by Robert Oscar Lopez
Recent fiascos in Portland and Chicago indicate a dangerous turn for the left, and for the English language.
Recent fiascos in Portland and Chicago indicate a dangerous turn for the left. Portland's mayor let anarchists terrorize the downtown for fifty days, then fueled a psy-op campaign blaming the destruction on Trump. Chicago's mayor, Lori Lightfoot, lashed out at Donald Trump just before hundreds of protesters hurled projectiles at police before a Christopher Columbus statue. Next, they marched to surround her house, yelling expletives at her.
Conservatives worry, understandably, about whether the public will blame this chaos on Trump. Many signs indicate that the left's propaganda machine has worked. As a personal endeavor, I contacted Democratic friends and relatives during June and July to see if we could find common ground. There exists no common ground.
All the Democrats I know hold Donald Trump personally responsible for the spread of COVID. They believe that racial violence has increased under Donald Trump. No Democrat who spoke to me believes there is any rioting in the United States other than white supremacist provocateurs. They believe that cancel culture is not real, not a problem, and not something that leftists participate in. They do not believe that the media have any bias.
November's results may have nothing to do with how Trump performs. This year has seen the largest false-flag operation in my lifetime; an enormous segment of the population refuses to believe copious footage of rioting and believes claims about "peaceful protesters" abused by Trump's "shock troops." Not even the shrewdest Republican could win over this demographic.
Looking past the election
We should campaign as we always do. Beyond that, Trump's fate is beyond our control. Let's consider the future beyond Trump.
Right now, the left's power consists mostly of power over the English language. The left has sway over education, the media, law, arts, and entertainment, especially in English-speaking countries: the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand. Liberal-dominated industries shape the understanding and use of words. Since the English-speaking world defines discourse for the whole world and the English-speaking left defines English words, the left now has global hegemony. For two reasons, I believe that this will not last very long.
First, the history of Spanish, French, and German shows that language communities reach their downfall when one party's prevalence distorts communication.
Second, the three most prominent left-wing slogans in recent history — "it gets better," "me too," and "black lives matter" — cancel each other. Eventually, skeptics will notice, or the folly will cause a social disaster.
Point 1: What do English-speakers have in common with speakers of Spanish, French, and German?
Having exiled conservatives from education, media, law, and the arts, the left lacks checks and balances. Without challengers to reveal their blind spots, they fail to see the dangerous direction of their own thought processes. This trend explains why the English-speaking world has adopted absurd beliefs on biological sex. It explains why basic current events, like violent anarchists rioting in Portland, are virtually unknown among huge numbers of English-speaking liberals. The center of gravity moves farther left, which causes dangerous radicals to flood into the liberal mainstream. Sound conservative counterpoints are dismissed or silenced.
Prescient writers like Cervantes (Don Quijote), Voltaire (Candide), Franz Kafka (Metamorphosis), and George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm) understood the collapse of meaning. They predicted in various allegories the suffering that would come from their own tongues becoming meaningless because of dire political turns. Orwell brought all these concerns about language together in his landmark essay, "Politics and the English Language."
As I'm exploring in a current book project, when languages attain too much social power, they suffer lapses in judgment. Spanish, French, and German lost their ability to convey universal and objective ideas, largely because their speakers' poor judgment caused heinous crimes against humanity. English-speakers were fortunate for many centuries and did not fall into the same traps. Now we see that English is not immune to collective madness.
The Spanish Inquisition had a long-term deleterious effect on the Spanish-speaking world because the inquisitors operated as a shadow government (the original Deep State, if you will), not entirely accountable either to the Vatican or to the Spanish crown. By denouncing anyone who disagreed with them as heretics, the inquisitors silenced correctives and became tone-deaf, humorless, and megalomaniacal. Cervantes mocks them mercilessly in Don Quijote. By the War of the Spanish Succession, Spain ceased to lead in debates about human questions. Spanish-speakers had been forced by ecclesiastical overreach to live in a bubble. Their ideas and understanding suffered.
Paris became the world's capital by the Enlightenment, but French-speakers slid into a similar fate. The Parisian philosophes knew how the Inquisition had gone haywire. The leaders of the French Revolution were prepared to avoid the excesses that brought down Spanish hegemony. Their answer was to pass the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, placing churches firmly under the control of the revolutionary government. In doing so, they sought to protect the nation from the ecclesiology that stifled the Spanish-speaking world.
In an oft-repeated trend, powerful movements fall into new errors when they try to avoid old errors that don't really pose a threat. It's the curse of the blind spot and "fighting the last war." French revolutionaries fought an entire civil war against staunch Catholics in order to show that a rogue system like the Inquisition would never arise in France, but the true danger to the Revolution came from secular lawyers whose jargon assumed overblown importance. Soon the "Terror" brought an entirely new form of politics into being — the use of sheer, unrelenting intimidation and violent spectacles to shake people out of their mindsets. The Directory and Napoleon followed. Both compounded the madness imposed on the French language.
