One of the most important points George Orwell made in 1984 is that language shapes thought, defining the parameters of what a culture believes, what people are allowed to say, and what they are forbidden even to think. Leftists continue to see Orwell’s insight as an instruction manual, not a warning. Two examples emerged in the past few days. The first is that black college students put together a list of hundreds of dehumanizing, derogatory terms for white people. The second is that the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project is trying to “decolonize” scientific language, which involves walking away from reality.

In George Orwell’s totalitarian Oceania, the official language was “Newspeak.” This wasn’t an organic language; it was, instead, a state-mandated language intended to control people’s ability to think, especially to think about concepts such as freedom:

By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of The Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like Freedom is Slavery when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

There’s a direct line between Orwell’s Newspeak and the phrase “gender-affirming care” as an anodyne way of describing castrating boys or giving girls mastectomies and hysterectomies.

Image by Andrea Widburg

Humans are the only animal with language, and language, therefore, has tremendous power over our brains. That’s why it matters when black college students spend time and energy coming up with demeaning and dehumanizing terms for whites:

A document reportedly linked to black students at numerous universities refers to white people as “maggots,” “vermin” and “roaches.”

Altogether the document contains hundreds of derogatory names for white people, with some listed as a “favorite.” One of the listed favorites was “decomposing form of humanity.”

Other names referred to white people as “pigs” and “rats.”

[snip]

Listed slurs include “yeast maggots,” “mutated vermin” and “snow roaches,” according to the list, obtained by 1819 News from Heard.

This was not a youthful prank. Blacks, more than any other group in America, are inordinately sensitive to how language is used to demean people because, for so long, they were on the receiving end of that language. Even now, the infamous “n” word is the only unspeakable word in the English language…if you’re not black.

The black students who did this genuinely despise whites in the same way Nazis despised Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, blacks…. This is one of the most dangerous emanations we’ve seen yet of the left’s relentless drive to make America a racially divided society.

Meanwhile, some “scientists” are waging their own linguistic war, this one against reality and common sense:

American and Canadian scientists are urging the scientific community to do away with recognizing biological sex, including tossing “binary terms“ such as male and female, man, woman, mother, or father.

The Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Language Project is working hard to destroy the “colonialist” mindset that Western scientists are supposedly in by breaking down language that could be deemed to be offensive, according to The Times.

Instead of male and female, the research group wants people to use “sperm-producing” and “egg-producing” to avoid reinforcing “heteronormative views.” Father and mother should be replaced with “parent,” “egg donor” and “sperm donor” as well.

The gender binary is real and, to the extent some people have genetic malformations that leave them stuck between male and female, those are anomalies. We never define the whole by the anomaly—that is, we never do that unless we are ideologically-driven leftists who seek to take down western society, beginning with the most basic unit of all: Parents.

The left’s war on the American experiment, which is the most successful product of the coming together of the Judeo-Christian Bible, Greek philosophy, and the Enlightenment, isn’t just continuing, it’s escalating.