One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words.
“Wokeness,” as it’s known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white. It forced Romance languages like Spanish to submit to gender-neutral constructions such as Latinx. It called for the display of pronouns in email signatures and social-media bios. It replaced a slew of traditional words and phrases: People were told to stop saying master bedroom, breastfeeding, manpower, and brown-bag lunch, and to start saying primary bedroom, chestfeeding, workforce, and sack lunch. At the extreme, it designated certain words—such as brave—beyond redemption.
This was often a nuisance and sometimes a trap, causing the perpetual sense that one might inadvertently offend and consequently self-destruct. In certain industries and professions, wrongspeak had tangible consequences. In 2018, Twitter introduced a policy against “dehumanizing language” and posts that “deadnamed” transgender users (or referred to them by their pre-transition names). Those who were judged to have violated the rules could be banned or suspended.
Donald Trump promised that his election would free Americans from ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again. He even signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” But a few weeks into his administration, we hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech and tolerance for opposing views. Almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he’d promised and put together his own linguistic proscriptions. Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them.
“Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own,” wrote Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times. These included: “Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites.”
Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But what is most striking about this dismal back-and-forth is how well it demonstrates that the illiberal impulse to dictate what can and cannot be said is always fundamentally the same, whether it appears on the right or the left.
An extraordinary number of conservatives have ignored and even delighted in their side’s astonishing hypocrisy. But a few consistent defenders of free speech have not gone along with what they see as the new “woke right.”
The pervasive and nitpicky control of language is a crucial, but far from the sole, component of the woke-right movement. Like its antithesis on the left, the woke right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought. One of the best descriptions I can find of it comes from Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and seminary professor, in a 2022 article called “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism.” DeYoung, reviewing a book on Christian nationalism in The Gospel Coalition, argues that the book’s “apocalyptic vision—for all of its vitriol toward the secular elites—borrows liberally from the playbook of the left.” It “redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression” and tells white and male right-wing Americans that they are the country’s real victims. But “the world is out to get you, and people out there hate you,” DeYoung warns, “is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.”
Another hallmark of wokeness is an overriding impulse to contest and revise the historical record in service of contemporary debates. The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which reimagined this nation’s founding, was emblematic of this trend from the left. But similar attempts are happening on the right. Last summer, the amateur historian Darryl Cooper caused an uproar when he made the case, on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II.
The compelled politesse of the left has been swapped out for the reflexive and gratuitous disrespect of the right. Representative Mary Miller of Illinois recently introduced Representative Sarah McBride, Congress’s sole transgender member, as “the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride.” The activist Christopher Rufo, one of the most belligerent voices on the right, endorsed the move: “We are all tempted to be polite,” he wrote on X. “But complicity in the pronoun game is the opening ante for the entire lie. Once you agree to falsify reality, you have signaled your submission to the gender cult.”
Speaking of falsifying reality: The Trump administration seems to be devoting a remarkable amount of energy toward making sure people call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” In the White House press room last week, the administration went so far as to eject Associated Press reporters because the publication refused to alter its stylebook to comply with the change. “I was very up front in my briefing on Day 1 that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” the White House press secretary said. “And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America.” European exploration records have referred to El Golfo de México since the 16th century.
Trump supporters fell immediately into line. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia—in a gesture encapsulating the digital-political fusion that has come to define the woke right—tweeted trollingly, “Stop deadnaming the Gulf of America.”
Just as corporations genuflected at the altar of wokeness during and after the summer of 2020—posting their identical black squares on Instagram and Facebook and, in the case of Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and CBS Sports, pausing their content for a symbolic eight minutes and 46 seconds—some of the country’s most prominent companies have preemptively submitted to the woke right’s new power play. Google and Apple have both relabeled the Gulf of Mexico on their map apps with Trump’s risible neologism. And an NPR analysis of regulatory filings found that “at least a dozen of the largest U.S. companies have deleted some, or all, references to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and ‘DEI’ from their most recent annual reports to investors.”
Some state leaders are following in Trump’s footsteps. In January, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued the “Executive Order to Respect the Latino Community by Eliminating Culturally Insensitive Words From Official Use in Government”—a loquacious way to say she ordered state agencies to stop using the word Latinx. Others, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, were woke right avant la lettre. The 2022 Individual Freedom Law, paradoxically known as the “Stop WOKE” act—developed under Rufo’s guidance—imagines the state as one enormous, humid safe space. The legislation aggressively restricts speech in workplaces, K–12 schools, and public universities, and even encourages snitching on community members who dare to advance illicit perspectives.
