Think More, Speak More

I just want to take a moment ahead of today’s post to honor veterans on this Veterans Day! In my family we honor my grandfather, who fought in WWI; my father, who fought in WWII; and our son, who was twice deployed to Korea just a few years ago.

The wall in the building where our son was
inducted into the US Army, featuring the seal of 
each branch of the military, February 2012

_____________________

Now, on to today’s topic: political correctness. I’ve been reading Michael Knowles’ book Speechless, and I’ve been marking more passages than I could ever quote. One thing that caught my eye was the grammatical part of political correctness. Knowles says,

cover image found on Amazon

Political correctness relies on euphemism, soft words used to sugarcoat harsh realities. We all use euphemisms some of the time as a matter of good manners. We refer to old women as “women of a certain age.” We mourn those who have “passed away” rather than those who have died. In prior ages, a lady went to “powder her nose,” and she still uses the “bathroom” or the “restroom” rather than the toilet. We use euphemisms—literally, “well-speaking” or auspicious words—to be polite.

I all those cases, the polite euphemism softens the reality it describes, but it doesn’t contradict that reality. The old woman is indeed a woman of a certain age. The poetical “passing away” describes the spiritual fact of death. Women may indeed powder their noses after they’ve done whatever else they do in rooms that often include a bath and in which anyone might rest. Polite euphemisms soften the truth, but they do not lie.

So, that’s our starting place—polite words to soften harsh realities but that do not lie: that’s euphemism.

Then we get to something else altogether: the manipulation of language that is political correctness. Knowles describes it this way:

Leftists tend to manipulate language by using vague terms and jargon not just to soften but to conceal and even contradict the realities to which they refer. Killing babies in the womb becomes “women’s healthcare” and “reproductive rights,” even though abortion results in precisely the opposite of health and reproduction. After a Muslim terror attack on a church in Sri Lanka, Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for “Easter worshippers,” a bizarre moniker designed to hide the victims’ Christian identity. In fact, the sole instance in which Hillary used clear language in 2016—when she referred to Americans who refused to support her as “deplorable” and “irredeemable”—proved to be the most disastrous moment of her campaign. Clinton had made a critical error for a radical politician: she told people what she really thought.

Political correctness, then, is not politeness: it is using inaccurate words intended to conceal. It’s lying.

Then Knowles takes a look at the structure of the phrase itself. You take the noun correctness, and you put a modifier in front of it, and it changes it entirely. He credits the late presidential speechwriter and conservative columnist William Safire with using the description “adverbially premodified adjectival lexical unit,” the description itself a play on PC jargon. It’s easy to mock: for example, “short” becomes “vertically challenged.” PC itself, you might want to call “truth challenged.” Knowles describes further:

In this formula, the adjective or adverb usually serves to negate the noun or adjective it modifies. The term “politically correct” itself follows this politically correct formula by using an adverb to negate the adjective it precedes. That is, “correct” means true. But “politically correct” means not true. “Justice” means getting what one deserves without favor. The politically correct “social justice” is a form of injustice because it means getting what one does not deserve because one is favored. “Marriage” in every culture throughout history has meant the union of husbands and wives. “Same-sex marriage,” however favorably one views the concept, is not marriage.

We could list a number of other PC terms that follow this structure:

·       Transgender woman = not a real woman.

·       Justice-involved youth = a juvenile involved in something that is not justice, but criminality.

·       Overseas contingency operation = Obama-speak for something other than an operation, something like fighting a war.

How about this one:

·       Compassionate conservative.

It means something other than conservative—leftist/liberal lite. But it also implies that conservatism—the God-given rights preserved in our Constitution—is not compassionate. If it were the other side being so maligned, they’d take offense.

There are also PC terms that obscure meaning even without this particular structure:

·       Handicapable = not capable in the normal sense.

·       Woke = not awake and aware of reality.

·       Diversity = absolute lock-step agreement in thought, preferably with non-white or non-male genetics.

·       Fetus (or clump of cells) = baby, but taking away the human and live meanings so the mother who wants to rid herself of it will not feel the tinge of guilt that baby killing causes.

