Most everyone has heard the meme, “He who controls the agenda controls the meeting.” Acknowledging that we can understand ultimate power would be controlling the words and language everyone uses lest they find socially or professionally ostracized.
When it comes to thought control, everyone should read or reread George Orwell’s 1984 as an essential marker of the dangers of an all-powerful state. In 2025, 1984 is no longer required reading in most schools, and you should ask yourself the question why? Even a cursory reading of 1984 would make many uncomfortable with the parallels to everyday life. A friend told me, “They are afraid students would recognize they already live in Orwell’s world.”
Newspeak was the official language of Orwell’s Oceania, the stage upon which Orwell told his story. Newspeak turned our language upside down “to make all other modes of thought impossible” and “to make any thought of diverging from the principles of the government unthinkable.”
False and misleading language is Orwellian Doublespeak, allowing murderous thugs like Adolph Hitler to disguise mass murder behind boring bureaucratic terms. (Example: “Evakuierung” (evacuation) was used as a euphemism for death and deportation to concentration camps.) This same manipulation of language was a key part of how Stalin and other 20th century tyrants used language to control people’s lives and, eventually, life itself.
What too few people realize is that, during the Obama and Biden years, the same thing happened in America, as leftists relentlessly seized control over American language and, through it, American thought. They rejected entirely Confucian wisdom for, when Confucius was asked what he would do if he were a governor, he said he would “rectify the names“ to make words correspond to reality.
When our government removes social media posts that differ from government policy or suppresses speech by arbitrarily deeming it hate speech, we begin to look quite like Orwell’s fictional Oceania. But that’s just a start. All kinds of behavior and thought are being restricted, manipulated, or banned through the left’s terms of engagement; that is, the language they use. Just take a look at a small subset of intentionally manipulative words and metaphors here:
- Undocumented Migrants—hides that these people are here illegally, and implies they are entitled to equality with legal citizens, devaluing the importance of and responsibilities of citizenship.
- Unhoused Person—homogenizes the causes of homelessness, which are mostly antisocial behaviors (drug addiction, criminality, and unaddressed mental illness caused or exacerbated by drugs) and implies that the fault is society’s, requiring ever more government money and control.
- Trans Woman—the normalization of deviancy instead of the truth of a mentally ill man
- Fair Share—the pretense that people who have acquired wealth (usually via hard work or exceptionally innovation) owe it to everyone else.
- Entitlements—another Democratic construct, as if God himself guarantees someone the right to your money
- Dreamers—take an illegal alien, give birth, or walk a child across the border, and voila, you produce a Dreamer!
- Fake News—life is like a TV; if you don’t like the show, change the channel. TV and life have merged into highly produced news curated for particular audiences, facts be damned.
- Death of Democracy—In his farewell Address, George Washingtoncautioned against the divisive influence of political parties, asserting that they could lead to the “Subversion of the power of the people.” We’re still standing, notwithstanding all those that parrot this tired lie.
A common thread runs through all attempts to control speech: de facto control of your freedom of choice. How patently absurd for someone else to insist you use their language, phrases, and false metaphors. The epitome of hubris is the assumption that what someone manifests out of thin air should become the law of the land, if not in fact, then in practice.
Is what is happening today a fad? Fads usually don’t last. Beatnicks come to mind, and so do various cults like the Manson Family, the People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, and the Branch Davidians, which garnered small but devoted followings; certainly not the mass hysteria that ripped us apart recently. While some charlatans took in a few people, reason prevailed for most.The correct and proper usage of words and phrases is not trivial. In the wrong hands, and given enough time, you can make something as life-affirming as creating new life turn into an optional “choice.”
Trump implicitly agrees as he has commenced the Herculean task of undoing the massive societal and economic damage wrought. Simply insisting that there are only two sexes (male and female) is a blow at the very heart of the Democrat effort forcibly to replace facts with fantasies. His stalwart support for Israel, a historic nation, and a free, pluralist society, is also a blow against the enforced fantasy that Gaza, a militarily controlled stretch of land in which Jews are executed and Christians banned, is an actual nation entitled to respect and a right to ownership of land from “the river to the sea”—a phrase that erases Israel entirely.
The very nature of words and phrases is the sly and insidious way that progressives intentionally enacted the slow and progressive destruction of our culture and, tellingly, that of Western culture everywhere.
Mark Twain once said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Let me substitute: “The reports of the death of Western culture are greatly exaggerated.”
I sure hope I’m right!
