The target of hostile rhetoric is required not merely to tolerate it but to state publicly that it was not meant or not said.
Anton's claim is that what is demanded is not silence but affirmative denial: the target must characterise the hostility as something else. He connects it to Steve Sailer's phrase about a war on noticing, and cites Anthony Daniels to the effect that a population made to lie is easily governed. The mechanism proposed is partly control and partly humiliation, since a denial extracted from the person denied is worth more than silence.
In practice
- A team told its concerns are baseless is then asked to confirm at the all-hands that morale is good.
- A complainant is offered a settlement conditional on a statement that nothing occurred.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is that hostility which is publicly acknowledged becomes contestable, so the demand for affirmative denial protects the position from argument rather than merely silencing the target.
- In its favour
- Anton applies it to his own side as well as his opponents, which is unusual for a polemical coinage, and the demand it describes, that a target recharacterise what was said to them, is recognisable in several settings including workplaces.
- Against it
- It is a polemical claim about political opponents, rests on selected examples, and no measurement distinguishes a demand for denial from ordinary disagreement about what was meant.
- Standing
- A polemical claim about political opponents, and unusually about his own side too, since Anton says institutions of the establishment right supply the denial. Compare preference falsification and the spiral of silence, which describe the same suppression without attributing it to a demand.
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Theories of what stands between an event and its audience