All of these moves are ripe for mockery—and they deserve it. The scholar and provocateur James Lindsay gained a large online following in 2018 after he and two colleagues successfully placed a number of outrageously bogus papers in peer-reviewed academic journals focused on what Lindsay called “grievance studies,” including one text arguing that dogs engage in “rape culture” and another that rewrote Mein Kampf from a feminist point of view. Last year, Lindsay applied the same test to the woke right, cribbing 2,000 words from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto and submitting them as a critique of liberalism to The American Reformer, a respected platform in conservative Christian media. The gag ran under the title “The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right.”
“What the Woke Right fundamentally don’t understand as they make their bid for power now, and why they’ll lose,” Lindsay wrote last week on X, “is that none of us want more ideological crazy stuff. We don’t want another freaking movement. We want to go back to our lives.” The obligation to call people aliens or unlearn the name of a body of water appears every bit as petty as the prohibition on describing boring things as “lame.” More than that, it amounts to a politics of brute domination, a forced and demoralizing expression of subservience that only a genuine fanatic could abide.
Voters in both parties are already signaling that the right’s woke antics are unattractive to them. When it comes to its edgelord in chief, Elon Musk, an Economist/YouGov found that the share of Republicans who say he should have “a lot” of influence has dropped significantly over the past three months, to 26 percent. Seventeen percent say they want him to have no influence “at all.” Over the past two weeks, Trump’s approval rating has fallen.
The truth is that most Americans bristle at wokeness from whichever direction it arrives. As the left is learning now, no victory can ever be final. The right’s illiberal zeal only creates the conditions for an equal and opposite reaction to come.
BelmontIncident on
Wait until you hear about the Watch and Ward Society
YeetThermometer on
Yes this is all despicable, predictable and profoundly hypocritical. But “stop deadnaming the Gulf of America” is a somewhat clever phrase.
Anal_Forklift on
James Lindsay is based, at least in this regard. The Left should absolutely abandon the woke critical theory approach to assessing the world. And, it’s true that the New Right ironically uses the same approach while opposing the woke left (critical view of an “invisible power structure,” a ruling class that doesn’t even know they’re in charge, despises the elite, “lived experience” > reality, skepticism of enlightenment institutions like science, economics, etc.
Many rank and file MAGA types share more in common with left wing tankies than they care to acknowledge. MAGA man will oppose free trade be cause it’s “a tool for the elite!” Bernie Bros will oppose free trade because… “the elite!” Both are skeptical of science, capitalism, the list goes on. Both refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that trade has been largely beneficial (even to them) and instead commit to conspiracy theory involving the ruling class. You can use many big policy examples and end you in the same place. Immigration, healthcare, education, etc.
This is what happens in a post truth era. If truth is subject to your experience/interpretation and not objective, enlightenment is over.
iknowiknowwhereiam on
An article whose premise is guaranteed to be vehemently denied both the far ends and is mostly right in both respects. Some of the words the left doesn’t like I agree with. Deadnaming someone is disrespectful at best. But you can’t use the word brave? Trauma? Come on.
Still doesn’t compare to trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico though. That represents a frailty I’m surprised they admit to.
Haffrung on
Just a reminder that, as much as it might seem that way on social media, the world isn’t divided between judgemental, tribal, hypocritical fanatics on the left and judgemental, tribal, hypocritical fanatics on the right. Most people in the real world don’t feel they’re in an existential struggle to control culture – they just want to act and speak as they please without someone jumping down their throat, and are happy to let other people do the same.
cjhdsachristmascarol on
>Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But
Lol
circlemanfan on
The issue I have with this argument is that the examples he gives of the left restricting speech come from….where? “People were told to stop saying master bedroom, …”
People? Which people? And by who? And what was the punishment? The only example he gives is Twitter saying that deadnaming trans people is considered harassment, which hardly seems like an insane overreach, and further is by a private corporation. The reason he can’t give specifics is because these examples are such low stakes anecdotes that if he gave them, they’d be laughable as a comparison to what Republicans are doing.
Then he talks about the right, and suddenly he has specific names, orders, laws and punishments. This man has spent years railing against low stakes anecdotes, and fully missed the rise of authoritarianism and censorship on the right, and now I’m supposed to believe that he actually cares about free speech when he can’t admit he was wrong?
This isn’t the “woke” right. Use proper language-it is censorship and authoritarianism. The leftie academic at your prestigious university that shamed you for saying Latino is not the same as the government restricting speech. It’s time to admit you missed the true danger to free speech and move on to actually writing about censorship and authoritarianism.
Snoo93079 on
Yeah, I mean this logic applies throughout the Trump administration rule.
Every time you see “free speech” it really means outlawing speech they disagree with.
9 Comments
Article:
One of the defining features of the social-justice orthodoxy that swept through American culture between roughly the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Hamas’s assault on Israel in 2023 was the policing of language. Many advocates became obsessed with enforcing syntactical etiquette and banishing certain words.
