The right weaponizes analytic terms by appropriating them and emptying their meaning.

Evidence

For instance, when Bannon states that his armed and authoritarian posse is being “othered” by leftists and liberals, he is appropriating an important term that analysts of authoritarianism have used to describe how fascists cast their targets as less than human, making them easier to discard and even exterminate. But he is doing more than that, too. He is also making a mockery of the whole concept of othering, which in turn makes it harder to use the term to name what Bannon does as a matter of course—to migrants, to Black voters, to trans and nonbinary youth. Similarly, when Trump, after the 2016 election, accused half the press corps of being “fake news,” he was beginning a process that would lead his supporters to doubt everything they read and watched in the mainstream press. But he was also doing something else. He was appropriating a term that had been used by communications scholars to describe a very real phenomenon: manufactured propaganda that is designed to seem like real news but is entirely made-up. Fake articles like that had been a boon to Trump, including one particularly viral one that falsely reported that the pope had endorsed him. But now, thanks to his appropriation of the term “fake news,” we were all robbed of a useful phrase to describe the phenomenon. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 472

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s standing thread about left-abandoned language — here the mechanism by which those terms get claimed and degraded, which the later Israel/Palestine chapters invoke. — connects to: Counter-hegemony works by reattaching emptied signifiers to their original meanings. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 367; Operationalism restricts concepts to measurable operations, erasing transcendent meaning. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 132
• SEED: The ‘othering’ appropriation example — Bannon claiming his posse is othered — is a tight concrete case for an essay on how the mirror world steals the left’s critical vocabulary.