians.” I may address them another day.
I would probably entitle that piece “Nazis in My Notifications.” Almost every day, I need to weed the Nazis out of my “notifications” on Twitter. These are people who celebrate the Holocaust (when they’re not denying it). They tweet pictures of crematoria and the like.
The “alt” people — the “alt-Right,” or “alternative Right” — use the word “cuck” a lot. This stands for “cuckold.” The alts believe that the conservatives let dark-skinned people come in and rape their women and take over the country. Hence, they are “cucks.”
So we writers at National Review, for example, would be “cuckservatives,” led by “William F. Cuckley.” That’s the way they talk.
Forget them, for now. Today, I will talk about the lexicon of Trump partisans, or many of them. They come after me on Twitter and in “comments” sections under articles and blogposts. I have been scanning such things recently.
The mindset is collective, and so is the vocabulary. People use the same words, whether the words are sensible or truthful or not. It’s like an army of parrots, squawking. I wonder whether the birds know what they’re talking about. 
I think the most prominent word, from Trumpites, is “globalist.” That is their epithet of choice. It seems to have replaced “cosmopolitan,” or “rootless cosmopolitan,” a once-common slur against Jews. It is one of those nonsense words of the populist Right.
Read the rest of Jay Nordlinger's op-ed HERE.

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