October 1, 2026
We have to change the words people use, say progressives, liberals, and leftists, in order to protect democracy, freedom, and the vulnerable. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says health and medical workers should refer to “people with undocumented status” and not “illegal immigrants.” We should refer to “people with obesity,” not “the obese,” says The American Medical Association. “Alien” is “an offensive term for a human being,” believes California Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed a 2021 law eliminating it from being used in the state’s laws. In 2022, progressive New York lawmakers replaced the word “inmate” with “incarcerated individual” in the state’s statutes. The Associated Press Stylebook, which most American newsrooms follow, tells reporters to avoid “the dehumanizing collective noun the homeless” and to refer to trans-identified men as “transgender women” and trans-identified women as “transgender men.”
The same is true across the West. Britain’s Green Party recently issued an “Inclusive Terminology Guidance” that instructs its members to stop using words like “mothers and fathers,” “elderly,” “able-bodied,” “youngster,” “sexual preference,” “nutter,” or “lunatic.” The goal is to “avoid language which is harmful to people with mental health conditions.” A video of a parliamentary debate in Wales went viral after showing candidates trying and failing to use the word “blanket” when referring to a new speed limit law. Currently, policymakers in the United States, Britain, France, the European Union, and Australia are all seeking sweeping new controls over what people can say online, while the latter is seeking to use anonymous accounts, known as sock puppets or bots, to propagate government information. And German politicians are now seeking to use AI to automatically monitor X, YouTube, and Instagram for ideas considered dangerous.
But telling people which words to use, and penalizing them when they refuse, is a totalitarian infringement on personal freedom. Students and staff at Harvard, the University of Sussex, and other colleges have forced out faculty members who insisted on referring to biological sex accurately. A Maryland school in 2021 suspended for two years a substitute teacher who, insisting on the reality of biological sex, refused to call girls boys and boys girls. The University of California treated repeated use of a student’s biological pronouns as harassment. New York City now requires employers to use the pronouns a person chooses, which means employees can be required to call men women and women men.
And we and many others have documented how leftists have sought to censor people online who say things they don’t like, creating a censorship industrial complex to do so, which consists of university researchers, the National Science Foundation, mainstream news media outlets, “factcheckers,” and government contractors to the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense.
Progressives argue that the Right also imposes language rules. An executive order by President Donald requires federal employees to “use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender’ in all applicable Federal policies and documents.” Federal agencies “have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid,” The Times reported last year. The flagged words included “advocacy,” “bias,” “Black,” and “women.” Head Start officials sent a grant applicant a list of nearly 200 words to remove. The White House barred AP from presidential events in February 2025 after the wire service kept “Gulf of Mexico” in its stylebook. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders ordered state agencies in 2023 to replace “Latinx” in all written materials
But the Right’s rules often reverse changes the Left made first or bring policy on sex and race into line with the law. It was radical trans activists and feminists who demanded, nonsensically, that Latinos be referred to as Latinx, which Pew Research Center found only 4% of Hispanic adults used, while 75% of those who have heard the term say it should not be used. President Joe Biden’s 2022 budget referred to “birthing people,” while Trump’s order correctly described itself as a response to “ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex.” The Supreme Court let the administration list sex at birth on passports on November 6, 2025. The removal of diversity vocabulary from federal documents followed the court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious college admissions. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” said Chief Justice John Roberts. Britain’s Supreme Court held unanimously in April 2025 that “woman” and “sex” in the country’s Equality Act “refer to biological sex.”
The Left, by contrast, is obsessed with language. Harvard’s former President, Claudine Gay, rose to power by promoting a glossary of terms that she insisted the university’s faculty, students, and administration use. Ibram X. Kendi did the same in his #1 New York Times 2019 bestseller, How to Be an Antiracist. The Sierra Club’s language guide steered staff away from “stand,” “crazy,” and “lame.” The AP dropped “illegal immigrant” in 2013 and required that its reporters capitalize “Black” when referring to black people. The National Institute on Drug Abuse urges people to use the words “person with a substance use disorder,” rather than “addict,” and “testing negative” instead of “clean.” Illinois enacted a law in 2024 that renames “offenders” in a state diversion program “justice-impacted individuals.” The University of Southern California’s school of social work dropped the word “field” in 2023 as language “that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant,” even though for most it did not have that connotation. Stanford University’s technology office published a list in 2022 that flagged “American” as offensive. A Johns Hopkins University glossary in 2023 defined a lesbian as “a non-man attracted to non-men.”
