What’s in a Word? Using Language as a Wrecking Ball

DEI is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the new language of the radical left's strategies.

To study history, even causally, is to some extent to examine how language and discourse in cultures control events and predict future outcomes for individuals, tribes, or nations.

In previous articles, I’ve suggested that since the first lie in the Garden of Eden and the first recorded obfuscation of personal guilt by Cain after murdering his brother, Abel, manipulating and stealing the meaning of words to escape individual responsibility or to cast blame on others is the first tool for which scoundrels, despots, kings, lawyers, and politicians reach.

Like crabgrass, the instinct to exculpate oneself personally becomes ingrained in the culture and grows across the general population, making it difficult to control. New narratives or histories are advanced to explain some social phenomenon, to cast a new enemy to blame for this or that, or to justify a new grievance on long-ago events that no one currently alive even remembers.

Ultimately, regardless of the culture, manipulation of language leads to the establishment of structures of law and civil power that organize language as a tool used to confer power on some and wealth on others. This pattern of history is astonishingly stable. Regardless of the physical, intellectual, and material state of culture, from tribes to empires, societies advance, retreat, or collapse around their language and discourse, as well as who controls it.

This line of thought comes to mind again when listening to the current debate, counter-debates, and court cases about the abolition of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs as a mandated initiative throughout American culture, from governments to industry and schools, and the companion theory of multiculturalism that befriends it.

Controlling the Common Lexicon

DEI is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the new language of radical leftist strategies — superseding even materialism — to destroy the concept of meritocracy with the guilt of race “privilege” and eliminate and replace the concept of rights with the equality of “essence” or “spirit.” Under this paradigm, the constructs of society, culture, and psychology must be studied and understood not by economic indices or the existing dynamics of class, but used to extinguish the singularity of personal excellence in a psychosocial purge where the historic virtues are exiled once and for all.

If merit, hard work, and talent are turned into evidence of guilt, and if equality is rejected as a declaration of each person’s rightful inheritance as a child of God and replaced with consideration only of each person’s essence, then there are no longer rational standards for competence.

It is a form of psychological coercion that demands full intervention and control by the “state” and the political process to accomplish. Half-measures in this theory will not achieve the demotion by race or promotion by “essence” that proponents of DEI want and are willing to fight for. The tool to accomplish this is to use the language as a ramrod against the established constitutional order by steady indoctrination – and finally, to turn the structures and words of law and civil power to make the new order an inescapable web.

The Trump administration has faced the radical Left head-on. It has issued directives to its agencies and grantees, such as universities and the U.S. military, to stop DEI programs that promote racism and exclusion. Hundreds of billions of dollars were invested in these programs over the last four years, and so far, they have generated nothing but well-paid consultants and controversy.

But vast pools of fungible money are not the only reason universities and the vast armada of extremist radicals, Marxists, and Communist front groups are fighting like wildcats in the streets, in their corporate media silos, and in the courts to stall out the president’s attempt to shut down DEI initiatives.

The ultra-radicals want, above all, absolute power over the levers of the economy and what is and isn’t produced and by whom. This would provide the assorted left-wing extremist movement bivouacked under the umbrella of the Democrat Party with the other bookend to education, where they have invested 60 years and now have total control over what higher education is; they also are working hard to capture the elementary and high school education systems. Nowhere has the radicals’s thrust been clearer than in DEI. It is about power and nothing else.

Suppose the ultra-radicals can reconstruct our language into a legal weapon of coercion and obedience. Then, the long struggle for human freedom will be changed in a moment, and the battle to turn it back will be much more complicated and difficult than the battle to save it now.

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture, and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the US House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) Administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.