5 Words Leftists Use to Lie

Get ready to lose your freedom. Not just the thing, the word, too.

Leftists are flipping the word “freedom” to mean “government control”. The party of more government control is now the party of “freedom”, it says.

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Chris  Hall wrote on Sub Stack on August 24th, 2024, quote: Freedom Doesn't Mean What You Are Likely Thinking. Use of the term by progressives and the left carries a different implication.

He was right.

(If you already know all about how and why leftists manipulate English vocabulary, you might want to jump to “Conclusion: Why This is Important!”)

On the final night of their 2024 national convention, the Democrats announced Kamala Harris' campaign would be about “joy”. And indeed, the speakers used the word joy 35 times that night. But they used the word “freedom” 94 times. That Democrats really want freedom is, of course, a lie. In a 2023 RealClearPolitics poll, one-third of Democrat voters said Americans have “too much freedom.”

In an article in Reason, titled “Democrats Aren't the Freedom Party”,  Liz Wolf wrote, quote, Party of freedom? Democrats make it hard for me to own a gun. They make it hard for me to get a gas stove or use the dishwasher I want to. Last year, the Democrats in my city tried to implement a tax on every single Amazon delivery.

And of course the leftist mass media immediately went along with the new meaning of “freedom”. No one in the mass media, or in academia or lexicography, questioned the lie, let alone opposed it. It was just like when the leftists changed the meaning of “democracy” to mean ‘leftism’. As in, “We must protect our democracy.” Meaning: We must protect leftism and the leftist regime from anyone who questions or opposes it.

But freedom and democracy were far from being the first words that leftists switched the meanings of. By switching and conflating the definitions of important words, the leftists muddy the waters of public discourse. They make it harder to talk about and understand what's really going on. And easier to replace truth with lies. This is language control. And leftists are very good at it.

Democracy and “The People”

As we pointed out in : “’We, the People.’ They, the government”: Maybe no language has been so tortured by the leftists as the two words “the people”.  Leftists have always equated the words “the people” with “the government”, implying that the people and the government are the same thing. So if the government controls all the means of production, then the people control all the means of production. But in reality, the opposite is true. When the government controls it, the people lose control of it. Especially when the government has become as unaccountable as the US government is now.

People in the government may say that somehow you are them, but you are not them.

Progressive?

Woodrow Wilson was one of the first leftists to use control of the then-emerging mass media to twist and reverse the meanings of words. Like the Democrats of 2024, he distorted the meaning of the word “freedom”. A 2024 Wall Street Journal article was titled and subtitled “Woodrow Wilson Redefined Freedom Long Before Kamala Harris: The use of government to achieve social or distributive justice by directing scarce resources to political ends, satisfying interest groups, is an even older story.” In Wilson’s definition, “To be ‘free’ is to do whatever the wise politician thinks you should do to help society run smoothly.”

But Wilson didn't stop there.

He reversed the meaning of the word “progressive” and turned it into a political label. By “progressive”, he meant the idea that the Constitution was antiquated and what was needed was more government. A government of elitist managers who controlled everything because they knew what was best. He slapped the label “PROGRESSIVE” on a jar containing the poison of leftism. And he reversed the meaning of “progressive”.

Liberal? Or Liberal?

Fast forward to 1941. Wilson had run on the promise to keep America out of WW I. As soon as he was elected, he got America into WW I and Expanded the federal government into hitherto and dreamt of ‘Progressive’ realms of unconstitutionality.  In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the U.S. beyond even Wilson' big government policies, and created the even more unconstitutional, huge government New Deal. He was still a progressive.

By 1939, many Americans were tiring of big government overreach, and Progressivism.

In 1940, the only meaning of ‘liberal’ in a political or governmental context was:

liberal n. a person who believes in free enterprise, small government, and individual rights. 

A liberal was the opposite of a leftist/socialist/progressive.

In 1962, Ludwig von Mises, in Liberalism: The Classical Tradition wrote, quote: In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.

FDR wanted to avoid being called a leftist or socialist, so he changed the meaning of ‘liberal’. Here is where he did it. In a speech in 1941.

“There are usually two general schools of political belief,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1941, “liberal and conservative.” Liberals, the president continued, understood that “as new conditions and problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of the government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them.” Conservatives, he said, believed, “that there is no necessity for the government to step in. ... at least since 1932, the Democratic Party has been the liberal party, and the Republican Party has been the conservative party.”

The leftist media immediately began to use the word liberal as Roosevelt had instructed them to. Leftism became “liberalism”.

But by the1980s, Americans had learned what FDR’s ‘liberalism’ really was, the word liberal had become a slur. An insult.

