Building a Discursive Arsenal: Engineering Weaponized Speech in the Service of Authoritarianism

We explore the various ways in which terms and utterances can be weaponized, particularly in the service of establishing and defending an authoritarian regime. While there exists an extensive philosophical literature on how speech can harm, our more specific interest in this essay is on the processes of weaponizing speech. That is, we explore how language that does not begin as a weapon can be engineered into a variety of weapons that inflict different kinds of harm. The Trump administration, we argue, has been particularly effective at building a well-stocked and diversified discursive arsenal that enforces and defends authoritrianism. It has engaged in a multifaceted discursive engineering project to retool and retrofit language in order to entrench its own power, amplify its goals, delegitimize opponents, and render dissent from its ideas or resistance against its authority risky and difficult.