I’ve warned for years that the left’s deceitful language games are one of their most potent weapons in the Long March to tear down capitalism and Western civilisation together. We see the same gambit played out again and again: whenever the left are losing the argument, they simply redefine the words and declare themselves to have been right all along.
This need to control language and constantly alter its meaning is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. By controlling the language, the state controls the way that the people think.
But it’s one thing to read about this in a 70-year-old dystopian novel, quite another to watch it happening in real time, right in front of our eyes.
Definitions are changed with breathtaking speed in order to make the perfectly acceptable thing a conservative has said at breakfast, evidence of bigotry by dinner.
The tactic – employed Tuesday with devastating effect against US Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett – is one with which Australians are familiar.
When Julia Gillard denounced then-prime minister Tony Abbott as a “misogynist”, the charge was plainly ludicrous. Far from hating women – which is what “misogyny” actually means – Abbott had surrounded himself with strong, assertive women. His wife, three daughters and sister; his deputy leader, Julie Bishop, his Chief of Staff Peta Credlin… the list went on.
So, the compliant editor of Macquarie Dictionary, supposedly the standard Australian reference, nearly fell over herself in the rush to validate Julia “hyperbowl” Gillard’s latest crime against language.
Dictionary editor Sue Butler told the Sydney Morning Herald the definition would be “changed to reflect what Ms Gillard really meant”.
Now that’s power – the ability to imagine your own version of reality and then edit the dictionary to later wave around as proof that your reality does in fact exist!
Far be it for a lexicographer to actually point out that a shifty politician with a notorious record of malapropisms was wrong – again.
After all, this is all about power. Power to control. It’s what the left lives for.
And it’s going about it, big-time, in the US.
What Macquarie Dictionary did in a week to damn Abbott, Webster’s dictionary did in a day to trap Amy Coney Barrett. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee told her Senate confirmation hearing: “I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would never discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.”
A perfectly reasonable statement. But the left don’t do reason, especially not in America.
Later that same day the Democrats decided the term “sexual preference” – a term Joe Biden used without complaint as recently as May and that media and gay activists have used for more than a decade – was problematic.
Senator Mazie Hirono said it was “an offensive and out-dated term used by anti-LGBTQ activists to suggest sexual orientation is a choice”.
MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin, who is himself gay, tweeted: “Sexual preference, a term used by Justice Barrett, is offensive and outdated. The term implies sexuality is a choice. It is not. News organizations should not repeat Justice Barrett’s words without providing that important context.”
Oddly enough, the gay folk of my own acquaintance were variously amused and bewildered by the news that “sexual preference” was suddenly verbal poofter-bashing. But they don’t control the dictionaries, so what would they know?
Later that same night Webster’s dictionary updated its definition of “preference” in order to be in lockstep with leftist ideology.
“The term preference as used to refer to sexual orientation is widely considered offensive in its implied suggestion that a person can choose who they are sexually or romantically attracted to,” the dictionary now says.
Putting aside the fact that this meant Websters themselves were unaware the term was “widely offensive” prior to Tuesday, it was an awesome demonstration of cultural domination.
If anyone doubted that the left is firmly in control of our cultural institutions, this sordid episode should dispel all doubt. Simply because someone they hated used a previously harmless term, the left instantly reframed it as “offensive”. Just like the OK gesture, a perfectly ordinary phrase has joined the left’s near-endless Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The auto-da-fes will duly follow.
It was unnerving to watch 1984 play out in real time, in real life, right in front of our eyes.
One side of the political divide has now been given free license to adjust language on the fly, however they see fit.
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