“Wokeness,” as it’s known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white. It forced Romance languages like Spanish to submit to gender-neutral constructions such as Latinx. It called for the display of pronouns in email signatures and social-media bios. It replaced a slew of traditional words and phrases: People were told to stop saying master bedroom, breastfeeding, manpower, and brown-bag lunch, and to start saying primary bedroom, chestfeeding, workforce, and sack lunch. At the extreme, it designated certain words—such as brave—beyond redemption.
This was often a nuisance and sometimes a trap, causing the perpetual sense that one might inadvertently offend and consequently self-destruct. In certain industries and professions, wrongspeak had tangible consequences. In 2018, Twitter introduced a policy against “dehumanizing language” and posts that “deadnamed” transgender users (or referred to them by their pre-transition names). Those who were judged to have violated the rules could be banned or suspended.
Donald Trump promised that his election would free Americans from ever having to worry about saying the wrong thing again. He even signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” But a few weeks into his administration, we hardly find ourselves enjoying a culture of free speech and tolerance for opposing views. Almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he’d promised and put together his own linguistic proscriptions. Most of the banned words related to gender and diversity, and this time the rules had the force of the government behind them.
“Fear that other words could run afoul of the new edicts led anxious agency officials to come up with lists of potentially problematic words on their own,” wrote Shawn McCreesh in The New York Times. These included: “Equity. Gender. Transgender. Nonbinary. Pregnant people. Assigned male at birth. Antiracist. Trauma. Hate speech. Intersectional. Multicultural. Oppression. Such words were scrubbed from federal websites.”
Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But what is most striking about this dismal back-and-forth is how well it demonstrates that the illiberal impulse to dictate what can and cannot be said is always fundamentally the same, whether it appears on the right or the left.
An extraordinary number of conservatives have ignored and even delighted in their side’s astonishing hypocrisy. But a few consistent defenders of free speech have not gone along with what they see as the new “woke right.”
The pervasive and nitpicky control of language is a crucial, but far from the sole, component of the woke-right movement. Like its antithesis on the left, the woke right places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought. One of the best descriptions I can find of it comes from Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and seminary professor, in a 2022 article called “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism.” DeYoung, reviewing a book on Christian nationalism in The Gospel Coalition, argues that the book’s “apocalyptic vision—for all of its vitriol toward the secular elites—borrows liberally from the playbook of the left.” It “redefines the nature of oppression as psychological oppression” and tells white and male right-wing Americans that they are the country’s real victims. But “the world is out to get you, and people out there hate you,” DeYoung warns, “is not a message that will ultimately help white men or any other group that considers themselves oppressed.”
Another hallmark of wokeness is an overriding impulse to contest and revise the historical record in service of contemporary debates. The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which reimagined this nation’s founding, was emblematic of this trend from the left. But similar attempts are happening on the right. Last summer, the amateur historian Darryl Cooper caused an uproar when he made the case, on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II.
The compelled politesse of the left has been swapped out for the reflexive and gratuitous disrespect of the right. Representative Mary Miller of Illinois recently introduced Representative Sarah McBride, Congress’s sole transgender member, as “the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride.” The activist Christopher Rufo, one of the most belligerent voices on the right, endorsed the move: “We are all tempted to be polite,” he wrote on X. “But complicity in the pronoun game is the opening ante for the entire lie. Once you agree to falsify reality, you have signaled your submission to the gender cult.”
Speaking of falsifying reality: The Trump administration seems to be devoting a remarkable amount of energy toward making sure people call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” In the White House press room last week, the administration went so far as to eject Associated Press reporters because the publication refused to alter its stylebook to comply with the change. “I was very up front in my briefing on Day 1 that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” the White House press secretary said. “And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America.” European exploration records have referred to El Golfo de México since the 16th century.
Trump supporters fell immediately into line. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia—in a gesture encapsulating the digital-political fusion that has come to define the woke right—tweeted trollingly, “Stop deadnaming the Gulf of America.”
Just as corporations genuflected at the altar of wokeness during and after the summer of 2020—posting their identical black squares on Instagram and Facebook and, in the case of Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and CBS Sports, pausing their content for a symbolic eight minutes and 46 seconds—some of the country’s most prominent companies have preemptively submitted to the woke right’s new power play. Google and Apple have both relabeled the Gulf of Mexico on their map apps with Trump’s risible neologism. And an NPR analysis of regulatory filings found that “at least a dozen of the largest U.S. companies have deleted some, or all, references to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and ‘DEI’ from their most recent annual reports to investors.”
Some state leaders are following in Trump’s footsteps. In January, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued the “Executive Order to Respect the Latino Community by Eliminating Culturally Insensitive Words From Official Use in Government”—a loquacious way to say she ordered state agencies to stop using the word Latinx. Others, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, were woke right avant la lettre. The 2022 Individual Freedom Law, paradoxically known as the “Stop WOKE” act—developed under Rufo’s guidance—imagines the state as one enormous, humid safe space. The legislation aggressively restricts speech in workplaces, K–12 schools, and public universities, and even encourages snitching on community members who dare to advance illicit perspectives.
