Farewell to year of leftist words

At the end of 2021, a year of weird speaking, Americans learned from Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., that “student debt is policy violence.” Previously, Americans were lectured that “silence is violence” — that not voicing support for this or that supposedly oppressed group is violence against it. The proliferation of new forms of violence raises a question: Are old forms — say, a flash mob looting a Louis Vuitton store — still violence?

Normal people, who might want to toss anvils to progressives drowning in their jargon, should modify George Orwell’s axiom that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

Today, the enemy of clarity is the scary sincerity of progressives who are politically inflamed about everything.

Two percent of Hispanics, according to a national poll cited by Politico, approve of progressives designating them Latinx. In 2021, did Blacks and Indigenous People of Color suddenly start thinking of themselves as BIPOCs? Or did advanced thinkers volunteer to do BIPOCs’ thinking for them? In Dane County, Wis., home of the hyper-progressive University of Wisconsin, the sheriff ’s office announced a new “philosophy”: Persons in jail are no longer “inmates,” they are “residents” or “those within our care.”

The word “infrastructure” polls well because, in normal usage, it denotes glistening new airports and such like. So, congressional progressives decided that increased “investment” for school lunches — the word “spending” has been stricken from progressivism’s lexicon — and every other domestic purpose counts as “social infrastructure.”

Colorado’s constitution forbids “any distinction or classification of pupils … on account of race or color,” a provision adopted in 1974, during the national recoil against segregation. Now, however, a Denver school is planning, when COVID-19 permits, a “families of color playground night,” a project overseen by something not all elementary schools have: the school’s “dean of culture.”

An Indiana school district urged teachers to join one of 12 “affinity groups” based on race, sexual preference, etc. The group for whites is called “Confronting White Privilege.”

At Yale University, where an emotionally fragile undergraduate said he felt “victimized” by daylight saving time, a lecturer at the School of Medicine inflamed the sensitive when she said that during her year studying the opioid crisis in rural Ohio, she was surprised to find there an “artisanal coffee shop.” Her sensitive listeners denounced this as “dehumanizing, demeaning and classist,” and indicative of the lecturer’s “problematic” thinking. “Problematic” is progressive-speak for “justifies cancellation.”

In April, a National Archives task force said the Archives Rotunda exemplifies “structural racism” because it “lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding,” thereby marginalizing BIPOCs and others. The report recommended that “trigger warnings” be attached to Archives materials to “forewarn audiences of content that may cause intense physiological and psychological symptoms.” Among the potentially harmful terms identified were “illegal alien” and “elderly.”

If, the morning after next November’s elections, Democrats wonder what went wrong, they might try talking the way sensible people do. Sensible thinking might ensue.