Save Your Words

I wanted to write something optimistic for Christmas, something uplifting. Alas, I’m not feeling it. No, I’m not down on Christmas. To the contrary, Christmas is one of the diminishing number of things that still make sense to me. Because it’s about action that lines up with eternal truth: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

God doesn’t just tell us He loves us. He acts. He delivers.

Action is real. What I’m down on these days is words. They’re killing us.

Words have become two related brands of malevolence. There are the words that mean the opposite of what they denote, and there are words that mean precisely what they denote but are uttered to obscure the speaker’s antithetical intentions.

The first, one hopes, has become easier to spot. Anti-racism is racism. Diversity is the demand for monolithic adherence to progressive pieties. Equity is systematic inequality. Inclusion is exclusion — the excluded being the oppressor class that isn’t actually oppressing anyone; its members simply lack the immutable characteristics favored by the progressive clerisy. Sustainable is something that requires confiscation of people’s property in order to be sustained, in lieu of what reliably provides us with actual sustenance and flourishing. Discrimination is unconscious bias because, unable to prove intentional bias (the conscious motivation one must have in order to discriminate), progressives need another word trick to make you a racist in need of anti-racism indoctrination. Our values are their desires — the “them” in question being progressives, whose values (anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, etc.) are not shared by the main of society. Hence the need to disguise them in . . . words.

We could go on with this. The game is now so pervasive that the ploy is easier to spot. But that, of course, is how it goes when societies come under the thumb of despotic forces. An expression that starts out as a subversive absurdity — what could be more absurd than supplanting equality, our core commitment, with equity, its opposite? — becomes part of a mandatory, exhaustive (and exhausting) glossary. Commonsense expression is condemned as “violence” and relegated to samizdat.

Even more insidious, though, is the second category: The invocation of words for what they really do mean. It’s often done legalistically, usually indignantly, but always to conceal the faithlessness of their utterance.

This word trick took center stage when the presidents of three elite universities — three putative masters of the game — gave their disastrous testimony in Congress earlier this month. House members, most memorably Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), pressed them about whether calls on campus for genocide against Jews violated the universities’ policies against harassment and bullying. In response, las jefas gamely hewed to the scripts that Harvard, Penn, and MIT paid WilmerHale the fortune of Croesus — or half a semester’s tuition — to produce. It depends on the context, they bobbed; it depends on whether the words cross into action, they weaved.

This might actually have been amusing if not for the context the school presidents studiously avoided acknowledging: the menacing by pro-Hamas students, faculty, and administrators of students who were known to be (or outwardly appeared to be) Jewish, with calls for the destruction of Israel and the elimination of Jews. What instead made the testimony infuriating was not the words per se but the hypocrisy of their assertion.

Technically, what the presidents said was not wrong. Context does in fact matter. Always. The fan screaming, “Kill the umpire!” behind home plate does not actually want the umpire to be killed. If I, as your lawyer, tell you, “You’ll avoid any trouble if you tell the truth in court tomorrow,” it means one thing. If Luca Brasi shows up at your door and tells you precisely the same thing, it means something quite different.

Now, let’s say you ran a school that was trying to arrive at a policy of anti-harassment (here, unlike with anti-racism, I mean “anti” in the sense of actually being against the thing in question). It could be a state school, or a private school that receives a lot of federal money and that therefore must conform to the First Amendment. Or maybe it’s just a school that, regardless of whether required to do so, aims to strike a prudent balance between free expression (consistent with a university’s truth-seeking mission) and security (consistent with the university’s obligations). In any of those postures, we are looking for the line where expression is so provocative there is a danger of violence that is intended, real, and imminent.

The law defies easy articulation and application here because the matter is so fact-specific and the jurisprudence is muddled (which is why the now-rote admonition against “yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” rarely adds the commonsense caveat “unless, of course, there really is a fire”). But if you were a bona fide actor trying to determine the risk of forcible harm, you’d be grappling with the words invoked and the peculiar circumstances — the context. That is, you’d probably say something that sounded an awful lot like what WilmerHale advised the university presidents to say.

The problem is not what the three headmistresses said. It’s that they were avatars of vice paying tribute to virtue. Their utterance of authentic principles riles us because, out of their mouths, it is just consciousness of guilt. It shows that they know what the rules are. It illustrates their arrogant perception that if they emote these principles just so, this performance will inoculate them from their failure to apply the principles universally — a willful and thoroughgoing failure rationalized by their woke allegiance to “equity.”

I will offer some observations that, though hardly original, are undeniable for people who cherish their credibility: If the question had been about calls for the genocide of, say, Palestinians, or the extermination of “trans women,” there would have been no congressional grilling of the presidents because, with blinding speed, the universities would have come down on the perps like a ton of bricks. Indeed, for such an occasion, that American original, Claudine Gay, would undoubtedly have come up with something scathing that someone had once said. Similarly, if the targets had been Jews (as was the case) but the perps had been red-capped “insurrectionists,” we’d have discovered that the 14th Amendment’s Section 3 expulsion applies to Harvard, too (if you could suspend disbelief and imagine that ilk’s being at Harvard in the first place).

The presidents’ problem is that, while they can mouth a principle accurately, its application to bien pensant lefties — white progressives, black anti-racists, apologists for jihadis, and the whole rainbow coalition of antisemites — would be inconceivable, would be treasonous.

So what’s their solution? To apply a First Amendment-informed standard across the board and evenhandedly? Don’t be daft. Their plan is task forces to study antisemitism, meaning: Get Jews back on the reservation by granting them a modicum of oppressed status. At the right equity rank, of course — I mean, they can’t expect a seat at the adult inclusiontable, right? But if Jewish students and, especially, Jewish donors are cool with reverting to the October 6 wonderland, where anti-Zionism had nothing to do with antisemitism, no sirree — if we can just go back to the premise that “some of my best friends are Jews; it’s Israel that sucks” — all will be well, across Harvard Yard and from the River to the Sea.

We’ll see, but I don’t think October 7 allows a return to October 6. It won’t for Jews, and it shouldn’t for anyone.

I confess to amusement that the presidents’ chief tormentor was Elise Stefanik, Harvard College class of 2006. The congresswoman, formerly president of her alma mater’s Institute of Politics, is now front and center in the MAGA vanguard, a wave she rode to the No. 3 post in House Republican leadership — supplanting Trump nemesis Liz Cheney in 2021. As a prominent backer of the former president’s 2024 campaign, Stefanik’s keen ear for dangerously belligerent speech turns deaf when it comes to Trump’s pre-riot barn burner on the Ellipse. That’s the speech that progressives have labored to nail Trump on for incitement, but they can’t because — almost as if he’d consulted WilmerHale on it — Trump remembered to bleat a few words about wanting a peaceful march while he, the chief executive of the Article II branch, urged a raucous crowd to protest at the Capitol, the turf of the Article I branch.

Stefanik is apparently unperturbed by the speech. All depends on the context, I guess. Meantime, you can bet the presidents of elite American universities would have not the slightest hesitation issuing a full-throated condemnation of Trump’s words, their indifference to Hamas’s barbaric actions notwithstanding.

Action is what matters, though. Save your words.