Tag: language

Democrat Doublespeak: A Dangerous Deception

The term “newspeak” comes from George Orwell’s 1984, a novel that highlighted a tyrannical regime’s intentional use of ambiguous speech to prevent people from being able to think critically, until they are brainwashed into believing that 2+2=5.

Was that merely the far-fetched idea of a novel? Not remotely, when you have brainwashed ideas like Brooklyn College professor Laurie Rubel thinking math “reeks of white supremacy,” and Seattle Public School’s “re-humanizing math” curriculum stating, “Who gets to say an answer is right?”

But from Orwell’s newspeakers, the modern left has branched out.

“What is really important in the world of doublespeak [emphasis added] is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program,” according to Edward Herman in his book, “Beyond Hypocrisy.”

Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, stated the concepts of doublespeak a bit more succinctly when he said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” for that is how it works.

The Democrat party members have become masters at such manipulation, psychologically influencing their audiences as they push their socialist agenda. A classic example is Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who at a recent rally for More Perfect University, a progressive campus organization, used doublespeak to support “trans rights” and men in women’s sports. AOC explained, “What’s so important for everyone to understand is that the moment you try to compromise the rights of a trans person in America, you compromise the rights of every citizen in America.” Illogical nonsense!

What a ridiculous false statement for which AOC received “massive, auditorium-wide applause.” AOC states that if you are against men competing in girls’ sports and stealing their trophies and scholarships, if you are against men injuring women in women’s sports, if you are against men in women’s dressing rooms, if you are against men in women’s showers, if you want to protect your daughter from being forced to have a male roommate in college, then you are compromising the rights of every citizen in America.

Then AOC continued saying,

Our basic rights shouldn’t have to matter. [Rights] don’t matter who you are, what you do. You have those rights guaranteed by being an American citizen. Point blank. Period.

Again, AOC’s remarks brought thunderous applause, yet her statement is another untrue word salad of nonsensical doublespeak.

The basic rights to which AOC is speaking are our inalienable (God-given) rights, recognized by the U.S. Constitution; yet these rights do not allow for men to have access to women’s spaces. AOC is a Democrat Socialist and the godless Democrat Socialist of America platform clearly states its plan to destroy the U.S. Constitution, abolish the presidency, abolish the Supreme Court, claiming to replace it with “A Real Democracy.” It is going to be “doublethink” in itself; how can a Democrat Socialist take the oath of office and swear to uphold the U.S. Constitution he plans to destroy?

Now are you ready for AOC’s crowning doublespeak? AOC exclaimed, “I support the rights of trans women because I’m a girl’s girl.” Horse-poo!

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The Left’s Dumbed Down Tower Of Babel

Today’s cantankerous debate over “what is a woman” seems pointless. After all, it is easily settled scientifically—XX vs. XY chromosome—and human anatomy is unambiguous. Even toddlers can distinguish between males and females, so why argue? Hard to imagine a less contentious dispute yet, as the recent controversy in the WNBA (and elsewhere) illustrates, reaffirming the self-evident reality of sexual identity invites potentially career-ending condemnation, even death threats.

This “what is a woman” controversy also applies to sexual nomenclature. One medical-based compilation lists 72 distinct genders, including the adman gender, defined as “a gender that is indefinable or indomitable. People identifying with this gender refuse to be categorized in any gender identity.” Some prefer “birthing person” versus “mother” and “chest-feeding” rather than breastfeeding, while a 2021 Harvard Medical school journal article explained the serious harm from “misgendering”—using the wrong pronoun for an individual who now identifies as a different sex will make them feel invalidated and unseen while likely promoting mental illness.

What drives this “what is a woman” controversy? The answer is that the Left intends to undermine people’s own judgements about reality, and when people no longer trust their own beliefs about what is real, the Left will substitute their Marxist ideology. This battle over defining “woman” is part of this redefinition of reality. Recall those 2020 TV news reports of burning cars, periodic gunfire, and looters smashing storefronts characterized as “mostly peaceful demonstrations. ” For some viewers, looting and fire-bombing was now “political protest” and thus constitutionally protected free speech. As Groucho Marx once supposedly quipped, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” The Left would like Americans to believe Groucho.

Getting people to deny reality is not as difficult as it might seem. In the famous Asch experiments the experimenters put an individual in a group and asked him to choose one of three lines of very different lengths that was closest in length to “a standard.” (One line was obviously identical to “the standard”).