All of these moves are ripe for mockery—and they deserve it. The scholar and provocateur James Lindsay gained a large online following in 2018 after he and two colleagues successfully placed a number of outrageously bogus papers in peer-reviewed academic journals focused on what Lindsay called “grievance studies,” including one text arguing that dogs engage in “rape culture” and another that rewrote Mein Kampf from a feminist point of view. Last year, Lindsay applied the same test to the woke right, cribbing 2,000 words from Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto and submitting them as a critique of liberalism to The American Reformer, a respected platform in conservative Christian media. The gag ran under the title “The Liberal Consensus and the New Christian Right.”
“What the Woke Right fundamentally don’t understand as they make their bid for power now, and why they’ll lose,” Lindsay wrote last week on X, “is that none of us want more ideological crazy stuff. We don’t want another freaking movement. We want to go back to our lives.” The obligation to call people aliens or unlearn the name of a body of water appears every bit as petty as the prohibition on describing boring things as “lame.” More than that, it amounts to a politics of brute domination, a forced and demoralizing expression of subservience that only a genuine fanatic could abide.
Voters in both parties are already signaling that the right’s woke antics are unattractive to them. When it comes to its edgelord in chief, Elon Musk, an Economist/YouGov found that the share of Republicans who say he should have “a lot” of influence has dropped significantly over the past three months, to 26 percent. Seventeen percent say they want him to have no influence “at all.” Over the past two weeks, Trump’s approval rating has fallen.
The truth is that most Americans bristle at wokeness from whichever direction it arrives. As the left is learning now, no victory can ever be final. The right’s illiberal zeal only creates the conditions for an equal and opposite reaction to come.
Wait until you hear about the Watch and Ward Society
Yes this is all despicable, predictable and profoundly hypocritical. But “stop deadnaming the Gulf of America” is a somewhat clever phrase.
James Lindsay is based, at least in this regard. The Left should absolutely abandon the woke critical theory approach to assessing the world. And, it’s true that the New Right ironically uses the same approach while opposing the woke left (critical view of an “invisible power structure,” a ruling class that doesn’t even know they’re in charge, despises the elite, “lived experience” > reality, skepticism of enlightenment institutions like science, economics, etc.
Many rank and file MAGA types share more in common with left wing tankies than they care to acknowledge. MAGA man will oppose free trade be cause it’s “a tool for the elite!” Bernie Bros will oppose free trade because… “the elite!” Both are skeptical of science, capitalism, the list goes on. Both refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that trade has been largely beneficial (even to them) and instead commit to conspiracy theory involving the ruling class. You can use many big policy examples and end you in the same place. Immigration, healthcare, education, etc.
This is what happens in a post truth era. If truth is subject to your experience/interpretation and not objective, enlightenment is over.
An article whose premise is guaranteed to be vehemently denied both the far ends and is mostly right in both respects. Some of the words the left doesn’t like I agree with. Deadnaming someone is disrespectful at best. But you can’t use the word brave? Trauma? Come on.
Still doesn’t compare to trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico though. That represents a frailty I’m surprised they admit to.
Just a reminder that, as much as it might seem that way on social media, the world isn’t divided between judgemental, tribal, hypocritical fanatics on the left and judgemental, tribal, hypocritical fanatics on the right. Most people in the real world don’t feel they’re in an existential struggle to control culture – they just want to act and speak as they please without someone jumping down their throat, and are happy to let other people do the same.
>Plus ça change. The government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so. But
Lol
The issue I have with this argument is that the examples he gives of the left restricting speech come from….where? “People were told to stop saying master bedroom, …”
People? Which people? And by who? And what was the punishment? The only example he gives is Twitter saying that deadnaming trans people is considered harassment, which hardly seems like an insane overreach, and further is by a private corporation. The reason he can’t give specifics is because these examples are such low stakes anecdotes that if he gave them, they’d be laughable as a comparison to what Republicans are doing.
Then he talks about the right, and suddenly he has specific names, orders, laws and punishments. This man has spent years railing against low stakes anecdotes, and fully missed the rise of authoritarianism and censorship on the right, and now I’m supposed to believe that he actually cares about free speech when he can’t admit he was wrong?
This isn’t the “woke” right. Use proper language-it is censorship and authoritarianism. The leftie academic at your prestigious university that shamed you for saying Latino is not the same as the government restricting speech. It’s time to admit you missed the true danger to free speech and move on to actually writing about censorship and authoritarianism.
Yeah, I mean this logic applies throughout the Trump administration rule.
Every time you see “free speech” it really means outlawing speech they disagree with.