Would you support a law protecting healthy minors from life-altering injections and amputations, side effects of which may include infertility, cancer, sexual dysfunction, and heart trouble?
Would you support a law that makes it a crime for a doctor to give “gender-affirming care” to minors whose gender dysphoria places them at a heightened risk of suicide?
If the average voter were asked each of these two questions, it’s not hard to deduce that the wording of question No. 2 is far more likely to garner “no” answers, regardless of the false assumptions the question relies on. We see the same reality at work in polling: The way you ask someone a question greatly influences the answer. Its why lawyers aren’t allowed to “lead the witness” during direct examination.
For example, when PBS commissioned a poll in 2021 asking about restricting transgender surgeries for children, pollsters used this euphemistic language: “Do you support or oppose legislation that would prohibit gender transition-related medical care for minors?”
Unsurprisingly, they got 66 percent of respondents to say “oppose,” with only 28 percent admitting support. Who doesn’t want kids to get “medical care”?
Conversely, when the conservative group Convention of States Action asked respondents the following year, “Do you believe underage minors should be required to wait until they are adults to use puberty blockers and undergo permanent sex change procedures?” an overwhelming 79 percent said yes.
There are doubtless other factors contributing to the polling discrepancy (though it’s worth noting both survey samples included more Democrats than Republicans). But the more than 50-point spread between the polls has something to do with the question language. Researchers have tested the idea that ballot language affects voters’ decisions and come to the same obvious conclusion. Democrat officials and activists are aware of this too — and use it to their advantage when writing the language voters see on their ballots.
‘Prejudicial, Partial, and Inaccurate’
For example, parents rights group Protect Kids California is suing the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, for dishonestly crafting the title and summary of their proposed ballot initiative to benefit Democrats’ policy preferences. The summary provided by Protect Kids California for its own ballot initiative says it will:
(1) repeal the California law that permits [male] students to compete in female’s sports and students to be in females’ locker rooms and bathrooms; (2) prohibit schools from deceiving parents about their student’s gender identity crisis and stop them from secretly transitioning a child; and (3) stop sex change operations and chemical castrations on minors.
I might quibble with the phrase “sex change” — since it’s metaphysically impossible to change a person’s sex — but overall, the summary is pretty clear. The actual text of the proposed statute is similar, with provisions like, “Health care providers are not permitted to provide sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures on a patient under the age of 18 years,” and “any sex-segregated facility, including, but not limited to, a bathroom or locker room, on the campus of a school shall be segregated based on biological sex.”
Bonta took it upon himself to title the initiative the “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth Initiative.” The summary created by his office says the initiative, in part, “Prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents consent or treatment is medically recommended,” and that it “Requires schools to notify parents whenever a student under 18 asks to be treated as a gender differing from school records without exception for student safety.” According to California law, the attorney general’s dishonest title and summary must appear on every page of the petition.
Protect Kids California is suing Bonta over his obvious attempt to prejudice voters and run interference against the ballot initiative. The group contends his “title and summary is prejudicial, partial and inaccurate.”
How to Get Away with (Making People Vote for) Murder
Sometimes the dishonest framing is in the proposed measure itself, rather than the summary. In Ohio last year, for example, pro-abortion activists behind Issue 1 carefully crafted the benign-sounding amendment to cloak its drastic ramifications.
“Every individual has the right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to contraception; fertility treatment; continuing one’s own pregnancy; miscarriage care; and abortion,” the amendment text stated, brushing over the fact that it made no exception for minors and threw open the door to transgender surgeries for kids as a kind of “reproductive decision.”
Furthermore, the text used a common Democrat trick to ensure the amendment would allow abortions throughout all nine months of pregnancy. It winked at allowing abortion restrictions after “fetal viability,” but kneecapped any such restrictions by making exceptions “if in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient’s treating physician it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.” It sounds nice to the voter who skims the page for the first time at the polling station on his lunch break, but it really allows any doctor to prescribe an abortion for any reasons that can be couched as “health”-related — presumably including a woman’s mental distress at being pregnant.
