AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
The AP Stylebook announced via Twitter last Thursday that “the” labels, as used in phrases like “the poor,” “the college-educated,” and even “the French,” are no longer acceptable, deeming them “too general” and “dehumanizing.” To those of us whose job isn’t inventing new things to be offended by, decreeing that the most common word in the English language is “insensitive” may seem trivial, silly, and completely unnecessary – and it is. But the ridiculousness of the AP’s edict doesn’t discount its real and harmful impact, nor the disturbing cultural trend it represents.
The AP Stylebook is what virtually every American high school and college student turns to for standard writing conventions – and is what their teachers and professors grade them against. A college student who writes “the homeless” instead of “people who are experiencing homelessness” in a public policy essay may now lose points on the assignment for failing to comply with AP style guidelines.
In other words, if students refuse to embrace the left’s wholesale rewrite of the English language, their grades will suffer. That should have every parent and politician concerned about indoctrination in schools on edge.
The AP is also just one of the prominent cultural institutions attempting to categorize everyday speech as “offensive.” In December, we learned that the language police at Stanford had spent 18 months and untold millions of dollars creating a list of “harmful language” that included words like “grandfather,” “prisoner,” “chief,” and even “American.” (Stanford administrators also included “crazy,” “dumb,” and “lame,” in their index of dangerous words, presumably to justify labeling their critics as bigots.)
USA Today “diversity and inclusion” reporter David Oliver similarly added “aloha,” “hola,” and “shalom” to the left’s banned words list earlier this month. “If you’re not Hawaiian and you say [aloha],” Oliver says, “it could come off as mockery.”
Other examples of the left’s attempt to contort and redefine language have gone more mainstream, like the term “Latinx,” which is used by virtually no Latinos and almost exclusively by non-Hispanic liberal elites. Merriam-Webster even changed the definition of the word “female” last year amid accusations from transgender activists that the biologically accurate definition of the word, which had remained unchanged since the dawn of language, was not “inclusive” enough.
If keeping up with all these rules about which words and phrases are and are not acceptable seems disorienting, that’s by design – confusion is a feature, not a bug of the left’s new language regime. The more you are consumed by worrying about whether or not each syllable you utter will offend someone, the more control the leftist language gatekeepers have over your speech, and by extension your thoughts.
George Orwell warned of just such a dystopian nightmare in his increasingly prophetic novel 1984.“The whole aim” of the political redefinition of language “is to narrow the range of thought,” he wrote. The end goal is to “make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
That is the reality we are fast approaching as our own linguistic overlords attempt to impose their very own version of Newspeak on us. Take, for example, the effort by the media and academia to rebrand “illegal immigrants” as “undocumented persons.” By removing the notion of illegality from the label used for someone who unlawfully crosses the border, and then denouncing all other labels as racist,” the left is attempting to force people to speak and think in terms that are favorable to their political agenda – to prevent the “thoughtcrime” of thinking illegal immigration is wrong.
A similar effort is underway with the word “groomer,” which the left has now declared to be “homophobic” to distract from their attempts to sexually indoctrinate children. As Donald Trump decried the failures of the “globalist” agenda during his 2016 campaign, the left also dubiously alleged the term had “anti-Semitic” roots – a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by Jewish scholars.
In each case, the left addressed a threat to liberal orthodoxy by merely asserting that the language that their critics used was “problematic” and “hateful.” The point is not to defend leftist ideology on its merits, but to use cancel culture and control of the media to silence the opposition altogether.
The left’s war on language, then, is part in parcel with their assault on the First Amendment more broadly. While not explicitly restricting the right to free speech, they threaten to make a social pariah of anyone who does not self-censor.
If this dangerous trend is left unchecked, “freedom,” “sanity,” and “common sense” may soon become taboo as well – if they aren’t already.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @Shane_Harris_.