You can’t win—or even debate—when you agree to the enemy’s definitions of terms. Not even if you’re trying to be agreeable to find common ground. They have a tendency to change the lexicon as soon as people agree to it. In my lifetime, we have been told to call blacks

·         Negroes

·         Colored persons

·         Afro-Americans

·         Blacks

·         African-Americans

·         Blacks (again)

·         Persons of Color

After trying to keep up, out of politeness, for some time, I got to a point where I now just use the simplest term, the one most likely to convey meaning, not offense: black. Usually I do not capitalize, just as I would not capitalize white in the description of someone’s skin. Neither white nor black is very accurate, because most blacks are some level of brown; most whites are some level of peach or tan. Many many people of most ethnic and racial backgrounds are in the middle (as I am). Negro is from the Latin, meaning “black.” I understand why the unutterable N-word is not to be used, since it pretty much always meant a derogatory version of Negro. But I don’t really understand why the actual term became no longer usable.

Biden, speaking November 11, 2021
screenshot from video tweet within this article

Incidentally, while I was writing today, Biden managed to talk about “Negroes,” as though he’d never stopped using the term, even though Obama had outlawed its use in government. But it is mainly conservatives calling him out—for the inconsistency and duplicity of the Biden supporters. He was referring to a baseball player, from the times there was a Negro league (as it was called at the time). He refers to that awkwardly, but I don’t think he actually forgot what to call blacks today. Still, his gaffe is amusing, as is the media’s covering for him.

I don’t understand why Afro-American fell out of favor, but African-American shortly thereafter (a decade or two) fell into favor, when they are nearly identical. Neither is very useful to describe skin color, because not all Africans are black (the very blonde Charlize Theron comes to mind, as well as a number of Middle-eastern-looking people along the Mediterranean in northern Africa). And certainly not all blacks are American. Are you supposed to learn their lineage before you can refer to their skin color? What do you call blacks in Britain? What about those from Jamaica, not Africa? Are they Jamaican-Americans when you refer to where they immigrated from, but African-Americans when you refer to their skin color? What if they’re still Jamaican nationals who happen to be residing here? African-Jamaicans-in-America?

I have a friend from Honduras. She is clearly black looking, as are all the members of her family. Spanish is the native language. She has been here for about 20 years, and her English is good, but she still has an accent that is challenging for our communication (as my Spanish probably is for her). I asked her, quite sincerely just curious, about the history where she is from, because it was something I did not know. She says everyone from her homeland looks like them, but she is unaware of any origin story of people coming from Africa. I imagine if you go back far enough, you might find a connection from Africa. But it’s so far back, these Honduran people aren’t even aware of it. So, under what circumstance would it make sense to call her and her family African-American, when they clearly are not?

I don’t understand why “colored person” became taboo, but “person of color” is considered polite. The only explanation is that it’s a trap: if you try to follow their speech code, they will change it—because the goal is to be able to shame you for being racist, and this is how they come up with evidence against you.

Knowles points out that “this constant flux is a feature, not a bug, of political correctness.”

There’s a quote Knowles uses to begin Chapter 1 of his book, from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

illustration by John Tenniel, circa late 1800s
found here

The one who controls the meaning of words has power over the one who is not controlling the meaning. That describes the mostly lost culture war. As Knowles says in reference to the debate over the definition of marriage,

The cultural revolutionaries found it far easier to redefine the terms according to the conclusions they hoped to reach. When conservatives acquiesced to the verbal trickery, the radicals won the debate before it had even begun.

And I like this line: “What begins with semantic quibbles ends with refashioning the entire political order.” One thing I have to say for Knowles, whose first published book was wordless: he has quite a way with words.

He points out that conservatives tend to agree, along with John Stuart Mill and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and others: The answer to bad speech is more speech. But those trying to take over the culture believe: The answer to bad speech is censorship.

In such a discussion, one could hardly leave out Orwell’s 1984. Knowles says this:

Big Brother’s government relies on the control of language to maintain power. “Newspeak,” the novel’s most direct prophesy of political correctness, controls its subjects’ minds by changing and limiting their lexicon. Through this curtailing of language, “thoughtcrime”—that is, dissent from party orthodoxy—becomes impossible.

When you control the words, you control the thoughts. Newspeak was designed to take away the ability to refer to certain ideas; it removed the words necessary to conceptualize them. Imagine if you were to take away a common idea, for instance, friendliness. For a while you could use multiple other words, like “goodwill among people who are well acquainted.” But how often would you be willing to refer to someone by saying, “He seems like a person of goodwill among people who are well acquainted, even though I am not well acquainted with him yet”? Before long, you’d simply let the concept go.