Define the Terms, Control the Discourse
Language is an all-important tool, and Democrats often use it to manipulate and take advantage of Americans who don’t have hours to spend sifting through media lies to figure out the truth. Dishonest terms like “gender-affirming care” sound positive and invite sympathy, even though the procedures described by the term are neither medical “care” nor “affirming” of a person’s real sex.
And — just like media blackouts (see: Hunter Biden laptop) or partnerships between election offices and left-wing dark-money groups — deceptive ballot initiative language is one of the many methods Democrats use to rig elections before the first vote is even cast.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used.
The Associated Press Stylebook, a once-respected linguistic guide for journalists, conceded the definition of the word “woke” to conservatives on Thursday, in an update instructing writers to “use quotes around the slang term.”
“Woke” was originally popularized by left-wing proponents of identity politics to flatteringly refer to their own “enlightenment or awakening about issues of racial and other forms of social justice,” as the AP explains. Conservatives have used it to describe those same people and their ideas.
Those ideas more often than not, demand revolutionary social changes that prejudge people based on their secondary physical characteristics. If, like the vast majority of America until about five seconds ago, you think such identarian prejudices are a bad thing, you might use the word “woke” in a less than fawning manner. Apparently, the AP’s staff can’t handle that.
AP’s concession of the word is hilariously thin-skinned, but it’s also a rare win for conservatives in the war of words. Just by describing woke behavior as such, we’ve held a bit of ground against the unhinged language police who are mad that the right is using their terminology against them. Unintentionally, it seems we’ve ended up with command of the word altogether, if left-wing outlets like the AP are henceforth refusing to use it.
While there are times individual ideologies require a more specific description — queer theory, or socialism, for example — “woke” is a completely fair and often helpful term to use when speaking generally about the coalition of people on the left who want to see meritocracy replaced by identity politics. As my colleague Samuel Mangold-Lenett noted recently in these pages, “what other slogany-sounding word really works as a catch-all for what leftism has become?”
“They lost complete control of the English language,” he added, “and the word they used to indicate their radicalism to one another is being used to expose that radicalism to the rest of the world.”
The apparatus of left-wing media outlets, cultural celebrities, and tech platforms that drives our modern discourse has a majority share in defining the language we use. From headlines to search engines to literal dictionaries, activists manipulate the tools of debate. In any debate, the first step is defining your terms — if your definitions are off, you’ve already lost.
That’s why it’s incumbent upon conservatives to be intentional, honest, and straightforward with the words we use. That includes defending the legitimacy of disfavored-but-accurate terms (like “woke,” or “woman”) and refusing to use inaccurate language.
Take the nonsense phrase “gender-affirming care,” for example. The diction dictators have effectively standardized the term, to the point where even people who disapprove of such procedures will glibly repeat it. But nothing about the phrase is tethered to reality.
The whole idea that people have “genders” beyond their natural sex is pseudo-science crafted to further an ideology. Procedures that attempt to inhibit or reverse the physical realities of a person’s sex are not “affirming” that sex, but actively rejecting it. And deformative surgeries that involve amputating healthy body parts and creating Frankenstein-esque “penises” and “vaginas” with scraps of carved-up skin are certainly not “care.”
To use the phrase “gender-affirming care” is to give up the entire argument before it’s even begun. Or, as George Orwell put it, such nonsense terms “construct your thoughts for you,” and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
The same goes for using improper pronouns to describe sexually confused people: calling a man “she” or a woman “he.” Doing so indulges a delusion. Having physical reality on your side does little good if you concede it away by the very words you use.
Concurrent with the effort to mainstream invented euphemisms such as “gender-affirming care” is an effort to cannibalize established English vocabulary. Other victims of the AP Stylebook’s recent crusades include “riot,” “mistress,” “crazy,” and “pro-life.” Proper grammar is also a victim, with the redefinition of the plural pronoun “they” to refer to individuals who are in denial of their natural sex.
