Terry Dyke wrote
One thing that confounds liberal, rational people is the language of the Right. Even though it sounds like English, it is spoken from a worldview with entirely different premises than what we assume.
We assume a speech act is meant to convey empirical information about the world. Speech acts for them, however, consist of using weaponized language to land blows on their opponents.
Whatever the "content" might be, its relation to the empirical world is unimportant, as long as it delivers damage.
They may sincerely believe bits and pieces of the content, but chiefly as "ideological boilerplate" that identifies themselves to each other.
Meanwhile, poor rational chumps like us assume there are debatable assertions being made and fall right into the trap. What they hear is "This guy is trying to convince me I'm not a Republican!" and laugh all the way back to their highly-perfected verbal arsenal.
Do not be distracted by what they say, for that is exactly their intent.
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