On this date, Feb. 17, five years ago, America lost the greatest media host of all time, the “Mayor of Realville,” Rush Limbaugh.
One of El Rushbo’s maxims was, “Words mean things,” and he reportedly once added, “If you don't have the proper definition for a word, you're going to get the wrong conclusion.” What he meant by that was a two-fold truth. Firstly, do not necessarily assume that everyone defines words the same way you do; and secondly, words cannot simply be used in any way you wish — they have specific correlations to reality. That’s all very abstract, but I think when we start to pull examples of modern jargon such as leftists claiming that election fraud is “protecting democracy,” that domestic terrorism is “free speech,” that illegal aliens are “undocumented immigrants,” or that dismembering unborn babies is “healthcare,” we all immediately understand Rush’s point.
The words we use shape the way we think and act, and therefore using words incorrectly, talking at cross purposes, and having vague or warped understandings of certain words very directly impact the world we live in.
The most glaring example of the misdefinition of a common word — one conservatives misuse nearly as often as leftists — is the word “gay.” What it truly means is “happy” or “merry”; hence the popular Christmas carol that goes “Don we now our gay apparel” is referring to festive holiday garb, not a rainbow flag-themed ensemble. The whole reason leftists began to use “gay” to mean “homosexual” was a brilliant and devious effort to reshape people’s views on homosexuality, to convince us homosexual acts are not a perversion as the Bible clearly tells us (e.g., Romans 1:25ff, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Leviticus 20:13). And it was a wildly successful gambit — Americans overwhelmingly have a much more positive view of sodomites now that they’re relabeled “gay.”
In fact, conservatives are often slower to understand the power of language redefinition in the culture war than leftists, which is unfortunate. Rush would want us to be more alert. When former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began calling mutilating transgender “treatments” the “sex-rejecting” treatments, it was genius. And if ever we needed aggressive focus on winning the language war, it’s during this critical midterm election year.
On abortion, Islamic terrorism, election integrity, transgenderism, free speech, gun rights, child grooming, and so many other topics, conservatives have the truth all on our side, and yet leftists hold sway over the minds of a significant portion of the U.S. population, especially young people. Why? Because their propaganda is false, but extremely effective.
And here I wanted to make the point that conservatives also sometimes operate under a false assumption that most people basically have the same goals as we do. This is absolutely not true. Part of the issue is that we think if other people use the same words as we do, they want the same things. Thus when Democrats say they want justice and equality and freedom, we seem to think they share some of our views on those topics, when in fact, their definitions of all of them are completely opposite to ours.
By freedom, for instance, American Democrats have always meant a zero-sum game, meaning they think their freedom demands your freedom be limited. It’s how they could support slavery or segregation or “gun control” and still claim they loved freedom.
Just as the French Revolutionaries used many of the same terms as the U.S. Founding Fathers, but had radically — and I do mean radically — different definitions, so we find ourselves dealing with an enemy in this culture war that never spouts a word but to misuse it. We must remember what Rush Limbaugh said: that “words mean things,” and if they’re redefined, the liars behind the misdefinitions deserve to be called out.
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