So in 1988, Ronald Reagan was being impolite by calling the liberals liberals when he said, quote: The masquerade is over; it's time to ... use the dreaded 'L' word, to say the policies of our opposition ... are liberal, liberal, liberal.

Of course, the leftists blamed the fact that the word liberal had itself become an insult on guess who? The right, of course. It was the right’s fault that liberal was now a bad word.

In 2010, in a leftist BBC article titled, "Liberal? Are We Talking About the Same Thing?", Michael Goldfarb said, quote: The word liberal has been so debased in America by right-wing demagogues that liberals have for at least two decades preferred to call themselves progressives.

And in 2002, a writer in the leftist LA Times had openly admitted that FDR had intentionally flipped the meaning of ‘liberal’, and the writer proposed flipping liberal yet again! Quote: Democrats are now faced with two options: They can seek to redraw the political landscape and invent a new rhetorical dichotomy, as Roosevelt did in the 1930s. Or they can try to resuscitate liberalism... to reclaim the liberal tag.

So, in our story of liberal so far:

FDR reversed the meaning of ‘liberal’.

A BBC leftist blamed it on the right.

And an LA Times leftist admitted it was FDR who did it, and suggested doing it again.

So leftists are indeed flipping ‘liberal’ again. Most 21^st century dictionaries and encyclopedias describe “liberal” as meaning something to do with social justice and the Kamala Harris kind of “freedom”.  They want to make it seem as though all leftists of the past, from Karl Marx to Woodrow Wilson, were a good kind of “liberals”.

In page eleven of the book Why Liberals Win — Even When They Lose Elections, the leftist writer Stephen Prothero categorized Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Barack Obama together as famous American “liberals” who all practiced liberalism. They were all liberals, who believed the same things, leftists said. Jefferson’s beliefs about big government were the same as Obama’s and FDR’s.

In a 2024 article titled “The Left's Assault on Language Is an Assault on Freedom” in  Mises Wire, Will Ferrel wrote, quote: How can people who are intolerant and authoritarian at every turn call themselves “liberal”? How can people wanting to regress the United States to the collectivism of the past—as socialism and fascism both devolve to feudalism over time—call themselves “progressives”?

How? By changing the meanings of words, that’s how.

 The leftist media are constantly changing the meaning of words. In the hands of the leftist language controllers, the idea that two wrongs make a right became “affirmative action”. Taking $trillions from productive Americans to make politicians rich became “wealth redistribution” to create “equality”. And so on.

In the article "Language Is Changing in America; Indeed, Probably Throughout The West. And the Changes Are Not Good." Naomi Wolfe wrote in 2023, quote: ...neo-Marxist/feudalist globalist oligarchy, are deliberately driving artificial changes in language and language practices.

Famously, George Orwell saw it all coming when he created a fictional totalitarian “Doublespeak”. Leftists have been making reality imitate art.

It was nothing new. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal quoted Vladimir Lenin: We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.

Mass Media Weapons of Destruction

Progressive

Liberal

Democracy

Freedom

The public

In Elizabeth Smoots’ Substack she quoted Alexander Trachtenberg, U.S. Communist Party leader, quoted by Mary A. Nicholas, Paul Kengor, The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman’s Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption (2022).

When we get ready to take the United States we will not take it under the label of communism; we will not take it under the label of socialism. These labels are unpleasant to the American people, and have been speared too much. We will take the United States under labels we have made very lovable; we will take it under liberalism, under progressivism, under democracy. But take it we will.

Equality

Diversity

Racism

Violence

Genocide

Gender

And on and on. Leftists twist and distort the meanings of all those words and more, to turn them into lies. Ammunition for the leftists’ big weapon of truth destruction. The mass media.

The semantic obfuscations employed by today’s progressives inculcate a political vision that has evolved from Wilson’s. An enforced moral monoculture is now “diversity.” Excluding ideas that reject progressivism is “inclusion.” Quietly minding one’s own business is “violence.” Refusing to discriminate on the basis of race is “racism.” Pro-Hamas demonstrators somehow think it is Israel, rather than Hamas itself, that seeks to enact “genocide.”

“Woodrow Wilson Redefined Freedom Long Before Kamala Harris, WSJ

Conclusion: Why This is Important!

“Quietly minding your own business is not ‘violence’.” That’s the truth. Live and let live is a rightist idea. We, the right. are only in conflict with the left because the left attacks us and America with an endless stream of bad ideas and lies. Their underlying idea is always to give government more control and then to use government to control the rest of us.

The right has the real freedom.

Leftists want to force fake “freedom” on us. Government is not the source of freedom. We, the right, have the true freedom ideas. The Freedom System.