Joe Clark

Right-wing neologisms

Beyond based and cringe:
Right-wing vocabulary in the 21st century

I am a descriptive linguist who is not (a) progressive. I have done previous work on vocabulary, as you’ll see below.

But what I have for you now is a one-of-a-kind list of basically every right-wing neologism or coinage (new terminology) in use in this, the Year of our Lord 2025.

Core set of terms

The canonical right-wing neologisms come in two sets. You can’t understand right-wing assholes’ podcasts, Twits, and Substacks without comprehending these terms.

  1. based and cringe

  2. any number of productive uses of the suffix ‑pilled, starting with redpilled/bluepilled

Based is applied to anything that opposes GAE/globohomo, i.e., the leftist/neoliberal/progressive régime. It is based to have five kids and to just refuse to engage with pajeets. Now, it’s been argued that whatever is based is “kind of a bad look,” meaning that retarded objections can be too easily levied at that which is based (in the previous examples, respectively “overpopulation”/“climate change”; “racism”).

But those objections are cringe, referring to anything that reflexively conforms to or neatly slots into the libtard régime. Pronouns in bio are cringe. So was wearing a chin diaper or getting injected with the vagine during the coof. Taking the knee for BLM or for Saint Floyd was cringe.

There is a bright line between based and cringe. But what might be based or cringe may be open to debate from time to time. Just as an example, Wignats on the DR tend to have Oriental girlfriends – or sometimes wives, even then with hapa children. Based or cringe?

The ‑pilled suffix is almost as productive. Of course the source is The Matrix. That barely begins to explain the terms’ current usage. Michael Malice, The New Right (his hyphenation sic):

The mother of all New Right techniques is that of the red pill, or variants thereof like “red-pilling” or “becoming red-pilled.” The term comes directly from the film The Matrix. In the movie, everything that the vast majority of mankind sees is actually a lie, a false reality constructed for their benefit and comfort by a secret ruling cabal. Morpheus... offers Neo... a choice of two pills. “You take the blue pill,” he explains, “the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

The film’s concept is virtually identical to how red-pilling is evoked in New Right and broader Internet circles. Namely, demonstrating to someone that what is presented as fact by the corporate press and entertainment industries is only (at best) a shadow of what is real, that this supposed reality is in fact a carefully constructed narrative intentionally designed to keep some very unpleasant people in power and to keep everyone else tame and submissive.

Malice has elsewhere noted that a bluepilled person thinks his TV screen is a window. Yet “[o]ne of the problems with being red-pilled is that once one believes everything one sees as a lie, it’s often hard to navigate to truth – and in fact the more intricate and bizarre something sounds, the more intriguing its veracity becomes.” (Curiously, another book by Malice, The White Pill, barely uses that term in a commonly understood sense.)

A purple-pilled person – hyphen seems mandatory there – is either a right-wing centrist (a right-liberal) or is too much of a coward to go full redpill. A purple-pilled person, for example, would like to return to the conservatism, or feminism, or transgenderism of the 1990s.

These core neological sets intersect in the near-canonical catchphrase based and redpilled. (Are those nationalists with Oriental girlfriends raced and bedpilled?)

Honourable mention:
fake and gay

It’s a single nondecomposable word (the way ice cream and New Jersey are single words each), and is an easy and pleasant way of calling something, or someone, cringe. All the right people take offence.

Affixes

The extraordinary productivity of right-wing neologisms is best seen in its proliferation of suffixes.

And, in detail:

Now, what about prefixes? Not many of them.

Infixes? English doesn’t have many of those, and they’re all debatable. Is the morpheme “in” that is inside brother-in-law an infix? (Lots of ins there.) How about tmesis, as in abso-bloody-lutely? Probably not infixes in either case. Right-wing assholes haven’t come up with any, either.


Colophon

This list is a successor to the list of right‑ and left-wing vocabulary that I had submitted for a revision to CP Caps and Spelling in 2018. Were one to merge and dedupe these lists, I have amassed about 450 vocabulary items.

“In-group preference”

Now: Given that I am a mere linguist and not a real lexicographer, one of whom I actually know, how did I choose what to include and exclude?

Slang can be evanescent or it can be assimilated into everyday language. Don’t be too concerned about the former case; I’m not. Those who know what a high-and-tight or hi-’n’-tite haircut is (mainstream terms) probably don’t know that hairstyle used to be called a heinie (slang term). Language change is the norm; indeed, languages change.

There is no bright line separating vocabulary items to include versus exclude. Relevance resides on a cline.

