Take the following premise. Bob sees Mike (who has blue hair) rob an orphanage, and considers him a bad man.
Bob exclaims in a public forum, “That blue-haired sneak! He should be found and put in jail.”
Mike (wearing a mask while on the run) highlights this statement, replaying a record of it in another location, and adding: “I can’t believe Bob would say such terrible things about blue-haired people! This is extreme bigotry!”
Jill, who also has blue hair, and Derek, who simply doesn’t like bigotry, both miss the context of the robbery that happened earlier, and are shocked at the isolated statement.
When the town meets later, the issue of a robbery at the orphanage is downplayed, and the town instead spends the meeting condemning Bob’s bigotry.
While a lot could be said about the whole sequence, I want to find out if there is a shortened term used to refer to the deception by Mike when deliberately misrepresenting the grouping of a targeted statement; eg, to build class solidarity the wrong way. The closest I’ve found might be “Strawmanning” or “Divide and Conquer” but it seems common enough I’d like to see if there’s a name.
I tried to generalize by picking “blue hair” for the example, but I admit it’d be an odd, off-color statement by race or appearance. There are still other forms of grouping that are more common to state in conversation, like “gamers” or “voters”, or “farmers”, in which such statements could apply to all, or just some, of that broad group.
So maybe I can try to give an idea of a more specific real-world example.
Say there’s a Discord group, where everyone plays COD, but also some members are very practiced in making fake SWAT calls, and innocent people have nearly been killed by them.
That is a big, urgent issue; one that can drive emotions. Picture that an influencer gives a statement like “These gamers are horrible, worthless people.”
You’re right, that an absolutely perfect, flawless statement might have been “The people SWATting in that Discord are horrible and worthless.” But assume the statement, in its emotion, tried to be contextual and descriptive, mentioning “gamers”.
In your definition, this might be an unnecessary detail. Yet, that’s not a huge misstep; and yet someone could potentially weaponize that statement so it sounds like the influencer believes all members of that Discord, or even all gamers, are horrible. AND, by pulling attention to that statement, they both draw attention off that Discord, and discourage people from speaking out on it.
Worse, let’s say the next influencer gives a perfect statement: “We will bring SWATters to justice”. If people have already fallen under the misconception that this is a cultural war targeting gamers, then they might invent reasons to oppose that second statement anyway, since they feel their identity is being attacked. So it can even discourage people from speaking up in the “wrong” way.
Hence why I’d like to work on terminology for the misdirection, rather than tone policing on the exact words people use; something that can help us call it out. Unnecessary details like “black”, “female” or non-identity descriptors like “blue-collar” can be a misstep, but they are not the largest evil in a lot of cases.
Thank you. I grew up with a lot of unnecessary details described around me, so I was having difficulty defing a more innocent example.
I stick by my examples. You can find more information on them in the Wikipedia link in the other reply.