Ep. 7 - Courage for Profit: How the Modern Right has Weaponized Language

In this episode we’re looking at specific strategies that the anti-democratic revolutionary libertarian right, the McConnell-Trump-Koch/Dark money axis of evil for short, redefines particular words such as “liberty” and “courage” and “conservatives” so that they can dupe their supporters into believing they are getting one thing--more liberty, more courage, more conservatism--while they’re in fact getting less. 

With help from Ian Haney López, author of Merge Left, and Nancy McLean, author of Democracy in Chains, this episode explores how the radical anti-democratic libertarian Right has exploited “religious liberty” and “conservatism” and how “courage” is being redeployed to mean pro-corporation and anti-democracy.

Mary revisits the ever important issue of court packing, following some Koch surrogates like Carrie Severino of the Heritage Foundation. We unpack the word “courage” popping up in strange ways to describe the judicial quality that the Trump administration has been looking for in their nomination list of Federal Judges. Looking across excerpts not only Severino but also Justica Scalia, Don McGahn (former White House Council, and Leonard Leo, it’s clear that courage is joining liberty and conservative as code words for the willingness to undermine democracy in favor of the rich getting richer.

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

• "The Politics and Rhetoric of Courage" by Vatz, Richard E. - USA TODAY, Vol. 141, Issue 2814, March 2013 | Online Research Library
• Analysis | Five of John McCain’s most courageous political moments
• Scalia on Democracy Without Disclosure, Brennan Center
• The Conservative Pipeline to the Supreme Court
• Nancy MacLean, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” (Viking, 2017)
• Ian Haney López, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America (New Press, 2019)

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