In real time we can see this kind of destruction of the words marriage and family. The PC dictators accuse us of disrespect if we do not acquiesce to redefine these words to mean something they are not. For marriage, that would be something that does not involve the sexual procreative act between people who are permanently committed to only each other, and who plan to remain together for the rest of their lives. It has—only in this century, which is only two decades old—come to mean “any two adult persons currently in a sexual relationship.” That’s a very different concept, leaving out creating offspring, exclusivity, and permanence. How can you wonder that the purpose was to destroy to institution of marriage by changing what is thought about it?

And family? We have all the social science data that shows children are most likely to have the best outcomes when they are raised by their own married mother and father. But now we are told it’s impolite—politically incorrect—to assume that two men with a random child, or two women who certainly no more than one of whom is genetically related to a child are “family.” Or single parents who never marry a string of live-in men. Or whatever other arrangement you might think of. Family changes from "parents raising their children" to "any combination of adults with any children or no children." When you change what it means, you erase the idea of its original purpose. If you look at China, where they long enforced a one-child policy, they have raised a generation or two who have no concept of sister, brother, aunt, uncle, or cousin. One hopeful sign is the culture ware is that, in Virginia, where the now-former governor accidentally said what he thought out loud, that parents shouldn't have the right to decide what their children are taught in schools, he got booted out of office.

I haven’t reached the end of the book yet. I don’t know whether Knowles provides us a solution. I suspect not. He ends his preface with,

Political correctness has left us speechless, but the right to speak means nothing to those who have nothing to say.

I suspect his book is a call to speak, to have courage, to keep a grasp on our words and their meanings, the way I keep an old dictionary to remind me of what words meant some 40 years ago. And we should keep using the words that mean what we want to convey. We should keep thinking the concepts of those words. The more words are forbidden for our use, the more we should explore the true meanings that are being snuffed out before our eyes.

We need to think more—and we need to speak more of what we think.

Gravity Problems

I recently read the book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. The book says that everything that was designed was a problem that was solved. It’s a different way of looking at problems—not just obstacles that prevent you from doing what you want, but opportunities to design solutions. The book is about doing that for your life. Worth reading.

But there’s a section near the beginning that talks about some problems that are not worth solving:

Newton and the apple
image from here

These are all gravity problems—meaning they are not real problems. Why? Because in life design, if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. Let’s repeat that. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but, like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.

Here’s a little tidbit that is going to save you a lot of time—months, years, decades even. It has to do with reality. People fight reality. They fight it tooth and nail, with everything they’ve got. And anytime you are arguing or fighting with reality, reality will win. You can’t outsmart it. You can’t trick it. You can’t bend it to your will. Not now. Not ever (p. 9).

How do you know when we’re looking at a gravity problem? Or, even more specifically, how do you know when it’s a tilting at windmills sort of worthless effort, even though technically it isn’t totally unactionable. Here’s how they say it:

We recognize that there are two variations of gravity problems—totally inactionable ones (such as gravity itself) and functionally unactionable ones (such as the average income of a full-time poet) (p. 10).

About that second one, the authors say,

To change the median income of poets, you’d somehow have to alter the market for poetry and get people to buy more poetry or pay more for it. Well, you could try for that. You could write letters to the editor in praise of poetry. You could knock on doors to get people out to the poetry night at your local coffeehouse. This one is a long shot. Even though you can work on this “problem” in a way that wasn’t possible with gravity, we’d recommend that you accept it as an inactionable situation. If you do that, then your attention is freed to start designing other solutions to other problems (p. 11).

It’s about accepting reality. Some things aren’t problems with the world that need fixing; they’re just “a situation, a circumstances, a fact of life.”

Mr. Spherical Model used to say, “When I make a world, I’ll make the day 25 hours long but tell people there are only 24, so there will always be enough leeway to get everything done.” OK. We laughed. But that’s a gravity problem. You don’t get more time than there is; all you can do is figure out how to better use the time you’ve got.

I’ve been looking at some reality—and the fights against it—since reading about gravity problems. It explains what’s happening. It doesn’t fully explain why. But maybe if we see these things as gravity fights, we can avoid being brought into someone else’s waste of effort.