Tech monopolies such as Google instruct their employees to avoid terms like “man hours” and “blacklist.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has nixed “criminal” and “foreigner.” From journalism to medicine, terms such as “mother” and “woman” are replaced by dehumanizing lingo like “birthing parent” and “person who menstruates.” Merriam-Webster has redefined “anti-vaxxer,” “sexual preference,” and “assault rifle” to further the editors’ ideological ends.
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used. But the same people policing the word “woke” are appointing themselves the arbiters of the rest of the English language, too.
For those of us who prefer our words to reflect reality, there is nothing to be gained by good-naturedly going along with linguistic charades. On the other hand, there is the entire discourse to be lost.
“The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell protested not just sloppy use of language, but intentional misuse of language for political purposes.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” he said. “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
Politicians and dishonest media propagandists today use inaccurate language to frame narratives and foster a leftist perspective. Inadvertently, even well-meaning audiences sometimes internalize this language and end up propagating the very ideas and framing they fundamentally reject. Don’t let that be you.
In every debate, it’s vital to start by defining your terms. If conservatives want to counter the radical left’s agenda, we have to begin by using words that accurately reflect what we mean — not words that actively mean the opposite. Here are just 10.
1. ‘Mainstream Media’
The public communication cartel headed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and MSNBC does not represent mainstream Americans. Earlier this year, Axios (another culprit of heavy-handed political spin) reported that 56 percent of Americans believe “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
Big Media has engaged in deception through false and misleading “reporting” on Georgia’s election laws, the trespass and unrest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and more. Embracing “Russiagate” and the allegations of the Steele dossier against President Trump was one indicator of crumbling credibility. The cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 presidential election was another.
Even more recently, CBS’s “60 Minutes” invented a scandal about Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, while giving minuscule coverage to New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s cover-up of COVID-19 nursing home deaths his policies caused.
Leftist propaganda outlets who are running cover for Democrats and spreading inaccurate opposition research on conservatives don’t deserve to be called mainstream. Instead, use “Big Media,” “corporate media,” or — as DeSantis says — “smear merchants.”
2. ‘Gender,’ When You Mean ‘Sex’
Words have gender; people are one sex or another. For Latin and in many of the languages that have grown out of it, gender is a linguistic term indicating which word endings a term should possess. Gender is either feminine, masculine, or neuter. The phrase “la boulangerie,” for example, is French for “the bakery,” and its gender is feminine.
Male and female, on the other hand, refer to sex. Sex is a biological category that reflects a person’s physical characteristics and reproductive systems, and also manifests in certain broad behavioral differences that distinguish men and women.
3. ‘Sex-Reassignment Surgery’
Further, sex is not assigned, at birth or ever. If it is not “assigned,” it cannot be reassigned. Surgical procedures that remove or conceal the outward appearance of a woman or man’s reproductive organs, are most accurately described as genital mutilation or amputation.
4. ‘Democracy,’ When You Mean ‘Republic’
A democracy is direct rule by the supreme will of the people: the highest law is that of the loudest mob. Derived from the Greek “demos” (people) and “kratia” (power), democracy involves no higher law than popular consensus, and subjects the majority will to no checks and balances but itself.
In Book VIII of “The Republic,” Plato lists democracy as the social structure directly followed by tyranny. Democracy, Plato theorized, “comes into being when the poor, winning the victory, put to death some of the other party, drive out others, and grant the rest of the citizens an equal share in both citizenship and offices.” He continued, “that is the constitution of democracy alike whether it is established by force of arms or by terrorism.”
The American system was established as a constitutional republic. The highest law of the land is the U.S. Constitution, to which all public servants are (or should be) accountable. Additional laws are made by elected representatives of the people. Further, the American system is a federal republic, meaning power is divided between federal, state, and local governments, all of whom serve as the guarantors of the people’s sovereignty and rights.
5. ‘Abortion Doctors’ and ‘Abortion Clinics’
Doctors protect life; they don’t willfully take it. The Hippocratic Oath, written by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and long respected as a noble description of a doctor’s vocation, includes a commitment to “not give to a woman an abortive remedy.” Doctors are also obligated to, as far as it is in their power, “do no harm.” (This phrase is commonly attributed to the Hippocratic Oath, but actually comes from another work of Hippocrates, his book, “Of the Epidemics.”)