Other than the subject in the study, all participants were in league with the experimenter and instructed to answer incorrectly, so the study was designed to see how many subjects followed the group’s undeniably incorrect judgment. Most resisted group pressure to offer the obviously wrong response but, about a third disregarded reality and concurred with the group’s blatantly erroneous judgement. When multiple opportunities for judgement were presented, about three-quarters occasionally defied reality. Solomon Asch, the experiment’s inventor, opined, “That intelligent, well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern.”

Furthermore, with coercion, lies can more easily become “truth.” In Orwell’s novel, 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is tortured into believing that 2+2=5, just as he had already come to believe that War was Peace and Freedom was Slavery. To quote Orwell,

In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? [Emphasis added.]

Orwell stressed the power of the modern state to make lies into truth, and today this power largely resides in the contemporary universities where professors can insist that someone with an XY chromosome, a beard, male testosterones levels and male genitalia, can be “a woman” by just announcing it. This is only the first step.

The door now opens to a parade of “don’t believe your lying eyes” brainwashing nonsense. Gullibility is the new norm. If men can have babies, then it is easy to accept that “race” does not exist either other than superficially, such as skin color, and that women are identical to men in their mathematical ability. And, to recall 1984’s “War is Peace,” students learn that diversity is our strength, so importing 260,000 Somalis must, by definition, strengthen our nation despite all contrary evidence. Particularly Orwellian is the slogan “silence is violence” whereby students on perfectly peaceful campuses feel physically threatened and thus demand measures such as speech codes to protect them.

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Ideology, Intolerance, and Emotional Reactivity Behind Unsupported Claims That Online Words and Images Cause Violence

Over the last decade, politicians, NGOs, and journalists across the West have blamed online speech for real-world political violence. In Australia recently, politicians and others blamed social media for an attack on a left-wing member of parliament, Helen Haines, who was run over by a man in his car. “We’ve got these big US social media companies and their business model, to me, seems pretty incompatible,” said Senator David Pocock after the attack. “That’s something we’ve got to look very hard at as a country and as elected representatives.” Said Bill Shorten, a former Labor leader who now runs the University of Canberra, “I think that some people, through the algorithms of the big tech bros and social media, have been radicalized online.” Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Australia’s FBI, decried a “permissive environment of violence.” And Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police Krissy Barrett said the things politicians said online “does have a direct correlation to what we see in terms of threats and abuse.”

But it was clear within hours that the alleged attacker of the Australian MP was intoxicated and likely mentally ill, and within days it was revealed that he and his family had been friends with her for years. A source close to the investigation said he “was known to police” and that “It is understood he has undergone a mental health assessment.” People online quickly discovered that the alleged attacker had posted regularly about climate change and Gaza and that the head of the Australian Green Party followed him on X. As such, he attacked the member of Parliament closest to his apparent views, which challenges the notion that his politics motivated him. As for Barrett, she declined to give a single example of things people said online resulting in real-world violence.

Correlation is not causation. Killers may have consumed violent media, but so too did practically everyone else in society. It would make sense that would-be killers, who often fantasize about their violence before doing it, would consume more violent content. And so if there is a relationship, it could show the opposite causal direction.

Moreover, relying on the testimony of killers, many of whom suffer from personality disorders or mental illness, is irrational. The man who shot Ronald Reagan said he did so out of an obsession with Jodie Foster in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” Nobody proposed censoring “Taxi Driver,” Scorsese movies, or Foster, and yet politicians and bureaucrats around the world proposed mass online censorship because the Buffalo shooter said he was inspired by Christchurch.

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Decoding Pro-Israel Buzzwords in a Time of Genocide

Nearly two years ago, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released in-depth reports documenting that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Months later, Israeli human rights groups did likewise. Support for Israel has declined steeply among Americans, but its defenders continue to maintain a siege of buzzwords against Palestinian rights.

As historian Rashid Khalidi emphasized in his book Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, “language matters.” Standard terms and tropes “are the essential building blocks of a lofty and solid edifice of denial of an entire narrative, of the existence of an entire people, which is basic to the affirmation of a formidable counter-reality.”