All of this is strange because the Left, not the Right, has historically sought more liberty and defended free speech. The New York Civil Liberties Union defended American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell in 1960 and said free speech “applies to all.” Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union represented Ku Klux Klan leader Clarence Brandenburg at the Supreme Court in 1969 and won. The ACLU’s David Goldberger, who represented Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, wrote that a government that can ban hateful speech “can prevent any speech that it dislikes.” As the left-wing writer George Orwell famously said, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
Nor is the Left representing popular demand. A 2022 study found that 87% of autistic adults prefer “autistic” to “person with autism.” Another study showed that 70% to 73% of middle- and low-income adults say “homeless person.” Pollsters found in 2018 that 80% of Americans call such political correctness in the form of language policing a problem, and there is good reason to believe it has contributed to the growing backlash against the Left, making it self-defeating. So why do liberals and progressives keep trying to control language?
Inner Revelation and A Control Obsession
The Left’s obsession with controlling language dates back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “One does not dare to appear as what one is,” said Rousseau in 1750 in an essay that called polite speech a “perfidious veil.” For Rousseau, what felt right should trump ordinary speech. In his book about teaching, Emile, he promoted the views of a priest who resolves to “follow the Inner Light” and declares that “what I feel to be right is right.” Changing language, he argued, was part of the task of “changing human nature.” Rousseau proposed a civil profession of faith and wrote that a citizen who accepts it and then “behaves as if he does not believe” should “be punished by death.”
The French revolutionaries who revered Rousseau made changing language, and using state power to enforce its use, a high priority. One revolutionary told the 1794 National Convention that a free people must have one language. Another urged the destruction of regional dialects. A law of July 20, 1794 set six months in prison and dismissal for any official who wrote a public act in a language other than French.
Marxists and communists embraced language control for thought control and behavioral control. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845 that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” If the ruling ideas belong to the rulers, then ordinary vocabulary is an instrument of class rule. And so the communist revolution had to center its replacement. The Bolsheviks replaced the old forms of address with “comrade,” and people who fell out of favor lost the title. The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci wrote in prison that whenever “the question of the language surfaces,” the task is “to reorganize the cultural hegemony” — in other words, to gain state power by controlling language and cultural institutions.
Orwell highlighted the problems with totalitarian efforts to control language 80 years ago. In 1946, he noted that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” In his 1949 book about a dystopian totalitarian future, 1984, Orwell highlighted “Newspeak” as crucial to state domination because it served “to make all other modes of thought impossible.”
In 1961, the American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton added empirical heft to Orwell’s insight through a major study of communist language. “The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché.” The phrase “bourgeois mentality,” used by communists, Lifton observed, served to dismiss “the quest for individual expression” and “the exploration of alternative ideas.”
In the 1960s, the American New Left, Black Power, and second-wave feminism took up language control after briefly promoting free speech. In 1964, Mario Savio led Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. But the following year, the influential philosopher Herbert Marcuse called for “liberating tolerance” that “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” Today’s cancel culture and aggressive silencing of conservative and other dissident voices by left-wing students derive from Marcuse’s call for “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly” from groups that oppose “social security, medical care, etc.” By 1969, Marcuse was even promoting “linguistic therapy” to free words from “distortion of their meanings by the Establishment.”
The Left declared that the goal was not for revolutionaries merely to speak freely but for everyone to speak like revolutionaries. Black Power founders Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in 1967 stressed the need to “create our own terms through which to define ourselves and our relationship to the society, and to have these terms recognized.” Six years later, Berkeley linguist Robin Lakoff argued that women suffer “linguistic discrimination” in “the way general language use treats them.” In 1989, a left-wing law professor made the case that criminal sanction “is also an appropriate response to racist speech.” The University of Michigan adopted a code punishing any behavior “that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual.”
