“I Wear Combat Boots on My Tongue”: Quantitative Discourse Analysis of Stance Taking and Evaluation in The Radical Right Media

Contemporary research on the far right has often discounted the informal grassroot components and the individual motivations that draw people toward the extremist ideological components of this political current. This article quantitatively explores evaluations and stance expressions in the caller section of The Savage Nation, a popular conservative radio show. We randomly selected 106 conversations from 37 shows that aired in August and September 2018 and from March to June 2020. We manually extracted and annotated for the type of evaluation produced using a mixed methodology. A random forest analysis to the resulting dataset shows that both the callers and the hosts have departed from the “old racism” model to instead target opposing ideologies as proxy, dynamically construe the American society in a dichotomous frame that distinguishes between the “pure” and the “corrupt,” and do so in a paranoid style ripe with oversuspicion and overaggressiveness.