Similarly, clinics are medical facilities where people receive help and care. We do not call the room in which a prisoner on death row is executed a “clinic,” and neither should we use the term to describe the place where preborn babies are killed and dismembered. Call abortionists and abortion facilities what they are.
6. ‘Antidiscrimination’
Often, “antidiscrimination” policies actually refer to legal preferences based on sex, race, socioeconomic status, or some other category. The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, for example, released an “Antiracist Agenda For Medicine” earlier this month that would provide “preferential care based on race” for black and Latino patients.
In another example of discrimination under the name of its opposite, Yale University unlawfully discriminated against white and Asian students, according to a two-year Department of Justice investigation. Instead of using the leftist buzzword “antidiscrimination” to describe these policies, call them legalized preferences, or simply the discrimination they are.
7. ‘Undocumented Immigrant’
“Undocumented” is the term used by people who don’t want to call breaking immigration laws “illegal.” However, most illegal immigrants have identification documents from their home governments. Further, 16 states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Washington — as well as Washington, D.C., issue drivers licenses to illegal aliens, giving them U.S. documents as well.
8. ‘Equity’ Or ‘Equality,’ When You Mean The Other
Equity and equality sound similar, but have widely different implications today. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines “equality” as “The same degree of dignity or claims; as the equality of men in the scale of being … an equality of rights.” The Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” recognizes this equal value and dignity in personhood of each human being.
Equity has traditionally been a common legal term, referring to civil remedies; it can also mean the “impartial distribution of justice.” But in the jargon of identity politics, equity describes a policy that “recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.” See the above entry for “antidiscrimination” for an example of how equity-driven policies usually work.
9. ‘Cisgender’
Cisgender is an unnecessary word and assumes that sex is a result of human choice. A cisgender man is a man; a cisgender woman is a woman. Only added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, “cisgender” was invented to represent the opposite of “transgender” in the 1990s.
10. ‘Pro-Choice’
“Pro-choice” is a euphemism to get around having to call yourself pro-abortion. But just as we don’t use “pro-choice” to describe supporting a person’s decision to murder another, we shouldn’t use it here. Abortion denies giving the unborn baby the choice to live; in that sense, it is violently anti-choice.
“This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases,” Orwell continued, “can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them.” Sloppy, inaccurate phrases will “construct your thoughts for you,” he says, and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
Don’t let corrupt media and politicians design your words and supplant your meaning. To win the culture debate, you better first define your terms.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
In preparation for the close of the year’s second economic quarter, the White House Council of Economic Advisers has already started the spin: We’re not in a recession if we just redefine what a recession is.
“While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle,” the supposedly nonpartisan group said in a blog post on Thursday.
It’s doubtful the verbal smoke and mirrors will persuade the average Americans whose grocery bills keep growing as fast as their gas tanks empty. A recession is a sustained downturn in economic activity, and many Americans can feel it without knowing what the Q2 numbers are. But it’s far from the first concept the left has simply redefined to deflect the consequences of their failed policies and ideas.
One of their favorite words to redefine, apparently as “full and unchallenged political control,” is democracy. When actual democratic processes are at work — such as when an elected majority votes not to pass a pet piece of legislation, or when issues such as abortion law are left to elected representatives of the people at the state level — leftists scream their favorite catchphrase and call it a “threat to democracy.” They’ve levied that smear at everything from our bicameral legislature to the Supreme Court to the other party in our two-party system. It’s obvious they’re not really talking about democracy in any honest sense of the word. When democracy is a threat to their power, it simply gets redefined.