Here’s an example. Your sex is something you’re born with. It is expressed in the DNA in every cell of your body. It is expressed in your body’s shape, appearance, and function. And in many ways it is expressed in preferences and behaviors. While preferences and behaviors are somewhat subjective and individual, that does not negate all the rest of the evidence. We’re a binary species, like so many other complex species: male or female.

People who don’t want to be what they are have a gravity problem. They and their sympathizers are putting in a great deal of energy and time, and sometimes sacrificing actual body parts, to insist that reality is what they say it is. They are trying to change the world rather than change their own minds.

If they were to convince the whole world, they still would not change the reality they are fighting. It’s a gravity problem.

They harm themselves. They harm civilization. We would all be better off if the people fighting this gravity problem would just stop it.

Here’s another one. The way reproduction works in humans is that when a male and female engage in sexual intercourse, with the right timing, an egg is fertilized, and a new human begins to grow within the female.

It doesn’t matter whether you think that’s fair. It doesn’t matter whether you think engaging in sex shouldn’t lead to pregnancy—or, as former president Obama said, “be punished with a baby”—it is the way the species propagates. We're designed that way.

Within marriage, pregnancy is something to be celebrated. What a miracle! A new life, a new person, is joining the family! That’s such a profound good that for humans (as it is for most species) its goodness should be self-evident. But it’s also profoundly important, since human lives are involved, so it isn’t something to mess around with if you’re not in a position to care for that new person. So, the simple solution to avoid starting that new life when you’re not married and prepared is to not have sexual intercourse until you’re married.

Birth control pills are an attempt to overrule reality. And I’m not going to argue that they’re always wrong. There are plenty of times when married couples aren’t ready to bring another person into the family. There might be temporary financial or health concerns. It’s a private decision. Even so, it’s a private decision that wasn’t available to humans until historical yesterday. And it isn’t fail proof. But when the unplanned pregnancy happens within a marriage, the couple readjusts and gets ready, even if they’re going to face some challenges.

When unplanned pregnancies happen to unmarried people, that’s the result of behaving as if married. It’s preventable. And the way people have prevented it for thousands of years is to wait until marriage to have sex.

A horrendous, savage response to the reality that sex leads to pregnancy is abortion. It doesn’t solve a “problem”; it ends a life. The only grounds on which we can even have a conversation about this is under the rare circumstances in which the woman did not consent (rape) and danger to the life of the mother (which usually endangers the life of the baby as well).

Abortion to nullify the effects of natural human reproduction is an example of fighting a gravity problem. People are harmed in the process. Every time. The baby. The mother. The father. The doctor. The nurses. Civilization.

We would all be better off if the people fighting this gravity problem would just stop it.

Gravity problems aren’t just a problem of youthful lack of wisdom. But things are made worse when young people, planning out their futures, are encouraged to go out and “change the world,” which all too often means throwing their lives at a gravity problem.

If it were only affecting them, we’d all shrug our shoulders and move on. But practically every issue considered “politically correct” is an attempt to impose a “solution” on a gravity problem. And suggesting someone isn’t politically correct isn’t enough, so then the “solution” gets imposed with, not just social pressure, but threats to life and livelihood.

I'm not sure that big government control types and big social experimenters are the only ones imposing world control instead of self-control. But it’s worth noting, since so many of their issues go against truth and reality. 

I don’t know whether they’re aware of it or not. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, let’s keep sharing truth and reality with them. And encourage them to stop breaking themselves—and us with them—against the law of gravity.

Bernoulli Effect
image from here

Imagine the energy being put into fighting gravity problems instead being put into solving real problems. That’s what real world changers do. Like the Wright Brothers and others who invented and improved flight. They didn’t stop gravity, or change it. They found another law—the Bernoulli effect—that they could use to their benefit, and ours.

Word Control

Words are my tools. And my playthings. A big part of my life. I appreciate a good word, a good phrase, a good sentence. I try to write powerful words, but mostly fall short. Still, sometimes I read some older pieces and think, that was well written. Good for me—and the inspiration that was with me at that moment of writing.

So, because of my interest in words, I’m interested in freedom of speech, and I pay attention when words and ideas are oppressed or suppressed.

image from here

A week or so ago a friend posted on Facebook a piece called, “Why I’m Teaching My Kids to be ‘Politically Correct.’” My Facebook friend is a young mom, non-religious and not very political (but probably leaning liberal and/or libertarian). I know her to be a good person, trying to live a decent life and contributing well to her family and society. Knowing that, I read this piece trying to see what appealed to my friend, to learn from that.

