Here’s a really abbreviated history lesson about the way southerners speak, especially southerners who come from states that were on the wrong side of the Civil War.
Language in the south became extremely coded in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. The south was essentially an occupied territory, and the occupiers could make the life of anyone who crossed them severely difficult. This caused the language to become both overly polite, and understated, so as not to offend. This was carried out to such an extreme that it essentially became a linguistic
cant that’s meant to mislead those outside the group, like carnival workers use of cizarn, or homosexual use of Polari.
So, southern hospitality becomes a thing because those in the know understand that the more polite someone is being to an outsider, the less they think of the person. A southerner would also be unlikely say something overtly negative about someone. For example, saying someone is “okay,” or “alright” has a completely different meaning to a southerner than it does elsewhere in the country as the southerner tends to speak in gradients of positive rather than direct negatives. Rather than speaking of people in terms of say, terrible to great, they speak in terms that are neutral to great, with half of that positive spectrum having negative connotations, and any use of negative language tends to be understatement.
While some of this soft-speak has become commonly known, as with phrases like “bless your heart,” and “good old boy,” or any variation of racist dog whistles, much of it is still opaque to those who exist outside southern culture. For instance, there has been a lot of confounded commentary on the use of the phrase “Let’s go Brandon,” but that phrase meshes nicely with the idea of not saying the negative thing out loud, which is likely why it became so popular.
Now, back to Graham. He more than any other current politician is a master of this form of doublespeak. He is constantly saying things that have a completely hidden meaning for those who are outside that particular culture. In this case, my immediate understanding as someone who spent the majority of my life in the south, is that this is a very concise soft statement that says much to its target audience while slipping past the broader audience as just another dumb Lindsey Graham comment. Here’s how it breaks down:
Southerners old enough to remember will recognize this as a reference to the days when klansmen would force black men to jump from bridges so law enforcement could claim they weren’t murdered, but had simply fallen in accidentally, or had committed suicide. Except in this case, by referencing San Francisco, still largely seen by older southerners as a Haight-Ashbury era liberal haven for hedonism, he makes it less of a racist dog whistle and more of an anti-liberal dog whistle that also serves as a
leaderless resistance call to violence for all of the “lone wolves” who are listening. Either he’s saying Jordan will conduct roundups of their political enemies, or his leadership will allow for others to do it for them.
Graham makes comments exactly this coded on a regular basis. He knows what he’s doing, and is just as bad as any of the others openly calling for violence, maybe more so because he knows how to speak the language of those most likely to act on their own violent impulses.
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