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A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Hate Speech Go Down: Sugar-Coating in White Nationalist Recruitment Speech

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Abstract

I argue that popular understandings of white nationalist double speak strategies do not fully represent the practice of these strategies, and identify a linguistic tactic used by white nationalists that I call sugar-coating. Sugar-coating works by packing an otherwise unacceptable utterance together with some kind of reward, thereby promoting uptake. I contrast this with existing notions of double speak, such as figleaves (Saul 2017, 2021), dogwhistles (Haney-López 2014), and bullshit (Kenyon and Saul 2022). I argue that sugar-coating more accurately reflects the practice of white nationalist recruitment rhetoric, as described in the Daily Stormer Style Guide.

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Notes

  1. Blee and Simi primarily use the term ‘white supremacist,’ whereas I will use ‘white nationalist’ in order to highlight the recruitment objectives and political identity motivations of the actors in question. The language used in the Style Guide features both ‘nationalism’ and ‘white supremacism’. I am thankful to an anonymous referee for calling my attention to this terminological distinction.

  2. Throughout this paper I will cite the Daily Stormer Style Guide as DSSG, as its author, although almost certainly Andrew Anglin himself, is not explicitly given.

  3. A metaphor for which I am thankful to Bianca Cepollaro—it would have been all but impossible to make this paper readable without it!

  4. This is a very slight rewording of what is, at the time of writing, the highest-voted joke on the “Boycott These Jokes” page of Laugh Factory, with over 20,000 “laughs” from members of that site.

  5. I return briefly to the topic of denial later, but for detailed discussion of creating deniability, see (van Dijk 1992; Saul 2017, 2018; Blee and Simi 2020; Wodak 2021; Camp 2022).

  6. The use of “reading” here is not strictly literal, as large proportions of the content are either insinuated or communicated through imagery.

  7. I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this objection as a consideration.

  8. I find, personally, that it strongly engages the emotion of revulsion.

  9. I would sympathize with such an objector: in fact this paper arose out of an attempt to analyze the Style Guide as white nationalist instructions for the use of figleaves.

References

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Kyle K. J. Adams

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Adams, K.K.J. A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Hate Speech Go Down: Sugar-Coating in White Nationalist Recruitment Speech. Topoi 42, 459–468 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09898-2

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