The language gap: AOC edition

I don't like to write about AOC. It's an unpleasant subject in more ways than one, and I don't like to give her any more attention than she already gets from a crazed media (especially the conservative media, which is making the same mistake with regard to AOC that the mainstream media made with Trump).

That said, AOC fits so perfectly into a phenomenon I wrote about last September that I couldn't resist. From that post:

One worrying sign of the sharpening polarization in America is the increasing inability of the Blue Church to communicate with the rest of the country. Not only do the bizarre ideological fixations of the Left appear to the majority of Americans to be increasingly unhinged and divorced from reality, but the very vocabulary of the Left -- the actual words Leftist use -- bear an ever-more-tenuous connection to normal English.

I was recently thinking about AOC's "voice"... the distinctive way that she communicates on Twitter. Love it or hate it (personally, I find it about as appealing as a million fingernails scraping a chalkboard in unison), there is no denying its power and appeal to a large swath of the country.

AOC's "voice" is a millennial voice, narcissistic and self-satisfied, aggressively liberal, but reasonable-sounding enough to command wide assent. Something else caught my attention too. AOC may be the first mainstream, national politician to communicate in the strange vernacular of Social Justice - an idiom that includes terms and phrases such as these:

• "calling in"
• "centering their concerns"
• "climate delayers"
• "frontline/impacted communities"
• "intersectionally"
• "Latinx"
• "LGBTQ+ inclusion"
• "tokenism"

It goes without saying that, although her meaning is usually clear in context, many of the terms that she uses are totally incomprehensible to normal Americans. "Latinx"? WTF?

I close with this characteristic AOC tweet:

GOP defensively say, “we’re not scared of dancing women!” yet proceed to use footage of me dancing “with the color drained to make it look more ominous.” ?? Spoiler: The GOP *is* scared of dancing women, because they fear the liberation of all identities taught to feel shame.

The USA is so over.

Triumph

It's over.

They threw everything they had at him. They mobilized the entire vast apparatus of the evil establishment for their shameful, lying campaign to take down a good man, a mild-mannered Catholic of impeccable reputation, and they failed. The effort backfired on the Democrats, hideously and spectacularly.

The disgusting and cynical attack on Kavanaugh will not be forgotten. If you come at the king, you best not miss. The Democrats missed, and they will pay the price in the midterms. And they will continue to pay the price in the form of awakened Republican anger, and a newly radicalized Kavanaugh who will, we can hope, exact his revenge from the bench of the highest court in the land.

 

Conservatives are beginning to discover what it means to win. It is an unfamiliar feeling for people on the political Right. We are so used to noble defeat and Pyrrhic victories, to endless, shameless betrayal by the Republican establishment. Fine rhetoric about muh Constitution and muh principles, and perhaps the occasional tax cut and pointless foreign war, while the greatest nation in the history of the world morphs into a continent-sized freak show. "Winning" meant George W Bush in the Oval Office. Now, for the first time in 30 years, under the magnificent God-Emperor, we are starting to win by ACTUALLY FUCKING WINNING.

Make no mistake, this is a landmark victory. We now have possibly the most conservative Supreme Court since 1934; this is real power. The Left is in disarray, but it is also dangerous, like a wounded animal that is still far from dead. Having failed to defeat Kavanaugh through the normal political process, and having failed to ruin his life through their despicable lies and machinations, the Left will now extend and widen the battle to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself. They are already laying the groundwork for this next phase of the conflict. "Kavanaugh’s confirmation will have poisoned the foundation of the judiciary’s authority." If they cannot keep the court, they will burn it down.

There is literally no institution, no custom, no tradition, no bedrock American value the Left will not eagerly demolish in its insane, totalizing quest for utopia. Do I exaggerate? Forget limited government, forget guns and border enforcement...  now they're attacking the freakin' presumption of innocence!!!

Mike Cernovich made the astute point that the establishment media has lost any remaining credibility through this fiasco. Even the formerly admired Ronan Farrow has completely jumped the shark, penning not one, but two ludicrous hit pieces against Kavanaugh in The New Yorker. Why would anyone even bother to refute a hit piece anymore? The media is totally, utterly fake and everyone knows it. If you're ever accused of something by the media, all you have to do is say "fake news" and you've won the argument.

