It's been said that "He who defines the terms, wins the argument." That's been said because it's true.
Over the last several decades, the political and cultural Left in America has been on a crusade to redefine and prohibit words in our common lexicon to redefine arguments in their favor and manipulate Americans into subtly aligning themselves with their arguments out of pure reflex.
Look at these words and stop for a moment to recognize how they are being used in our everyday political discussions and how they are applied by our news media to bolster and prop up the Left's political agenda:
- Assault Rifle
- Undocumented Migrant (instead of illegal alien)
- Common Sense Gun Safety Measures (instead of gun control)
- Affordable
- Living Wage (instead of minimum wage)
- Investment (instead of government spending)
- Gender (instead of sex)
- Universal Background Checks
- Privilege
- Ally
- Health care
- Infrastructure
- Complicit
- Fascist
Now comes the Biden Administration forcing new terms on the federal government to redefine whole categories of government responsibility and powers.
If "infrastructure" means something, anything, other than roads, bridges, power grids, and water supplies, it doesn't mean anything anymore. In the new world that we find ourselves in, "infrastructure" means every big government spending plan that results in government regulation or a hand-out that the Left has been pining to implement for the past half-century.
The American people recognize that the federal government has some responsibility for our infrastructure. We are all in favor (for the most part) of the government spending money on upgrades to our roads, highways, bridges, dams, and airports. That's infrastructure.
The cynical members of the Democratic Party have decided to manipulate the argument over abortion, welfare, universal income, government-controlled health spending, and every other scheme they've failed to implement in our lifetimes. They now wrap all these socialist ideas under the broad, multi-trillion-dollar umbrella known as "infrastructure," and they believe they can ram it through without any opposition.
They may be right.
Idiot Republicans in the Senate might cower in fear over a potential television ad accusing them of "opposing basic infrastructure spending" in their home state should they vote to oppose the giant, government-grab now proposed as "infrastructure spending" by Biden's corrupt Democrats.
Is Mitt Romney incapable of communicating to the good people of Utah that he would've gladly voted for new bridges and an upgrade to Salt Lake City's airport, but the Biden Bill was really Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal with a fresh coat of lipstick, so he was compelled to vote against it? Is that really so hard, Sen. Romney?
Perhaps it is.
Thankfully, most Republicans in the Senate know better. And, it appears, a small handful of Democrats.
But, the details of the infrastructure bill are less important than the lie that it in any real way is, in fact, an infrastructure bill. The argument Republicans should be focusing on is the insidious attempt to manipulate our language and voters by deceptively calling this thing an infrastructure bill in the first place.
That's ground zero of the cultural debate we are losing every single day.
The latest example lies in the Biden Administration's directive to federal agencies with regard to language used for immigration policy.
NPR celebrates the bastardization and deceptive manipulation of the English language for political purposes:
The terms "illegal alien" and "assimilation" are out — replaced by "undocumented noncitizen" and "integration."
The new guidance is laid out in a pair of detailed memos sent Monday by the heads of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to roll back the previous administration's hard-line policies and build what they call a more "humane" immigration system.
"We set a tone and example for our country and partners across the world," Troy Miller, the top official at Customs and Border Protection, said in his memo. "We enforce our nation's laws while also maintaining the dignity of every individual with whom we interact. The words we use matter and will serve to further confer that dignity to those in our custody."
They're being honest about one thing here: The words we use do, in fact, matter.
The Left knows this... that's why they put a priority on this sort of thing. How many times do we have to sit back, watch them do this, hear them tell us how these words matter and how important it is, and then shrug and decide we don't care because it doesn't matter?
Take a look at that list above again. Think about the heated, political debates surrounding those words. Do you feel confident in how we're doing in those debates? Do you think we're gaining or losing ground?
Do you still think these words don't matter?