Use Words to Suppress the Debate
Many colleges and universities have policies narrowing the realm of permissible speech, reducing students to silence, leaving them unsure of what they can or cannot say.
Word control means thought control; the goal is to put parameters around what people can say so that eventually, they will apply these parameters to what they think. Just dare to express a different point of view in front of others and see what happens.
Brandeis University recently posted a list of offensive words, urging students and faculty “to stop using words and phrases like ‘picnic,’ ‘trigger warning’ and even ‘rule of thumb,’ because of what a campus counseling service calls their links to violence and power to ‘reinforce systems of oppression.’”10 A list of potentially oppressive language was posted on the school’s website by its Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center.
Other flagged words include freshman, victim, survivor, addict, disabled person, policeman, and the list continues. And if there is a barbershop in your area, they shouldn’t say they welcome “walk-in customers” because some people who suffer from disabilities and are unable to walk might feel excluded.
The University of Michigan ITS department compiled a similar dictionary of acceptable terms, and other colleges and universities are following suit, making sure their students and staff know about approved guidelines. And fully on board with the wokeness of the moment, the United Nations has said that the word chairman should no longer be used.11 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has urged that baseball replace the term bullpen with arm barn out of consideration for the bovine species.12
There is a reason for this madness.
The reason is not to elevate the conversation, but to silence it. The goal is not only to deny free speech, but to produce students who graduate with ideological conformity; those who do not comply with this guidance are intimidated. After all, an unapproved word or phrase might trigger someone and cause them to feel inferior or left out.
A Christian professor at a state university told me that when she expresses a Christian opinion in meeting, she is told, “I don’t feel safe around you,” or “What you say does me harm.” This woman asked me, “What do you say if someone says they don’t feel safe around you?” She answered her own question by saying the discussion abruptly ends.
And that is the point.
This retreat into the language of “safe-ism” or “freedom from harm” is intended to close the mouths of those who might disagree with the contemporary zeitgeist—that is, the spirit of the age. Certain ideas should not be spoken. The radical left touts its commitment to tolerance, yet their tolerance extends only to the echo of their own voices. As someone has said, they are very intolerant of the three Cs that shaped America: Christianity, the Constitution, and capitalism.
Freedom of speech has been narrowed to fit into an ever-constricting tunnel.
“My pronouns are not preferred; they are mandatory!” certain activists shout. But the goal of an endless number of pronouns is to keep us demoralized and inarticulate. We fear saying even a straightforward sentence because we might inadvertently use a wrong pronoun or say something that shows we are not fully in line with woke orthodoxy. (Whether we as Christians should use people’s preferred pronouns will be discussed in chapter 8.)
Research by the Cato Institute reported that nearly half of the students surveyed in the 13–22 age group said they had stopped speaking up in the classroom because of the prevailing atmosphere of intolerance and political correctness. More broadly, “self-censorship is on the rise in the United States, with 62% of Americans saying that the political climate today keeps them from expressing their beliefs,” and “77% of conservatives…feel compelled to keep their beliefs to themselves.”13
Remember, the goal is to imprison the mind, to cause people to self-censor so that banned ideas will never be uttered. Eventually, people will not be able to object to any radical leftist ideas no matter how absurd because there will be no vocabulary for doing so; the words they need will have been banned.
To summarize: The radical left is bent on limiting ideas. Barriers are put into place so that everyone will “stay in their lane” and not veer into conservative territory. Independent thought must be banned in favor of groupthink approved by the ideology. Anyone who dares to harbor contrary ideas will be reduced to silence. They tell us they are not denying people freedom of speech, but rather, they are simply trying to promote “harm reduction.” Really?
Shame Those Who Disagree with the Accepted Narrative
The radical left believes it is morally superior to those who disagree with them. Thus, they shut down contrary ideas by accusing their opponents of a psychological and moral deficiency. They describe those who disagree as being emotionally underdeveloped. The debate is no longer about ideas, but about bigotry and hate. And outrage sells.
Are you opposed to abortion? Then you just hate women. If you are opposed to same-sex marriage, you are a bigot. If you believe the US should have strong borders, you are racist. If you oppose radical Islam, you are Islamophobic (a term coined by a Muslim to shame anyone who dares to criticize Islam). And if you are opposed to China’s dictatorial government or inquire whether COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, you are xenophobic. And if you believe that people should show an ID in order to vote, you are destroying democracy!
The narrative is that conservatives are motivated by hate; the left is motivated by noble ideas of justice and fairness. Thus, the left wants to pass hate speech legislation to shut down the expression of conservative ideas on the pretense that they are hateful and cause harm. In a strange twist of irony, the left will sometimes even justify violence as “free speech.”
And, for good measure, if you think people should honor the American flag, you are most probably a white supremacist. If you believe those who live in the US should adhere to the Constitution, or that they should have free speech, it’s because you want to defend your white power. The goal of this slander is to shame people into silence.
Historically, Russia has used the tactic of labelling dissidents as mentally deranged. In effect, the government says, “Challenge our ideas, and we will declare you mentally ill. You have an emotional or mental disorder and should be locked away in an insane asylum.” Tragically, many healthy people were put into asylums or were killed for the simple reason they didn’t obey the state’s guidelines about what constituted acceptable speech.
Theodore Dalrymple is a prison physician, psychiatrist, and English cultural critic whose father was a communist. He writes,
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity…A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to14 (emphasis added).
The bottom line: Political correctness demands all objections to the leftist narrative be reduced to a psychological disorder that requires therapy. Ultimately, the goal is always the same: to define what is acceptable thought and what is not. Approve only words and ideas that have passed the woke guidelines.
I should add what a wise attorney once told me: When the discussion goes from ideas to shaming and personal attacks—which are an attempt at avoidance—you have actually won the debate. Your opponent is resorting to accusations knowing they cannot win in a respectful exchange of ideas.
The radical left says, “You disagree with me? See a therapist.”
10 Bernadette Hogan, Carl Campanile, and Bruce Golding, “Brandeis warns students not to say ‘picnic,’ ‘rule of thumb,’ calling words ‘oppressive,’” New York Post, June 24, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/06/24/brandeis-warns-students-not-to-say-picnic-rule-of-thumb/.
11 United Nations @UN, https://twitter.com/UN/status/1262322788687323136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1262322788687323136%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Freason.com%2F2020%2F05%2F18%2Funited-nations-gender-neutral-language-twitter%2F.
12 “PETA’s Call to the ‘Bullpen’: Rename Outdated Term ‘Arm Barn,’” People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, October 28, 2021, https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/petas-call-to-the-bullpen-rename-outdated-term-arm-barn/.
13 Emily Ekins, “Poll: 62%of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share,” Cato Institute, July 22, 2020, https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share.
14 Jamie Glazov, “Our Culture, What’s Left of It,” FrontPage Magazine, August 31, 2005, https://archive.is/WBcUY.
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