There’s this paragraph near the beginning, that I can almost agree with:

As a writer, I think constantly about how words are being used, and from where I’m sitting, political correctness has gotten conflated in recent years with common decency, kindness, and consideration. On one hand, anyone who dares to acknowledge people who say they’ve been hurt, or who suggests that demonizing an entire group of people is a bad idea, is automatically derided for being “politically correct.” And on the other hand, people will say any awful thing that floats into their mind, claiming that they are “just being honest,” and then when challenged, they will cry about political correctness. (For the record, speaking your mind isn’t a virtue if what’s on your mind is bigoted, obnoxious, or insulting. It’s just rude.)

The problem is, indeed, that political correctness has been conflated with “common decency, kindness, and consideration.” That’s what has given political correctness power—because we decent, kind, considerate people don’t want to be misunderstood or mislabeled as bigoted and hateful. But in reality political correctness isn’t about politeness or consideration for others; it has the purpose of shutting down voices that don’t align with the viewpoint being enforced.

The author of the piece decides to keep the incorrectly conflated definition of political correctness, and insists she will teach her children to be politically correct—because words do have power to hurt, and we should at least make an effort not to offend or be rude. Her complaint is that so many people are sick and tired of political correctness being shoved down their throats that they eschew any controls, even self-control, over what they say:

The war on political correctness has become a scapegoat for people to regress to a less open and tolerant era, as evidenced by the amount of blatant racism, sexism, prejudice, and hatred being spewed in the name of not being PC. The idea that marginalized or historically oppressed groups should be given any kind of consideration is met with eye-rolling and open disdain. In the past year, I’ve been stunned to witness educated adults behaving like petulant children, gleefully claiming they’re taking down “the establishment” by throwing out the baby of human decency with the “politically correct” bathwater.

I agree with her that spewing hate in a misguided rebellion against political correctness is pretty ugly. And she’s probably right that there’s a rebellion going on in a PC reaction. That probably explains much of Donald Trump’s popularity. He does speak things that are not PC, and people who have had enough of that oppression cheer.

However, people are mistaken if they think he does it for the sake of free speech. If you watch how he reacts to people who speak out against him, or disagree with him, you’ll see the very tactics the PC police use: humiliation, coercion, and economic and social pressure. He’s not anti-PC; he’s pro-Trump’s version of what is allowed to be said. He’s into manipulating people by controlling their words as much as anyone else shutting us down for the sin of digressing from PC script.

For someone like me, careful about words, and naturally gentle and kind, yet "painfully honest" (yes, I've been called that), any version of political correctness is a danger; it mislabels me without exploring who I am in my heart.

I’ve lived long enough to watch PC vocabulary change. In my childhood, the N-word was never used; that would have been considered offensive well before I was born. But at that time, in the place where I lived, which had never allowed slavery and never had Jim Crow laws, the word for the race of people descended from various tribes in Africa and identifiable by darker skin and other characteristics was Negro, which comes from the Latin for black. It was just a term, not intended to be derogatory.

Then the term colored became more common (as used by the NAACP). Then we were told that was derogatory and we should use the term Afro-American. Then we were told the preferred term was black. Every time we accommodated, the term was changed and we were accused of being offensive.

Not that long ago we were told that black was derogatory and we should use the term African-American.

As a word person, that term doesn’t make sense; it applies not to race but to place of origin. A Saturday Night Live skit once played on this, because the very blond Charlize Theron is from South Africa, so she is literally African-American. There are major portions of Africa today populated by Arab-type peoples, or Europeans who moved to Africa many centuries ago. Meanwhile, there are people of the black race all over the world who are not American, so you have to know enough about country of origin to refer to their race in any way, even when country-of-origin isn’t salient information. Imagine the awkwardness of talking about the racial aspects of Tay-Saks disease, which affects African-Americans of a certain skin color, and African-French of a certain skin color, and African-Britons of a certain skin color, and Egyptians of a non-Arab lineage, and Angolans of a certain skin color….

It appears to me that there are people seeking to feel offended, and no matter how many times we go along with their requests for yet another politically correct name change, they will come up with something new so they can claim we are offending them.

