A very bombastic yet very intelligent, sharp, and witty radio talk show host named Michael Savage refers to the left’s war on American values as an assault on our “borders, language, and culture.” I don’t think any individual pundit or commentator has more accurately summed up this great divide in just three simple words.
The attack on our language in particular is a very dangerous, albeit effective tactic – it is a battle among the intellectuals within the larger war against our borders and culture, a war which expands and encompasses the wider range of both the educated and non-educated on both sides of the debate. That is to say it does not take an educated man to notice the attack on our borders and culture, but the same cannot be said for such a calculated attack on our language.
The English language is a beautiful and intricate one. For non-native speakers it is difficult to learn, and many American citizens graduating with college degrees still cannot write an effective thesis in their own native language. As such, it is impossible to overstate how disconcerting this is, for the majority of the population is not keenly aware that their language has been hijacked and is being compromised on the daily. Words have very little meaning anymore, and great orators of our generation – men like Alan Watts, Christopher Hitchens, and other grandmasters of the spoken word are undoubtedly turning in their graves over what is happening today.
Here are a few examples of how the left has invented new words or hijacked existing ones in an attempt to redefine them to suit their agenda:
“Islamophobia”
“A persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to a compelling desire to avoid it.” – Dictionary.com
There is no such thing as an irrational fear of or aversion to Islam. With regard to the specific tenets of the Quran and the Hadiths, a fear of these ideas being exported to your country is incredibly rational. Furthermore, an aversion to stoning women for adultery, throwing homosexuals from rooftops, or beheading apostates seems not only rational, but noble. One could make a strong argument that being anti-Islam is a synonym for being pro-human rights.
The word “Islamophobia” is a ploy – a propaganda word used by Islamists who believe it should be illegal to criticize Islam, in order to deter infidels from doing so publicly. As Marco Rubio said, let’s dispel this notion that those who use this word don’t know what they’re doing. They exactly what they’re doing, as they are often lawyers, professors, and people of above average intelligence.
We would all agree that discomfort merely with seeing a Hindu or Sikh family on your flight could be a genuine display of intolerance, but what the “Islamophobia” crowd have done is deliberately conflate generic bigotry towards brown-skinned people with opposition to Islamic doctrine. This is very dangerous because of the potential for a slippery-slope progression. Yesterday it was drawing Muhammad, today it is criticizing Islam, and tomorrow it is being a non-Muslim.
“Rape”
I just can’t even.
“Unlawful sexual intercourse or any other sexual penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth of another person, with or without force, by a sex organ, other body part, or foreign object, without the consent of the victim.” – Dictionary.com
Do you notice the qualifier of penetration?
We all know about the universally discredited myth which claims 1 in 5 women are the victims of “sexual assault” on college campuses, but let’s break it down. Apparently, a study was done in 2007 that concluded the aforementioned assertion. This outlandish and intrinsically flawed study polled an extremely small sample of women, and were deliberate about wording the questions in the vaguest, broadest terms possible.
The study only interviewed 5,446 women across two universities, and included incredibly subjective questions such as:
“Were you unable to provide consent or stop what was happening because you were passed out, drugged, drunk, incapacitated or asleep?”
“Can you discuss sexual encounters that you think (but are not certain) happened?”
The first step was to blur the lines between rape, a very specific term, and sexual assault, a much broader and slightly less severe term. The second step was to broaden the definition of “sexual assault” so as to include crude comments, unwanted touching of the hair or shoulders, and even consensual sex between two drunken adults that resulted in female “buyer’s remorse” the next day. The third step was the blur the definition of consent such that a woman’s expectation to act responsibly were far lower than a man’s, while her word in a court of law meant much more than his.
Once the phrase “sexual assault” was diluted of all meaning and it was made interchangeable with rape, this allowed proctors of the study to double down on their confirmation bias and assert that 1 in 5 women were effectively raped on US college campuses, painting on unconscionable picture of all men as “potential rapists” and the American campus as more dangerous than ISIS territory for a young woman.
“Racism”
“A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” – Dictionary.com
Dating back to the 1970’s, the far-left has hijacked the word “racism” so as to include vague inferences to “power”. This is an extension of “critical race theory”, which was made popular by a handful of black male and (mostly obese) white female college professors. It has retained a pulse due to modern-day race hustlers like Marc Lamont Hill and Michael Eric Dyson alluding to it constantly during their weekly word salad on CNN/MSNBC.
This alternative definition with strong implications of “power” is not a mainstream definition outside of radical leftist university classrooms or commentator panels at said “news” stations, but as the far-left grows and becomes more vocal, this definition is shouted louder and more vociferously from megaphones with every passing year.
These vague inferences to “power” are typically accompanied by other liberal buzzwords like “institutional” and “systemic.” These words are also intentionally broad and typically rely on philosophical tropes, alluding to how the effects of slavery are “intractable” even 160 years later. These race hustlers have to fall back on ancient platitudes absent any abundance of specific examples today. Note that a few instances of systemic racism (the Ferguson police department’s emails) are not ample evidence to convict of an entire country of 330 million people of “systemic racism”.
The purpose is simple: to give the impression that white people have a monopoly on racism. It gives non-whites carte blanche to take their anti-white racism as far as they want to, because by definition they can never be racist. Forget tens of millions of white people living in poverty while we are one election removed from a black President and black Attorney General, but even terrorists loosely affiliated with Black Lives Matter “cannot be racist” because they don’t benefit from these invisible, so-called discriminatory “systems”, all of which were abolished in the 1960’s.
I have been waiting for the longest time for someone to ask Marc Lamont Hill, Michael Eric Dyson, or Shaun “Talcum X” King whether white people can be racist in South Africa where they are facing a genocide, or in Zimbabwe where by government edict they cannot own land. I am still waiting.
“Nazi”
“A member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945 under Adolf Hitler” – Dictionary.com
There are very few Nazis still living. Many of them are in their 90’s and are being prosecuted all over the globe for the war crimes they committed seven decades ago.
There is indeed a resurgent movement of Neo-Nazis in the West, largely as a response to this global attack on our borders, language, and culture. Neo-Nazis represent a deeply extreme perversion of what we affectionately refer to as “Western culture”. They are absolutists and totalitarian in their ways, which separates them from the rest of conservatives.
These individuals were marginalized and banished to the fringes of society where they belonged. People like David Duke had not been heard from in twenty years, until CNN resurrected him as a weapon to maul Trump with during the primaries. The white supremacist movement as a whole was dug out of obscurity by Antifa, who needed an enemy to punch. These Neo-Nazis are throwbacks that share the ideology of the National Socialists, but they are not Nazis. They are Nazi imposters and not nearly as dangerous or intimidating as the original version, as much as they wish they were.
There is a broad spectrum of bigotry on the far-right, and not every conservative is someone like Richard Spencer. However, the far-left has gone nuclear with the phrase “Nazi” on nearly everyone this side of the 50 yard line. It was quite a stretch to call Milo Yiannopoulos, a homosexual who prefers black men a Neo-Nazi, but the left lost all remaining credibility when calling people like Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris Nazis. Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew, Harris is a liberal atheist, and both are ardent supporters of the state of Israel. The day these men were called Nazis for the first time was the day irony died.
These examples are not the only four I can think of, but if you ever find yourself in a public debate and one of these words is used in the aforementioned context, respectfully point out that there can be no discourse until both sides show respect to the language we’ve all agreed upon. And if they insist, make sure they understand that deploying the extraordinary luxury of redefining words at will just might be their non-white privilege talking.