Another word that’s undergone a 180-degree redefinition is racism. No longer is it considered racist to treat someone differently based on his or her skin color, and not racist to value all human beings equally. Instead, if you’re not promoting theories that “remedy … past discrimination [with] present discrimination,” as critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi suggests, you are clearly a racist according to the left’s new dictionary. Do you believe in meritocracy? Racist. Think people are responsible for their own choices, and it’s neither possible nor beneficial for the government to dole out equivalent outcomes to everyone by force? Doubly racist. The new liturgy says that true equality lies in teaching some children that they’re part of a hopelessly oppressive system and other children that they’re hopelessly oppressed.
On the subject of pitting people against each other, the term “vaccine” has been ridiculously redefined to cover for the incompetence of the people who profit from them. After the shot that was promised to protect people from Covid transmission and infection failed to ward off either, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention simply changed the definition of “vaccine” to fit the narrative. “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” was quietly altered to “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” Barely a week later, Merriam-Webster followed suit by changing the definition of “anti-vaxxer” from someone who opposes vaccines to someone who doesn’t believe the government should mandate Covid shots.
Just last week, as part of the trans-crazed campaign to redefine what a woman is, Merriam-Webster added“having a gender identity that is the opposite of male” to its definition of “female.” Categories such as “men” and “women” that are based in biological reality don’t suit the agenda that seeks to abolish those realities from minds and bodies. So rather than advocate their agenda within the bounds of reality, the left simply attempts to redefine reality itself. It’s apparent in the push to call women by the objectifying terms “pregnant persons,” “menstruating people,” etc. We saw it when then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson told Congress she couldn’t define what a woman is, and it’s obvious in the attempts to put confused men in women’s prisons, shelters, and bathrooms. The reality of womanhood is in the way, so it’s being redefined out of existence.
And while abortion advocates lately have been willing to defend the act of killing a baby in the womb even with the understanding that it takes a human life, for years they’ve pushed their agenda by redefining an unborn baby as a “clump of cells” or some other dehumanizing description.
On any of those topics and more, leftists and their allies in Big Tech also persistently redefine any dissenting opinions or perspectives as disinformation,using that disingenuous label to erase opposition from channels of discourse.
Of course, many people who hear them prattle about “disinformation,” “birthing persons,” “anti-racism,” “threats to democracy,” and their host of other buzzwords know those words are nonsense. We can tell, as George Orwell wrote in 1946, that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
But, as he noted, “the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them.” The danger is in allowing these redefinitions of reality to be said, unchallenged, until enough people forget they could ever be challenged at all.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
Democrats Attempt To Erase The Words ‘He,’ ‘She,’ ‘Mother,’ And ‘Father’ From The House
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is attempting to excise all references to either sex in House business to “honor all gender identities” and “promote inclusion and diversity.” On Monday, the House of Representatives is set to vote on a Rules Package for the 117th Congress, which Pelosi and Rules Committee Chairman James McGovern promise will be “the most inclusive in history.”
Congress is following in the illustrious example of companies like Twitter and educational institutions such as the University of Michigan in removing language that recognizes the two sexes from their work product and interpersonal communications.
This would mean replacing any instance of “he or she” with the grammatically incorrect colloquialism of “they” as a singular, or the unnecessarily long “such Member, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner.” Further, “himself” or “herself” becomes “themself,” a word not recognized by several dictionaries, and acknowledged by the New OxfordDictionary as “not widely accepted in standard English.”
Words such as “mother” and “father” would be replaced with “parent,” “aunt” and “uncle” with the awkward “parent’s sibling,” and “grandmother” and “grandfather” becomes “grandparent.” I wonder if Pelosi will bring her commitment to language policing to Twitterand remove “mother, grandmother” from her bio.
The insanity spread to the opening prayer, whereMissouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver ended the opening prayer with “Amen and A-women.” Amen does not refer to males at all. It is a word from biblical Hebrew meaning “so be it.” It appears Cleaver, in the middle of praying to a pantheistic or syncretistic god, didn’t have the cultural literacy to have ever understood the meaning of this basic word from context.
Democrats haven’t said whether references to “congressmen” and “congresswomen” will similarly be removed, nor if Pelosi will continue to be referred to as “Madam Speaker.”