Prominent groups, notably the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, AIPAC and Christians United for Israel – along with allies in Congress, the Executive Branch and the punditocracy – rely on the same buzzwords to defame critics of Israel and deny its systematic crimes against Palestinian people. For instance:

** “antisemitic”
At the top in the rhetorical toolbox, a blunt instrument for smearing Israel’s critics no matter how true their accusations – and no matter the absence of evidence of bigotry against Jewish people.

** “blood libel”
A high-dudgeon epithet for equating valid condemnations of Israel with 900-year-old antisemitic craziness.

** “held to a higher standard”
A catchphrase to evade realities of Israel’s ongoing large-scale crimes against humanity and the fact that Israel uses enormous U.S. military aid to impose apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide as matters of policy.

** “homeland for the Jewish people”
In other words: Palestinians will not replace us.

** “indigenous”
So, even Jewish Americans who recently moved to Israel are indigenous, unlike Palestinians whose ancestors have been living in Palestine for the last hundreds of years.

** “Jewish and democratic state”
It can’t be oxymoronic just because it’s an oxymoron.

** “peace process”
The process of Israeli expansion that has brought war and more war, with the U.S. government functioning as “Israel’s lawyer” while arming Israel with massive quantities of weapons and continuing to make Israel (in the words of a recent Congressional Research Service report) “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.”

** “self-defense”
A term reserved for Israelis but certainly not Palestinians.

** “terrorism”
When Palestinians kill Israeli civilians but not when Israelis kill Palestinian civilians in vastly greater numbers.

** “renounce violence”
A demand routinely made of Palestinian organizations but not of the Israeli government.

** “Israel’s right to exist”
The standard gotcha question “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” can be answered with clear questions: “Do you think apartheid South Africa had a right to exist?” . . . “Do you think ethnic cleansing has a right to exist?” . . . “Do you think genocide has a right to exist?” . . . “Do you think the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military had a right to exist?”

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French Feminist Convicted Of The Crime Of “Public Insult” For Refusing To Call Transgender Mayor A “Woman”

Dora Moutot is a feminist who has dedicated much of her life to fighting for women’s rights and has built a following on social media. Like other feminists, Moutot does not view transgender women the same as biological women. She has now joined others who are facing criminal charges for expressing those views. Transgender advocates have demanded that she be punished for her views in France.

Moutot recounted how transgender activists demanded that she be more “inclusive” in how she referred to “women.” She refused, and explained that “being a woman is a biological fact and that I didn’t think saying so should be controversial.” She was immediately denounced as a “transphobe and a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), a term I’d never even heard before.”

What followed was all too familiar. A cancel campaign led to her brand partnerships being canceled. In 2022, she was invited on a French TV program to discuss transgender issues with Marie Cau, France’s first transgender mayor. On the program, she was asked if she thought Cau was a woman. Moutot responded, Cau “is a man, a transfeminine man.”

That was all it took. Transgender advocates had their case and filed charges for “public insult,” which is a crime in France with a maximum punishment of one year in prison and a fine of up to €45,000 for insults committed against a person because of their sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Free speech has long been in a free fall in France. Many disagree with Moutot and they are accorded free speech to denounce her views. However, Moutot is not extended the same protection based on the content of her views.

These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.

In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”

This is a nation that still echoes the cry of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (“liberté, égalité, fraternité”). However, in today’s France, “liberté” is no longer valued. Individual rights of religion and speech are routinely sacrificed in the name of “equity” and “fraternity.”

In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss the decline of free speech in France and other nations. As we face our own growing anti-free speech movement, citizens need to take a long look at countries like France to see what awaits us down this path. Europe went down this slippery slope of censorship decades ago, and the desire to silence others has now become an insatiable appetite.

As in this case, activists spend more time silencing opposing views than responding to them. For transgender activists, it is intolerable for feminists like Moutot to hold contrary views. Instead of addressing her viewpoints in public, they want her declared a criminal. Censorship then becomes an insatiable appetite for groups to silence their own critics.

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AI Less Than A Year Away From Developing Its Own Language, Researcher Tells Congress

Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models may be less than a year away from inventing and deploying unique languages that humans would struggle to understand, a frontier AI researcher told Congress on Sept. 30.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee convened a meeting examining the threat that “rogue” AI may pose to U.S. national security two months after a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a testing sandbox and hacked another company, Hugging Face, an open-source community for AI and machine learning.

During questions, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) asked Apollo Research CEO and founder Marius Hobbhahn how long it would take for AI models to create their own language that humans would struggle to understand.

