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Sept. 18, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
27:21
'The Linguistic Battlefield' - Jeff Deist.

Jeff Deist on the linguistic wars and why you should choose your words carefully.

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Time Text
War On Language 00:15:17
Next up, a dear friend of mine, someone I've known for a long time, this is a man that he takes something and he always leaves it better.
He used to be the former chief of staff for Congressman Ron Paul at his office.
Many people know him as the former president of the Mises Institute, which he was a superstar during his tenure there.
He made the place what it is today.
Today he works for, he's the general counsel for monetary medals there.
lucky to have this man, Jeff Deist.
Thanks Chris.
So there is, of course, a war on for your words, but there's a war on everything.
So why wouldn't there be a war on for your words?
In 1984, Friedrich Hayek gave a very interesting interview in which he told the interviewer that basically David Hume and Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, had identified that there are three spontaneously occurring institutions in society.
Okay, sounds interesting, namely law, money, and language.
I thought this was a really interesting observation by Hayek because we all think a lot about law.
And I would suspect that most of us in this room would be proponents of a type of law that arises naturally, right?
It evolves from the bottom up.
We call that common law.
And that the role of lawmakers is to discover the law, the natural law, the truth, and to develop this slowly and painstakingly over time so we achieve justice.
Common law has a local or a temporal element to it.
We don't need these positive law legislatures to tell us what the law is.
Law can occur naturally.
Most of us in this room would believe that.
Same thing with money.
Menger taught us that money arises spontaneously in the marketplace as the best commodity for barter, the most saleable commodity with certain properties.
And that's what I think most of us would want.
We would want money to arise naturally in the marketplace.
And we don't need these national governments and their treasuries.
We don't need these central banks to give us money.
That would be a happy world.
But what about language?
What about language as an institution?
I bet most of us don't think about it that way very often.
But if language is an institution, then it too can arise naturally, bottom-up.
It can evolve and develop on its own without these masters and these elites and these governments and these commissars imposing it on us.
And so if we begin to think about language like we think about the economy, we might say, well, I would like to have a laissez-faire linguistic system where all of us participating in language, and in our case, the English language, every day, that's how language evolves naturally.
But we might think about those aforementioned elites as engaged in interventionism, not just in the economy, but in our language, linguistic interventionism.
In other words, there are all kinds of nefarious people in government, in academia, in media, in places like the Modern Language Association, if you know what that putrid trade guild is, who are actually trying to impose language on us as opposed to allowing it to evolve bottom-up.
And so if we begin to think about language as an institution, which I think is just an absolutely mind-blowing concept, and how important it is in our day-to-day lives and in this terrible political system we have, then we know that like any institution, and we're seeing this in America, it's subject to capture by people with very different agendas than the people in this room.
So our language, our birthright, Shakespeare's English, is actually being captured slowly but surely every day.
But unlike some of those other institutions in society where we feel pretty powerless, you know, government and politics or media or academia or even the big, you know, the Roman Catholic Church, the mainline synagogues, the mainline Protestant denominations, we might feel like we don't have much say over what they do.
Each and every one of us in this room has the ability to participate in the institution of language each and every day.
We can be foot soldiers in this linguistic battlefield.
Nobody's stopping us.
Right?
That's the difference.
So I would encourage you to be thinking along those lines.
Now, if any of you suffered through portions of the Democratic National Committee nomination process the other week, I didn't watch it on television, but I did see some of the clips on YouTube.
And they had the Chiron, sort of like the TV Chiron that's going across the podium as all these people are speaking.
And it just struck me that it just had these absolutely meaningless terms going across, these complete euphemisms.
Meaningless.
And so one word that was going across it, I think during Tim Waltz, was freedom.
Okay.
Well, I would suspect that most of us in this room would view freedom as a negative rights concept.
Freedom is the ability to live your life without state coercion.
It's not a freedom to have other people's stuff.
I think we would mostly agree on that definition of freedom.
And then I thought, well, I bet you the people at that convention hall view that term very, very differently.
So differently that we might even wonder how it's the same word, the same number of letters.
Because I'm telling you, left progressives view freedom as a set of necessary preconditions for self-actualization.
That's what progressives think freedom means.
Freedom means when you don't have to worry about the grocery bill, you don't have to worry about the mortgage.
Education's free.
Health care, so-called, is free.
Everything's free.
And then you can kind of, as Marx wanted, you can spend all your day painting or something.
Can you imagine if most of us were painters, how awful it would be?
If I were a painter, oh my God.
But no, this is what the left thinks freedom is.
It's a set of conditions to be provided by other people.
So those two definitions of freedom don't work, right?
You can't have one word with two opposite definitions.