The resolution deserves at least some credit for following its own ridiculous proposed rules, as any instance of singular personal pronoun use was replaced with “they” or “their,” shown under whistleblower protections.
The same bill promises to “give priority consideration to including in the plan a discussion of how the committee’s work will address issues of inequities on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, or national origin.” How can Congress be expected to legislate “sex, sexual orientation, gender identity,” as the new rules require, when they are not permitted to write in terms of sex?
These rules are not helping anyone, but are harming the specificity of language and the unique experiences and basic reality of the sexes in the name of inclusion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paulina Enck is an intern at the Federalist and current student at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service. Follow her on Twitter at @itspaulinaenck
Why does it matter whether we call someone who breaks the law to enter the country an “illegal alien” or an “undocumented immigrant”? What’s the difference between a Christmas tree and a “holiday tree”?
It’s just semantics, right?
Yes…and no.
It is just semantics, but “semantics” means the meaning of words. Words exist so that we might discriminate one thing from another. Without words we have chaos. And it starts with the first words; a baby says mama to distinguish mommy from daddy. Words shape how we think; they color how we view the world.
No one understands this better than the Left. They are the masters of words. Because they know that words matter.
The Left has a special gift for euphemisms –soft words selected to sugarcoat harsh realities so as to make those harsh realities easier for us to swallow. But these soft words are insidious. Their sole purpose is to deceive.
Race discrimination in hiring and college admissions is refashioned as the much nicer sounding “affirmative action.” Who would ever oppose an affirmative action?
Global warming, which can be measured and challenged, has morphed into “climate change,” which means essentially nothing because the climate is always changing.
When Barack Obama became president, George Bush’s war in Afghanistan suddenly transformed into the far less ominous and threatening “overseas contingency operation.”That’s one way to try to end a war. Just rename it.
The examples are endless. There’s a new euphemism every week.
In the make-believe world of leftist language, young criminals have become “justice-involved youth.” Mandates and taxes are “individual shared responsibility payments.” Government spending becomes an “investment.” Wanting to keep more of your hard-earned money becomes “greed”; taking more of someone else’s money is them “paying their fair share.” Opposing a Democrat in the White House is “obstruction.” Opposing a Republican in the White House, “resistance“.
In the name of “diversity,” the left enforces intellectual conformity. It censors opposing views in the name of “tolerance.” And it labels all non-left views “hate speech.”
Consider the ongoing battle over pronouns, whether to call a man who thinks he’s a woman “he” or “she.” Very few people in the country suffer from gender confusion, and we should have compassion for those who do, but the Left has invested countless funds, time, and energy to make everyone refer to some men as she and some women as he.
Why? Is it because the Left is so compassionate? Or is it more likely because so much of the Left’s cultural agenda is about blurring, even denying, the natural distinctions between men and women?
Sometimes it’s just an adjective that can change or even negate the entire meaning of the word it describes.
Take “social justice.”
Justice means getting what you deserve without favor. “Social justice” means getting what you don’t deserve because you are favored.
Here’s one we hear a lot these days. “My truth.” Truth is reality regardless of any individual’s feelings or perceptions. “My truth”is how I perceive things regardless of how they really are.
And how about “Same-sex marriage.” Let’s not get into the politics; let’s just look at the language.
Throughout history, in every culture, marriage has been the union of husbands, men, and wives, women. “Same-sex marriage” is the union of men with men or women with women, but it is most certainly not the union of husbands and wives.
Once the phrase “same-sex”was placed before the word marriage – that is, once the definition of marriage changed, the debate changed. It became about “marriage equality.” It was suddenly an act of bigotry to limit marriage to husbands and wives.
All this manipulation of language has paid off for the left: because whoever controls the words controls the culture.
Don’t believe me? Just try using plain language instead of the Left’s politically correct jargon. But be careful. Use “the wrong words”and you might lose your job, your home and your reputation.
The culture war is largely a war of words. Right now, the Left is winning. You can see the consequences everywhere: in politics, in education, in media.
It’s time to fight back. We should not cede another syllable.
What’s in a word? Everything.