Newer left-wing movements, such as for transgender rights, for climate action, and against what they call “Islamophobia,” have made language an even higher priority. The Berkeley philosopher Judith Butler wrote in 1990 that gender identity “is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.” If expression constitutes gender, then pronouns do the constituting, a line of thinking that runs through the AP Stylebook’s insistence that journalists “Don’t refer in interviews or stories to ‘preferred’ or ‘chosen’ pronouns.” Colorado added “chosen name, and how the individual chooses to be addressed” to its anti-discrimination law in May 2025. Michigan’s Supreme Court ordered the state’s judges in 2024 to use each party’s “designated salutation or personal pronouns” or another respectful form.
Many of these changes are aggressive and hostile. The Guardian changed its style guide in 2019 because, its editor said, “climate change” sounds “rather passive and gentle,” and replaced “climate sceptic” with “climate science denier,” the latter being a term most associated with “Holocaust denier.” A British parliamentary group defined Islamophobia in 2018 as “a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness,” and the language of “targets” suggests violence. In March the UK Labour government published its own definition of “anti-Muslim hostility,” which covers “the prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims.” The United Nations General Assembly created an International Day to Combat Islamophobia in 2022, an effort that mostly targets words, not actions.
Feminist, antiracist, and LGBT activists intensified their focus on language over the last decade and a half. “Definitions anchor us in principles,” said Kendi, who changed many of the definitions he used between the hardcover and softcover versions of his book. Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 White Fragility listed “argumentation, silence, and leaving” as the defensive moves of white people, a linguistic construction that only allows agreement. The gay rights group GLAAD first told journalists to not use the word “homosexual” and later demanded they refer to trans-identified men and women as “she” and “he,” in defiance of their biological sex.
One purpose is control of thought and then of institutions through what leftists call the “long march through the institutions.” Marcuse described Rudi Dutschke’s strategy in 1972 as “working against the established institutions while working in them.” Carmichael and Hamilton said, “Those who have the right to define are the masters of the situation.”
On another level, these efforts are driven by secular pseudo-religions, or dream worlds, which treat reality itself, including Western civilization, but also often human life, as immoral. The philosopher Eric Voegelin argued in 1952 that modern mass movements resemble the ancient Gnostic sects, which taught that secret knowledge frees the believer from a botched material world. Voegelin described a “dream world” in which “nonrecognition of reality is the first principle,” as Alex Gutentag and I explain in our forthcoming book, The Left’s War on Reality.
Gallup found that 37% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans call religion very important, and so it’s progressives more than conservatives who need pseudoreligious dream worlds.
In left-wing dream worlds, words work like magic, so that a pronoun can make a man a woman and declaring “No human is illegal” serves as a debate-ending cliché. The dream worlds allow the Left to avoid responsibility and blame their enemies for the problems they cause. Advocates of drug legalization blame drug prohibition for overdose deaths, climate alarmists blame climate skeptics for the failures of renewables, and LGBT activists blame people who insist upon the reality of biological sex for the deaths of trans-identified people, few of which result from prejudice-driven homicide and many more from comorbidities and homelessness.
New research offers support for the observation that the Left is demanding of totalitarian controls of language. A 2022 study of 7,258 people identified in left-wing authoritarians a trait it named “Top-down Censorship,” a preference for using “governmental and institutional authority to quash opposition.” A 2023 paper covering 12 studies found that people high in left-wing authoritarianism “show more support for restrictive political correctness norms” and “more cognitive rigidity.” “Across all attitudes, Psychopathy and Entitlement were the most consistent, strongest predictors,” said the authors of a 2020 survey of 511 Americans on authoritarian political correctness.
Above all else, the Left’s language disempowers, demoralizes, and depresses people declared to be “victims.” A 2016 experiment found that people are “viewed more negatively when described as having special needs,” which is how the Left describes black people, trans-identified people, and women. Given that the Left is comprised disproportionately of professionals and managers who gain power, control, and status through exerting control over the lives of vulnerable people, its use of language to create victims should be a feature, not a bug, of the Left’s agenda.
