Striking Names off THE LIST: The Communicative Functions of a Modern Hit List Brian K Ladd (North Carolina State University)
Abstract: In late 2021, an internet ecofascist group active on Telegram called the Terrorgram Collective produced an online hitlist of “enemies” called THE LIST. The Terrorgram hitlist was targeted at identified “enemies,” particularly doctors and public health professionals who advocated giving children the COVID-19 vaccine. There is no extant research on these types of lists which is an oversight given that my research shows hit lists such as this one both act as a form of extreme political communication and work to promote mobilization to violence. To parse this text I use rhetorical theory, specifically Burke’s concept of fulfillment of the form, to show that THE LIST is an ideologically violent type of interactive communication; a message that begs to be completed. Though many members of Terrorgram are likely contributing to this list “for the lulz,” the more hardcore members of the collective employ participation in THE LIST as a form of stochastic terrorism with the goal of prompting lone actors to take up violent action. Thus, THE LIST and other ideological lists (e.g., hit lists/enemies lists) like it constitute a specific genre of communication that should be studied precisely because they can be used to prompt real-world violence.
44
Made with FlippingBook HTML5