Whenever words or phrases appear out of the blue and achieve rapid currency—think “disinformation”—they’re almost always top-down attempts at mind control or mental conditioning.  In sneaky fashion, a new phrase can be just a tweak of a former phrase yet the tweak will shift one’s mindset. For example, people used to have medical insurance for medical care—insurance to cover unexpected and high medical bills in case someone got seriously sick. A few decades ago, however, the term became health care.  This slight change had huge implications: instead of people seeing a doctor to treat illness, people began to accept the notion of seeing a doctor to maintain health.  This was especially true for mothers who took their kids to the pediatrician for “well visits”—mostly to get vaccinations.  Then the word “doctor” yielded to the more generic “health care provider”—sometimes a doctor, sometimes not.  Ultimately, these changes suggested that one’s health was no longer the responsibility of the individual but rather the responsibility of others, including non-doctors.

They say that “verbal engineering precedes social engineering,” so language tweaks are often the first step toward controlling behavior—most effective when those controlled don’t even know.

Another example is the replacement of the phrase childbearing years for women, now said to be reproductive years.  Before 1960, the latter phrase was almost unheard of.  But feminists and lefties of the 1960s and 70s were atheistic and hostile to the idea that humans were distinct from other animals—that is, they were hostile to the notion that humans are made in the image of God, insisting, instead, that humans were just matter or material that got reproduced like anything else in a factory. Hence, people “reproduce” rather than “have children,” or “start families” and women have “reproductive years,” not years for childbearing.

New words are warranted, of course, when new technologies require them. Before the computer age, for example, “download” or “upload” weren’t terms because these actions weren’t realities. But now they are. The word “access,” formerly only a noun, became a verb for the same reason. But neither medical care nor childbearing is new.  When new phrases or words describe old and familiar things, something’s up.

In our age obsessed with race and sex—another top-down phenomenon—the most obvious verbal engineering, and therefore social engineering, is happening with regard to ethnic heritage and sexual ethics. Many remember when “gay” meant happy or merry, while now the word applies almost exclusively to homosexuals.  But even that was not enough for those seeking to normalize same-sex relations. So “gay” was followed not only by “same-sex marriage” but also by the contrived term “homophobic,” nonexistent in older dictionaries. The phrase is an obvious subversive political weapon, casting traditionalists as pathological when homosexual conduct was, traditionally, the vice and the pathology.

So too with “white supremacy” and “diversity.” Given the near ubiquity of the term “diversity,” one would think America was founded for the pursuit of diversity rather than happiness, even though “diversity” appears neither in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to locate it in political discourse before 1970, a sure sign that those wanting to change America’s demographics over the past 50 years started first with changing the language.

Similarly, “white supremacy” was rare even just a decade ago but has now become the insult of choice as the term “racist” has lost its sting from overuse.  What even is a “white supremacist?” Presumably, it’s the belief—held mostly by “whites” or those of European descent—that their people are best or “supreme.”

But what people doesn’t believe that?

Don’t the Japanese care more for their people and seek to preserve their heritage and language? In this sense, don’t they think the Japanese are more important and “best” such that they are Japanese supremacists? And if so, why don’t we hear about that?  Are the Chinese also Chinese supremacists, since they also seek to preserve and defend themselves as a people?

Every people tends to prefer itself for the boring and benign reason that people like what is familiar. “Familiar” is a variant of the word “family.”  A mother prefers her children to others’ children not because her children are intrinsically better but because they are hers.

So talk of supremacy is dishonest political weaponry. The real issue is that different peoples and nations exist, just as different families and children exist, and they all seek to protect, defend, and preserve themselves.

Of course, some peoples seek more than self-protection and self-preservation—they seek conquest or the right to rule others. But these are not so much nations as empires.  But empires have always existed, of course, and they’re not specific to “whites.” They’ve existed throughout the world—in Egypt, China, Babylon. Those preoccupied today with colonialism and imperialism seem to think that history started with European conquest—that no empire and no conquest existed before the white man. In this way, Europeans get suspiciously singled out while Asian and African empires of old get memory-holed and get a pass. Despite the norm of tribalism in much of the globe, the insult of ethnic supremacy is leveled only against Western peoples.

What’s more, the current race industrial complex singles out Europeans for criticism not just for their ethnicity or skin color—as “white” supremacists—but also because of their moral and cultural heritage—that is, their traditional sexual ethics and family life.  Groups such as “Black Lives Matter,” for example—yet more top-down fomenting of chaos—did not limit their protests to matters of race but also attacked marriage and “hetero normativity.”  So the target of the race hustlers isn’t just the skin color or ethnicity of Western peoples; it’s the civilization of Western peoples.

In the end, bogus terms like “white supremacy” are just war on the West.

***

Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason University. She authored the 2020 Report, Dear Colleague: The Weaponization of Title IX.

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