Brittney Griner, a WNBA star who was detained in Russia for cannabis possession and who was exchanged in a prisoner swap by the United States and Russia for a Russian arms dealer, has come under attack by the right wing. Why did President Biden choose a “basketball player” instead of getting Paul Whelan, former Marine, imprisoned there for far longer?
The attacks grew ever more comparative: she was a criminal. (She did plead guilty to the possession charge, for which she received a nine-year sentence for a guilty plea.) It’s clear that, not soon after she was captured, Vladimir Putin got frustrated with the (lack of) progress in the Ukrainian war and with Biden’s perceived role in that stagnation and decided to use her as a chit.
She was a pawn, and Biden rescued her.
Instead, the right wing has passed her up and is demanding why Whelan was “left behind.”
That is a loaded phrase in some circles! This is a well-chiseled chip, faceted on many sides. Left Behind was a series upheld and/or venerated by
- White supremacists.
- Christian nationalists.
- Southern Baptists.
- Pentacostals and other charismatics.
- the Endtimes-minded.
And, of course, there is the cowardly meaning, in the context of the military and abandoning one’s buddy/mate/sworn brother.
The phrase is a potent symbol.
Then, we have Tucker Carlson sermonizing that phrase, emblazoning it onto the graphic of Whelan in his Marine dress, literally trading in on the uniform.
The uniform = the man in uniform, and thus instead of celebrating Biden as a liberator of an unjustly captured American citizen, this instead is linked by Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric to the same emotions his viewers felt when they were convinced that Biden left beind Americans in Afghanistan.
Carlson means to recreate all of that via condensation of symbolism. (The APA defines condensation as “the fusion of multiple meanings, concepts, or emotions into one image or symbol.” Think of it as the compression of imagery.) This is not by happenstance, and we can’t divorce what he’s doing from the surrounding context of Donald Trump’s Nazi repast and his most recent call (or setting of the mechanism) for an abandonment of the American Experiment.
Carlson means to make this an issue vaguely resembling the right wing’s perverted idea of affirmative action, harkening back to decades of stoking resentment among young (and now middle-aged) White men that un- or underqualified others were taking jobs that otherwise would be theirs. We had a system like that once, before the 1930s. Germany did, too: they tolerated large inefficiencies in the economy because it was more important to demonstrate physically, visually, that one race controlled everything that mattered.
In a very short period of time, Carlson primes his audience about hate, hating America, how vile it is (ostensibly in Griner’s estimation, but the use of rapidity and frequency is Tucker’s, not hers), then sticks in the word “reward” to his audience. He primes them, then tells them that, in some circumstances, there’s a reward for that. For hating America.
Behavioural studies … have shown shorter reaction times for words that were preceded by unrelated words. These results suggest that related words benefit from facilitated processing. This has been termed ‘semantic priming’ .... (Kumar & Debruille, 2003)
Carlson then bizarrely pronounces “identity,” which he explicitly links with “equity” (which actually doesn’t make sense—equity is a word describing relationships between people, while identity is self-relational), that he’s equalizing the two clues you into the rhetorical trick he means to pull.
But hold a moment and examine: what is he doing with that pronunciation?
Just by enunciating like that, Carlson is calling attention to the word, making it utterly ridiculous in some sense (he’s making fun of it aurally) but also managing to emphasize a totally different word which otherwise would not have entered the conversation: entity.
This is key, because after he does this, he otherizes Griner thoroughly. She has been labeled alien, then Tucker enumerates (and you can count with him on two fingers): “Brittney Griner is not white, and she’s a lesbian.”
“Id-EN-TIT-Y”—might as well call her E.T. She’s no longer a full human being. Weird phrasing or no, semantic and symbolic associations erect a scaffold of meaning and have an effect on their own.
The anger effect means that, in that compresed time, those emotionally laden words get to gather and linger as capacity lags, then it all suddenly snaps forward when Carlson introduces the word “reward,” both denotatively (the hard definition of the word) as well as temporally (how it is used in time, in a particular context). The anger effect creates a deciphering & encoding process that unfolds in about the same of time as occurs in a N400 error. It’s a semantic error. In fact, it’s an error that is commonly found in those suffering from schizophrenia.
It has been postulated that the initial spread of activation dominates the first 500 msec of word processing. (Wang et al., 2011)
Reaction times were slower for semantically angry sentences than semantically neutral sentences, but reaction times were even slower for sentences spoken with angry prosody, regardless of semantic valence [i.e., positivity or negativity]. Slowed reaction times reflect a processing burden associated with the angry stimuli; perhaps the adaptive significance of the signal earns anger a more rigorous and time-consuming treatment by processing resources. (Castelluccio et al., 2015)
(My emphasis.) But consider also that many right-wing spokespeople garble their sentences, creating syntax errors which are then overlaid with semantic priming errors and lag. These are the psychotechnics that Theodor Adorno spoke of all those years ago. Playing with processing speed.
We know, above all, that fascist propaganda, with all its twisted logic and fantastic distortions, is consciously planned and organized. If it is to be called irrational, then it is applied rather than spontaneous irrationality, a kind of psychotechnics reminiscent of the calculated effect conspicuous in most presentations of today’s mass culture—such as in movies and broadcasts. (Adorno, 1948)
And it’s bothersome, because it harkens back to the same strategy engaged in by Carlson, Fox News, and Republicans of all stripes when Ketanji Brown Jackson was given a hearing for consideration for the Supreme Court. (It was a hearing, but by those people she was not heard.) It was a deliberate and vicious tearing apart, insofar as it was possible with now-Justice Brown Jackson. With Griner, Russia had helpfully provided not only the arrest and subsequent criminal record but also the parade and pageantry of walking her to and from her jail cell, handcuffed, in front of the cameras.
Bothersome. Concerning. These are not quite right. Alarming comes closer. Of course, to say that, people will say that one is being alarmist.
I was going to pass this story up, truth be told. When I heard the news break on Thursday, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Griner was coming home. I watched the press conference and saw the gleaming eyes and smiling cheeks of all three of the people on stage: President Biden, Vice President Kamela Harris, and Griner’s wife Cherelle Griner. It was a moment I had not expected but that I appreciated; and when I saw headlines cropping up about people making this comparison with Whelan, I wanted to push that aside. I didn’t want those negative feelings dampening my joy.
It took watching and listening to two broadcasts about this story, one by Keith Olbermann on his iHeart radio show, the other by Jesse Dollemore on YouTube, for me to realize that I couldn’t afford to ignore this; and shame on me for having to wait until two (white) men told me to pay attention and to look more deeply.
References
Theodor Adorno, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” The Stars Down to Earth (originally published in 1948, republished 1994 by Routledge).
Brian Castelluccio et al., “Neural Substrates of Processing Anger in Language: Contributions of Prosody and Semantics,” Jrnl Psycholinguist Res, 2015.
Namita Kumar & J. Bruno Debruille, “Semantics and N400: insights for schizophrenia,” Jrnl Psychiatry Neurosci, 2004.
P. G. Nestor et al., “Semantic Disturbance in schizophrenia and its relationship to the cognitive neuroscience of attention,” Biol Psychol, 2010.
Robert S. Robins & Jerrold R. Post, Political Paranoia, 1997 (Yale University Press).
Tayna Telfair Sharpe, “The Identity Christian Movement: Ideology of Domestic Terrorism,” Jrnl Black Studies, 2000.
Kui Wang et al., “Semantic Processing Disturbance in Patients with Schizophrenia: A Meta-Analysis of the N400 Component,” PLoS One, 2011.