Free Republic

It's a cliche to say that democratic states can't function properly without an informed electorate. But it’s absolutely true. And this is why, heading into the 2016 election year, I'm nervous about the future. With Donald Trump leading the Republican presidential contenders, even many Republican die-hards are shaking in their boots.But Trump isn't the cause, just the symptom. The deeper cause is a strain of anti-intellectualism that runs through the roots of American culture. And while this strain is found on both sides of the political spectrum (see some liberals on vaccines and chemtrails), it's mostly concentrated among religious conservatives...

The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, by George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling (Free Press, $11) George Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at U.C. Berkeley — and highly regarded Democratic tactician — has just released his playbook for the 2012 election. Titled The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, it purports to be the ultimate insiders’ guide to liberal messaging and left-wing ideology. Before you even open the book, its sly self-referential gamesmanship leaps off the cover: the very title itself is a wink-wink-nudge-nudge ironic-but-not-really reference to Chairman...

“Revenue” Redefined: Libs abuse another innocent word by Daniel Clark Sometimes it seems like it would be a good idea to publish a liberal-to-English dictionary. That way, normal people would be able to understand what liberals mean when they take already existing words, and apply meanings to them that are nowhere close to their true definitions. Listening to liberals speak can be like visiting Alice’s Wonderland. Taking things that belong to somebody else is what they call “fairness.” Parading through town while wearing leashes and chains and nothing else is an exhibition of “pride.” Violent criminals who are turned loose...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: George Lakoff (rhymes with). Bill Jacobson has the details at LegalInsurrection.com. By now you have heard the Obama and Liz Warren speeches about how no one got rich on his or her own. ... This narrative is cribbed almost verbatim from the narrative of George Lakoff, a progressive [liberal] linguistics activist and Professor at Berkeley," and he has been advising the Democrats on how to change and use language in order to hide who they really are. That's what it boils down to. Lakoff advises Democrats on how to say things that mask and cover up who...

I hadn't heard of him since I last debunked him some years back but he is still at the same old stall selling the same old secondhand ideas. He has issued a book called "The Little Blue Book: Quotations from Chairman Lakoff" Lakoff's central "insight" is that you must use distorted Leftist language to have any hope of promoting Leftist ideas. But telling that to people who already call racism "affirmative action" and abortion "choice" must be one of the most unoriginal ideas ever proposed. George Orwell beat him to that idea by half a century. I suppose that telling...

Language has an effect. Violent political encounters have an effect. The link of the use of guns with patriotism and morality has an effect. Expressions like "targeting" and "in the crosshairs" evokes images of shooting to kill. The murder of a liberal leader in Pakistan seemed far away. Now it's here days later. Given all the death threats, it was almost inevitable. Gabby Giffords was in the crosshairs. Republicans will say it was just the work of some crazy. Hardly. Even crazies get their ideas from somewhere. Violent political encounters and the language of violence activate the idea of violence....

1: Our Brains Had to Change Everything we know is physically instantiated in the neural system of our brains. What we knew before September 11 about America, Manhattan, the World Trade Center, air travel, and the Pentagon was intimately tied up with our identities and with a vast amount of what we took for granted about everyday life. It was all there physically in our neural synapses. Manhattan: the gateway to America for generations of immigrants—the chance to live free of war, pogroms, religious and political oppression! The Manhattan skyline had meaning in my life, even more than I knew....

Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked this summer if she would describe herself as a “liberal.” The Democratic front-runner shied away, saying the “word” — noticeably not using the word — has taken on a connotation that “describes big government. “I prefer the word ‘progressive,’” she said. It has a “real American meaning.” Then she expanded the term to “modern progressive,” and, finally, clarified that she was a “modern American progressive.” These are heady days for Democrats. The party is favored by almost all measures in the coming presidential contest. But while Democrats are emboldened, they remain wary of the term...

Often I see Libertarians refer to themselves as "Conservatives" or "Right". Yet, many times, on many web-boards, I see the libertarians taking the same positions as Demonrats, and they seem to support Demonrats over Republicans. I did a bit of research, and I found why this might be the case. Libertarianism is actually in the same political system as Liberalism. http://www.moral-politics.com/xPolitics.aspx?menu=Political_Ideologies&action=Draw&choice=PoliticalIdeologies.All

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton ratcheted up her talk about religion yesterday - saying a GOP-sponsored bill making it a felony to be in the United States illegally would have "criminalized" Jesus. Clinton, who's considered the Democratic front-runner for the 2008 White House race, made the comments at a hastily scheduled news conference about the House-passed bill aimed at illegal immigrants.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton invoked the Bible yesterday to criticize a stringent border security measure that, among other things, would make it a federal crime to offer aid to illegal immigrants. "It is hard to believe that a Republican leadership that is constantly talking about values and about faith would put forth such a mean-spirited piece of legislation," she said of the measure, which was passed by the House of Representatives in December and mirrored a companion Senate bill introduced last week by Senator Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican and the majority leader. "It is certainly not in keeping with...