So, for my personal language style guide, I have settled on black—without meaning any offense. And that seems to be returning as the preferred term, if you can trust such groups as Black Lives Matter or the New Black Panthers.

Would it be nice if we didn’t have to refer to race at all? Yes. But since members of tribes insist on asserting their tribal pride and power, it comes up. And any idea can only be expressed if there are words to use.

Meanwhile, PC continues to be a bludgeon used against people with views differing from a particular “progressive” ideology.

I recently read a piece called “Thought Reform in America,” by Thomas Lifson, comparing America’s political correctness with oppressive regimes of the past:

Political correctness has attained a level of institutional power today in the United States that it can justifiably be compared with the totalitarian brainwashing efforts seen in Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (also known as "fundamental transformation"). The salient social mechanisms shared by the two efforts at thought reform are public shame and self-criticism.

He offers this anecdote:

Decades ago, when China first opened up, I met a prominent Chinese scientist finally able to travel to the USA, who had been denounced, tortured, and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for his crimes of having a PhD from an American university and being dedicated to scientific truth instead of political doctrine.  I will never forget the broken man talking about he had been made to confess his crimes in front of a howling mob.

I thought about this sort of pressure when Governor Mike Pence was chosen as the running mate on the Republican presidential ticket. He’s generally a decent person, and has served his state relatively well. But remember when Indiana came under attack for passing a RFRA law to protect religious freedom in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overreaching same-sex marriage ruling. The PC police—in the form of media and loud voices combined with threats, claimed the state should be shamed and shunned and boycotted.

This episode included a newsperson seeking out a Christian family-owned pizza shop and asking them the hypothetical question of whether they were willing to cater a same-sex wedding. The honest owners—who pretty much never catered weddings anyway, as a pizza shop—answered no, and were shut down by the PC enforcers.

In that atmosphere, revealing why religious people needed the protective law, Governor Pence caved to the pressure, and basically apologized for the state’s mistake.

Sometimes it helps to reveal absurdity using absurdity. Blogger Matt Walsh did that this week, talking about the silly, over-the-top PC position that gender doesn’t exist. The satirical piece is entitled “Dear Transphobic Ultrasound Technician, How Dare You Assign A Gender To Our Baby!” As he explains to the politically incorrect technician:

You’re obviously a simpleton, so let me break this down a little further. You cannot tell anything about a person based on their physical and biological makeup. Anatomy doesn’t matter. DNA doesn’t matter. Bone structure doesn’t matter. The reproductive system doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. You can’t tell what a person is just based on what that person is. You can’t even tell if it’s a person just because it’s a person. You can’t tell anything about anyone based on anything.

If we are to win out against the oppression of our ideas, we need to do it clearly, and boldly. Without rancor. Being kind and polite in general, so that the claim that we are uncivilized for disagreeing makes no sense.

It is not particularly brave for me to express these things, here, in safe obscurity, where so far I face little effort to shut me down. But at least I speak. So, with no intention of hurting the feelings of various groups, here are a few things that I believe are true but could be subject to the suppression called political correctness:

·         The most common occurrence of racism in America today is black racism against whites and other non-blacks.

·         The systemic reason for blacks suffering poverty, crime, and other social negatives is the breakdown of the family—with 70%+ children born out of wedlock, and fathers missing from homes.

·         The Democrat party is and has always been about limiting the rights and opportunities of blacks—but they’re willing to oppress others as well.

·         Almost all the terrorists in today’s world are radical Islamists. Islam has a problem: either they must find a way to oust radicals from their religion so we can all identify them and thwart them—or they must leave that religion as unrecoverable, so that we can identify and thwart the terrorists. The very idea of imposing radical Islam on the world is incompatible with civilization and will bring only tyranny, poverty, and savagery. We need a way to identify and stop anyone trying to impose tyranny on us.

·         Marriage is between a man and a woman, permanently covenanting to form a family in which children can be raised by their father and mother. No other sexual relationship has the benefits to society that marriage does. Pretending other relationships are equivalent to marriage harms marriage and degrades the family, leading to the decay of civilization into savagery.

·         Sex outside of marriage is always wrong—and harmful both to the individuals and to civilization.

·         Abortion is a choice against life. It is generally a selfish choice made to get rid of the natural consequences of the choice to have sex outside of a married partnership.

