Two days ago, news broke that Chita Rivera, the multi-talented star of Broadway, movies, and television, had passed away. Rivera, 91, was an entertaining dynamo who could sing, dance, and act. But this post is not about Rivera. Instead, it’s about what MSN.com’s automatic censorship system did to Dick Van Dyke. It seems like a trivial thing, but it’s not. Instead, it’s a subtle form of Big Brother censorship that slowly but so steadily destroys American’s ability to recognize ideas antithetical to leftist control.

When I saw that Rivera had died, I was curious to read her obituary given her longevity and breadth in the show biz world. The first article that popped up in response to my search appeared to be the obituary from The Hollywood Reporter (“THR”). I clicked over and discovered that, instead, it was MSN.com’s re-publication of the THR obituary. Fine. Whatever.

I started to read and instantly noticed something peculiar. I’ve highlighted it below:

Chita Rivera, the sultry singer, dancer and actress who commanded the Broadway stage for more than a half-century, has died. She was 91. 

[snip]

When West Side Story bowed in 1957, it was Rivera singing about life in America as the fiery Puerto Rican transplant Anita. As Rose Grant, the long-suffering girlfriend of songwriter Albert Peterson, Rivera received top billing over Dick Van D*** in 1960's Bye Bye Birdie.

[snip]

On TV, Rivera played Mrs. Dame opposite Martin Landau and Sally Kellerman on a 1964 episode of The Outer Limits titled "The Bellero Shield" and had a recurring role as the neighbor Connie Richardson (married to Richard Dawson‘s character) in 1973 on The New Dick Van D*** Show.

Who the heck is Dick Van D***? I was perplexed.

A quick check of the original THR essay revealed that the actor and show to which the obituary refers are properly spelled out at THR: Dick Van Dyke.

After a moment’s thought, I think I’ve figured out what’s going on. In some circles, the word “dyke” is a pejorative used to describe a lesbian. Of course, as with the N-word, for the in-crowd, it’s not a pejorative at all. Just as blacks routinely refer to themselves using a word banned to all others, for decades, one of the highlights of the San Francisco Pride Parade has been the “Dykes on Bikes” segment, as hundreds of often topless women roar by on motorcycles. Heck, the group even has a web page!

Nevertheless, the MSN.com AI algorithm is relentless: The word “dyke” must be purged. And the fact that it’s attached to the name of one of America’s greatest comic actors (who, at 98, can be forgiven for being a leftist) is irrelevant to the all-powerful march of wokism and artificial intelligence.

And that’s why this story, although seemingly inconsequential, matters. One of my major complaints about conservatives is that they always believe that, once they’ve won a single battle, they’ve won the war. Having achieved a victory, they pack up, go home, and get on with their lives. Leftists, however, don’t operate on a battle-by-battle basis. Instead, they’re engaged in a global, winner-take-all war, and they understand that every battle matters and that all lost battles can be still re-fought against an enemy that keeps walking away from its victories.

This mindset means that there is no issue too small for leftists to address and control. The word “dyke,” unless used in a careful affirmative manner by the dykes themselves, must be deleted from the world. And now, AI is there to help make sure that global censorship happens.

George Orwell explained that the whole point of Newspeak in Big Brother’s Oceania, a completely totalitarian state, was to contract people’s vocabulary so much that certain ideas became impossible. If there are no words for an abstract thought, that thought ceases to exist.

We already live in a world in which people’s vocabulary is shrinking dramatically, especially amongst the most credentialed, leaving them with increasingly less scope to think and communicate their ideas. Thanks to MSN and AI, it’s about to shrink a little more—and soon, Dick Van Dyke himself, a straight white male, will surely be deleted, too.

Image: Dick Van Dyke in 2017 (edited) by Gage Skimore. CC BY-SA 2.0.