When should we drop momentous words such as ‘invasion’, ‘war’, or ‘coup’? In the heated discourse of the mid twenty twenties we may be used to name-calling between different factions, but then there are words that evoke a particular social, political, or perhaps even military interpretation of events.
In February 2025, on her podcast How to Survive the Broligarchy, Carole Cadwalladr suggested that leading newspapers such as the New York Times carry banner headlines declaring that ‘It’s a Coup’. This was her response to the media’s ‘inability to shake off the “business as normal” framing of the authoritarian takeover of the US government’ (Cadwalladr, 2025). Does the current situation warrant the use of such consequential words as, coup, along with others including: war, invasion, genocide, and so forth? There are of course legal frameworks and definitions where such questions are explored and determinations made. But there is something more fundamental than this. Our use of words is governed by the conceptual frames that underpin them. And there is a theory—frame theory—that illuminates the ways we conceive of such words, often unconsciously. In addition to this there is the question of how literal our use of the word might be. We could be using it in a joke, for example, or with irony, or metaphorically as a way of explaining something else, it might be an exaggeration, or to support a form of overreach. It could also be used literally in which case this literal interpretation might require real world actions to be taken, based on the framing that is accepted, perhaps of a life-or-death nature.
On the BBC’s Newsnight (26th September 2025), the Deputy Political Editor of GB News declared that there are the ‘highest number of people coming across on small boats that we’ve ever seen, well practically, since the Norman invasion.’ When challenged later in the programme about his use of the word ‘invasion’ he responded by saying ‘Oh I made a joke about the Norman…I made a joke about the number of boats coming across the channel.’
There is then a potential here, that we have to be alert to, for politicians and commentators to shift the way we think about a particular issue. It might start by making a joke that makes a contentious association between two things, say immigration and invasion. If there is push-back then the person making the joke can claim ‘it was just a joke’. It provides a way of testing the water. But if the joke lands particularly with your core base, it is but a step to using ‘invasion’ metaphorically as a source domain to illuminate the target domain of ‘immigration’. Now we start to understand immigration by thinking of invasions, where an invading army, in opposition to the wishes of the inhabitants of the country being invaded, overwhelm the resistance of the local population and take over the running of the country and its resources. This framing will be seen by some as misplaced or an exaggeration but if it becomes entrenched in the thinking of a substantial section of the electorate then there may be the possibility to start to assert this more literally. So for example, in the UK, when it is claimed by Zia Yusuf that the ‘vast, vast majority of the people making the journey from France by small boat are fighting age/military age males, not children’, or by suggesting that the Royal Navy should be involved as a deterence. The Royal Navy is of course a branch of the military historically linked to repelling invasions from the Armada onwards. Similarly, characterising a certain age demographic as ‘fighting/military age’ rather than say as ‘young adult’ or ‘working age’ is consistent with an invasion frame. In such ways it is possible to imagine how more extreme views can be introduced, explored, and normalised. We can imagine this as a process where jokes become metaphors which become literal interpretations, but equally these different kinds of statements can be made contemporaneously, all at once.
The left side of politics obviously also make use of humour—in the same Substack post (in a passage of the post originally published in The Guardian on 17.11.2017), Cadwalladr herself suggests that we ‘Take the piss.’ as a way of surviving the ‘broligarchy’. There are both classic and contemporary examples of graphic design that have used humour as tool against the right, which will be explored in this essay. In addition there are the more ephemeral uses of humour in countless social media posts. And, if it is not already apparent, this essay is not neutral, but written in opposition to the emergence of right popularist politics. In light of this, calls for framing or reframing may be seen as something manipulative, especially as it concerns views that might be held unconsciously. But the approach to framing advocated by Lakoff is very different to this,
Reframing as we discuss it in this book, is about honesty and integrity. It is the opposite of spin and manipulation. It is about bringing to consciousness the deepest of our beliefs and our modes of understanding. It is about learning to express what we really believe in a way that will allow those who share our beliefs to understand what they most deeply believe and to act on those beliefs.
Framing is also about understanding those we disagree with most. Tens of millions of Americans vote conservative. For the most part they are not bad people or stupid people. They are people who understand the world differently and have a different view of what is right.
Lakoff, 2004|2014, xiii
For those of us on the centre/left, or left of politics we still need to concede that we are not framing the debate as effectively as those on the right (as Lakoff conceded in earlier times). In terms of immigration, for example, at least some of the narrative of the right has been taken up by the centre left UK government. When thinking about immigration, for example, it is more difficult to think of a reciprocal framing that suggests a positive attitude toward immigration—we might perhaps think of ‘infusion’, where immigration is an infusion of talent and cultural values that supplement rather than replace those of the existing population. In any case, the progressive voices on the left are currently struggling to respond to the populist challenges from the right. But really there should be no excuses, since much of the strategies pursued by the right, and our suseptibility to them, have been meticulously highlighted by George Lakoff since the mid 1990’s. There is little new that will be added to this analysis here, but it is worth revisiting for the depth of insight he provides, in volumes like Don’t Think of an Elephant (2004|2014) and Moral Politics (1996). Before reviewing, therefore, what graphic designers on the left have done in the past, what we are doing in the present, and thinking about what we might do in the future, it is worth returning to Lakoff’s analysis, which forms the next section of this essay.