Language changes naturally over time, but the shift from “criminal” to “justice-involved person” did not come about through natural linguistic development. Rather, leftist academics, political activists, and bureaucrats contrived the new term, and left-wing journalists parroted it. The two terms reflect two different cultures: one in which people have moral agency, another in which they do not. Criminals break the law and deserve punishment. “Justice-involved persons” are passive characters; if active at all, they sound as though they pursue justice. And only a cruel society would punish someone for pursuing justice.
Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, by Michael Knowles, p 48
Lenin copied Marx’s idea of central control.
Moreover, Lenin’s chief amendment to Marxism–“the vanguard party”–finds good intellectual warrant in the Founder himself. …there exists a deep connection between Marx’s idea of Communism as conscious, rational mastery over mankind’s collective fate and Lenin’s idea of the Party as the controlling vanguard of the spontaneous mass movement.
Signet Classics edition of The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, with an Introduction by Martin Malia and a New Afterword by Stephen Kotkin, p 29
Communists now fight a culture war, not a class war.
Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, described herself and co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists.” The organization’s third co-founder, Opal Tometi, has been circumspect in her self-definition, though one may deduce Marxist sympathies from the several photographs of her smiling next to Venezuela’s Communist dictator Nicolás Maduro. Cullors, Garza, and Tometi share [U.S. Senator Bernie] Sanders’s basic Marxist framework. But they didn’t name their organization “Workers’ Lives Matter” or “Proletarian Lives Matter.” While Bernie focuses on wealth to fight a class war, BLM highlights race to wage a culture war.
Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, by Michael Knowles, p 25
Communists know that words matter.
[Italian Communist agitator Antonio] Gramsci believed that Marxists should aim to attain what he called “cultural hegemony,” an early expression of Andrew Breitbart’s famous dictum that “politics is downstream of culture.” And the beating heart of culture is language.
In the little-read Discourse or Dialogue about Our Language, Machiavelli compares the infiltration of an opponent’s language with the military tactics used by ancient Rome to control foreign territories and armies. By “cultural hegemony,” Gramsci understood, as did Machiavelli, that society may be overcome not solely by force but also by internal subversion. A crafty revolutionary may find more success by transforming a society’s traditions, institutions, and most of all its language than by picking a fight out in the open.
Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, by Michael Knowles, p 19
As Rush Limbaugh often said, “Words mean things.” Communists know this well.
Communist politicians punish those who ridicule them.
Communists take silence as resistance.
The consequences of woke cultural authoritarianism are real, and they are devastating. They range from job loss to social ostracism. Americans live in fear of the moment when a personal enemy dredges up a Bad Old Tweet™ or members of the media “resurface” an impolitic comment in a text message. … Silence used to be possibility. Now silence is taken as resistance. Everyone must stand and applaud for Stalin–and he who sits down first is sent to the gulag.
The Authoritarian Moment, by Ben Shapiro, pp 19-20