The Woke's War on Words

Changing language, inserting ideas, steering culture.

When I wrote the first installment of The War on Words a couple years ago, the main inspiration was the “R-word” which has become almost as insidious as the “N-word”. If you want to read it, you can (here), but I don't want to talk about either of those words here.

The premise of the first war I wrote about was that we tend to change up words when people take them and use them in an irresponsible fashion, over and over again - basically just being assholes with them. Eventually the word becomes so distasteful that we shorten it to its one letter version and cast it into the outer realm of darkness where words never to be used in public again are destined to go.

Of course, it doesn't take long for a new word to rise up and take its place and then we need to start the process all over again. In this case it's basically the assholes among us who decide which words we toss aside.

Well times, as they say, are a-changin' and evidently so is the war on words.

These days, the war on words focuses mainly and purposefully on changing the established meaning of words.

It seems there are two reasons for this. One reason is simply so the person using this word with the new definition can add significantly more drama to what they're saying. This is usually because the person is just too damn lazy to bother finding a more suitable word.

The other reason that exists for changing the meaning of words with long-established meanings is apparently so one could attempt to establish negative associations where none previously existed in order to push an agenda. Put simply, if you can change the meaning of a really nasty word just enough to make it apply in a brand new way, you now have a way to associate a whole new group of people with that word - even if it never applied before. Basically, it's all about manipulation and control.

For example, the word “Racism” has been thrown around quite a lot lately and as a result has become a favoured insult by many on social media. You'll notice that the most common words that people use as insults are also the words that require the least amount of thought. This is what makes them so easily accessible to so many people.

Racism is hardly a new phenomenon, in fact I'm sure it's as old as races themselves. Because it's been around for so long, pretty much every person who's been alive for more than 10 years has a very good idea what this word means. Well, they used to anyway.

Even though most everyone can agree that “racism” has to do with treating someone differently based on their race, that definition is decidedly unhelpful when you're trying to paint someone as a literal Hitler because they disagreed with you over something as politically expedient as climate change, for example. In order to make it apply, you need to alter that definition ever so slightly. Now, in order to legitimately call that person a racist, you need to establish that because that person thinks climate change is no big deal, what they really believe is that most poor people (who will undoubtedly bear the brunt of climate change and who are by extension, largely non-white) are unworthy of consideration. In fact, according to some activists, “Climate Change Denialists” actually welcome the coming apocalypse because it “gets rid of all those ‘undesirable’ non-white people.”

Obviously racist. I mean, if someone said it on the internet, you know it’s a fact. So now that we've established that everyone who's not all up in arms about the coming climate catastrophe is a seething racist, you know what you are if you don't get with the program - so, bring on the carbon tax.

A great example of how the meaning of the word “racism” was shifted is in the coverage of the Freedom Convoy in February. Based on the sudden appearance (and then just as sudden disappearance) of a single Confederate flag, the media instantly asserted that the protest was in fact, a racist gathering. This, despite the fact that it was by far the most culturally diverse protest in our history.

And so I would just like to take this opportunity to thank our media and its supporters for letting us know what a violent, racist protest really looks like.

Thanks to their excellent coverage of this event and the comments of our Prime Minister, we now understand that these people are few in number and not even worthy of recognition.

Now we can finally pick out those racist, misogynist, homophobes that permeate our society. Now those Nazis hiding in plain sight will be easily recognizable.

And now that we know what these people really look like, one has to wonder what all the fuss was about during World War two…

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya,

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

This obsession with racism on the left is what spawned the whole “Antiracism” movement, which is really just a convenient cover for real racism. You can check out my thoughts about this in The New Racists if you're so inclined.

Another word which has evolved over the last few years is the word, “aggression”.

Here's Google’s definition:

ready or likely to attack or confront; characterized by or resulting from aggression.

Ok, so that sounds about right. There are surely many instances where this word would be appropriate today. Like if you're quietly sipping your scotch at the bar and some greasy, dishevelled drunk guy comes and breaks his beer bottle beside you and points the remaining pointy end in your direction. Definitely aggressive.

Here's how it was recently used by Ottawa city councilor Mathieu Fleury in describing the Freedom Convoy:

There were all these microaggressions that created an unsafe environment for residents.

Sadly we may never know what he actually meant by that, since when pressed for a little more detail, he was unable to define “microaggressions”…

Okay, so maybe it wasn't actual aggression, but it sure sounds ominous, even with the “micro” prefix attached.

There's always been an inclination amongst humans ever since the invention of language towards over-the-top speech in order to really drive home a point. This goes back to reason number one above, and it’s the reason people use the word “awesome” when describing a bowl of chocolate ice cream, or something that's at best, super cool or pretty neat, but decidedly not awe-inspiring. When people talk about “microaggressions”, what they're really saying is, “That meany doesn't like me very much and he didn't do anything to me but I still want you to put him on time-out anyway!” Oh, how I miss those wonderful preschool years where victim mentality was so easy to cultivate…

Since we're talking about aggression here, let's pull back a bit and just look at violence in general. And by “violence” of course I don't mean actual violence, that would be cruel. I'm referring to what passes for violence today. You know, like deadnaming and misgendering someone who identifies as something you can't possibly understand. Or, as Black Lives Matter activists so eloquently stated during the George Floyd protests: Silence is Violence (evidently because they sort of rhyme - or something). And apparently, according to these same individuals, words are also violence, so by these metrics it's pretty hard to disagree (or not disagree) with anything these people say without being accused of some sort of violence.

“Hate crime” legislation is another one of these strange permutations. Of course hate is a bad thing, and crime is a bad thing too. The fact is, every act deemed a hate crime in this country since the legislation came about was already a crime before this legislation. Like, it was wrong to kill someone before but now if you hate them while you're killing them, it's more wrong because we have judged that hate is somehow involved. But who decides what constitutes “hate”? Sometimes it's just plain, old-fashioned assholery. And meth.

As I stated at the beginning of this piece, there is a deliberate method to this madness. Changing the meanings and implications of commonly understood words and then repeatedly using them in a specific context helps create negative associations with people and ideas we don't like - and with people and ideas we don't want others to like.

So essentially what's happening here is we're being set-up by people subscribing to a far-left radical ideology that says, in effect, “You must agree with everything I say immediately or you will be shouted into submission and publicly slandered until you do.”

This is really the ultimate culmination of entitlement and privilege, and because this tendency and ideology is so prominent in our education system, our legacy media, and certain political circles, it's also probably the biggest threat to free speech going right now.

Call me simple, or naïve, or whatever, but I still think the answer is simply to refuse to bow to this. For every hundred people whining about microaggressions, (non)violence, and racism that isn't actually racism, there are a hundred more who are calling bullshit (usually in a rather coarse and vulgar fashion). And then there are literally thousands more who want to call bullshit, but don't because they are afraid they'll be identified with the aforementioned vulgar people. I believe most of these people are just waiting for someone else to get up and do it in a calm, rational manner and without all the drama.

Decide to be that person and you may be surprised at how much support you end up receiving. Then maybe we can stop the madness and make sure our kids grow up knowing how to recognize real problems. And eventually, maybe they’ll even solve some of them, but the longer we allow ourselves to be distracted from the real problems, the longer those problems will persist.

---

More form BlogOfKen: