"They" Must Die!
Populism's assault on the English language
…never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for they.
—Josh of Arc1
They Creep
If you’ve spent any time on social media, or watched television at some point in the past five years, or gone outside—you’ve likely noticed what has become a near-ubiquitous tendency among right-wing populists towards the incoherent and promiscuous use of the word “they.” This phenomenon becomes especially pervasive during moments of maximum partisan tension following episodes of political violence. In the wake of the Kirk assassination, for instance, we were treated to a veritable tidal wave of they-inflected moral pronouncements coming from right populists of all different stripes. 👇
As Richard Hanania succinctly summarized 👇
The rhetorical tactic that they are deploying here isn’t particularly subtle or sophisticated. It merely aims to exploit cognitive biases and obscure distinctions between groups, categories, and individuals in order to gain political advantage by weaponizing collective guilt. If Charlie Kirk’s murder can be broadly attributed to anyone and everyone who doesn’t share his politics, it becomes a political jus ad bellum, liberating his defenders from any ethical or legal constraints that might hamper their ability to pursue the total liquidation of their opponents.
They creep is far from the only example of this phenomenon. Over the past several years a distinctive vernacular of cliches and mushy language which I’ll call Theyspeak has emerged among populists and contrarians, who’ve deployed it in service to excusing, rationalizing, ignoring, and promoting a staggering record of corruption, atrocities, and authoritarian power grabs from the Trump regime. In this capacity, Theyspeak underwrites a perverse moral calculus in which everything from extra-judicial murder to ignoring court rulings to strong-arming law firms and news agencies to the selling of presidential pardons is justified as a tit-for-tat reprisal against entire classes of people (e.g. the left, the laptop class, the elites, etc…).
They Relapse
After regaining some limited degree of marginal coherence since the September killing of Charlie Kirk, right wing populists were once again sent into a state of apoplectic delirium following Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents dinner, opening the floodgates to all manner of populist gibberish, as our beloved native tongue is once again receiving a brutal beating from all of the usual suspects.👇
To my mind Theyspeak is often even more insidious than outright lies. A lie can at least be proven wrong. There’s some actual skin in the game. Theyspeak, by contrast, seeks to promote vile conspiracy theories without specifically identifying or committing to them. It’s a modern form of blood libel with plausible deniability, in addition to an especially pernicious form of epistemic pollution that undermines our collective ability to make moral distinctions between groups and individuals: a cheap knockoff of the English language that’s evolved to accommodate and exploit certain primitive mental heuristics for partisan advantage.
In fairness, politics isn’t an exact science. Or any kind of science for that matter. Sometimes you really do need to use the occasional “they” to get your point across. But what we’re seeing here is something different. This is the use of language—not to clarify or illuminate, but to mislead, confuse, and obscure.
They Started It
If there are any rightists out there who happen to stumble into reading this article, they’re likely to do a double take in response to lines like “It’s a…form of epistemic pollution that undermines our collective ability to make moral distinctions between groups and individuals” and point out that this description better encapsulates a different contemporary jargon-heavy illiberal ideology. And indeed, Theyspeak does have strong antecedents in the woke movement. Both mind viruses deploy postmodern language in service to undermining our critical faculties, delegitimizing their political opposition, and weaponizing collective guilt. As the recent popularity of the term “woke right” would indicate, many regard it as the same mind virus, adapted to infect a different host.
Generally speaking, I think the extent to which we’re living in an era of contingency, in which major historical developments hinge on the decisions of a few powerful actors, tends to be underestimated. However, the emergence of two different flavors of wokeism (one left-coded and the other right-coded) does seem to undercut this idea somewhat in favor of more structural explanations. Namely, it indicates that wokeism, properly understood, is not fundamentally a partisan phenomenon. Rather, it’s an artifact of our modern information ecosystem and functions as the new way power seeks to justify itself within it.
They Can’t Possibly Be This Stupid. Or Can They?
