https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/once-again-stop-talking-progressives-bruce-thornton/
Anyone who regularly comments on current political affairs will eventually end up repeating himself. Usually that’s because politicians and pundits keep making the same errors of thinking, and displaying the same lack of critical self-awareness of those mistakes. Some, like Capote’s Holly Golightly, are true believers who sincerely believe all “this crap” they believe, and “can’t be talked out of it.” Or they are conscious liars who don’t care that their ideas and beliefs are incoherent or pernicious, as long as they win them more power and privilege.
That truth is a commonplace. But as novelist André Gide once said, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again,” in the hope that somebody will be listening, since using the dishonest, politicized words of progressives helps to spread the malign concepts and ideologies like a virus, infecting the body politic.
Recently columnist George Will called this phenomenon “semantic infiltration . . . the tactic by which political objectives are smuggled into discourse that is ostensibly, but not actually, politically neutral. People who adopt a political faction’s vocabulary also adopt — perhaps inadvertently, but inevitably — the faction’s agenda.”
Will’s example is the “woke” economic term “stakeholder,” a synonym for “stockholder.” Extending a “stakeholder” to include anybody and everybody whom a business even slightly affects is to indulge a false analogy, the logical fallacy favored by those who are up to no good or smuggling their ideology into an argument––which, as Will points out, is exactly what the “stakeholder” metaphor does: “Stakeholder capitalism violates fiduciary laws that require those entrusted with investors’ money to employ it ‘solely in the interest of’ and ‘for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to’ the investors.”
Most of us can cite a whole catalogue of scare-words and question-begging epithets, like “racist” and “sexist,” used not to communicate precisely but to demonize a political enemy or advance a dangerous ideology under cover of invective.