David French Candidly Explains how He Shifts Terms to Manipulate Conservatives
This article is a tie-in to season 2 episode 24 of the podcast: How the Woke Manipulate 8: Shifting Terms ft. David French
Self-professed “conservative” political commentator David French inadvertently exposed a common tactic of the left to manipulate conservatives. Specifically, at the Karam Forum of 2021, French answered an audience member’s question about how to overcome the “boogeyman of Marxism” in conservative evangelical circles so they might see social justice issues, such as systemic racism, as a legitimate Christian call. In response, French opened by framing the debate in a negative light toward conservative Christians:
So number one let’s just acknowledge that there is absolutely no way to navigate for a… for example race issues, without somebody getting supremely ticked off. So the measure of your success is not “did everyone agree with me.”… I mean where I am in, in Middle Tennessee there are… people are trying to ban from our early elementary curriculum the book Ruby Bridges goes to school. Okay?…another one about Dr King Goes to Washington. The, uh, Norman Rockwell painting of, uh, Ruby Bridges desegregating schools in New Orleans. So that is, that is not a position where you’re going to say “well in order to accommodate somebody who’s upset at a historically accurate depiction of desegregation, I’m going to remain quiet.” That… no, no no no no… no.
In the opening to his response, French implies that many conservative Christians, and specifically in Tennessee, get “ticked off” by race issues. He then asserts that the stereotypical Southern conservative wants to merely ban books that teach desegregation. This unsubstantiated claim implies conservatives are either in favor of segregation, or that conservatives are willfully blind to the historical reality of segregation.
Not only is French incorrect about his assumption, but he’s also dishonest about the context in which he makes the claim. As part of Tennessee’s mandated curriculum, “Ruby Bridges Goes to School” is a book that teaches kids that while Bridges tried to attend an all-white school, she encountered a “large crowd of angry white people who didn’t want Black children in a white school.” Because the curriculum for this book was for first graders, the Moms for Liberty, a Tennesean group objecting to this book and other CRT-laced curricula in Tennessee, replied to the Bridges book in a tweet: “Should history be taught? Emphatically, YES. But with objectivity and at an appropriate age.” French’s entire framing of conservatives is a caricature of an angry, mildly racist simpleton who is thirsty to censor the truth. However, far from being bigoted, these mothers took issue with the characterization of “angry white people” to an audience of children who are too young to understand how to process these difficult historical truths with nuance and objectivity. Thus, we see that French has sloppily created a strawman to paint conservatives in a negative light.
While we observe the rest of French’s response in which he reveals his tactic to manipulate, conservatives must remember that this cartoonish depiction of conservatives is the lens through which people like French view us. They look at us with condescension and scorn. Nevertheless, French exposes his strategy in the latter part of this reply:
However, at the same time …we should go out of our way to try to use language and concepts that are not explicitly tribal… jargony and often, um, highly political, okay? So there are different ways of describing things, um, so in in more left-leaning circles, uh, you might say systemic injustice or systemic racism and people will know what you mean… You might go into another, um, audience and… the phrase systemic racism might immediately mean they tune you out completely. And so, hmm, I still want to communicate with folks and I still want to reach their hearts on this.
So one of the ways that I try to do it, I say there was 345 years of…slavery followed by Jim Crow, which is, um, legally enforced discrimination violently defended, for 345 years. You do not eliminate all of the effects of that in 57 years of contentious change… Do you agree? And if somebody says yes to that, now we’re cooking now we’re cooking. If somebody says no… well, you got to back up some steps there. But if they’re going to agree… you got some to work with. And then the other thing is don’t go for everything when you can go for one thing or two things.
Here, French immediately establishes that he believes in the idea of systemic racism, that the system of America is inherently racist, which is a core idea of a woke worldview. Notice also how the “left-leaning” audience immediately understands French’s ideas without needing further explanation. They are more “in the know” than conservatives, who apparently need to be manipulated in order to get them to understand leftist concepts. He then pivots to “another audience” of conservatives who are too bigoted to hear the idea of systemic racism because they will “tune out” anyone who merely mentions the term. In reality, using the language of “systemic injustice” would alert a conservative audience that French is espousing ideas rooted in Marxist “class warfare.” The proponent of such ideas would receive immediate pushback from a conservative instead of being “tuned out.” Perhaps some would, but others would listen and disagree honestly. However, just as in his introduction, French stereotypes conservatives, making them all incapable of listening during a conversation about race.
French’s solution to what he perceives as conservatives’ lack of attention is to shift terms by refraining from using “systemic racism” explicitly, and instead to espouse the concept behind it, by using a reductionist view of history that portrays “white” Americans as an oppressor class. This is why it’s so critical to understand the concepts these terms represent, and why we write/podcast so often about woke manipulation tactics.
He then reduces things to an all-or-nothing binary of systemic racism or denying all unsavory elements of America’s past. Acknowledging America’s flaws while holding a conservative vantage point is not an option for French. We can, and should, acknowledge things such as slavery and segregation which impacted lives and thus altered the course of history, leading to impacts still felt today, yet deny the existence of systemic racism, an oppressor-oppressed hierarchy, and the need for things such as reparations. He never explains how the system is “racist” today, when we have ended chattel slavery and have made discrimination based on skin color illegal in public accommodations. He doesn’t explain this because all he’s trying to do is “go for one thing or two things” rather than convince conservatives of the entire leftist worldview at once. In other words, French is slyly attempting to get a foot in the door of conservatives’ minds by getting them to adopt a shallow version of a woke assumption. Adopting a full-blown belief in systemic racism will come later, once the basics are believed.
Not everyone who claims to be conservative is actually conservative, as some subversively claim the title to manipulate conservatives to move to the political left. It is their beliefs that determine where they are at ideologically. French not only makes it clear where he stands in this candid conversation, but exposes a major tactic of how the woke manipulate… and that they do it intentionally. This cult-like indoctrination strategy makes one wonder: if French’s ideas are good, right, and true; why does he need to manipulate people and be dishonest about the beliefs behind systemic racism to persuade people to believe it?
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