Talk:Silent majority

message: Could someone rewrite this article and incorporating reference? As it stands it's almost unintelligible.
I removed "see also" links to the Moral Majority and Straw man because it isn't apparent how they relate to the Silent Majority. The straw man fallacy refers to attacking a weak version of another's argument, rather than the actual opposing argument, and is not relevant to this article. --DDerby-(talk) 23:12, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Older

message: I think this article may have a conservative bias. When you say "made up the backbone of America" and "didn't have the time or ability" to participate in politics you're implying that their views are superior to liberal ones--Ezadarque 22:32, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Wrong on every count. It's a totally accurate characterization, and your assertion that Republicans out-voted Democrats in favor of civil rights (when Republicans were such a tiny minority in Congress as to be virtually irrelevant at the time) is loony. And to say Nixon supported desegregation but opposed busing is doublespeak. He supported the idea of desegregation, but opposed actually doing anything to desegregate? Then his support of desegregation was meaningless lip service. 24.214.230.66 (talk) 19:52, 12 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  conservative bias? 

message: The article takes Nixon's "great silent majority" as good coin, "vindicatd" by the 1972 election. It neglects to add that within less than three years, Nixon was facing impeachment and forced to resign, and mass opposition to the Vietnam war had forced a complete US withdrawal.
More disturbing is the reference to the media covering protests in order "to boost the media's own left-wing bias." This is unsubstantiated--and certainly at odds with its treatment of the protests against the Iraq war.
The article invokes the 2000 election as a confirmation of the existence of the "great silent majority." It attributes the controversy in 2000 to a "liberal media" which called the election for Al Gore because it was supposedly working off of exit polls "focusing on radical leftists and black voters in Florida." It states that the results were reversed by "later estimates of voters." None of these extremely questionable assertions, which appear to conform to a definite conservative agenda, are substantiated.--Bvanna 18:14, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Liberal media?" 

message: This article is very much not neutral. I think that it is a good article to have (the concept of the silent majority is referred to often in politics). However this article makes a number of unsubstiated claims and uses language that could be interpretted as offensive to the socalled leftists and also those who form part of the silent majority61.69.174.127 12:00, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article Neutrality 

message: Pages like this are the reason many scoff at Wikipedia as a legitimate reference. It is unorganized, unsubstantiated, and sounds to be authored by a C student attempting to stretch one sentence into four. Editing a jumbled mess such as this is sadly beyond my own attempts; perhaps a better soul will put it on themselves.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tmoss (talk • contribs) 04:22, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  In bad need of a cleanup... 

message: Please note that official Wikipedia policy allows the primary article to be titled without parentheses. In such a case,  according to WP:MOS-DAB, an  tag will be added at the top of said article.
This article should be moved back to "silent majority," because this article is about said term. —Tokek (talk) 01:18, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I've moved it back, as the recent move appears to have been undiscussed and there are pretty strong indications that this is the primary topic. If that is not clear, a new move discussion can be initiated. older ≠ wiser 01:50, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 

message: Nye Bevan, the founder of the NHS in the UK, used, in the 1940s, to call women, ‘the silent majority’.  Msrasnw (talk) 19:39, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bevan's use of "the silent majority" 

message: J. Sid Raehn supposedly coined the phrase "silent majority" in 1968 while a student at Florida State University, with the application specifically aimed to describe students who were not protesting the war in Vietnam. The webpages which tell this story include portions that were written by J. Sid Raehn himself, and I cannot find a single reference to confirm either the details or the general gist of the claim. Raehn writes that CBS News editor Lee Townsend came to FSU to interview and film those involved, with resulting clips shown by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. If this was the case, a glimmer of this appearance should be present online somewhere, but I find nothing to substantiate it. Here are the links under discussion:
*http://myweb.fsu.edu/jkoslow/studentprojects/pubhisfall06website/timeline.html
*http://www.fsu.edu/~fsu150/memorybook/ym_50-60.html
More to the point, a Google search for Raehn and "silent majority" turns up only these two FSU pages which Raehn himself authored. With no apparent support for the story, Raehn's tale appears to be greatly inflated self promotion or a hoax. Binksternet (talk) 22:19, 15 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  J. Sid Raehn in 1968 at FSU 

message: I removed the following addition to the article:
::*Reference:  (Also available with very slight wording changes at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/04/thelegacyofthe1968riots )
I took this bit out because of several reasons. Clay Risen writes about the King assassination riots:
Risen is making a novel connection (which is his right as a writer), but I think it is not worthy of inclusion here. Risen's new premise is that the Nixon campaign used the concept of "silent majority" in the 1968 presidential race. We know, of course, that Nixon did not make his "Silent Majority" speech until November 1969, a year after the voters had made him president-elect, ten months after he took office. Clearly, he was not using the phrase outright in his presidential campaign.
Nixon speechwriter Ray Price said that Nixon wrote the "Silent Majority" speech alone, according to Hal Bochin. Bochin was professor of speech communication at California State University, Fresno. Bochin wrote, 
Bochin brings up the final complaint I have of Risen's premise, that the Nixon campaign concept of "silent majority" was largely in response to race riots, not antiwar protests. Most commentators observe that Nixon's speech was about his goals for American involvement in Vietnam, not about race riots. In this manner Risen voices a lone sentiment on the fringe of mainstream historiography. I think including Risen's book is undue emphasis on what can be best described as a minor viewpoint. Binksternet (talk) 19:42, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  King riots influence? 

message: Perhaps this use of the term shouldn't feature so prominently. The term isn't widely understood as such, so it seems like this marginal curiosity is given undue weight. Heptor (talk) 07:16, 25 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Synonym for the dead