And of course, George Orwell in 1946 writes this tremendous essay, Politics in the English Language.
And he understood this.
He called it meaningless words.
Meaningless words are words that are overused or abused or misused to the point where they just become these political bludgeons.
They don't actually have any coded meaning to them.
And Orwell knew what he was talking about.
You know, Orwell was a propagandist for the BBC during World War II in India.
Part of his job was to counter Nazi propaganda.
And so he gave us this wonderful concept of meaningless words.
And we see every day, every day, with all this white noise that bombards us, we see that meaningless words are really weapons to be wielded in political combat.
They're not words to create communication or understanding between humans.
And this war, this war on language, which is nothing new, by the way, it's always existed, but this war on our language, it's interested in you, whether you're interested in it or not.
And that's what I hope you would take away today: we're all part of this.
And if you're not a combatant, you can't be a bystander.
You're probably a prisoner.
And you're probably losing this linguistic war and all these little cold minor skirmishes we see each and every day.
So we've identified a lot of this evolution, this top-down imposition in language.
You know, we used to call it PC.
We called it political correctness.
That term's been around since the 90s.
Seems almost quaint today.
PC was this sort of conscious or design manipulation of our words and it was sold to us.
Well, you have to be nice.
You have to be nice to people and don't use certain words and be inclusive and this and that.
So we thought of PC as an irritating factor in our lives.
But it evolved into a broader concept which sometimes I think verges on becoming one of Orwell's meaningless words, and that is the term we use, which is woke.
So political correctness evolved or devolved into woke, and I would say woke is basically a totalizing worldview.
It's where it's not just about your words like PC, but it's where your entire mindset, your entire worldview, has to be informed at every turn by what they call critical theory, which means you have to view all human activity, even personal relationships, your parents, whatever it might be.
You have to view every sphere of human activity, not just the public sphere, the private personal sphere as well, through this lens of critical theory where you sort of say, well, everything old is bad and retrograde, and we have to rethink everything because the past is bad.
I mean, imagine having these little cell phone devices that have the sum total of human history and knowledge in them and saying, nah, I'm going to reject that.
We'll just start anew because we're such smart progressives.
That's essentially what woke is.
It's basically saying all of human history and tradition needs to, if not be thrown out the window entirely, it needs to be examined constantly.
So PC evolves to woke in the linguistic battlefield, and we all know what the next turning is.
We all know what that next evolution is.
It's speech crimes.
We're going to jail.
That's the next evolution.
And folks, this isn't alarmism.
This is happening right here, right now, in the West.
This happens in Canada.
I don't know if you've been following what's happening in the UK.
People are going to jail for Facebook posts.
People are going to jail for being in proximity at a protest.
Apparently, some immigrants murdered some young girls in there.
There are people who are in jail now because they were waving the cross flag, the English flag, at a protest outside.
So don't kid yourself.
Hate crimes are coming here.
Speech codes, speech crimes are coming to the U.S. absolutely positively.
People are going to be in jail.
We already have people in jail in the United States, essentially, for political crimes, for protesting like January 6th.
So this is the next turn.
I'm not trying to be alarmist.
So as a result of this, we all have the aforementioned choice to participate in this war for words or not.
And I would encourage you to choose to do it.
If words are going to be weapons, let us wield them too.
Some of you probably know Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy.
He's come out pretty strongly on social media over the last couple of years.
And he coined this phrase a few years ago called linguistic kill shots.
And that's when you come up with a term and you apply it to a person or a movement or something with such laser-like precision that it basically blows them out of the water.
And I'll give you an example.
Hillary Clinton attempted to do this with her deplorables comment.
It kind of backfired on her.
But nonetheless, that's an example of a linguistic kill shot.
And so you start to think, well, how can we develop some of these things?
How can we wield language more effectively?
And we at least ought to be thinking about it.
And let me tell you something.
And let me just tell people on this useless, feckless right-wing GOP we have in this country.
If your linguistic kill shot for Kamala on the left is commie, that ain't going to work.
Okay, that's not going to work.
It's not 1985.
It just shows a lack of understanding of where we are.
Socialism versus capitalism is not the animating issue of the 21st century.
It just isn't.
At least not in the public's mind.
And you can look at all this and you can say, Jeff, you know, this isn't fair.
All these state-funded universities have these left-wing professors and we have all these media people and we have this entire, you know, basically the entire academic establishment, the entire media establishment, all these people are aligned against us and they're really sort of controlling and imposing the language top-down.
And that may well be true.
It may be unfair.
But that strikes me as saying, well, you know, as saying, well, the outcome of World War II was unfair because the Allies had better supply lines or they had more capable generals.
