If you're walking around a city like Seattle or Portland, you've got to watch where you step. If you're not careful, you might step on an "unhoused person," who may be a "Criminal justice-impacted individual," who could become violent due to a "substance abuse disorder."
It's worse if it's a "birthing person."
If you watch a congressional hearing, these terms are bandied about as if they're normal language that all Americans use in their daily lives. I imagine overhearing a conversation at Starbucks or Whole Foods would sound similarly disconnected from reality.
After a decade of trying to strong-arm Americans into accepting terms like "Latinx" and "intersectionality," some Democrats have decided that their nomenclature needs a new coat of paint. As 2028 looms in the background, some contenders, real and would-be, are trying to lead the charge to renormalize the Democratic Party.
"Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has been the most vocal about the need for Democrats to 'talk like a normal human being,' as he's put it in speeches and interviews," reports Axios. "Sometimes these terms make it feel like we're talking down to people, like we're talking at them, instead of to them," he said.
Beshear is the Democrats' 2028 "moderate" entry and is looking to connect with Democratic voters by claiming his party is out of touch with the rest of America. I don't think that will work very well.
Every four years, a Democrat "Great Moderate Hope" emerges, usually in the South or West, whom the New York Times and Washington Post believe could beat a Republican. They made Joe Biden a "moderate" who then governed as a captive of the radical left.
Beshear is no Biden, and he talks like a normal person. But the entire radical left enterprise to change the English language to be more "inclusive" and "culturally sensitive," by sheer brute force and shaming, was doomed to fail from the start.
They aren't going to give that up, though, even if it would give them a better chance in November.
Axios:
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said repeatedly that Democrats need to start being more "culturally normal" — a challenge he might face himself after governing one of the most liberal states in the country.
Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel argues that the party should "ignore the culture police" and worry less about "a child's right to pick his pronouns" and more about "children who do not know what a pronoun is."
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) says Democrats need to speak the language of the "factory line, not the faculty lounge."
The centrist Democratic group Third Way created a guide to "woke" buzzwords it wants the party to stamp out heading into 2028.
"For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying," the group writes.
"To please the few, we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant."
Gee. Ya think?
Related: Canadian Broadcasting Instructs Staff Not to Refer to the 9/11 Attacks As 'Terrorism'
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) had a recent "Road to Damascus" moment where she tried to laugh off the entire "woke" movement as a joke. "I have a local city councilman that has this saying, 'Woke 1 was crazy,'" Ocasio-Cortez said, laughing.
Will AOC and the Democrats' efforts to "reimagine" the past and slough off "Woke 1" as an aberration that didn't mean much succeed? With the help of big media, they easily can.
Prominent Democrats rarely talk this way anymore, but such words still show up in press releases and progressive circles.
Rep. Wesley Bell (D-Mo.) introduced a bill this year that replaced the term "ex-felon" with "qualified criminal justice-impacted individual."
Newsom in May announced new apartments in Los Angeles for "formerly unhoused people."
In January, Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Katie Britt (R-Ala.) announced a resolution praising community-based health systems for helping "birthing individuals" and "birthing people."
Zoom out: The disconnect between how Democratic politicians usually talk and how their press releases sometimes read points to the problem: Language that's natural in liberal safe spaces can make Democrats seem foreign in places they need to win.
The idea that the radical left could alter a language spoken by a billion people around the world to fit their lunatic ideas of "justice" and "inclusion" has been totally rejected by the vast majority of Americans.
Will voters forget what the "Age of Woke" meant? Calling that period "Woke 1" is a clever way to create an artificial divide between "Woke 1" and "Woke 2," even though Woke 2 will almost certainly be just as repressive and just as censorious as Woke 1.
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