Mises Wire

The Left’s Assault on Language Is an Assault on Freedom

George Orwell wrote, “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” More colorfully and in a similar vein, it has been said that blurry words carry deplorable thinking the way mosquitoes carry malaria.

It behooves us all to pay attention when people use words deviously or manipulatively not to inform but to conceal.

How can people who are intolerant and authoritarian at every turn call themselves “liberal”? How can people wanting to regress the United States to the collectivism of the past—as socialism and fascism both devolve to feudalism over time—call themselves “progressives”?

How can one honestly use the term “affirmative action,” which is reverse racial discrimination, when discriminating on the basis of race is the definition of racism? There is nothing affirmative about being discriminated against simply because you are a white or Asian male.

“Diversity” means that only those infected by the woke mind virus need apply so that diversity equates to ideological conformity. “Equity” necessarily means inequality, with some people given privilege at the expense of everyone else. “Inclusion” means everyone who doesn’t bow to the political correctness dogma or possess some forever-victimhood privilege will be excluded.

Social justice essentially means “not justice.” Socializing justice demands injustice to individuals, to the white and Asian men whose careers have been foreclosed as college admissions, jobs, and promotions have been given to less-qualified people with a preferred race or sex. Every woman in East Germany being raped by Russian soldiers at the close of World War II—that was the principle of social justice being applied by the powerful victors at that moment.

“Gender-affirming care” means endorsing a feeling, very possibly induced by propaganda, that runs counter to every identifiable physical scientific fact concerning sex. Castration of a minor is the opposite of care.

For many decades, dictionaries defined “vaccine” as a preparation of killed or attenuated organisms administered to produce immunity to a particular disease. The emergency-use mRNA injection was neither that type of preparation nor did it provide any immunity, yet it was called a vaccine by all those pushing it on us. Someone playing with the meaning of a word should be a red flag that you are not dealing with someone of honest persuasion.

And “cases.” What did that word mean? Were you sick with covid, or had you just tested positive with the worthless polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests? Nobody ever knew, and—purposefully—none in the pay of the ruling class ever asked.

Harvard just contrived the euphemistic phrase “duplicative language” to obscure the reality of plagiarism being intellectual theft.

If someone uses the word “misinformation,” it is a pretty good tell that they are working for a censoring propagandist. Incorrect information in a free society is corrected by information that persuasively counters it, not censorship. This is a founding principle of the US republic and has a rather good track record to the extent it has been allowed.

The Trusted News Initiative, for all their “Poison Ivy League“ grads, behaved as if it was oblivious to this history: the media members censored and shadow banned mostly true information about the virus, the “vax,” and other things—often information from extremely reputable experts in the relevant subject. The most salient feature of the Trusted News Initiative is that it cannot be trusted.

Similarly, the one thing that does not matter to the Black Lives Matter movement is black lives: Murders of blacks surged in 2020 in the wake of their riots and calls to defund the police. With police diminished in number and unable or afraid to do their jobs, murders of blacks increased 43 percent over the average of the previous ten years! (Historically, 93 percent of blacks have been murdered by other blacks according to the Department of Justice, and this definitely doesn’t matter to Black Lives Matter.)

The dominant marketing department of the ruling class of the US is known as the Democratic Party. The one thing that party is not is democratic.

Witness the shenanigans by which they elevated Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016. Witness the backroom way that Joe Biden was anointed as their nominee (at Congressman Jim Clyburn’s signal in South Carolina) in 2020. The Democratic Party’s undemocratic ways are further exhibited by the way their droves of lawyers maneuvered throughout the country to overturn all manner of election law (established by democratically elected legislatures) so that Biden could be elected from his basement with almost forty-seven million mail-in ballots.

Presently, their legal persecution of the candidate for president who is leading Biden in the polls and their chicanery to prevent voters from having the right to vote for this presidential candidate are both exceedingly undemocratic. Democratic congressmen have also literally sought to prevent 126 Republican congressmen from being allowed to appear on the ballot for reelection because of their thoughts surrounding January 6 and 2020 election irregularities. To describe Democrats as “democratic” is 1984 doublespeak.

The other marketing department for the US ruling class, the Republican Party, doesn’t have deceit built into its name. However, a party campaigning vociferously for cutting government spending for the last fifty years while virtually never cutting any spending certainly brings to mind the quip, “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”

The Republican Party does make a home for the handful of members who genuinely value individual freedom and limited government, but it never allows them into the leadership. Allowing a few virtuous into the party creates the illusion that the party is something other than controlled opposition—as they join the Democrats in loving US taxpayer involvement in every single war anywhere on the planet.

The only thing the putative “conservative” party conserves is the ruling class.

As best as you can, beware those using squirrelly words, trying to usher us deeper into an Orwellian dystopia.

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