Linguistic Manipulation

Language provides an avenue to express shared meaning so we can relate to one another.  Or at least it once did.  Today, on college campuses, social media, and in the courts, this shared meaning is being destroyed.

Through linguistic activism, leftists have begun a full-scale war on language, playing by their own set of constantly shifting rules.

The modern American lexicon is changing faster than society can keep up. Any twentieth-century liberal who walked onto a college campus today would be more confused than the town drunk straggling into town the morning after a bender. Words can now literally be defined with their antonym. We are a hair’s width and an ounce of stupidity away from “war is peace, freedom is slavery.”

This isn’t innocent linguistic drift or slang; it is a conscious effort to reshape society with schemes that redefine words for personal gain, that alter the meaning of a word to fit a set agenda or make up new words that mean nothing to bully, to distort and destroy.

Disassociating words from their accepted meaning opens an entirely new realm of possibility for leftists. By separating gender from sex, activists created a new class of victims, and by definition, a new class of offenders. Pronouns, the simplest way to identify another party, are now subject to feelings.

Transgenderism is the latest assault on reality. In order to assert that one is a female because he identifies as one is clearly not the same thing as saying that one was designed to be woman because she has the female genetic makeup. Loose language leads to absurd conclusions. If one is male or female in definition but not by nature, then one may also be white, black, or Asian by definition and not by nature.

Defining words on subjective views defeats the purpose of language, because it creates an endless guessing game, and empowers the other party to choose when to reward and when to punish the speaker.

Another word the left prefers to leave undefined is abortion.  Providers don’t describe what is involved or what is destroyed in an abortion. Planned Parenthood’s website states that their doctors “gently empty the uterus,” or use a curette for the removal of “tissue.” Never mind that this “tissue” is a living human being who feels the pain of being ripped apart limb by limb.

In the case of firearms, the new popular phrase is “assault rifle,” which Webster’s Dictionary was happy to update its definition of to help “nudge” society in the right direction.

Even more explosive is the left’s use of the word terrorism, which is now used to label anyone who disagrees with the left’s agenda; anyone being Patriots, Christians, Republicans, Conservatives and White Supremist, which by the way can include black people who are not black enough.

Controlling how people speak is the implicit goal, which, when combined with anti-hate-speech activism empowers the Left as the arbiters of morality with power to punish those who wrongfully use language.

Today, written law is no longer the supreme law of the land because words themselves are decaying. Judges can decide on meaning, politicians can misuse words with abandon, and activists can weaponize linguistic drift to brainwash uneducated voters.

The pen is truly mightier than the sword. The power to influence language is the power to create and destroy. 

Source: How the Left’s War on Words Manipulates Your Mind by Benjamin Dierker, The Federalist; How Liberals Abuse Language by Shannon Holzer, the Imaginative Conservative. 

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