But the damage runs deeper than that. As @Instapundit noted, "Trump's greatest gift is getting various institutions to make clear in obvious ways that they're as corrupt as he says they are." This was in reference to the story that hundreds -- ultimately more than 2,400 -- law professors had signed a letter arguing that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed based on his judicial temperament. As if the righteous fury of a good man falsely accused, when defending himself before the Senate and the nation in the capacity of a witness, has any bearing whatsoever on his temperament as a judge! And then there is the contemptible bias displayed by the ACLU and the American Bar Association.

The Democratic party. The media. The legal profession. All severely damaged, if not comprehensively discredited, in a matter of weeks.

The Right has won a huge victory, but there are many more battles to come. The Left will grow crazier, more desperate and more violent as their world continues to fall apart. Our political system will devolve into chaos and our institutions will continue to bleed legitimacy. There is little doubt that the United States is on a greased slope to collapse, but we need to keep winning or what replaces the US will be worse than we can imagine.

The language gap

One worrying sign of the sharpening polarization in America is the increasing inability of the Blue Church to communicate with the rest of the country. Not only do the bizarre ideological fixations of the Left appear to the majority of Americans to be increasingly unhinged and divorced from reality, but the very vocabulary of the Left -- the actual words Leftist use -- bear an ever-more-tenuous connection to normal English.

I just came across an example of this in a New Yorker article on Linus Torvalds, the irascible creator of Linux, who decided to step down temporarily after the magazine confronted him about complaints that his "abusive behavior" had discouraged women from working as Linux programmers. The article finds no evidence that Torvalds' notorious rudeness was directed specifically at female programmers, or was intended to discourage women as a category from contributing to Linux.

In any case, the article describes the efforts of Sage Sharp, "a prominent Linux contributor," to influence Torvald's behavior and impose a Code of Conduct on the project. I was struck by this sentence:

In 2013, Sharp, who is nonbinary and uses “they/them” pronouns, confronted Torvalds on his home turf—the public Linux kernel mailing list.

Now, I have come across the term "nonbinary" before, and I imagine most regular readers of the New Yorker have as well. They are, I assume, steeped in the vernacular of social justice. A majority of Americans, however -- perhaps a large majority -- when confronted with the matter-of-fact assertion that some individual is "nonbinary" and uses the pronouns "they" and "them" to describe xirself, would have absolutely no idea what the fuck that means.

Other examples abound, of words that are pregnant with meaning to Leftist elites but meaningless, incomprehensible or totally misunderstood by the rest of America. "Cisgender." "Privilege." "Being an ally." "Intersectionality." "Safe space." Insane concepts denoted by fake words or made-up uses of normal words. They infest the discourse of the modern Left, these alien locutions as indecipherable to the average American as a Sanskrit mantra.

It bodes ill for our republic that important segments of the elite no longer speak to the rest of us, but have retreated into a make-believe world, speaking an arcane court language that nobody else understands.

The Left and violence

In case you think I've overgeneralized in calling out the Left's propensity to advocate violence against heretical thinkers, as witnessed by the strange online reaction to the punching of Richard Spencer, consider what this liberal has to say:

I made a miscalculation earlier today. I suspected that many of the people cheering Spencer’s attack did so innocently, and by minimizing the assault– that is, they think that’s okay to hit him but not go much further than that. I made a pretty simple point on Twitter: even a single punch can disable or kill a man, and therefore Spencer’s attacker conceivably could have killed him.

The tweet took off, and not in a good way. Literally hundreds of people responded, all saying that they would have loved if the attacker had killed Spencer. Some went further, calling for the extrajudicial killing of all Nazis.

...

I honestly don’t have room for all the responses along these lines. These are also the polite responses, not the ones calling me a Nazi or calling for my death.

It was an eye-opening reaction. The reason I penned the tweet was because I thought the liberal consensus that serves as the bedrock of the American society was intact. I had this whole spiel planned about how if we as a society endorse violence against one Nazi, we’re responsible if it leads to worse violence, maybe even murder, where do you draw the line, blah blah blah. I thought it was more or less self-evident that you don’t murder people on the street for expressing views you don’t like. I thought we were all the same page, and I was wrong.

What was most depressing is that the pro-violence responses came almost uniformly from liberals. I suppose that isn’t that shocking: 51% of modern Democrats believe the government should ban hateful speech entirely. The more intelligent responses phrased it this way: Nazis are so violent, so dangerous, so outside the mainstream, they don’t deserve the usual protections afforded to political speech, including protection from violence. Still, it is sad to see so many liberal Americans abandoning one of the founding suppositions of liberalism at the dawn of an administration where it will be more necessary than ever before.