Weaponizing Words

“Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.” -- Plato

The rhetorical process of weaponizing words is as ancient as it is simple. It is also as invidious as it is insidious. Here’s how;

Change a definition and you change people’s thinking

Change people’s thinking and you change their speech

Change people’s speech and you change their behavior

Change people’s behavior and you control their political policies

Change people’s political policies and you change their laws

Change people’s laws and you control their culture

Change people’s culture and you control their society

If culture wars are wars of ideas, and ideas are constructs of words, then nothing is more vital to cultural combatants than weaponizing their words. The technology to weaponize words is the skill to rhetorically re-define terms. Like most other forms of propaganda weaponry, re-defining terms is a bipartisan device with equal opportunity for all. I learned this skill early. Father Jim Johnson was both my debate coach and football coach in high school. Day one on the debate squad witnessed his opening dialogue; "Who always wins any debate?" he asked. "The one with all the facts,”, bellowed quarterback Bob Fitzpatrick from the back of the room. "Nope!" the muscular priest dismissed that answer with a brisk wave of the hand. "The one who has the best logic,", tried left tackle Charlie Cunningham. "No such thing as 'best' logic, Chuck...you're either logical or you're not...just like pregnancy," his words cracking the air like a bull whip with giggles all around. After exhausting our ignorance, Father Jim finally gave us the keys to the kingdom of debate. "Definitions, gentlemen! Whoever gets the other side to accept their definitions of terms always wins the debate."

Word(s)	Literal Meaning	Weaponized Meaning
Gay	Happy and carefree	Oppressed and persecuted homosexuals victimized by bigoted religious zealots.
Hate	Think or feel intense dislike	What you do when you disagree with me because I’m right and you’re wrong.
Inequality	Things not the same	My right to take anything I want from you regardless of my incompetence or lack of ability.
Climate	Meteorological fluctuations	Human crimes against Mother Earth that will kill all humans unless we stop using fossil fuels by establishing a one-world socialist government to control all human behavior through the United Nations.
Denier	One who does not accept	Criminal enemy of 97% of world’s scientists paid for by the greedy 1% who impose fossil fuel consumption on the world’s population.
Justice	Impartial system of judging accusations or claims of wrongdoing and/or unlawful actions	Empowerment of women, people of color, and LGBT people to substitute accusation for legal proof of white male oppression.
Unacceptable	Not satisfactory or allowable	We don’t like you because you don’t agree with us.
Bad	Indecorous, not proper, immoral, evil	Why we don’t like you because you don’t do what we tell you to do
Tolerance	Endure without adverse effect	We only tolerate you if you admit that we are right and you are wrong
Marriage	Life commitment between on man and one woman sanctioned by society for the procreation and protection of children	Any permutation or combination of committed gender couplings for personal happiness and companionship

Government can criminalize constitutionally protected speech simply by designating it ‘hate speech’. Thoughts and emotions can be then criminalized. Commit a crime while thinking or speaking hatefully and you are guilty of a ‘hate crime’. Thus, thought becomes an Orwellian crime against the state.

A shooting 'culture war' looms on the near horizon in America. When words become weapons to impose one cultural ideology over another, then betrayal turns to anger, then to resentment, then to hostility and finally to open violence. Social justice worriers do not fall from trees already indoctrinated into their smug superiority. They need professors to become intolerant of opposing views. 'Inequity' has been weaponized by the professors to now require a socialist outcome in every human competition. ‘Empower‘ is another weaponized word giving false hope to also-rans despite their lack of talent or ability. Children are routinely told everyone can be ‘empowered’ as the next Tiger Woods, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or Albert Einstein. Tummy rot! Eyewash! Balderdash! No, they can’t. Some can, maybe, but not everyone. It’s a cruel thing to tell a quadriplegic child they can become the next Rory McElroy just because it makes you feel like a role model to them.

'Inequality' (gender, wage, income etc.) is a socialist presumption as though it is even remotely possible for a government to equalize human talent and ability and engineer equal outcomes.

‘Undocumented migrants’ becomes a euphemism for criminals who broke into your country and stole your stuff and now want to stay with no accountability for their crime and take more of your stuff. Try doing that in Mexico and you’ll taste the delights of a Mexican jail.

‘Diversity’ is now the pretense that variety equates with quality, competence, and merit. Diversity, however, only extends to skin pigmentation, selected national origin, sexual inclination and the configuration of female genitalia. Diversity of contrary ideas is strictly forbidden This is exemplified by the latest weaponized term is ‘Cultural Misappropriation’ i.e. more gobbledygook from some Ethnic Studies academics as dissected here in our popular, previous post, Tempest In A Teepee. As an update, at yesterday’s Santa Barbara City College ‘forum’ only proponents of the cultural misappropriation theory were invited to address students that attended the session for credit. No opposing views were invited or represented. Fortunately, indoctrination from social ‘scientists’ does not work except on mediocre minds and then only for a short time.

A few years ago one of my logic students wrote a sound term paper entitled, Social Science is an oxymoron. Her thesis was, If it’s ‘science’ then it can’t be ‘social’ and if it’s ‘social’ then it can’t be ‘science. She traced the origins of what we call social science today. Prior to Auguste Comte (1798-1857) 'social science' evolved from the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment and not from anything we would accept as ‘science’ today despite Comte’s attempt to weaponize it calling it ‘social physics’. It should be recalled that Comte’s teacher and mentor was the utopian socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon . The hope was to fit a positivists methodology (knowledge through observation) to the study of human relations. Positivism was all the rage in Europe at the time, and Comte actually believed that Sociology was the 'queen of the sciences', a title formerly held by Philosophy for two millennia. While Comte influenced the social thinking of Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and George Elliot his ideas are not taken seriously by those outside academic divisions appropriating the title 'social science'. So, that's how you weaponize a term. You just make it up and get your pals to agree with you. If enough people see some social, economic or political advantage in your newly weaponized word then your meaning will become main stream and the rest is just good old fashioned ‘marketing’. For proof, just look up the etymology of the term ‘gay’.

Activists and politicians globally know the power of what Fr. Johnson taught us in high school debating. Take the word ‘gay’ for example. Since 1969, when the word 'homosexual' was replaced by the word 'gay' for politically euphemistic reasons, the left discovered this simple weapon to advance their perception of social justice and economic redistribution of wealth. Hijacking the word 'gay' i.e. happy and carefree, to now mean same-sex acts and relationships was a brilliant if somewhat accidental victory for the left. As I narrate the story in my book, REASON ARGUE REFUTE, New York Times reporters covering the infamous 1969 'Stonewall Street' riots by homosexuals protesting police brutality tired of typing the word h-o-m-o-s-e-x-u-a-l (ten letters) when filing their stories on these disturbances. Eventually, so the story goes, a New York Times reporter got the protest leaders to provide a three-letter word, ‘gay’ to refer to homosexuals. After 1969 media outlet globally substituted the word ‘gay’ everywhere and always for the word ‘homosexual’ in their official ‘style’ books of politically correct and politically incorrect words to be used in reporting events.

Mark Twain quipped, "I've never let my schooling interfere with my education." Leanardo DaVinci told his students, "Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in." For my money, the British communist writer and Nobel Laureate for Literature when she was 88, Doris Lessing accurately describes what happens to education when words become politically weaponized whether by the Left or the Right and turn into indoctrination.

"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgments. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” ― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

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