The final factor in the intensification of the Left’s war on normal language appears to be its loss of control over social media platforms. As we and others have documented, the Left, through the NGOs, government agencies, and news media organizations, secretly exercised sweeping control over the speech that Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok allowed to go viral from around 2010 to 2025, the year that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared he would follow Elon Musk’s example and use crowd-sourced fact-checkers, rather than left-wing ones. Musk’s purchase of Twitter in late 2022, and his reduction of censorship, sparked an enormous backlash from the Left that continues to this day. The Left today appears to be responding to its loss of control, which has severely undermined its ability to maintain political control, as well as to protect its dream worlds from reality.
Don’t Use Their Words
The Left has proven to be far more adept at constructing and promoting language that advances its agenda than the Right, and now it’s intensifying its efforts at language and thought control. Australia’s proposal to use anonymous sock puppet and bot accounts to “disseminate” government propaganda is unprecedented. After the Trump administration took down the CDC’s list of preferred terms, a court ordered it to put the page back online. An Austrian teachers’ college last year lowered a student’s grade for not writing in a gender-sensitive way. A judge imposed an injunction on the University of California’s prohibition on using accurate biological pronouns, but it only covers the members of the conservative group that sued, and the university made clear it intends to work around the ruling. Canada’s Combatting Hate Act, which makes it a crime to promote hatred by displaying certain symbols in public, took effect on July 18. Three days earlier, the Assembly of First Nations called on Ottawa “to criminalize residential school denialism as hate speech,” despite growing evidence that the mass killings of indigenous people at residential schools never occurred. And In July, a criminal court convicted an influencer for referring to a trans-identified congressman in the masculine.
But the backlash to the Left’s language control is racking up victories. “The First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” said a judge after ruling unconstitutional a Biden administration order that penalized students or faculty for “misgendering” or “deadnaming” trans-identified people. Austria’s national ombudsman found in July 2025 that the grade penalty a teachers’ college imposed had no legal basis. The Free Speech Union of Britain is challenging the government’s attempt to prohibit “anti-Muslim hostility.” Shawnee State University in Ohio paid philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether $400,000 in 2022 after disciplining him for answering a transgender student with “Yes, sir.” A Virginia school board paid $575,000 in 2024 to a French teacher it fired for avoiding pronouns for one student. An Indiana district paid orchestra teacher John Kluge $650,000 in March. And Stanford took down its word list after its technology chief conceded the office had “missed the intended mark.
Meanwhile, similar backlash is occurring in other Western nations. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation withdrew on August 28 a memo telling staff not to call the September 11 attacks terrorist attacks. In April, the Dutch government disowned an Education Ministry word list that proposed renaming Mother’s Day and Father’s Day “You Day.” The British hospital trust that disciplined a nurse for calling a transgender patient “Mr.” settled her claim in April. And Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes rejected in September 2025 an attempt to prosecute Isabella Cêpa, a feminist who had said the most-voted woman in São Paulo was a man.
These rejections add up to more than the sum of their parts and give liberals and leftists in Orwell’s tradition room to reject totalitarian leftism.
New terminology “bewilders and alienates millions of Americans,” said left-wing New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in February 2023. Kristof called the American Medical Association’s guide “a wordy model of obfuscation, cant and sloppy analysis.” The Atlantic’s George Packer wrote in 2023 that the Sierra Club’s guide “seeks to cleanse language of any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion.”
“Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying,” the centrist Democratic group Third Way said in August 2025. Two entries on its list of words to drop, “BIPOC” and “chest feeding,” also appear on the Trump administration’s flagged list. Newsom claimed the same year that no one in his office had ever used “Latinx,” even though CNN found that he had used it himself.
A 2025 survey of 470 American psychology professors found that most “opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions.” In Britain, Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting said last year that health guidance had been “erasing women.”
Across the Western world, citizens are coming to see each attempt by the Left to dictate vocabulary as an attempt to control and dominate them. Pew found that the share of Americans who say gender is determined by sex at birth rose from 54% in 2017 to 67% in November 2025. Researchers have found that resentment of “restrictive communication norms positively predicted support for Trump. And today, free speech advocates around the world, from Australia to Canada to the UK and Europe, are fighting back against censorship with increasing success.
