Read on Twitter
Warning: a typical Pitcavagean thread begins here. Read on at your own peril.
Note the phrase below, "we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple." The word "sheeple" is commonly used by people in the far right to refer to the American people, who passively believe https://twitter.com/SamuelSokol/status/1355679694763515906
Note the phrase below, "we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple." The word "sheeple" is commonly used by people in the far right to refer to the American people, who passively believe https://twitter.com/SamuelSokol/status/1355679694763515906
whatever the government/New World Over/media/Jews/Deep State/Name Yer Enemy tell them. When I began researching right-wing extremism in 1994 it was already on everybody's lips. Was it always this way, though? When did this phrase emerge? (or, given its simple construction, how
many different times did it independently emerge?"). Some words you can look up the etymology of, but slang terms are more difficult. However, you don't have to be an expert in order to do Internet sleuthing using Google Books and specifying various time ranges. The results
are interesting (to me, at least), if you can put up with Google Book's awful interface and info delivery (like many Google services, Google Books is far less useful today than it used to be)..
Given how common it was in the early to mid 1990s, we can assume it was in use for some time before that. But what about when we look further back? It pops up far less often, and not always in the context of right-wing extremism, but more
often in a generic sense. I've compiled some examples and we can go through them in reverse chronological order. In addition to Google Books, I have also used my personal account at http://Newspapers.com . Just the usage graph for "sheeple" from this site alone is interesting.
This one is a little mysterious. However, some searching on Barbara Hutchinson and "tax law researcher" suggests that she was an activist in the right-wing tax protest movement in the 70s and 80s; thus this 1977 usage would be extremist.
Here is a 1970 white supremacist newsletter, Facts for Action (I actually subscribed to it in the 1990s), in which "sheeple" is clearly used in an extremist fashion. Google Books, per its usual nonfunctionality, no longer displays this language in snippet view for us to see.
Indeed, there are enough 1970s examples involving right-wing ideology that we can be confident it was in common usage in this sense at the time. Here's a 1979 letter to the editor in the Billings Gazette that not only has "sheeple" but as a bonus has "New World Order!"
Going further back in time, though, interestingly, examples of "sheeple" from the 1960s seem virtually non-existent. I guess the phrase was forgotten for a while. Here's a rare 60s example from the Louisville Courier Journal in 1962; note the reference is generic, not extremist.
In the 1950s, usages seem to be generic and unrelated to right-wing extremism, as in this 1951 essay originally appearing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
In this 1950 advertising work, we see a sheeple reference that is generic in nature, contrasting "big shots" and "sheeple."
Here in this 1949 work, "The Old Hokum Bucket," we can see very clear usage of the word--but in a generic, non-ideological sense, as victims of demagogues and "shysters" of all types.
Before the late 40s, the references to "sheeple" that I find are not in the context of "sheep-like people" but tend to refer to actual sheep. So, basically, this cursory research would suggest that a few people began to use the word "sheeple" in a generic sense in the mid-20th
century, but it was probably in the 1970s that right-wing extremists--both white supremacists & anti-gov't extremists (who overlapped more in the 70s/80s than today)--picked up the term & began using it regularly. I did not know that before this evening. I find it interesting.
