Words are important
Whoever controls the words controls the agenda and, more often than not, controls the outcome. It's something great debaters are familiar with. That is why Democrats are so obsessed with finding new ways to name people and policies that would normally be unpopular with Americans.
The Democrats know that if you don't have words or phrases that fit your agenda, you can just make up some new ones. They regularly create new terms such as woke, cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, and more. Then, importantly, rather than having a meaningful discussion about the underlying issue, they instead demand that conservatives simply fight the linguistic changes.
We've seen something as basic as gender redefined into a new alphabet of fragmented terms designed to fracture conversation so much that the science and morality underlying the terms become impossible to discuss.
Recently, Democrats have reframed "equality," a classic American concept, as "equity." Equality under the law has been a major force for all groups of people in this country. The Constitution guarantees this, and the Civil Rights Act reaffirms it. It should be a bedrock American idea.
To undermine the concept and prove that America still mistreats minorities and other special interest groups, the left has come up with "equity" — although nobody really understands what that means. Moreover, the left doesn't even try to make it clear. It's enough for leftists to claim you're stupid and racist if you don't get it.
So again, after decades of progress, equality has become another divisive argument.
The reality of an issue such as the right to bear arms should be debatable on simple constitutional terms. That's why the left reframes it into satellite issues such as a "national health crisis" or "national security imperative," or "gun control," making any resolution about the original issue impossible. Instead, we are left with an argument about the nature of the argument.
Once the original debate is lost in this morass, enough non–critical thinking people will buy into the new framework and be distracted by the host of newly created sub-issues, to the point at which the original intent has been lost entirely. They'll often just give up and walk away. Next, they'll promote push polls showing that the debate about the Second Amendment's core meaning has been lost in this blizzard of meaningless language.
Recently, we've been lectured and scolded like children with the harsh warning that election "fraud" doesn't exist. There are only "mistakes," and these aren't "systemic," but rare and random if they exist at all. Move along, nothing to see here.
The original discussion or question about election fraud has been attacked, minimized, demonized, and reframed to a point where anybody who even suggests that it might be a possibility is racist! How's that for reframing and changing the language? Now the discussion is about how racist the questioner is.
Another example of successful reframing through word choice is the whole "climate change" issue. Democrats started with the specific "global warming," which has a particular factual focus to debate. It can be settled. Now, though, they have the fractured and confusing climate change, which they're morphing into "climate emergency" and "extreme weather." Can one seriously debate "change," "emergency," or "extreme"? Again, any discussion is an argument about an argument.
Invariably, the reframing assures that there can be solutions, that the country will fracture even more, and that hate will increase. Don't allow any discussion about how any of these critical issues will have an impact on American society, culture, and country, perhaps for generations to come. Just make sure the arguments remain about the arguments. It's all chaos without solutions.
The reframers win the war every single time with this tactic because the country falls for this linguistic ruse nearly wholesale. It's why problems increase, and nothing ever gets solved. Like Humpty Dumpty, we may be too fractured to be put back together again.
Until we take back the language and focus on the substantive problems, no issue, local, state, regional, or national, will ever be solved.
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