George Lakoff's Blog, page 2

Time to Get Woke about ‘Woke’

From the FrameLab Newsletter with Dr. George Lakoff and Gil Duran: “Woke” has quickly become the most ubiquitous weapon word in American politics. Republicans use the term as a pejorative term to describe Democratic or progressive policies in general. Increasingly, everything Republicans don’t like gets described as woke, and wokeness has become the scapegoat for any bad […]

How to deal with conservative relatives during the holidays

A few years ago, right before the holidays, someone wrote in with a question for Dr. Lakoff: “When my family gets together for the holidays, how do I avoid getting into a political argument with my conservative grandfather?” “Don’t argue with your grandfather,” Dr. Lakoff answered. “Instead, ask him to tell you a story about a time […]

New! George Lakoff’s FrameLab Newsletter on Substack

If you have been a reader or subscriber of this blog, please take a moment to visit FrameLab, my new Substack newsletter at http://georgelakoff.substack.com. It’s free to subscribe, but the generosity of our paid subscribers helps make this work possible. Here’s an excerpt from our latest post analyzing how Elon Musk is using Twitter to […]

The Power of Positive Persistence

Strategies to flip negative attacks by Republicans into positive progress for Americans Like some foreign dictator, the Republican in the White House will launch a planned attack on the free press today. But he’s been in an ongoing campaign against the truth since Day One. It’s alarming because presidents don’t act this way. Dictators do. […]

A Modest Proposal: #ProtectTheTruth

America’s tweeter-in-chief plans to attack the free press next week. He desperately needs your help to succeed. You can help him by repeating his words and lies. You can help him by focusing outraged attention on his antics. Or we can work together to redirect the energy, counteract rather than react, and reframe the conversation. […]

Protect Internet Freedom

Donald Trump and the Republicans are trying to restrict American freedom and destroy the Internet as we know it. They want to hand control of a crucial public resource – the Internet – over to corporations. These corporations will then be able to restrict the flow of information, effectively censor voices of dissent, and charge […]

Why are you a Democrat?

Ten months into Trump’s Presidency, Trump’s approval rating is historically low and members of his campaign are under indictment, yet the prospects for the Democratic Party appear bleak. At a time when we should be harnessing the energy of a grassroots movement to revitalize American democracy in 2018, Democrats are beset by infighting and chaos. Most … … Continue reading →

What is Hate Speech?

I have been asked what hate speech is. It is not exactly hard to detect. Hate speech defames, belittles, or dehumanizes a class of people on the basis of certain inherent properties — typically race, ethnicity, gender, or religion. Hate speech attributes to that class of people certain highly negative qualities taken to be inherent […]

Why Hate Speech is Not Free Speech

Freedom in a free society is supposed to be for all. Therefore, freedom rules out imposing on the freedom of others. You are free to walk down the street, but not to keep others from doing so. The imposition on the freedom of others can come in overt, immediate physical form — thugs coming to […]

The President Is The Nation: The Central Metaphor Trump Lives By

Metaphors in the Brain     We know from neuroscience that most thought is unconscious, carried out by neural circuitry. In Metaphors We Live By, Mark Johnson and I showed that much of that unconscious thought is metaphorical, and further, that we often live our lives according to those metaphors. A simple example, we understand time as […]