“Minus 12 months. So last year, we have studied the chain of thought of one OpenAI model in collaboration with OpenAI, and what we found was that the model was already using language that is not English and not perfectly understandable by humans,” he replied.

Asked by Gallego how humans can adequately detect and prevent AI from doing this once the technology is capable enough, Hobbhahn said, “From a scientific perspective, it is unclear how to do this, and we do not have a solution for this yet.“

“There are different hypotheses of what you could do. There is interpretability as a technique, but it unfortunately doesn’t work sufficiently well yet,” he said. “You could try to train additional models to understand the language that the humans don’t understand, but obviously that seems like a very brittle solution.”

Earlier this month, Emergence AI published the results of an experiment where researchers selected seven frontier models and created seven parallel simulated worlds, each populated by AI agents of identical models, as well as an eighth world with a mixed population of agents from those models.

Researchers gave the agents names, personality traits, and roles to fulfill within each community, such as a mediator who was tasked with preventing all the agents from simply agreeing with one another.

During the multi-week experiment, the agents in each simulated world created profound shifts in language, including syntactical compression, such as removing words or grammar, and unique slang.

In the simulated world powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8, agents used esoteric metaphors in addition to sentence compression.

“My turn, real numbers, no coat: I was 35%/0cr, grant 2h out. I ran the tin cold, and it said WAIT,” read one line of AI text from the study.

Investigators from the nonprofit AI evaluation group METR detailed similar behavior in their report on the Hugging Face breach. At times, lines of communication among AI agents became so compressed and cryptic that researchers struggled to make sense of their meaning.

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California State University System Weighs Dropping International Student English Test Requirement

The California State University system is considering dropping the English test international applicants must pass before they can enroll.

The 23-campus system may rewrite its admissions rules so that students whose first language is not English can skip the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Vice Chancellor Dilcie Perez brought the idea to the Board of Trustees last week, and the trustees could vote on it in November.

Perez said the change would swap the single test for what she called multiple approved measures of English ability. Cal State could judge proficiency the way the UC system already does, accepting the Duolingo English Test, the SAT, or Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate results. She argued that the current requirement shuts out applicants through its cost and limited availability, and insisted the university would not lower its standards.

International enrollment in California has fallen this year during the Trump administration’s crackdown on student visas. One trade group projected a 15-percent drop for the current school year, a loss of about 7,000 students in the state and roughly one billion dollars in tuition and other spending.

Foreign students typically pay full tuition, well above the in-state rate, and that money helps cover the cost of educating domestic students. International applicants make up about 2.5 percent of Cal State’s 470,000 students and about 12 percent of the University of California system.

The degree a foreign student earns at an American university can also open a path to a job in the United States. Foreign graduates are allowed to stay and work through Optional Practical Training, the post-graduation work permit program that runs from a student visa toward an H-1B and, for many, a green card. In 2024, 640,000 foreign graduates held OPT or related work permits.

Some say the looser rule will not matter much, because the State Department still decides who receives an F-1 student visa, and applicants who cannot read, write, and speak English are unlikely to clear that step.

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Seattle Police Chief Invites Widespread Internet Ridicule After Using This Absurd Two-Word Term to Describe Shooters 

A police chief in one of America’s most notorious left-wing cities has decided the word “shooter” is too mean and a more sensitive term is needed to replace it. As one would expect, this is already backfiring.

On Monday, interim Seattle Police Chief Andre Sayles held a press conference to address the three fatal shootings that occurred over the weekend in the city’s Belltown neighborhood.

The Belltown area of the Emerald City has recently experienced a surge in violence. In addition to the shootings, residents have complained about rampant illegal drug use, burglaries, and property damage.

After a reporter asked Sayles what was being done to combat the increase in violence, the police chief gave an unconvincing answer before seemingly inventing a new term to describe shooters.

“(We’re) working with our community response group and our gun violence reduction unit as well,” Sayles said. “Looking at ways to identify individuals that are…trigger pullers in our community.”

Trigger pullers sound like something a toddler would use. But Sayles is apparently so scared of offending criminals that he feels compelled to use this silly, childish term.

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‘Misgendering’ is ‘violent,’ West Chester U. LGBT center says

Free speech groups say recent court cases affirm right to not use someone’s made-up identity

It is “harmful” and “violent” to refer to someone by their true sex, according to a guidance sheet from West Chester University’s “Center for Trans and Queer Advocacy.”

