WORDS, IMAGES AND AUTOCRACYMarch 13, 2025
We used to say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.” Such innocence! The pen can mightier than the sword. So, a bully has prohibited certain words—and images—from use by government agencies. Toadying civilian organizations likely will follow suit.
The Trump administration now outlaws—or cautions against—hundreds of words on government websites and in government publications. A few at random (reported by the New York Times): advocacy, barrier, Black, disability, Gulf of Mexico, multicultural, pollution, prejudice, transgender, and underserved.
But, as they say in TV informercials, there’s more. Recently, 28,000 images were banned. They include a photo of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Trump’s MAGA world cannot tolerate “Gay.” Newsflash: Enola Gay was the name of the pilot’s mother. Do American military members and civilians need protection from such words? Will Washington ban mention of the former NBA player, Rudy Gay? Did I hear on the grapevine that the White House will prohibit mention of R&B great, Marvin Gaye?
George Orwell warned against the control of language in his classic novel, “1984.” Through the Ministry of Truth, the autocrat Big Brother—is he real or a fictitious symbol?—corrupts language. Black is white, white is black. War is peace, peace is war. Oceana’s inhabitants—“citizens” seems inaccurate—have no objective way to view past, present and future. Truth has no place in their world. Alternative facts control their lives.
In our era of far-right social media and podcasting—this also applies to the far-left—fewer Americans look to responsible mainstream media for news and commentary. Truth is up for grabs and readily distorted. Donald Trump plays Pinocchio daily. So do legions of conspiracists. The Flat-Earth Society pales in comparison to what the White House and its enablers have been saying to support unsound policies.
Distorting or eliminating information represents attacks on democracy. An uninformed people can never be a free people. Turkey, Russia, China and North Korea offer prime examples of government control over media. Language and image restrictions and misinformation abet autocracy.
David French wrote in last Sunday’s New York Times (“The MAGA Culture War Comes for Georgetown Law”) that “Trump’s administration and his MAGA movement are the most dangerous and powerful censors in the United States. When an administration blatantly attacks the First Amendment, it attacks our national identity. The First Amendment is core to the idea of the United States of America. The Supreme Court has protected it even in our nation’s darkest and most dangerous moments.”
For guidance about the proper role of the American presidency in this regard, I turn to Jon Meacham, author of “And There was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.” Meacham writes, “In life, Lincoln’s motives were moral as well as political—a reminder that our finest presidents are those committed to bringing a flawed nation closer to the light, a mission that requires an understanding that politics divorced from conscience is fatal to the American experiment in liberty under law” (pp 419–20).
Steamrolling the First Amendment constitutes an unconscionable and vicious step towards destroying American democracy. I will use every word in my arsenal—like autocrat, ignoramus and tyranny—to oppose that.
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Thanks David.
It’s tempting to look at cases like the Enola Gay and scoff because they are so absurd, I know I did. But that reaction undermines what should be outrage at the deliberate degradation of language. If there are words you can’t use because they are “offensive” to those in power or words that have simply lost their meaning because they have been used to lie, then it becomes impossible to talk about things that need to be talked about — racism, poverty, etc. Those issues literally become unspeakable because their vocabulary is off limits.
And it’s also tempting to draw a false equivalency between MAGA efforts to ban certain words and progressive cancel culture. Yes, cancel culture is a real thing that has in some cases cost people their livelihoods. But, however misguided cancel culture may have been, it had at its roots a moral vision. Its flaw was in its absolutism — if you were not in perfect alignment with that vision, you were an enemy.
The administration’s attack on what it perceives to be the progressive lexicon is far worse. It lacks any coherent moral vision, and it seeks to take some issues completely out of the public sphere. It shares with cancel culture the rigid absolutist mindset, without any compelling moral foundation. That it produces absurd results is evidence of its moral bankruptcy, but it doesn’t make it funny. Rather, the fact that it leads to ridiculous outcomes proves that its premise is fatally flawed.
So, yes, keep using the words that describe reality — tyranny, autocracy, mindless cruelty. If we don’t speak of what some want to make unspeakable, the joke will be on us.
Good points, David.
I have a friend named Gay. Should i call her with the bad news?
I think so, David. She may be taking a risk.