The Nazis had studied the French Revolution. The Nazis decided to avoid France's overreaching universalism and chaotic squabbling by focusing on the concrete ties of shared bloodlines. Rather than submitting their language to the veto power of Jacobin lawyers, the Nazis gave direction of their language to a police state. The Gestapo assumed control over professional communications. Policing became the dominant source for language definition, as ecclesiology had in Spain and lawyers had in France. We know what happened next: genocide and fascism.
The English-speaking world is obsessed with undoing the errors of the Nazis: their racism and their policing obsession. But the dangers now are not racism and eugenic race fantasies. The dangers are Stalinism and Maoism, offshoots of the Marxist-Leninist thinking that has enamored English-speaking academics, and which English-speaking schools have downplayed when they teach twentieth-century history. The left's blind spots are its forced compassion and false equalities. Orwell foresaw this.
The implosion of the left
Since 2010, three slogans dominated the left, all based on the English-speaking world's turn to coercive liberalism: "It Gets Better," "Me Too," and "Black Lives Matter." Each is in itself an Orwellian delusion. Together, the three undermine each other.
"It gets better" is Orwellian. Most youths who begin a homosexual or transgender lifestyle will see their living conditions worsen. As they get older and adult demands weigh on them, they suffer from more health problems and an unsupportive LGBT community. LGBT networks reward them for joining by pulling them into needlessly stressful debates and unstable relationships. The slogan was aimed at young people, whose age afforded them the support of patient schools, families, and communities, which will no longer see them as babes to care for when they become adults and realize how cold and harsh the LGBT scene really is. The campaign commissioned aging LGBTs to speak via internet to impressionable teens and pre-teens, in essence imposing gross assumptions on them and lying to them about how happy gay and trans adults felt.
"Me Too" is an Orwellian delusion because the movement for sex abuse victims was never
As we saw with Tara Reade, women victimized by prized liberal males could be quickly dismissed as well. The MeToo revolution elevated well-to-do professional women in high-profile fields like entertainment, finance, government, and academia, especially if the perpetrator was somebody rich, famous, and for whatever reason unpopular. The vast majority of abuse survivors want healing rather than revenge, wish to move on with their lives rather than dwell on their pain, and cannot withstand the nastiness of a public campaign against their abusers. Instead of "me too," it should have been called "only if we like you."
Finally, "black lives matter" is an Orwellian delusion because the organization called Black Lives Matter does not prioritize the black community's problems over the general left-wing agenda, nor does the organization conduct itself as though it cares about all black lives. In an interview with Terry Crews, CNN commentator Don Lemon stated that the movement wasn't designed to address the large numbers of black Americans killed in civilian gun violence; their only focus was on killings of black Americans by white police officers. The organization has shown zero interest in pro-life black Americans worried about the effects of abortion on black communities.
The group does not exist as a real nonprofit but siphons its money to a liberal partisan group, while its mission statement prioritizes transgender rights, gay culture, the Sexual Revolution, and alternative families that lack a mother or father. The hostility from BLM-supporters to the phrase "all lives matter" makes no sense, no matter how many times they repeat the tortured logic behind opposing it. Activists accuse "all lives matter" of drowning out the particular hardships imposed on black Americans with too general a focus. But the organization Black Lives Matter refuses to address many threats to black lives while taking on a plethora of left-wing agendas (not the least of which is getting Joe Biden elected), which are of tangential or minimal importance to black communities.
These three slogans contradict each other; the left falsely intertwines them. It Gets Better seeks to thrust sexual content into young children's lives when they are vulnerable vis-à-vis the powerful position of adults who dictate false sexual terms to them. It focuses on painting a rosy picture of the LGBT community, hiding the many forms of abuse people suffer there. This conflicts with MeToo's emphasis on protecting people from abuse and laying bare the truth about abuse wherever it has hidden.
But MeToo also became a lopsided movement of females threatening males with legal action, police intervention, and public shaming. Given our country's long history of terrorizing non-white men with excessive police force, criminalization, and charges of menacing white women, MeToo was bound to produce white Karens calling cops on black men.
Black Lives Matter draws its strength from the vivid experience of males being terrorized by police, to a large degree because they are males. The statistics on murders of black men pretending to be women, for instance, illustrate this (22 "trans women" killed in 2019, but 6,237 black males killed in 2018). A black man is in much greater danger of violence if he presents as masculine than if he cloaks his masculinity behind a feminine costume. MeToo spent three years inveighing against all things masculine. The movement's hysteria made things more dangerous for black men as all men were suspected of violently endangering women.
It Gets Better prioritizes anti-bullying measures. These, like MeToo's protective crusades, give more power to enforcement authorities to investigate, sanction, and punish people considered "aggressive," which usually means men. When you demonize typically masculine behavior, you endanger black men.
Perhaps, through some magic trick, the left will be able to hold all this together. I don't think so. History shows us what happens when politics corrupts the meaning of words. The language goes crazy, and the community that speaks the language slides into a world-historical collapse. The left will implode.
Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed on Twitter, at his blog, or on his podcast at Gatekeepers.
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/the_implosion_of_the_lefts_language_circus.html
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