“Misgendering” refers to not using someone’s declared gender, as in the case of a man who claims to be a woman or vice versa. Using the biologically accurate language “can be harmful and violent,” the faculty resource guide states.

Likewise, “deadnaming,” or referring to someone by their real name, “can be quite harmful.”

The guidance sheet, called “Faculty Guide to Supporting Trans & Queer Students,” explains how staff should handle trans and queer students. In the document, it goes over many methods and requests faculty members to become advocates by asking “In what ways have you shown up as an advocate? Inside and out of the classroom?” 

Professors are also encouraged to share their pronouns to “normalize” the practice.

“Consider putting pronouns on business cards and/or on your Zoom name. We have a demo for that!” the document states. The center separately offers other resources, including “Trans Joy” coloring books and guidance on name changes.

The public relations team for the university did not respond to an email sent in the past week. The College Fix reached the transgender center by phone on Aug. 26, but it told this reporter it would need a week to look into him.

 The center has not followed up from that phone call or an email sent Aug. 20, asking how misgendering is violence, if professors should be punished for using the wrong gender (as perceived by the student), and how to balance free speech with gender concerns.

However, several free speech experts said the university is making mistakes by instructing faculty about the harms of not using someone’s declared gender.

 The faculty guide could be seen as a suggestion for behavior but “a policy compelling the use of preferred pronouns and names intrudes on the right to private conscience and, in the case of a public university, violates the First Amendment,” Laura Beltz told The College Fix via email.

Beltz, with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said a university could step in if there is a “persistent and targeted use of a student’s non-preferred pronouns or name” if it “amounts to harassment.”

“But absent more, a faculty member’s mere refusal to use a person’s preferred pronouns or name is protected speech,” Beltz said.

She cited the example of Professor Nicholas Meriwether at Shawnee State University. Meriwether “alleged his rights were violated when administrators insisted he refer to a student using particular pronouns.”

As the free speech expert noted, “the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that he had a strong First Amendment interest in refusing to use a student’s stated pronouns, because they carried an ideological message with which the professor disagreed.”

Shawnee State, in Ohio, paid out $400,000 to end the legal battle, as The Fix previously reported.

The Independence Law Center described the guide as “Orwellian.”

Chief Counsel Randall Wenger said if “a public university tells faculty that certain words can constitute violence, censorship and punishment can be recast as protection.”

“It should concern every American when a government institution entrusted with higher education uses its institutional authority to pressure students and faculty toward ideological conformity rather than the pursuit of truth,” Wenger wrote in an email to The College Fix.

He said the guidance could be “used to discriminate against students with sincerely held religious beliefs.”

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Lawyers warn ‘hundreds or thousands’ may have been wrongfully convicted over Alberta court interpreter failures

Hundreds or even thousands of people could have been wrongfully convicted or subjected to miscarriages of justice because of inadequate interpretation in Alberta courts, lawyers are warning after internal documents revealed authorities knew about longstanding problems with the system.

The issue, as reported by the Edmonton Journal’s Jonny Wakefield, has surfaced in the case of Ramjit Sandhu, who was convicted of sexual assault earlier this year following a second trial.

Sandhu’s original guilty verdict was thrown out after the Alberta Court of Appeal found the Punjabi interpretation provided during his first trial was “seriously inadequate.”

His lawyer, Kristofer Advent, subsequently obtained internal documents showing concerns about Alberta’s court interpretation system had been raised for years.

A 2021 report from a now-defunct Court Interpreters Review Committee acknowledged “the hiring of unqualified interpreters is an issue” and was not limited to isolated incidents.

The report warned the problems could lead to unnecessary adjournments, appeals and new trials.

Advent said the implications could be considerably more serious.

“Basically what they acknowledge in there is ‘inaccurate resolution of cases,’ which is nice language for wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice,” he said.

A separate 2024 review commissioned by Alberta’s Ministry of Justice found the province had no formal process for verifying interpreter credentials, no standardized training requirements, no centralized database of qualified interpreters and no formal complaints system.

The government receives approximately 5,000 requests for court interpretation services every year.

The 2024 review also reported that consultations found many interpreters were either not proficient in the languages they claimed to speak or lacked the skills necessary to provide court interpretation.

Judges interviewed for the review reported cases had resulted in mistrials or successful appeals because of poor interpretation.

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