Don’t give in to ‘wokespeak’

OPINION:

Wokespeak has turned evasion into an art form.

Imagine the following scenario. An astronomer is testifying before Congress. A senator asks: “Is the moon made of green cheese?” The scientist demurs: “I don’t know where you’re going with that. That sounds like a political question.”

In essence, that is what happened at a recent Senate hearing on the abortion drug mifepristone. Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN and senior adviser to a pro-abortion group, told the hearing that medical policy should be guided by science alone

Sen. Josh Hawley, Missouri Republican, torpedoed Dr. Verma with four little words: “Can men get pregnant?”

He asked the question 11 times and never got an answer.

Dr. Verma replied: “I hesitated there because I wasn’t sure where the conversation was going or what the goal was.”

Mr. Hawley responded: “The goal is to establish biological reality. You said a moment ago that science and evidence should control, not politics. So, let’s just test that proposition. Can men get pregnant?”

Dr. Verma steadfastly refused to answer.

The good doctor was protecting the gender ideology she supports, which holds that there is no difference between a man who thinks he is a woman and an actual woman.

To say that men can’t get pregnant would be to acknowledge that there are very fundamental differences between the sexes. A man can want to be a woman. He can “change his pronouns.” He can have his body altered with chemistry or surgery. But he still can’t function as a woman.

Dr. Verma is part of a growing chorus among transgender advocates. At her confirmation hearing in 2022, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define “woman.” She responded: “I can’t. I’m not a biologist.”

If she had been asked to define a tariff, would she have answered: “I can’t. I’m not an economist”?

Justice Jackson sits on a court that will soon decide whether it is constitutional for so-called transgender men to be banned from playing women’s sports. How could she rule on this without knowing what a woman is?

In a 2021 appearance on CNN, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, attacked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his state’s new abortion law. At the time, she referred to a woman as “a menstruating person.” Besides the absurdity of this label, it implies that women who have gone through menopause are no longer women.

Liberal language manipulation aims at a gross distortion of reality.

Thus, an illegal immigrant becomes “undocumented.” An officer charged with enforcing immigration law is “the Gestapo.” An unborn child is a “product of conception.” Two people engaged in acts of sodomy are a “same-sex couple.” A prostitute is a “sex worker.” And the pervert who wants to have sex with your child isn’t a pedophile. He is a “minor-attracted person.”

In all of these instances, the goal is to legitimize the abnormal and to stigmatize those who dare to defend normative values. If you haven’t noticed, it’s working.

The war over words has been going on for a very long time.

In his classic novel “1984” (published in 1949), George Orwell described a totalitarian state where mind control was so absolute that it invented a new vocabulary, eliminating words that promoted dangerous ideas and changing the ordinary meaning of other words to facilitate conformity. It was called “newspeak.”

In 1974, Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained that totalitarianism “demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit — and this suffices as our fealty.” The ideology that Solzhenitsyn spent most of his life fighting is alive and well in 21st-century America. Instead of newspeak, we have wokespeak.

Whoever controls the language dominates the debate. That’s why the left has always focused on controlling society’s idea generators: public education, academia and mass media. That way, it will always be in a position to push its poisonous cliches.

The greatest mistake conservatives can make is to acquiesce to wokespeak — for instance, by calling Marxists “progressives,” the gender-confused “transgender” or riots “mostly peaceful protests.” (You know, like the mostly peaceful protests that burned down whole city blocks in 2020.)

Instead, we must take every opportunity to challenge the left’s language manipulation and help others connect with reality by using language that’s clear, unambiguous and true.

If you accede to the left’s terminology, you have lost the war before the first shot is fired.

• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.