This lexicon is unknown to shitlibs

Indeed, looking at the last neologism above, a leftist term of opprobrium would be MAGAts. Rhymes with “faggots,” a word they cannot bring themselves to utter.

While normies may have heard of such lexemes as MAGA, essentially every term in this lexicon is completely unknown to normies and everyone to the left of them – all the way down to based and cringe. In part this is due to libtards’ unwillingness to conceive of certain morphemes (e.g., troon, which can also be a suffix; retard). What you cannot bear to conceive you cannot bring yourself to say or write.

(There actually are barely any books or articles that include the word normie in their titles; Kill All Normies stands almost alone. Nonetheless, even normies know the word normie, which antedates to 1950.)

Another right-wing term that normies will know is woke. But like telling a gay man he isn’t gay, he’s just experiencing same-sex attraction, the sense and intent behind right‑ and left-wing usages of woke are worlds apart, and a normie will never use that term to describe himself (even if he’s gay).

Fact-checking my ass

In another wrinkle, some terms that seem new to the dissident right are well established and materially unchanged in sense.

I looked at the Canadian Business and Current Affairs database of newspapers, magazines, and transcripts of régime media. I was trying to disprove my contention that *pilled constructs are completely unknown to régime apparatchiks.

With exceptions around the edges, they are.

...but shitlibs are great at coining phrases

What progressives are good at is coining entire phrases that shake up Anglosphere societies. They produce barely any of these catchphrases, but, boy, do they spread like wildfire.

Everyone has heard these phrases. In fact, most people could finish them off if you showed them cue cards containing only the first couple of words.

Liberals are quite shit at neologizing. Truthiness (OED: 2005) and deplorables had good runs each, and non-progressives began ironically reusing the latter (Deplorable Nation). Assault rifle in the sense used by Democrats dates only to 2018. Yet the malapropism cheap fakes is emblematic of the best they can manage. (The term of art is deepfake, but there was interference from “cheat.”)

Meanwhile, right-wing assholes are quite shit at coining world-changing catchphrases. (I have elsewhere described Auron MacIntyre as “a handsome aphorist.” Aphorisms are not catchphrases.) But that is to be expected, as the left wing, and everyone who isn’t in it, have long since speciated into irreconcilable factions. To their credit, though, the based contingent is an order of magnitude more productive (again: some 450 coinages here).

What a difference a couple of generations make

Just as the north and south magnetic poles might swap places every few millennia, a long time ago it was progressives who were adept at coinages – none more prominently than near-insufferable gayfag Douglas Coupland, whom I described as adept at “glib throwaway folk etymology (Vancouver condos are see-throughs).”

The value proposition of Generation X was its sidenoted neologisms, half of them with custom illos. Coupland, a drunk whose boyfriend left him, has thrown it all away, not least by misnaming the immediately-previous cohort as Generation C (for coronavirus SARS-CoV‑2). Yet his 2021 coinage high-network-worth individuals is a keeper.

I did say the poles swapped places. Republicans (Michael Moore: “the Republicrats”) were comically inept at neologizing in the warblogger era. French fries as freedom fries (why not liberty cabbage for sauerkraut?)... suicide bombers as homicide bombers. Risible on a good day.

Sarah Palin’s use of lamestream, however, brought it back to life. Doonesbury quoted her, and the OED antedates it to 1995. Also a keeper.

(Deep state? 1997. Drain the swamp? Ronald Reagan, 1982.)

SARS-CoV‑2

History repeated itself during the scamdemic of the Wu flu: Right-wing assholes came up with nearly a dozen euphemisms to evade censorship by troons at Twitter and Facebook, while progressives, and right-liberals in government office, flooded the zone with society-altering catchphrases (we’re all in this together; two weeks to stop the spread).

Herein, I categorize right-wing lexemes under the neutral heading SARS-CoV‑2.

(For reference, social distancing in directly applicable senses antedates to 2004.)

‑bux nixed

I have changed my mind on this one ↑

Not the Austrian Painter Starter Kit

I am not including a set of coinages that are well-attested by our enemies, as by government-funded soi-disant anti-hate groups and equally-government-funded anti-hate researchers.

Still to come

I will continue to pick away at the corpus and this elucidation over time. Of interest are coinages from individual right-wing personalities, usage of which immediately brings the relevant personality to mind: how this make u feel? evokes BAP.

One more time

Full lexicon ☞


Posted: 2025.08.25 ¶ Updated: 2025.08.27