There's no fair, folks.
Politics is proto-war.
So forget fair.
Get that out of your mind.
The question really is whether you're willing to be a foot soldier in some of these battles.
And the question is whether will you care, will you be as animated by the issue of language and the capture and degradation of that institution as most of us in this room are about money and banking and about law and legislation?
Because I'm telling you, it's equally important.
Culture precedes politics, and language is at the heart of culture.
So, look, there's always been elites, kings, clerics, media figures, just being literate for much of human history made you a privileged person.
So there have always been these sort of top-down attempts to control language and what the little people say, ultimately, because that will control what they think and what they do.
There's always been propaganda.
There's always been state control.
But because of the digital age, all this spreads a lot faster and further in ways that I would argue really fundamentally change society.
So, you know, we can go back in history.
Language Control in Politics 00:03:59
Look at the Roman army, right?
The Roman Empire, I suspect that they spread Latin throughout the sweep of that and across who knows how many dozens or hundreds of thousands of local vernaculars.
And I have a feeling they did that not the nicest way, that that was more or less imposed upon people who got up close and comfortable with the Roman army.
We could view that as a historical example of an imposition language.
And then we can fast forward to the 20th century, which is an absolutely fascinating example, of course, is in Turkey.
Kemal Atatürk, in 1928, he simply decreed the use of a new Latin-based alphabet.
The old Arabic alphabet was just thrown out of the window.
And he decreed this for all the schools in the country.
And he had to go up against all the imams at the mosques because they still wanted to use it.
You know, mosques were instructed to start issuing the call to prayer in Turkish rather than Arabic.
So that's hubris.
I mean, boy, there's an example of a real top-down state imposition of a kind of language.
But today, we don't have Kemal Ataturk, but we have the Modern Language Association, which I mentioned earlier, which is basically the Association of English Professors and all that, which you can imagine what that's like.
And I get to say that because I was an English major, okay?
You know, you have things like the ADL, you have the LGBTQ lobby, which is GLAD and the human rights campaign, and all this mainstream media basically backing them up and acting as the linguistic vandals of our time.
Now, there's so many examples of this.
I'm a little past time, Daniel, but I'm sure these luncheon plates will be coming in here at any moment.
But I mean, we see this in so many different ways.
I mean, we're just bombarded by euphemisms, and of course, it's in politics where this imposition of language, I think, takes its fullest expression.
But just look at the political lexicon.
I mean, for example, how many times did you hear, especially back in the first race, was Trump called a fascist?
I mean, this was just repeated ad nauseum in a way that would make Joseph Mengele blush.
I mean, Joseph Mengele and Edward Bernays, I know a lot of you know that name.
I mean, they really understood propaganda and the use of repetition.
But so Trump's a fascist, he's a fascist, he's a fascist.
My God, people, look at George W. Bush.
This guy created the Department of Homeland Security, okay, so that Michael Chertoff could sell TSA machines.
This guy had unlawful renditions and black CIA sites.
Okay, is Donald Trump more fascist than that?
Barack Obama created something called Obamacare, which literally forced you to buy an ostensibly private product called health insurance from a government exchange.
I mean, talk about the melding of state and corporate power.
Donald Trump is more fascist than Barack Obama?
I don't think so.
And yet we were just bombarded with this idea that fascist, as Orwell presciently pointed out, just is any governmental system I don't like.
And I don't like Donald Trump.
How about democracy, right?
Now our democracy is in peril.
It's anti-democratic, this and that.
I think one of the most instructive uses of this, you know, democracy is being threatened, is of course with the hysteria in the English press, and frankly the whole European press over the Brexit vote.
Time and time and time again we hear this is anti-democratic.
And here's something you didn't hear during that period is the turnout for Brexit, this is unthinkable in America, the turnout for Brexit was 72%.
72% of the British people.
Terminology Wars 00:08:04
And guess what?
It won comfortably by a 3% margin.
What are there, 50, 60 million odd people in the UK, I want to say?
I hope that's correct.
So that's kind of strange.
That seems kind of democratic to me.
A lot of people voted for this.
You know, you see this in the racial rhetoric.
You see Merriam-Webster changing its definition of racism after the Ferguson riots in 2020, you know, the riots, I guess, also in Minneapolis.
You know, we used to all think, well, racism is when somebody thinks that a particular racial group is inherently inferior or they just hate a certain race.
That's a racist, right?
So Merriam-Webster comes along and says, well, it's a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences, you know, work to the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another.
Wait a minute.
That's a little different.
That's a little different definition of racism than I grew up with, a systemic oppression of a racial to the political advantage of another.
And then the ADL not content with Merriam-Webster's kowtowing.