·         Socialism is a form of tyranny; it takes by force from people who create wealth and redistribute their property to those who have not created wealth. It discourages work and innovation and leads to poverty. Best outcomes happen when a free market is combined with voluntary charitable giving.

·         The American Constitution is a model for limited government to protect our rights, and if followed by a self-governing people, it leads to almost unimaginable freedom, prosperity, and civilization. It will lead to these positive outcomes wherever in the world its concepts are adhered to.

The way to freedom, prosperity,and civilization are known. We need the freedom to speak up and teach those ways.

Politically Correct or Not

Political—related to polarized, competing worldviews, particularly competing movements for power over the people

Correct—in alignment with prescribed answers, views, statements, opinions

So, politically correct means aligned with a particular polarity that wants to control others and maintain power. It has nothing to do with being tolerant and polite.

A few weeks ago I read a piece that detailed the definition, and outlined its use as propaganda: “PC Is about Control, Not Etiquette,” by Jeff Diest, in an issue of The Austrian, for The Mises Institute. I’d be satisfied just to concur with him. But for this post I’ll quote liberally from that piece, and then do some application related to current events.

If PC truly was about kindness and respect, it wouldn’t need to be imposed on us. After all, we already have a mechanism for the social cohesion PC is said to represent: it’s called manners. And we already have specific individuals charged with insuring that good manners are instilled and upheld: they’re called parents.

Diest offers a definition of political correctness, similar to mine, and asserts that it is best understood as propaganda:

Political correctness is the conscious, designed manipulation of language intended to change the way people speak, write, think, feel, and act, in furtherance of an agenda.

PC is best understood as propaganda, which is how I suggest we approach it. But unlike propaganda, which historically has been used by governments to win favor for a particular campaign or effort, PC is all-encompassing. It seeks nothing less than to mold us into modern versions of Marx’s un-alienated society man, freed of all his bourgeois pretensions and humdrum social conventions.

While we’re quoting, Diest quotes Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

[T]he masters … stipulate that aggression, invasion, murder and war are actually self-defense, whereas self-defense is aggression, invasion, murder and war. Freedom is coercion, and coercion is freedom. … Taxes are voluntary payments, and voluntarily paid prices are exploitative taxes. In a PC world, metaphysics is diverted and rerouted. Truth becomes malleable, to serve a bigger purpose determined by our superiors.

This ought to bring to mind the scripture, Isaiah 5:20:

20 ¶Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Political correctness is a lie imposed on people. It is the antithesis of free speech—and simultaneously the antithesis of social caring. It isn’t about being tolerant and kind; it is about bulling to force submission.

The bully of political correctness is always what the world terms liberal. Let’s reframe that using Spherical Model terms, which are more accurate, since “liberal” in this context has nothing to do with freedom or open-mindedness. Political correctness is the propaganda that enforces southern hemisphere tyranny. People who love freedom, prosperity, and civilization are the target of PC propaganda.

I don’t want to use a lot of space delineating the examples. So, just a few of the truths that are labeled politically incorrect:

·         Marriage is between one man and one woman.

·         Judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

·         All lives matter.

·         Abortion kills an innocent human being.

·         Men and women are different

·         A person’s gender is biological and unchangeable.

·         A person’s sexual orientation may be determined by many factors, but can change, and doesn’t determine behavior.

·         Religious people live their religion every day, not just at church on Sunday.

·         People have the right to defend themselves, their families, and their property.

·         People should feel secure in their person and papers, even when they have nothing to hide.

·         People who commit crimes should be held accountable—even if they had a bad childhood or other social disadvantages.

·         The person who earns money should be the one to decide how to spend it—even if that person makes more than someone else.

·         Disagreeing with someone doesn’t mean we hate them or consider them our enemies.

·         “Climate change” science isn’t settled.

·         Immigrants should enter our country legally and intend to become Americans, respecting our culture and our Constitution.

·         Enforcing our borders does not mean hating immigrants.

People who believe these basic obvious truths—who happen to be conservatives, almost exclusively—have been shut out of the debate, bullied, silenced with “political correctness” for so long, there’s a growing frustration and anger. They (we) are being bullied.

It is into that steaming, silent, seemingly powerless fuming that Donald Trump steps. It appears that someone is standing up to the bully. And people cheer for that. Sometimes to the point that they fail to realize that he isn’t their champion.