By Michael Knowles, Guest Columnist
Prager University, helps millions of Americans understand the fundamental values that shaped America and provides the resources to articulate them. Published with permission.
The Language of Liberty series is a collaborative effort of the Center for Self Governance (CSG) Administrative Team. CSG is a non-profit, non-partisan educational organization, dedicated to training citizens in applied civics. The authors include administrative staff, selected students, and guest columnists. The views expressed by the authors are their own and may not reflect the views of CSG. Contact them at CenterForSelfGovernance.com
“DACA! DACA! DACA! DACA fix!” shouts the “bipartisan” political oligarchy in one chorus. What about first fixing the problems in immigration that endanger American citizens — you know, the people you are required to represent?
A brand-new report from the independent DHS inspector general’s office confirms that not enough is being done to vet illegal aliens released by ICE for ties to Islamic terror or other security concerns. No word yet whether a district judge will “strike down” the inspector general report as invidiously discriminatory and a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
America has become a dumping ground. You might even say it has become a $#!%hole.1According to the report, there are approximately 2.37 million illegal aliens who have been released into our communities by ICE and are “officially” under supervision. Only 1.4 percent of illegals apprehended by ICE remain in custody. And no, they are not from Norway. The inspector general’s office found that the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the office responsible for supervising detained and released aliens, is not doing enough and not provided with enough resources to properly monitor and vet these aliens for connections to terrorism.
The IG’s office examined 40 case files between 2013 and 2015 and found that ERO was not complying with the procedures of vetting and accessing the relevant DHS data to screen for terrorist ties. “We attribute these instances of noncompliance to limited program oversight and weak management controls,”the report said. “As a result, ERO may be missing opportunities to identify, take into custody, communicate status of and make decisions on those aliens who pose the highest risk to national security and public safety.”
ERO is required by existing policy to use DHS’ Known or Suspected Terrorist Encounter Protocol (KSTEP) to vet the aliens for ties to terror, but hundreds of thousands have been released before information was accessed. Almost none of those released are continuously vetted as they commit crimes and more information is placed into law enforcement and intelligence databases, leaving agents in the dark about the nature of foreign criminals and even terrorists they are releasing. The report found that once they are released, ERO essentially stops researching them. And there are some bad hombres among them. A previous IG report found that 368,574 had prior criminal convictions but were allowed to remain in the country.
The report notes that a former vetting program focused more precisely on aliens from “specially designated countries,”defined as “nations known to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members.”In other words, $#!%holes.But President Obama abolished it in March 2012.
Under the new system created by the Obama administration, the majority of ERO offices “did not have access to DHS classified networks at their locations to communicate about derogatory information related to known or suspected Terrorists,”according to the IG.
Guess what else the IG found to be endangering our national security? Sanctuary cities. According to the report, “approximately 675 jurisdictions nationwide declined to honor more than 29,269 ICE immigration detainers from January 2014 through May 2017.”These detainers, by definition, are all targeting criminal aliens, the people for whom Obama claimed to prioritize enforcement. Yet the federal government agency tasked with identifying and detaining criminal aliens is denied access to critical information needed to vet and apprehend individuals whom everyone supposedly agrees must be deported. According to the report, sanctuary cities force an already beleaguered ICE to use “significantly more resources to bring the individual into ICE custody.”ICE doesn’t have such resources. In some field offices, there is only one agent per 10,000 released aliens.
Much of the report was redacted due to national security concerns, which demonstrates the importance of this issue.
We have a criminal alien crisis, an MS-13 crisis (as a result of DACA), and tens of thousands of known Middle Easterners crossing our border. Yet only a tiny percentage of the 2.4 million released by ICE under supervision have been deported, and now we find out that ICE has no real way to ensure that a significant number aren’t safety concerns before they are released, never to be detained again no matter what crimes they commit. Further, sanctuary cities are endangering our national security.
We can laugh, cry, or virtue-signal over Trump complaining about $#!%hole countries, or we can unite as a nation and demand a complete fix for criminal aliens and sanctuary cities before any talk of amnesty so that America doesn’t become the ultimate $#!%hole for the rest of the world.