In my article Epistemic Populism, published in January, I identified a phenomenon called artificial stupidity, which I defined as follows:
…the ability to accommodate insanity on a societal scale through the psychological trick of treating craziness as noise and the rest as signal… A story of autocratic consolidation and the descent of a superpower into corruption, lawlessness, and insanity is thereby laundered so that the willfully deluded can sell it to themselves as a severe but necessary application of the omelet-egg principle.
Zeroing in, the key phrase in the passage is— “treating craziness as noise and the rest as signal.” The point could be made just as well if we replaced the signal vs. noise framing with a similar dichotomy such as substance vs. style or feature vs. bug. But perhaps an even better framing, courtesy of a wise (and now deceased) older friend, would be essence vs. assets.
Once you notice the essence vs. assets trick you see it everywhere. Here’s former George W. Bush Press Secretary turned Trump lickspittle Ari Fleischer exhibiting a severe case of artificial stupidity as he attempts to lecture Jonah Goldberg on the Trumpified version of post-WW2 history in order to shift blame for NATO’s destruction from his master onto our former European allies (click to read the full tweet):👇
Fleischer’s tactic is a familiar one: Getting NATO allies to pay their “fare share”? Essence. Threatening to invade Greenland, imposing across the board massive tariffs, and belittling their past sacrifices on our behalf? Assets.
Now observe one of Sic Semper Tyrannis’ favorite punching bags Senator Mike Lee: 👇
Enforcing the border and making life affordable for hard working Americans (wink wink)? Essence. Everything else? Mean tweets.
Deployed together in a pincer pattern, Theyspeak and the essence vs. assets maneuver have combined to achieve weapons grade artificial stupidity at scale. In this power sharing arrangement, essence vs. assets functions as the epistemic Praetorian Guard, scrupulously redacting and essentializing the various strands of reality to ensure it never encroaches on the sacred mythologies cherished by Dear Leader and his many idolaters. At the same time, Theyspeak is used to attack, accuse, and indict.
These are more than just rhetorical tactics. They’re forms of mental conditioning, both for their recipients and their practitioners. The tip of the proverbial spear for a retrograde cognitive revolution that’s ushering in a new epistemology. Or to put it more accurately, a new version of an old epistemology.
Having defined artificial stupidity as both a cognitive tick and a mode of discourse, it can also be evaluated as a social phenomenon—the regression, via algorithmically boosted collective reinforcement, of a counter-elite from enlightenment rationality back to tribal reasoning. In this sense, the term counter-elite applies to MAGA’s thought leaders on multiple levels; characterizing not just their opposition to an established elite, but also the novel way in which they’ve turned the very notion of “elite” on its head by seeking to mimic and emulate, rather than enlighten, their intellectual inferiors.
While artificial stupidity may be artificial, it’s also in many ways quite natural, constituting a mental state that requires less effort and which is more compatible with our stone-age intuitions. Perhaps this is why it’s been such a smooth transition for so many. Enlightenment rationality, as it turns out, may not be a stable equilibrium at scale. It requires the right institutions, the right gatekeepers, the right mass communication medium, and the right citizenry. And when one or more of these variables is tweaked, centuries of moral and intellectual progress, and decades of socialization can be unraveled virtually in the blink of an eye via a potent mixture of collective incantations, perverse incentives, and foreign subversion.
In the end, those of us who’ve refused to “get with the times” are left staring in disbelief at people like this 👆 member of the Theyocracy and thinking to ourselves that they can’t possibly be this stupid: 🤨
Or can they? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Adapted from John Donne’s famous poem For Whom the Bell Tolls.
I admit I am predisposed to like your essay, Josh, because I despise the incorrect use of pronouns. Of course, you write about a matter more serious, even grave. Nonetheless, I found myself smiling throughout. Yes, I enjoyed reading "'They' Must Die."
I cannot be alone in my appreciation, can I? Only 4 'hearts' and 1 comment reply after half a week since publication? Something is amiss. Perhaps you would consider publishing in The Atlantic, or a similar publication, to win this essay the size audience it deserves.
Jesus…the second quote of Ari Fleischer is disturbing in its attempt to vilify discernment. At one time I admired Fleischer despite disliking the administration he spoke for….he must have gotten a lobotomy….or maybe I am just wiser now.