Language is changing in America; indeed, probably throughout the West. And the changes are not good.
The changes I see being introduced into English speech in America, are designed to kill off the practices and assumptions of individual freedom and responsive representation that have also been embedded for generations in us as a people.
The language and language practice changes that have arisen in the past few years tend to “deconstruct” (a favorite word of the globalist elite) the core concepts upon which the West has been built for four millennia. They also tend to subvert the norms of representational government that America has practiced since its founding. The new phrasings, cliches and speech patterns replace those foundational Western concepts with Marxist/feudalist and oligarchical concepts.
Language, of course, always changes. That is why we distinguish “living” from “dead languages.” “Dead languages” have stopped changing because they are not in use by living societies.
However, the new language usages that concern me are not from language changing organically, the way it used to — that is to say, via changes in sensibility and usage; via new inventions arising and requiring terminologies, or old habits, traditions and objects passing out of memory. In other words, the changes being imposed on our language and language practices are not arising for the same reasons that we no longer talk about “voyageurs” rather than salesmen, or why we no longer discuss wielding a “bare bodkin”.
Rather, the same monsters who have taken the rest of human civilization into their grip for the last two years, to establish their neo-Marxist/feudalist globalist oligarchy, are deliberately driving artificial changes in language and language practices.
(I’ll call the goal of these monsters, awkwardly, “NFGO” for short, as we tend to lack a catchall phrase for this horror. A “neo-Marxist/feudalist globalist oligarchy’ sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it isn’t; it’s neo-Marxist feudalism for you and me, friend, and the pleasures of a globalist oligarchy — with the oligarchy’s elites at the pinnacle — for them.)
Why does this matter more than slightly?
Changes in language are far from trivial. Linguists have pointed out, as I explore in my new book Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age, that language constructs reality. People can only conceive, understand, communicate about and act upon what they can name.
Thus, language and language practices shape national identity and even individual character: “[S]peakers of different languages develop different cognitive skills and predispositions, as shaped by the structures and patterns of their languages,” writes Dr Lera Boroditsky, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD, in her essay “Language and the Brain”
So your conciousness is affected by your language, which in turn imprints your brain processing; the way you structure information is affected by details as subtle as the direction in which letters flow: “Exposure to written language also restructures the brain, even when acquired late in life. Even seemingly surface properties, such as writing direction (left-to-right or right-to-left), have profound consequences for how people attend to, imagine, and organize information”, writes Dr Boroditsky.
When certain language practices are altered, they won’t just affect how easily people can understand each other; they can actually shut down certain assumptions about freedom and accountability, and thus close down expectations of political representation and individual rights, for an entire society.
New practices introduced into language can thus chip away at the identities of Westerners, and especially of Americans, to wear down what is most Western and American in the core of their being; to introduce, at level of their brain processing, acceptance of what would formerly have been alien norms of social conformity, servitude, submissiveness, powerlessness and hopelessness.
So those who wish to destroy America in other, material ways, such as by poisoning our pharmaceutical supply, as we discussed in Facing the Beast, or by buying up our farmland, are not wasting their time in their efforts also to subvert our language.
Here are some examples.
I. “Social Distancing.” “Public Health”. “Public Good. “Public Safety.” I’ve written about how Chinese Communist ideas popped up like mushrooms overnight when the “pandemic” drama was rolled out in 2020. “Social distancing” became a “thing”, even though in the individualistic West, the “social” part of that term was not organic.
The phrase lingers, threateningly, to this day: “In the pandemic, people needed moments of levity, and Barrymore’s crew could avoid spreading the virus by wearing face masks and social distancing.—Tori Otten, The New Republic, 15 Sep. 2023”.
The “social” of “social distancing,” just like the privileging of “public health” as a concept that is supposed to stamp out fragile protests about personal choices, or the rise of terms such as “safety” and “public safety” (and I gather, in Europe and Britain, “convenience”), are being used in ways that are meant to crush faint murmurs about rights and freedoms. And all of these are Marxist usages meant entirely to reorder how we think of humans in groups.
We used to have a society made up of individuals. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was famously accused of having said, in a 1987 interview in Women’s Own, that “there is no such thing as society.” I was living in Britain at the time and “There is no such thing as society” was inaccurately attributed to her everywhere, making her sound driven slightly mad with her lust for unfettered individualism.
And yet what she really said was:
“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who [italics mine] is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people [italics mine[ and people look to themselves first.… [It] is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate … [t]hat was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system … when people come and say: ‘But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!’”
Whether you agree with her here or not about benefits, her larger point was true of Western society: she did not say “society does not exist.” What she said was: “who [italics mine] is society? […] individual men and women.”
Indeed, this premise is the core building block of the Western project.
It is also essentially true of the American project – the fact that “society”, meaning the direction of a community or nation, must be made up from the autonomous wills of individual men and women.
But terms such as “social distancing” (which clearly parallels such Chinese concepts as “social credit score”), along with newly empowered terms such as “public safety” and even “public health”, are being “privileged” — that is to say, given validity and authority — over and above that formerly fundamental Western premise, that society is made up of individuals with rights.
Phrases such as “social distancing,” are predicated, in contrast, on the core beliefs of societies that manage the ordering of movements or behavior of masses of people by compulsion, as they do in China.
The repetition of “social distancing”, “public health,” “public safety” etc., along with the weird little circles on the supermarket floor during 2020-2022 telling you where to stand, as if you were prisoners getting exercise in a prison yard, all served to rewire the Western brain to become accustomed to the concept that we can indeed be told where to go, where to stand, whom to touch, whom to avoid; and that our individual wishes and rights are fungible.
All of this repetition is mind-rewiring that undoes the Western brain’s original wiring toward liberty.
I got into a gentle argument once with a right-on young lady who was speaking with me after I had been forcibly escorted out of a restuarant in Salem, Oregon, because I was unvaccinated. (I found it historically ironic that the restaurant, which would not let me eat alongside the vaccinated diners, had windows plastered with icons of the Black Lives Movement). The young lady accused me, during our back and forth, of “centering yourself.”
I had never heard that expression before, but it is an important one. It aligns with the Marxist goal of the restructuring of our language: from the Renaissance on, the “self” has been “centered” in the West. This was the great, revolutionary innovation of Western consciousness.
That centering of one’s self has now been turned into a “social” crime.