Birthing a think tank is analogous to the animal in the title of UC Berkeley linguistics professor George Lakoff's best-selling political book, "Don't Think of an Elephant." That is, long and ponderous. After seven years' gestation, Lakoff is prodding his Rockridge Institute out of its academic womb and onto the national political stage after obtaining his own federal nonprofit status in late January. Lakoff envisions a progressive think tank unlike any other, one that provides an ongoing, well-funded chorus of progressive voices to counteract their conservative counterparts. "Conservatives, largely through think tanks, have successfully framed the issues for years," he...

"NEW YORK The cover story by Matt Bai in the upcoming Sunday issue of The New York Times Magazine profiles the man some liberals allegedly consider a possible new “messiah” for the Democratic party, George Lakoff. An adviser to the party on “framing” issues, he wrote “Don't Think of an Elephant”-- a book about politics and language based on his own linguistic theories." Also from the article: "With the debate over social security, Democrats explained that Bush was going to privatize it, which frightened the public. To represent this idea, Democrats portrayed the president as "an old-fashioned traveling salesman, with...

NEW YORK The cover story by Matt Bai in the upcoming Sunday issue of The New York Times Magazine profiles the man some liberals allegedly consider a possible new “messiah” for the Democratic party, George Lakoff. An adviser to the party on “framing” issues, he wrote “Don't Think of an Elephant”-- a book about politics and language based on his own linguistic theories. “Framing” is the process of choosing the best words to describe individual issues and characterize a debate. Bai hails Lakoff as the father of the concept. His ideas seemed to gain some success recently in putting the...

George Lakoff is the latest liberal guru (Moses?) ready to lead the progressives into the Promised Land of Permanent Power. Does anyone still watch C-SPAN's Washington Journal? Does anyone have any comments on Lakoff's appearance on the program? C-SPAN is re-playing Washington Journal right now, Lakoff appears after Buchanan approximate at noon. Link to Rockridge Institue, where Prof. Lakoff is a member. Previous Free Republic Links:The missing pieces - (George Lakoff "reframing" liberals' religious "messages"-ZOTable agenda) ^ Posted by CHARLITE On News/Activism ^ 04/17/2005 2:20:36 PM EDT · 25 replies · 324+ views Linguistics professor George Lakoff dissects Conservative catchphrases...

If the Democratic chieftains in Washington really want a window into why heartland residents are tuning out our party, they should stop huddling with loopy linguists from Berkeley like George Lakoff and just start reading Frank Rich's commentaries in the New York Times. There they will find a perfect distillation of the arrogance and narrow-mindedness that typifies the cultural thinking of our elites -- and turns off red-state voters. In the view of Mr. Rich and his acolytes, freedom in our culture has been "under attack" ever since 9/11. Indeed, Mr. Rich has argued that this attack is being led...

BERKELEY, Calif. - At the birthplace of the free speech movement, campus radicals have a new target: the faculty that came of age in the 60's. They say their professors have been preaching multiculturalism and diversity while creating a political monoculture on campus. Conservatism is becoming more visible at the University of California here, where students put out a feisty magazine called The California Patriot and have made the Berkeley Republicans one of the largest groups on campus. But here, as at schools nationwide, the professors seem to be moving in the other direction, as evidenced by their campaign contributions...

The Radical Right's Weakness by The Rockridge Institute The radical Right's messaging and framing infrastructure doesn't seem so fearsome if you know how to spot its weaknesses. The radical Right is acutely aware of cases where the general public has progressive values and would ordinarily reject their agenda. The Right’s approach to such cases is deception, often through the use of Orwellian language — language that means the opposite of what it says.For example, the term compassionate conservatism is used because leaders on the Right have traditionally been considered mean and lacking in empathy toward people who are needy, poor...

Today's Washington Post features an excellent story teasing out the strategic calculations undergirding the Dean candidacy. The only quibble I have with this piece is that it attributes the view that Democrats must reach out to the center to Mark Penn. In fact, almost every Democratic strategist realizes that the party has to reach out to both the base and the center. Penn, who works for Joe Lieberman, represents the extreme right of this intra-Democratic debate. It would not be completely unfair to characterize his advice to Democrats as being to run as "Bush lite." So associating this view with...