The next time someone sneers “conspiracy theorist,” “anti-vaxxer,” “climate denier,” “far right,” “hate speech,” “terrorist,” or the ever-popular “racist,” understand what they are really saying: stop thinking.
These words are a linguistic kill-switch—engineered to short-circuit thought by triggering a reflexive emotional spasm.
If you encounter someone using these words, you can be certain you are not dealing with someone interested in a good faith effort to find the truth.
These terms are precision-guided psychological weapons, fired by unseen hands to herd the public mind. Recall the CIA’s own 1967 memo coining “conspiracy theorist” expressly to silence anyone doubting the magic-bullet fairy tale that supposedly killed JFK.
Although they are a poor substitute for an actual argument, these propaganda terms unfortunately work on many people. Call someone one of these words and you no longer need to refute their ideas with facts, logic, or reason. The slur does the work like magic.
Take the granddaddy of all elastic scare-labels: terrorism.
One hundred years ago the word barely existed. Today it vaporizes civil liberties on contact.
Glenn Greenwald nailed it: the T-word is “simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon.”
The only difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is who controls the narrative.
Hellbound and Down 