The Manipulation of Sarah Palin: A Historical Re-enactment of Global Postmodernism

Discourse analysts Michał Krzyżanowski et al. (2023) issued an interdisciplinary call to arms for academics to investigate on-going processes of normalization of anti- and post-democratic action. Historians who would answer this call, this article presents a cutting-edge investigative framework for pragmatic analysis of Russian manipulative influence in conservative political discourse recorded between 1945-present. This study presents the framework in a historical reconstruction re-enacting how Russian agents may have influenced events surrounding Sarah Palin’s prolific use of falsification during and after the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, establishing the genesis of global postmodernism and the post-truth era. The methodology follows Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine and integrates discourse theory, systems theory, and pragmatics with media analysis to confirm empirical findings. Historians may apply this framework in their own reconstructions to uncover leads for corroborating evidence in archival research.