Rightspeak

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Rightspeak

When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer…
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

George Orwell

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In George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ruling totalitarian party creates Newspeak, a language of impoverished vocabulary designed to limit complex and critical reasoning. The political contractions of Newspeak—words like Ingsoc (English Socialism) and crimethink (thought crime)—were inspired by similar words used by German and Russian dictatorships (Nazi for Nationalsozialist, Comintern for Communist International).

Although those regimes have since fallen, fascist Newspeak lives on today in the form of virulent memes, symbols, and hashtags, which emerge from the dark corners of the internet and spread through social media. In the United States, these memes, symbols, and hashtags are potent weapons for the Alternative Right, or alt-right (itself a political contraction), to spread its white ethnonationalist agenda and attack its detractors.

The internet culture of the alt-right is a modern phenomenon, yet we’ve seen these messages and tactics used time and time again by extremist political groups throughout history. RightSpeak is an investigation into the alt-right’s mobilization of symbols and image on the internet as a political tool and its broader connection to the communications strategies and ideologies of totalitarian regimes of the past.