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The hashtag #secondcivilwarletters emerged after conservative media personality Alex Jones tweeted that Democratic Party supporters were planning a Second Civil War. The resultant tweets mimicked the style of American Civil War soldiers' letters home, delivering often scathing commentary and critique of contemporary U.S politics, in particular in opposition to President Trump. While this was often accomplished through direct reference to socio-political events, the tweets also utilised food references as a means of indexing particular social identities and ideological positions and related political alignment. The emergent indexicalities demonstrate four key food-related indexical fields: Nutrition, Hipster, Basic, and MAGA. The analysis shows how these indexicalities demonstrate aspects of contemporary classism in the US alongside the partisanship underpinning the #secondcivilwarletters community. • Tweeters affiliated around the #secondcivilwarletters hashtag to express political views and commentary. • Food references in #secondcivilwarletters tweets perform indexical work. • The tweets and food references index partisanship and classism through the various references made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews discourse-based approaches to language attitudes in terms of their contributions to understanding the creation of socio-indexical meaning in metalinguistic discourse. It proposes a five-level typology of approaches which includes topic-oriented, linguistic, cognitive, interactional, and rhetorical analyses. The article discusses the ways in which different types of analyses expose various aspects of social-semiotic and meta-semiotic processes involved in constructions of sociolinguistic indexical relations in the local interactional and larger contextual frames. The paper argues in favor of integrated discourse-based approaches and illustrates the potential of a rhetorical approach to serve as a unifying framework for blending analytical levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]