In a culture of fear, we should expect the rise of new mechanisms of social control to deflect distrust, anxiety, and threat. Relying on the analysis of popular and academic texts, we examine one such mechanism, the label conspiracy theory, and explore how it works in public discourse to “go meta” by sidestepping the examination of evidence. Our findings suggest that authors use the conspiracy theorist label as (1) a routinized strategy of exclusion; (2) a reframing mechanism that deflects questions or concerns about power, corruption, and motive; and (3) an attack upon the personhood and competence of the questioner. This label becomes dangerous machinery at the transpersonal levels of media and academic discourse, symbolically stripping the claimant of the status of reasonable interlocutor—often to avoid the need to account for one's own action or speech. We argue that this and similar mechanisms simultaneously control the flow of information and symbolically demobilize certain voices and issues in public discourse.
The term “conspiracy theorist” is commonly used in social political discourse as a way to silence, trivialize, or demonize critics of the abuse of power. Nowhere does this become more evident than when used to discount marginalized groups, where the claims of individuals are not only treated as unworthy of consideration, but cast as the result of weaknesses of mind innate to certain races, ethnicities, and nations. The discourse surrounding two historical events—African-American responses to allegations of CIA complicity in drug trafficking, and the concerns among peoples in nations with Muslim majorities in the context of the “War on Terror”—exemplify the reduction of knowledge claims in conspiracy theories to motives so as to push them beyond the bounds of reasoned discourse.
We explore how opportunity environments, conceptualized to include political-legal and cultural components, help explain the trajectories of movement tactics and frames employed in differing contexts. Using data from interviews, newspaper accounts, and web sites, we document how opportunity environments affected the trajectory of "rescue" tactics and frames. When abortion opponents in France attempted to block access to abortion providers in order to "rescue unborn children, " the tactic and associated frames met with a different fate than in the U.S. The legal context under which abortion was available in each nation affected the use of specific direct action tactics. Also, how abortion was culturally constructed and embedded—its "cultural opportunity structure"—affected responses to rescue by pro-life activists, the media, and the countermovement.
This paper examines how US TV news on abortion-related protest forecloses possibilities for democracy and political action. Representing abortion-related activism as a battle, news segments portray activists, correspondents, and viewers as villains, witnesses, and victims in a tale of a nation decimated by civil war. While activists describe their work militaristically, the news\u27s war is not the war that activists describe. News discourse represents activists as threatening the American family/community/nation. Applying Hannah Arendt\u27s and Mary Douglas\u27s work shows how the news eclipses public spheres by mapping a pollution narrative onto those who threaten myths of national homogeneity and proper citizenship
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