He is his own propaganda machine. He is a new bully. He sets a different list of what can and cannot be said—and he enforces it with his considerable power, influence, and money, and in a way that goads the media into magnifying for him.

Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly
photo: John Minchillo--AP

As I write, I’m watching the Trump-free GOP debate, which Trump is boycotting because he’s been having a feud with Megyn Kelly, since her “politically incorrect—to him” questioning in the first Fox debate in August.

To review, this is the exchange, from the transcript:

KELLY: Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women. You’ve called women you don’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” Your Twitter account…

TRUMP: Only Rosie O’Donnell.

KELLY: No, it wasn’t. Your Twitter account…

TRUMP: Thank you.

KELLY: For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell.

TRUMP: Yes, I’m sure it was.

KELLY: Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?

TRUMP: I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.

And frankly, what I say, and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding. We have a good time. What I say is what I say. And honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.

But you know what, we — we need strength, we need energy, we need quickness and we need brain in this country to turn it around. That, I can tell you right now.

I highlighted the actual question. The answer is, essentially, “I was just kidding.” For that “attack on him,” even though he said he wouldn’t do such a thing, after the debate he started an ongoing attack on Megyn Kelly. It may be shocking that the details she used would be brought up to a presidential candidate—since they were pretty much ignored for Bill Clinton. But the question itself was reasonable, in not very substantive, and pertinent to this candidate. But it wasn’t pro-Trump, so he insists it’s bad journalism.

In another debate he admitted to a possible weakness. Here’s what he said: 

TRUMP: I think maybe my greatest weakness is that I trust people too much. I’m too trusting. And when they let me down, if they let me down, I never forgive. I find it very, very hard to forgive people that deceived me. So I don’t know if you would call that a weakness, but my wife said “let up.”

I would call that a weakness. A serious one.

So, how do you get attacked by Donald Trump? You cross him. You disagree with him. You let his own flaws become clear to the public. Or you simply get in his way. (Example here.)

He attacks with lies. He bullies. He manipulates. He publicly demeans.

How is that different from “political correctness” if you’re someone who doesn’t agree with him? It isn’t.

Trump isn’t standing up against political correctness per se; he’s standing up against the current propaganda and plans to replace it with his own.

If you do not agree with him, succumb to him, worship him, you risk being squashed under his very big shoe, you inconsequential bug.

Diest isn’t including Trump in his discussion. I’m making that addition. But Diest tells us that PC is indeed dangerous:

Understand that the PC enforcers are not asking you, they’re not debating you, and they don’t care about your vote. They don’t care whether they can win at the ballot box, or whether they use extralegal means. There are millions of progressives in the US who absolutely would criminalize speech that does not comport with their sense of social justice.

One poll suggests 51 percent of Democrats and 1/3 of all Americans would do just that.

A different flavor—a more brash and vulgar voice—is no less a problem for freedom-loving Americans.

Diest offers some suggestions about standing up to PC, wherever it comes from:

This is not to say that bucking PC can’t hurt you: the possible loss of one’s job, reputation, friends, and even family is very serious. But defeatism is never called for, and it makes us unworthy of our ancestors.

Use humor to ridicule PC. PC is absurd, and most people sense it. And its practitioners suffer from a comical lack of self-awareness and irony. Use every tool at your disposal to mock, ridicule, and expose PC for what it is.

Never forget that society can change very rapidly in the wake of certain precipitating events. We certainly all hope that no great calamity strikes America, in the form of an economic collapse, a currency collapse, an inability to provide entitlements and welfare, energy shortages, food and water shortages, natural disasters, or civil unrest. But we can’t discount the possibility of these things happening.

And if they do, I suggest that PC language and PC thinking will be the first ornament of the state to go. Only rich, modern, societies can afford the luxury of a mindset that does not comport with reality, and that mindset will be swiftly swept aside as the “rich” part of America frays.

I don’t want some dire calamity to wake us up. I’m totally in favor of thinking, reading, and doing the right thing without hardship. I’m not good at ridicule, even when exposing ideas (not in favor of ridiculing people, and I don’t think Diest is either). But I appreciate a good political cartoon or satire. Good luck to those who can do those things well.

Lacking those skills, let me just remind that speaking truth, in families, is where recovery begins, so we freedom loving people have the strength to stand up to the bullies.