When you think about Orwell’s 1984, it’s easy to go right to the heavy-handed intrusive measures. Things like Big Brother, the secret police, and midnight arrests make it easy to draw comparisons to today’s IRS and NSA abuses that would have made Nixon blush. Or the arrest of that guy responsible for the video that “caused” Benghazi. Or maybe the swelling pseudo-police powers of various non-policing entities now carrying firearms.
But these were not the only threats Orwell saw to citizen freedoms, were they?
A far more subtle, and in a sense, dangerous threat to those freedoms, Orwell called Newspeak. In his own words:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.
In his book, acceptable boundaries of thought were enforced by shaping — co-opting — language. We see this today. Just ask Paula Deen why the word that cost her dearly in her career is ubiquitous in some music genres. What gives anyone the right to sanitize our speech by force?
How else does a Christian Restauranteur’s private opinion about marriage become a national headline?
What about Duck Dynasty? Runaway hit show threatened because one guy said something controversial in an interview?
I don’t remember that reaction in ‘08 when Obama said he was “not in favor of gay marriage”.
Instead of using words constructively, to engage conversation, or hammer out differences of ideas, activists and political hacks are short-circuiting political process. If someone dares say something controversial, two things are considered. First, “Who said it?”, and second, “What it is said about?”
For example, the word that brought Paula Deen to court was also used by Madonna. Difference? Madonna is committed to the same values as the P-C police. Likely, it will cost her nothing.
They play the same game with sexuality. Gay is a relatively new term. It replaced other more vulgar, or more accurate words. Notice they chose an innocuous word synonymous with happy? People later manufactured the word “homophobe” to bludgeon the noncompliant into submitting to the new orthodoxy. This, too, is selectively enforced.
Where are the complaints about their treatment in places like Iran, where homosexuals are publicly executed under Islam? Yet somehow Christians are scapegoats to be reviled for their commitment to traditional marriage. Do they think only Christians held this view, rather than practically every cultural group in the world (other than our aggressive strain of secularism)?
Maybe I missed it, but around the time Phil Robertson called homosexuality “a sin,” Louis Farrakhan spoke of the Islamic teaching that homosexuals be beheaded or stoned. Where, exactly, was that outrage? Has a reference to violent death from the religion so often in the news for violence less newsworthy than Phil’s private opinion?
Well, that would overlook one little fact: they aren’t interested in debate, or justice, but naked power. Like good little thought police, they’re trying to bully people into obedience. For now, the Islamophobe card seems enough to protect them from charges of “homophobia.”
What can we learn from this? We can be conscious of their tactics, and use deliberate word choice to frame our own position. For example,
they use ”pro-choice” rather than ”pro-abortion”, it’s more “friendly” even if the latter is more accurate.
“Progressive” is used to imply progress, and “forward” (another word often used).
If you use their language, you are already fighting the battle on their turf. Worse, you may be using terminology they use to stereotype you.
Frame your ideas in the context of what you are for, not against. It lets you define yourself on your own terms.
Don’t be afraid to take the gloves off. If they’re going to invent accusations against you, try to “Judo” that energy back at your attacker.
If they call you racist, be ready to show why they are, and you are not. If they call you a hater, make them prove it. Show them up as cowards, flinging accusations because they have no actual arguments.
Remember how Orwell’s novel had a “Ministry of Truth” that was actually a State-run Propaganda House?
Part of the fight, is to call things what they really are. Barbara Walters — alleged journalist of no small reputation — said the following: “We thought he was going to be … the next messiah”.
That’s not objective reporting, that’s the language of religious devotion and Personality Cult. I fail to see how that is meaningfully different from the adulation given a little Austrian with a funny mustache so many years ago.
Above all, when you are dealing with someone that no longer feels the sting of conscience (as any group that rejects the Ten Commandments must be), use ridicule! Tweak the ego!
Since images and sound bites have become more important than ideas and substance, this can be devastating to those me-monkeys.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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