{"id":243380,"date":"2023-09-04T12:00:35","date_gmt":"2023-09-04T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=243380"},"modified":"2023-09-02T03:25:12","modified_gmt":"2023-09-02T02:25:12","slug":"tracking-orwellian-change-new-meanings-of-deep-state-and-working-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/09\/tracking-orwellian-change-new-meanings-of-deep-state-and-working-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracking Orwellian Change: New Meanings of “Deep State” and “Working Class”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Retired perfect killing machine Jeff Bridges.<\/p><\/div>\n

When left\/liberal fixations fall out of establishment favor, they’re re-christened as conservative menaces.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

30 Aug 2023 – <\/em>Thanks to a great response last week to an article about Klaus Schwab\u2019s creep-tastic use of the term \u201ctransparency<\/a>,\u201d I\u2019m pressing forward with a Devil\u2019s Dictionary<\/em>-style lexicographical project, tracking multitudinous dystopian alterations to American political speech.<\/p>\n

I absolutely want the list to be a collaboration with Racket\/<\/em>Substack readers, so this and future entries will feature open comments sections. I see this list working best if it also functions as a usage tracker, \u00e0 la<\/em> the Oxford English Dictionary. <\/em>The best gift my father ever gave me was a full OED<\/em>, a monstrous rack of volumes that still sits devouring space in my house, daring me to look up the earliest recorded use of pecker <\/em>in the impertinent sense (\u201c1902 <\/strong>FARMER & HENLEY Slang\u201d<\/em>). <\/em><\/p>\n

Here cites are important because they allow us to see how a 1966 use of transparency <\/em>that meant people seeing sins of government turned into a 2023 usage meaning government seeking out the people\u2019s sins. The more completely such changes are tracked, the more damning the lexicon.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s theme involves once-embraced liberal terminology re-branded as right-wing and therefore infamous, false, or seditious:<\/p>\n

DEEP STATE:<\/strong><\/h4>\n

In July of last year David Rothkopf wrote a piece<\/a> for the Daily Beast <\/em>called, \u201cYou\u2019re going to miss the Deep State when it\u2019s gone: Trump\u2019s terrifying plan to purge tens of thousands of career government workers and replace them with loyal stooges must be stopped in its tracks.\u201d In the obligatory MSNBC segment hyping the article, poor Willie Geist, fast becoming the Zelig <\/em>of cable\u2019s historical lowlight reel, read off the money passage:<\/p>\n

During his presidency, [Donald] Trump was regularly frustrated that government employees \u2014 appointees, as well as career officials in the civil service, the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service \u2014 were an impediment to the autocratic impulses about which he often openly fantasized. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This passage portraying harmless \u201cgovernment employees\u201d as the last patriotic impediment to Trumpian autocracy represented the complete turnaround of a term that less than ten years before meant, to the Beast\u2019s <\/em>own target audience, the polar opposite. This of course needed to be lied about as well, and the Beast <\/em>columnist stuck this landing, too, when Geist led Rothkopf through the eye-rolling proposition that there was \u201csomething fishy, or dark, or something going on behind the scenes\u201d with the \u201cdeep state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rothkopf replied that \u201ccareer government officials\u201d got a bad rap because \u201cabout ten years ago, Alex Jones and the InfoWars <\/em>crowd started zeroing in on the deep state, as yet another of the conspiracy theories\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

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