Debbie Dingell’s Defense of Rashida Tlaib Is Farcical

A couple of weeks ago, I observed how quickly the reactions to the atrocities of October 7 had exposed the entire progressive speech-policing apparatus as a grubby, self-interested fraud:

For more than a decade now, our universities, our media, our HR departments, and our celebrities have terrorized us with a bunch of vicious dogmas that, it turns out, they never believed in for a moment. In the name of “diversity” and “inclusion” and “equity” and any other abstract concept that might plausibly be recruited to the obscurantists’ side, Americans were asked to subordinate their freedom, their conversations, and their consciences to the personal preferences of a handful of unelected arbiters of taste. And then, one terrible day in October, a real barbarity was staged, and, within a few hours of the rules being applied to its apologists, the whole enterprise was revealed to be a brittle sham. Who among us could have predicted that?

Enter Representative Debbie Dingell, to add yet another example to the folio:

“People interpret words in different ways.”

Let me ask: Does this approximate — in any way, shape, or form — the way that progressives talk about language in other contexts? Does it track with how Rashida Tlaib evaluates words? Does it resemble, even in shadow, how figures such as Debbie Dingell usually behave toward controversial political speech?

Clearly, it does not. Indeed, that Dingell is trying out this line is an indication of raw contempt. It’s a power play, a screw-you, a gleeful middle finger, raised by someone who understands that the new rules simply do not apply to her and her friends. As we have learned, lo these past ten years, institutional progressivism is nigh on totalitarian in its demand that words must mean only what institutional progressives want them to mean. Just think about how many times a phrase that has been innocuous for all of human history has been redefined on the fly, and turned from that moment of definition into a “slur” or “dog whistle” or “attack” or “problem” whose use must be proscribed and then punished.

Far from reflecting humility, Dingell’s appeal to nuance is anathemic to the progressive ideology she champions — which, in its modern incarnation, is willing to tolerate no definitions beyond its own. The reach of this habit is mind-blowing: Currently, progressives are engaged in an attempt to change the name of nearly 80 bird species, because those species are allegedly named for “White men with ‘objectively horrible pasts.'” That nobody in his right mind thinks of those men when discussing those birds — indeed, that those names have developed their own meanings once applied to those birds — does not matter one whit. The slightest connection is sufficient to warrant change. In recent years, the same approach has been taken toward telescopes, cities, public schools, sports teams, sports cheers, books, cloud, public holidays, and streets, as well as toward words such as “grandfathered,” “blacklist,” “guys,” and “sanity check,” and toward well-established phrases such as “human capital stock” and “Anglo-American.” On the other side of the ledger, progressives have taken to demanding that some of the most commonly used words in the English language — “mother,” for example — be universally substituted lest they upset anyone who feels excluded from their ambit. Even the word “master,” which exhibits profoundly different meanings in different contexts, has been broadly purged, to the point at which institutions as divergent as the code-versioning provider, GitHub, the Real Estate Board of New York, and Yale University have all stopped using it.

In Yale’s case, the university openly acknowledged that the word it was using had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery, but elected to do it anyway:

The use of “master” as a title at Yale is a legacy of the college systems at Oxford and Cambridge. The term derives from the Latin magister, meaning “chief, head, director, teacher,” and it appears in the titles of university degrees (master of arts, master of science, and others) and in many aspects of the larger culture (master craftsman, master builder). Some members of our community argued that discarding the term “master” would interject into an ancient collegiate tradition a racial narrative that has never been associated with its use in the academy. Others maintained that regardless of its history of use in the academy, the title—especially when applied to an authority figure—carries a painful and unwelcome connotation that can be difficult or impossible for some students and residential college staff to ignore.

Nevertheless, Yale decided that:

The term “master,” when used to describe the role in the residential colleges, will be changed to “head of college.”

If pushed, Yale would presumably say that it is better to be safe than sorry. But therein lies the key point, which is that — once again — the rules that are applied to the groups that progressives like are different from the rules that are applied to the groups that they do not like. If the word “master” could plausibly carry such an offensive meaning within our university system that it must be banished from common use, then surely — surely! — a phrase such as “from the river to the sea” ought to count when it comes after an devastating terrorist attack, a palpable rise in national antisemitism, and is deployed by a political figure who gleefully spreads anti-Israel propaganda and refuses to condemn Hamas?

I take a back seat to nobody in my desire to see progressives abandon their relentless attempt to control the English language, but, to be useful, that abandonment has to be wholesale. To demand charity in interpretation only in such cases as the speaker happens to be lambasting Israel is no abandonment at all. When complaining about Donald Trump’s tweets, Debbie Dingell confirmed her staunch opposition to any “language that is xenophobic, racist, sexist, intolerant, prejudiced, or discriminatory” and that “has divided and pitted us against each other.” When reflecting upon the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, Dingell proposed that “words have consequences.” Evidently, Terms and Conditions apply.