We’re witnessing the conservative playbook in action. The tactic is to undefine certain words or phrases. By purging a proper definition from peoples’ minds, you can then use that label to turn your base against anything you dislike.

Phase 1 is to create a label. Usually by misappropriating something else that your voting base is already going to dislike. Find something they dislike, and start the messaging about how evil {label} is. The goal is to constantly hammer home how {label} is awful. Every conservative news org needs to be running constant smear articles about {label}. Newscasters need to talk about how {label} is coming for you. {Label} is coming for your job. {Label} is coming for your kids. {Label} is coming for your friends and loved ones. The bot farms need to be posting about how much they hate {label}, how much {label} took from them, how {label} is a slippery slope, etc…

Phase 2 is to begin broadening the definition of {label}. You find things that are {label}-adjacent, and begin calling them {label}. As time progresses, {label} is such a broadly defined term that it can basically apply to anything. By the time phase 2 has ended, {label} has effectively been undefined.

Finally, phase 3 is to weaponize {label} by applying it to anything you want your followers to dislike. You have been primed to dislike {label}, and now a figure of authority is saying “this thing is {label}.” So you’ll be instantly turned against whatever they were talking about, because of the transitive property of disliking {label}.

“DEI” as a label is currently in phase 3, and it’s where this post came from. It seems ridiculous to anyone who hasn’t been primed to hate {label}, and hasn’t been propagandized to literally forget the original definition of {label}. As an outside observer, seeing something erroneously branded as {label} seems stupid and obviously wrong. But that’s because you weren’t the target of the dedicated undefining campaign.

Some other good examples are “communism”, “socialism”, “woke”, etc… The real definitions for those things don’t actually matter to conservatives, because they’re literally working with a different language that has redefined those labels to simply mean “thing I should dislike”.

Imagine loudly calling someone a pedophile to win an argument in a crowd. It doesn’t matter if they actually are a pedo. Your goal isn’t to make a credible accusation. All that matters is the entire crowd heard you yelling about it, and is now less likely to listen to whatever they had to say. Any previous argument they had is suddenly irrelevant, because now they’re surrounded by angry looking people. Their entire argument has gone out the window, and they’re entirely focused on defending themselves from the “pedo” label instead.

The entire tactic is basically another arm of the (also extremely common) semantic laundering tactic. Where conservatives will find friendly-sounding words to disguise their awful plans. It isn’t “blatant racism”, it is “anti-DEI”. It isn’t “giving billions of taxpayer dollars to rich people to make them even richer”, it is “trickle-down economics”. Etc…