The left has created its own vocabulary, a first step taken by authoritarian movements from communism to Nazism.Words are violence. Disagreement is violence. You’re Hitler. Free speech is only free when people you disagree with are silenced.“Gender-affirming care” means undergoing a sex-change operation or taking chemicals to change, rather than affirm, your gender. Being “assigned a gender at birth” means being born and having the doctor record the truth on your birth certificate. And no one seems to know what a woman is.The left has developed its own vocabulary, which can be difficult even for educated adults to follow. Historically, inventing or redefining words has been a first step toward cult indoctrination and totalitarian government, on both the left and the right.Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961), based on interviews with Korean War POWs and Chinese defectors, identified “loading the language” as one of eight techniques used in Chinese Communist thought reform. This technique produces “thought-terminating clichés,” which Lifton called “the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”Victor Klemperer’s LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947) showed how Nazi propaganda changed the meanings of existing German words rather than inventing new ones. These changes were repeated until they were absorbed unconsciously.Françoise Thom’s Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism (1987) described Soviet official language as constructed “to protect ideology” from the malicious attacks of real things, with syntax designed to avoid contact with verifiable facts.In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell wrote that political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” His novel 1984 depicted this process through Newspeak, which narrowed the range of thought by eliminating the vocabulary needed to express dissent.For all its claims of supporting education, the left hates the teaching and reading of history. If leftists studied the history of language manipulation, they would see that their language policies follow the same script as, I hate to say it, Hitler.On the other hand, some of the left’s new language rules are more convenient. For example, there are so many ways to say, “I disagree with this policy” or “I don’t care for you.” If you don’t like something, you can simply call it genocide, fascism, Nazism, lying, racism, or white supremacy. The newest term is “pedophile,” which, in its narrowest usage, means someone who supports ICE deportations. More broadly, it applies to anyone the left dislikes.Some words, such as “antisemitism,” have been erased from the language. The act itself, however, is acceptable as long as someone is antisemitic in the name of opposing “genocide.” The left insists on calling the Gaza war a genocide despite the fact that less than half of 1 percent of all Palestinians have been killed.This is one area in which the right is more honest. You can oppose the Gaza war without calling it genocide. On a personal note, I hate broccoli, yet broccoli is not genocide. Likewise, you can oppose climate-crisis narratives without being racist. The left, however, lacks that degree of nuance. If you think low-flow toilets are stupid because you have to flush them eight times, defeating their environmental purpose, you are likely to be called a racist, white supremacist, or Zionist.Similarly, anything the left agrees with is “democracy” or “free speech.” This includes convoluted arguments explaining why the right must be silenced to preserve free speech or why Trump had to be kept off the ballot to preserve democracy.The left’s binary argument is particularly interesting. Gender is supposedly nonbinary, but nearly everything else is binary. They say, you cannot be a Christian and oppose abortion unless you also support extending free lunches to every child in America. You cannot oppose abortion and support women’s rights. Or, you cannot be antiabortion and be in favor of capital punishment.The left’s belief in women’s rights becomes problematic because it cannot define a woman, simultaneously insists that anyone can be a woman, and sometimes claims that men and women do not exist. At the same time, it argues that everyone should have equal rights and that men should receive women’s rights if they identify as women.The left also calls abortion a woman’s right while ignoring the fact that approximately half of the babies killed in abortions are girls. Similarly, it claims to support minorities despite abortion disproportionately killing Black and Latino babies.Black Americans make up 14.4% of Americans, but account for 39.5% of abortions. Hispanic Americans make up 19 to 20% of the population, but account for 21.2% of abortions. Black lives apparently matter, but not in the womb and not until the left says they do.The distinction between equity and equality is one of the more nuanced changes in meaning. Because the average attention span is down to about 15 seconds, most people cannot be bothered to sit through an explanation of the difference.“Equality” traditionally meant identical treatment and rights under the law for all individuals, regardless of group identity, as reflected in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. “Equity” was a narrower legal term describing a judge’s discretion to achieve a fair result when the letter of the law did not provide one.“Equity” has since been redefined as equal outcomes among groups, requiring unequal treatment of individuals to correct disparities between demographic groups. In federal policy, it has replaced the principle of treating individuals equally.On his first day in office, January 20, 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 13985, defining “equity” in federal policy as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals.” This was to be pursued by identifying and correcting disparities among racial and other groups across federal programs. The order directed federal agencies to incorporate this definition into hiring, contracting, and program design.Some terms no longer exist, yet simultaneously apply to everyone. There is supposedly no such thing as an illegal alien, but either we are all illegal on stolen land, or no one is illegal on stolen land. Borders should be open, but conservatives should not be permitted to speak on university campuses when leftists say, “Get off my campus,” or tell ICE, “Get out of my neighborhood.” They also periodically establish CHOPs and autonomous zones or lay siege to campuses, then strictly regulate who may enter or leave.“Insurrection” is reserved exclusively for January 6. Hundreds of nights of destructive riots across multiple US cities, along with documented cases of leftist government employees abusing their offices to advance leftist policies, are not considered insurrection.Words are violence, but violent crime statistics are suppressed, and offenses are downgraded in blue jurisdictions because reporting them is considered racist. Minorities supposedly do not commit more crimes than white people, yet reporting crime statistics is itself racist.“Islamophobia” now means the rational recognition that the world’s leading terrorist organizations are Islamic and that there are no comparable examples of Quaker suicide bombers, Amish jihadists, or Methodists demanding separate religious courts in secular countries. Not even Catholics, with their long history of Crusades and conquest, are calling for the establishment of a new caliphate, but Islamists in numerous countries are.“Xenophobia” now applies to anyone who opposes illegal immigration or cites crime statistics showing that illegal immigrants commit a disproportionate amount of crime and have disproportionate ties to cartels and gangs.If you disagree with any of the above or point out that definitions have changed, you are guilty of gaslighting.“Gaslighting” originally referred to sustained psychological manipulation in which an abuser deliberately causes a victim to doubt their own memory, perception, or sanity, usually over an extended period within an intimate or otherwise controlling relationship. The term derives from the 1938 play Gas Light and its 1944 film adaptation. Today, however, it is a general-purpose accusation applied to almost any disagreement or perceived dishonesty.The Democrat Party, including President Biden and his cabinet officials, supported these linguistic changes even at the expense of personal freedom and public health. Homeless people became “unhoused individuals,” and illegal aliens became “undocumented immigrants.” Race is rarely disclosed in public crime reports, and photographs are generally shown only when the perpetrator is white.Before the Biden administration, only women could become pregnant. Federal health agencies and medical organizations then increasingly replaced “pregnant women” with sex-neutral phrases such as “pregnant people,” “birthing people,” and “people with uteruses.” These terms were intended to include “transgender-identifying individuals capable of pregnancy,” meaning women who identified as men but became pregnant, thereby demonstrating that they were not men.Finally, feelings and opinions are now facts, while certain actual facts must be suppressed because they hurt people’s feelings. Hurting someone’s feelings is violence, which brings us back to the opening of this article.The post A Guide to Leftist Vocabulary for Adult Speakers of Real English appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.