‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me’
Political struggles can be divided into basic categories. There are matters too distant or arcane for some people to worry about, things like international relations or defense. Traditionally, the only thing that’s mattered to a lot of people and especially politicians, is anything associated with money. Then there are culture war issues, near and dear to people back home. Out of these, culture war issues became the ‘horse-trading’ coinage, the piece that politicians traded to get what they wanted in the money struggle. A lot of people go around believing that their politician cares about their culture war interests when at the end of the day they’re primarily concerned only with money but that could be changing. When culture wars take a more dark and serious turn and become more about basic constitutional rights and liberties, something is changing. We now find ourselves in an existential struggle for a way of life we always took for granted. Within the larger culture war there are battles and within the larger battle, the first hill to be taken is always about language.
The hill called language is a strategic place to win and hold. From that vantage point, one side controls the rhetoric, the vocabulary, they control the very rules by which the game is played. They control the laws because laws are nothing but language. For example, if an administration were to make a decree to ‘outlaw’ the phrase “I am going to the market” they’ve just taken a big step in controlling who and when people go to the market because people would no longer be able to discuss that very mundane idea. Suddenly they must devise new ways to communicate that they’re going to the market without actually saying the phrase. The next day, the word “store” is outlawed, and it makes it that much harder to go about your daily business. The day after that, other words are outlawed until the point where everyone is an outlaw and anyone can be locked up and denied the most basic freedom of movement. Maybe the police state doesn’t enforce it that often, what then? That just gives the government even more leeway, because then they can let their friends go to enjoy special privileges that come from ad hoc legal immunity to do whatever they want while they can crack down on their enemies at will, and no one ever knows when and where that point is going to occur; everyone else must move about with uncertainty and hesitancy, some are busted, some are punished severely, some are ignored entirely and are free to break the new laws. At that point, we are then living an oxymoron, in dictatorial lawlessness. If you’re not favored by the regime, your entire civic life is one big gaslit hell.
You say, “no one would try to regulate such basic language and behavior”. I just used a seemingly absurd example to illustrate how language is the first and most important way to subjugate and control you. Unfortunately, it may not be so absurd anymore. Let’s look at something even more fundamental, wholesome, and universal, the word ‘woman’.
The word ‘woman’ is now entirely banned in all woke strongholds, with the objective of spreading that prohibition, and the culture war politics behind it, to every institution within the country. It’s already so bad that the ACLU even corrupted a quote by liberal icon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg that used the word ‘woman’. Now every other possible synonymous phrase is put forth as the only proper way to refer to a host of bodily functions that could only be ascribed to a woman, anything to avoid direct association with the one of two binary genders, a female: people who bleed or menstruate, people who give birth. This is all done to create a new orthodoxy about gender which itself is just one of many planks in the culture war. What word could be more fundamental to human existence than the word woman and yet here we are today seeing it progressively banned in any public spaces that are considered ‘polite’ according to woke progressive ideologues. If they can ban the word ‘woman’, what could they not ban? The answer of course is – nothing. They are capturing every possible strategic space of language that are critical to subjugating and dominating conservatives.
Wherever you see words being demonized and abolished you will also see certain tactics employed which allows the aggressors to further disrupt their ideological adversaries:
A word is made uncouth, offensive, functionally illegal today, tomorrow a replacement word is also banished just as people were trying to acclimate to the first change.
Many words are bound to highly charged emotional dispositions. A word becomes deeply offensive to someone who has been recently awarded victim classification. Likewise, the user of the banned word is either extremely insensitive or an emotionally engaged aggressor against those same victim classes.
Certain classes of people are allowed to use banned words while other classes of people are punished and even canceled for using them.
The friends of the regime freely use the banished language in their private discourse with no repercussions. Enemies of the regime are held to an exacting standard for both public and private speech.
Once certain words are banned, its immediately retroactive and can be applied to anyone’s past documented written or spoken words, even if expressed prior to adulthood. There is no room for time-period or context. Language manipulation can be employed explicitly for the purpose of mining a person’s past with the objective of purging them from positions they hold now.
How could we stop this steamrolling monstrosity? Given that we’ve already ceded so much linguistic territory, I’d suggest that the first action for conservative persons to take is to loudly name and expose the inherent gamesmanship used by the radical left every time they try to move the linguistic goalpost.
We must educate ourselves about the tactics that have been foisted over us by progressive liberal activists and the constellation of their government endowed apparatchiks. We must preserve language and terminology that encompasses our values, stick to it, use it and defend it. If we fail to do this, we can be assured we’ll be exiled within our own land, treated as cultural outcasts, pariahs, given at best, secondary status, including economic opportunity.
The ultimate objective of language control is total thought control. You will only think what the state allows you to think. The next step or ‘hill’ in the language battle is cancel culture, affecting present and future employment and livelihood, and eventually, lifetime earnings.
Culture wars may be dismissed by some as the distracting stepchild of the weightier money arena, but it’s now more than ever a connected whole for the conservative.
‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me’