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November 16, 2022

With their control of all major educational and media institutions, progressives have had the ability to control the political language we use for a good half century now. Historically, they have used that control, in Orwell’s words, “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” In recent years, however, they have used language as a cudgel.

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Orwell also told us how we fight back. “We have now sunk to a depth,” he wrote, “at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Comedian Dave Chappelle has been made a pariah in many circles by doing just that, stating the obvious. “Did you know that Planned Parenthood was for abortions?” Chappelle said in a 2017 comedy special. “It’s for people that don’t plan things out at all.” He might have pointed out there is no parenthood involved either.

Chappelle accurately calls this era “the age of spin.” He followed up by subverting another euphemism of the pro-abortion movement, asking the young males in his audience, “Are you pro-choice or anti-consequences? What does it all really mean?” Many in the audience laughed and applauded, not fully realizing that Chappelle has just skewered one of their most sacred cows. In the process, he may have changed at least a few minds. Ridicule works.

Say what you will about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, but she did not bother with euphemism. In her 1925 book Pivot of Civilization, she made an unabashed case not only for birth control, but also for forced sterilization of the “unfit.”

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“Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society,” Sanger wrote, “if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.”  After Hitler gave Sanger’s brand of eugenics a bad name, the organization she founded rebranded itself “Planned Parenthood” and moved fully into the age of euphemism.

Of late, the pro-abortion movement has been organizing under the banner of “reproductive rights.” Chappelle needs to sink his teeth into this one. No one has tried to deny a woman her right to reproduce since 1927 when Sanger’s eugenicist’s friends on the Supreme Court okayed Virginia’s forced sterilization of the unfortunate Carrie Buck.

Arguably, the climate movement has relied more heavily on word control than the abortion movement. Activists could sell “global warming” only as long as the globe warmed. When a temporary warming “paused” some fifteen or so years ago, the whole movement quietly adapted the phrase “climate change” in its stead. As hard as I looked, I could find no acknowledgement that the semantics had changed, let alone that anyone had changed them.

Those who questioned this scam were hammered with the phrase “denier,” a world previously applied to those who questioned the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a real historical event. “Climate change” is a dubious computer projection of the future. No matter. Questioning is evil.

By contrast, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, an African American convert to Islam, has spoken openly about the introduction of the word, “Islamophobe.” He was there at the creation. He traced its origin to a group meeting at the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Northern Virginia in the late 1990s.

According to Muhammad, a critic of radical Islam, the IIIT Islamists consciously decided to mimic homosexual activists who had been successfully using the phrase “homophobia” to defame the opponents of their political agenda. They saw the same potential in the concept of “Islamophobia.” With just this one word, they could tie their struggle to those of other marginalized groups and “beat up their critics.”