By Thiago V. S. Coelho

As Étienne de la Boétie pointed out, the state is absolutely dependent on ideological support, without which it could not even command an army to force obedience from the public. Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State points out that the state acquires this support by means of its court intellectuals, who frame power as “public service,” while framing skepticism as childish, antisocial, or “conspiratorial”—especially the simple habit of asking cui bono (“who benefits?”). In a previous article, I highlighted the need for libertarians to criticize how academia and journalism can serve as the primary vehicles of state propaganda.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is useful to libertarians because it targets legitimating machinery at the level of language. In van Dijk’s formulation, CDA studies how dominance and power abuse are enacted and normalized through text and talk—by hiding agency, smuggling moral premises, and presenting contested choices as technical necessities. In libertarian terms, CDA is a discipline of de-mystification: it helps you translate respectable abstractions back into concrete human action—who decides, who compels, who pays, and who benefits. Once you can see those moves, the mystique weakens—and you can read “objective” prose as an artifact of institutional power rather than a transparent window onto the world. The checklist below turns that insight into a practical method.

Below are CDA “moves” you can apply to journal articles, think-tank reports, newspaper stories, policy memos, and NGO white papers. Each one answers a libertarian question: Where is the coercion hidden? Who is acting? Who pays? Who benefits? Who is being trained to feel ashamed?

Propaganda loves grammar that deletes responsible actors: passives (“mistakes were made”), nominalizations (“the implementation of policy”), and abstract forces (“market failures,” “systemic pressures”) that float free of decision-makers. A libertarian reading habit is to restore the subject. For example:

Van Dijk discusses how texts can conceal or understate the agency of powerful actors. If no one is doing it, no one can be blamed—and no one can be resisted.

Underline every verb in a paragraph and write the implied subject........

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