The ADL comes along and says, no, no, no, racism, we're going to define that for you.
Thanks, ADL.
Appreciate that.
It's the systemic oppression.
It's the marginalization of people of color.
Again, this people of color, talk about a linguistic thing we should have resisted from day one.
I have sort of a pinkish hue.
Does that make me a person, you know, am I a colorless person?
The marginalization and oppression of a people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.
Well, that sounds pretty Orwellian.
I don't know about you guys.
And of course, where we really have this linguistic battle, this imposition of language on us, is in the LGBTQ plus, in this new lexicon, which is truly being imposed upon us, okay?
The whole concept of cis, that you're a cisgender person, to basically, as a moniker for 99% of all humans who ever walk the earth, right, is a way to sort of elevate the trans terminology and sort of bring a cis person down to the same level where it's just one choice among many of, I guess, your sexual identity or your sexuality, right?
And that's a really profound and powerful way of looking at it, right?
All of a sudden, you have to explain yourself on an equal footing with someone, you know, a trans person who maybe to our sensibilities appears a bit strange or whatever in their dress or mannerisms.
So you get all these combinations of words like, this almost makes me blush.
A-romantic, alloromantic, sex-repulsed, QPO sexual, gray-sexual, gray-romantic.
Man, these baby boomers.
Omnisexual, trans feminine, trans-man, demi-boy, demi-girl, allosexual.
Okay, the point here is not to make fun of this.
The point here is this isn't an attempt to create understanding amongst people and sympathy using language.
This is just bullying.
This is using the English language or made-up words to bully us.
That's all this is.
And so what you have to understand, what you have to understand.
And look, my point here is not to mock someone who's got a certain sexual habit, but the point here is to understand this new trans lexicon, it's an overtly political imposition of language.
So even the most ardent trans advocate, they don't really expect average people to adopt and keep up with all this new terminology.
These are weapons wielded to demand respect for and acquiescence to a brand new sexual landscape that they just created.
Writers and speakers, especially older people who might find all this bewildering, you know, who fumble with all these rules, they can be attacked as misgendering or disrespecting people.
So, the goal of this new trans terminology, it's not better communication or greater understanding, it's to impose a new way of thinking on us about our most basic human biology and identity.
So, if that doesn't make you begin to think that language is just as important as politics and money and legislation, I don't know what will.
So, I'll finish with this because lunch is nigh.
This matters so, so much.
Language matters so much.
You know, consider the physical sciences, okay?
For now, this is changing, but for now, we still have precise meanings.
We have defined words in things like physics and chemistry and biology.
We have a unit of measurement.
We can measure force.
We can discuss velocity or heat or acceleration or weight.
And we all know how important this is, right?
When engineers design a bridge, well, it better work, right?
The bridge has to hold the weight of the trucks that go across it every day for years and years and years and years.
And if it doesn't, we're in big trouble, right?
We have defined terms that allow us to not only conceive of, but to actually create a bridge that holds the weight of a truck.
How about aviation?
Right?
We create these enormous planes.
The Airbus, what's the enormous Airbus called, the A380, double-decker?
I mean, what is the weight of that thing fully loaded?
And yet we understand through precise use of words and the concepts behind those words that there's a certain amount of thrust that's going to be required, so a certain capacity for the engines, a certain size of wings, and that's going to create the lift that gets that Airbus 380 in the air.
And I think we all, in this audience, anyway, we do like the flights that don't crash.
And we would like to keep that going.
We've got a pretty good track record in the West with aviation safety.
But boy, oh boy, we get to political science, we get to English, we get to sociology, we get to law, and we have this war on words.
And it is very, very dangerous because even in the social sciences, we need the bridges to hold the weight.
We need the airplanes to stay in the sky.
And when you start disagreeing on a fundamental basis of what words mean, not only are you getting this idea that there's multiple consciousness or theories of mind, which I hate that idea, but basically you're getting multiple lexicons, right?
English is just becoming this thing that anybody can call anything.
So what might we call a society that increasingly disagrees about basic metaphysics, about the nature of reality?
What might we call a society that increasingly disagrees about basic epistemology, about how we even know or can come to know the nature of reality, how we validate truth claims?
Those truth claims are what's keeping the airplane in the air.
And those truth claims are what's keeping the thin veneer when it comes to food and fuel and all those other things that are barely keeping Americans from each other's throats.
The terminology has a lot to do with that.
We can call it woke, we can call it madness, we can call it a postmodernist hellscape, we can call it whatever you want.
But if we can't agree on basic truths using words and the concepts behind them, good luck with ethics.
So I would just tell everyone in this audience, own your words.
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