A Facebook post reported:
The New York Times published a list of about 200 terms that the Trump administration reportedly prohibits or avoids. The list includes words such as activists, anti-racism, belonging, breastfeeding, climate crisis, community diversity, disability, discrimination, equality, feminism, gender, immigrants, LGBT, mental health, minorities, oppression, orientation, pregnant, racial justice, racism, sex, transgender, and victims.
The NYT stressed that the published list is likely incomplete, as more internal memos exist than those obtained by the newspaper.
(For a complete list that is free to read, see Diane Ravitch's blog.)
A couple of commenters thought that no matter what MAGA censors, they can't change reality, and therefore this word ban was "bonkers, stupid, and ineffective."
My response:
The ban is neither bonkers nor stupid. It is a very effective way to control what we, the people, believe. The censorship is calculated carefully to accomplish a whitewashing of communication and therefore people's mindsets. This is what dictatorships do. This is what the Nazis did. This is an endeavor that is tried and proven effective.
In the 1940s, my mother was one of the first female copywriters in a NYC advertising firm, and she used to say if you can get people to believe advertising, you can control what they think.
Not taking this stuff seriously and not understanding its effectiveness is how Democrats have been repeatedly defeated. We have a kind of arrogance that is self-sabotaging: we like to believe we think independently and therefore cannot be controlled by the language around us. But this simply is not true.
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff's book Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004) became wildly popular during the rise of Trump, helping warring families bridge political gaps by teaching them how to reframe their thoughts and find common values. Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel, as anti-Semitic speech exploded, Lakoff wrote on Facebook:
"All thought is carried out by neural circuitry—it does not float in air. Language neurally activates thought. Language can thus change brains, both for the better and the worse. Hate speech changes the brains of those hated for the worse. It creates toxic stress, fear and distrust—all physical, all in one's neural circuitry active every day.
"This internal harm can be even more severe than an attack with a fist. It imposes on the freedom to think and therefore to act free of fear, threats, and distrust.
"It imposes on one's ability to think and act like a fully free citizen for a long time.
"Hate speech can also change the brains of those with mild prejudice, moving it towards hate and threatening action. When hate is physically in your brain, then you think hate and feel hate, you are moved to act to carry out what you physically, in your neural system, think and feel.
"That is why hate speech in not 'mere' speech."
And so it follows, if you ban, for lack of a better term, "inclusive speech"—speech that invites thoughts of equity, acceptance, and empathy—you will gradually transform the culture to be accepting of a dictatorship.
This stuff is serious. Wake Up!