This fairly new thing, the so-called “great reset,” is more than the political left acting out their bottled-up fury at successes of the land in which they find themselves. Infuriated at how well freedom is working—the opulence, scientific and technological achievements, personal advancements at every level—even for the “downtrodden” compared to the rest of the world—they grouse. They can see (and deny) how poorly socialist utopian schemes they hold dear are doing. Like spoiled brats they nihilistically seek to overturn everything about this nation that is good and decent and pure.
America is in mortal danger from this actual mass psychosis afflicting so many of our countrymen. The psychiatric community calls it mass formation, a term and effect worth studying if you haven’t. The most striking modern example of course was in Germany before WWII, but communist China soon afterwards under the brutal dictator Mao Tse-dung wasn’t far behind. Pol Pot in Vietnam set new standards of depravity and evil, with popular support. Our own witch hunts in New England soon after we achieved independence were a similar thing—hysteria that knows no controls.
Words Are the Key
Using principles learned from Russian, Chinese and North Vietnamese communists, along with George Orwell, whose 1949 dystopian novel 1984 spelled it out with chilling clarity, leftists understand that whoever controls our language controls us. That battle is on. An entire generation of Newthink terms have entered the public mind, infiltrated newsrooms and classrooms everywhere, and threaten our health and liberty.
It boggles the mind how easily that disease has spread. People at the vaunted Associated Press have picked up the gauntlet, and what used to be a descriptive guide for journalists, like a dictionary, the AP Stylebook has become a proscriptive mandate. It now dictates which terms are acceptable and which must be cast aside as intolerant, offensive, biased and other inaccurate derogatory slurs.
It’s not like this sprang upon us unannounced or unnoticed. As early as 1962, the earth-shaking film Manchurian Candidate, directed by John Frankenheimer, woke this nation up to the effective perniciousness of “commie” brainwashing, a tool used to implement Newthink. That was based on Richard Condon’s 1959 novel of the same name, at the height of the Cold War, filled with gut-level fears many of us still viscerally recall. Those forces have been bubbling under and metastasizing since then.
America’s consciousness of this grew in a quantum leap, especially in the enormously influential Second Amendment community with the development and release in the year 2000 of The Politically Corrected Glossary, published by Bloomfield Press, https://www.gunlaws.com/politicallycorrect.htm. It changed some dialog and terminology, jump-starting reassessments, but the powerful mainstream media steamed right ahead regardless. The terribly sexist slur, gunman, appears constantly instead of killer, murderer or even criminal. Inanimate wholesome products like pistols or sidearms became fearsome semi-automatic handguns, which anti-gun forces publicly acknowledged misleads many into thinking machinegun.
To this day, despite constant complaints, reports call mass murderers “shooters,” denigrating 100 million American shooters who shoot for fun, sport and safety. Simultaneously, this linguistic trick avoids casting any shade on the criminal psychopaths who murder innocent people by the thousands annually. Those culprits are further protected by prosecutors and a judiciary that often avoids going after the perps, a shortening of perpetrators, now also frowned upon by the great resetters.
Assault is a type of behavior, not a type of hardware, outlawed everywhere under multiple laws, as it should be. That does little to stop resetters from attaching assault to weapon, so effective in turning the public against household firearms, the commonly used kind you’ll find in millions of American homes. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the Second Amendment holds extra special protection for such household arms in common use, a point leftists treat with disdain.
Those usual suspects—Marxist socialist democrats and other malfeasants—are actively pushing the overhaul of our language—and our freedoms. Tough to admit, but they’re pretty good at it. You may not even know you’ve been snookered, it’s so subtle and easy to miss. That’s what makes it so effective. Merely declaring yourself pro gun plays into their hands. How? Because they’ve cast guns as horrific instruments of the devil. If you say you’re pro gun you practically are the devil, to their addled minds. Try instead thinking of yourself as pro rights, a term they avoid, because if that’s you, what are they? Anti rights, which is pure truth on a platter, intolerable to them, and now you’re catching on.
Coming next, an installment of The Politically Corrected Glossary, a lexicon of freedom. Use terms that work for you as a liberty-loving individual, and cast intolerant bigots as intolerant bigots.
Alan Korwin, a national columnist, award-winning author of 14 books and veteran of more than 1,000 radio and TV interviews, has been writing as a journalism ombudsman since 2006. He can be reached at GunLaws.com. His 15th book, Why Science May Be Worng, is underway.