SPEECHLESS: CONTROLLING WORDS, CONTROLLING MINDS by Michael Knowles

Why has the United States been transmogrified in little more than half a century from a Christian nation that joyously displayed Christmas trees and crèches in public spaces, celebrated familial virtues, embraced the importance of temperance, and (both culturally and legally) censored pornographic productions, into a secular nation that bans prayers at public school graduation ceremonies, allows men who “identify” as women to invade female sport competitions and dressing rooms, celebrates the “freedom” to indulge in almost any debauchery short of the ever diminishing prohibition against pederasty, highlights paternal dysfunction, frowns on a woman’s desire to raise a family and even celebrates her penumbral Constitutional “right” to snuff out the life in her womb?  Add to this litany a cohort of semantic alterations that obliterate the biological distinction between men and women and label as “hate speech” or “violence” utterances that differ from the ever-shifting demands of political correctness.  Top off these changes with the silencing of a sitting President by a handful of tech oligarchs who effectively control speech in America’s and the world’s “public square.”

These are a few of the transformations in American society that Michael Knowles analyzes in his recent work Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, transformations broadly attributed to “political correctness,” a tactic with roots in Marxism whose ultimate goal is the destruction of our traditional culture -- a culture whose self-confidence and virtues made radical revolutions impossible.  In short, undermine the family, destroy moral probity, discard rational thought, debauch the population, vilify religion, denigrate patriotism, and you have a demoralized population ripe for indoctrination and authoritarian rule.

As Knowles’ subtitle suggests, a major component of the Left’s revisionist project is through the control and manipulation of language -- making it almost impossible to think and speak outside the radicals’ own linguistic box.  The semantic apotheosis of what once seemed modest feminist-inspired changes (e.g. substituting “chairperson” or “chair” for “chairman”) is the contemporary demand (on pain of being labeled a “transphobic bigot”) that everyone must call a “man” a “woman” if “she” identifies as a woman.  Other neologisms that set the terms of engagement for contemporary conversations include the word “fetus” (since Roe v. Wade, 1973) and the self-annihilating phrase “reproductive rights”-- terms used to mask the once morally repugnant act of stopping reproduction by killing babies in the womb. 

This linguistic project is part and parcel of the “long march through the institutions” that “cultural Marxists” like Rudi Dutschke and Antonio Gramsci (who employed the phrase “cultural hegemony”) deemed necessary to destroy the “false consciousness” Americans imbibed from traditional culture.  To give one salient example, if the values extant in the 1950s permeated society, most women would likely embrace the idea of being married and a mom -- a decision that feminists like Simon de Beauvoir equated with being in prison.  “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. . . .  Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”  Given the enthusiastic “breaking the glass ceiling” rhetoric that emanates incessantly from leftist media and the largely implicit denigration of women who choose the option of becoming a mother and homemaker, de Beauvoir’s vision of “freedom” for women now lacks only the element of legal compulsion.  More broadly, the traditional idea that freedom itself involves self-control and mastery of the passions has long been discarded for the notion that liberty  means the ability to act freely on one’s desires or, in popular lingo, the freedom “to be myself.”  

Of course to control language, one must occupy the “commanding heights of the culture” -- which include academia, journalism, entertainment, and major corporations (especially big-tech).  All these institutions (as well as most big cities in the U.S.) are now firmly under leftist control, which makes the charge that America is “structurally racist” all the more absurd.  Fortunately for PC radicals, logical consistency isn’t necessary for the success of a project whose consistent aim is, in Marx’s words, “ruthless criticism of all that exists.”

Explaining Marxist goals and their linguistic tactics, however, is only one side of Knowles’ argument. The most provocative and insightful component of his book concerns a critique of conservatives who play into the hands of their opponents by failing to see the importance of these linguistic battles or by countering them with abstract paeans to “free speech” and “free markets.”  As noted earlier, by defining the linguistic terms of debate, Marxists are able to create “heads I win, tails you lose” scenarios that revolve around putative “rights” of “marginalized” populations who “feel excluded” or “oppressed” by something that was once part of traditional culture (e.g. statues of Jefferson, the national anthem, the American flag, laws against abortion, vagrancy, and public lewdness).  Knowles observes that “free speech” and “anti-censorship” arguments essentially create a moral vacuum that are inevitably filled by the passionate Left.  He further notes that no society, including America, ever tolerated all manner of speech or failed to censor actions and ideas it deemed inimical to its welfare. 

The critical question concerns not “censorship” itself but the things a society censors.  Nowadays the “n-word” is number one on the list, with the exception that individuals possessing sufficient melanin (and leftist leanings) can employ the actual word with impunity.  Public displays of Christian religious items (crosses, crèches, Ten Commandments) are now deemed “exclusive” if not illegal.  A Michael Knowles talk may be heckled into oblivion and the speaker attacked, but black racists can address a crowd without interruption, be given academic tenure, and secure lucrative book deals.  The term “illegal alien” is verboten; “undocumented migrant” is ok; but best of all, I might add, one refers to “an economic or political refugee and future American citizen.”  Most notoriously, President Trump, as well as his supporters, can be denounced as “deplorables” or “insurrectionists” and silenced by the big-tech communication arm of the Left.  In short, we’ve exchanged the standards for acceptable speech and practice that guided a largely religious society for standards set by Leftists intent on destroying the country we once loved.

So how should conservatives oppose Leftists?  Not with encomiums to “free speech” that essentially abandon the substantive principles upon which our democratic republic was founded.  As John Adams observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  Consequently, conservatives must assert those basic principles that guided our nation and its moral progress since its founding -- principles and standards adumbrated in Knowles’ final chapter but reserved for and deserving a book of their own.  In brief, “Any substantive conservative vision must begin with an acknowledgment of moral conscience, which is a judgment of reason whereby we recognize the moral quality of concrete acts. This acknowledgement requires the further recognition that good, evil, virtue, and vice are not mere sentiments or superstitions but eternal realities.”  Conservatives must not cede to Leftists the linguistic playing field and tiptoe around the absurdity of saying that men can have babies or menstruate.  With William F. Buckley they must reject the “hoax” of “academic freedom” (God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”) and realize that “Skepticism has utility only when it leads to conviction.”

Knowles becomes in my view needlessly pedantic when he chides conservatives for noting that Antifa (meaning “anti-fascist) actually employs fascist tactics.  The author frequently insists that Antifa is a Marxist organization and should be so categorized.  (I myself would wager that most of these black-garbed gang members are philosophically clueless nihilists and prospective sociopaths.)  But that picayune quibble pales in comparison with the larger message that Knowles provides about the origins, linguistic tactics, and cultural victories of the Left.  More importantly, Knowles explains how successful opposition to the Left must embrace positive standards and principles rooted in both moral conscience and rational judgment -- not abstract praise of “free speech” and thoughtless denunciations of “censorship.”  

LIVE NOT BY LIES by Rod Dreher (American Thinker Book Review)

"Live not by lies" was the challenge issued by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, upon his departure from the Soviet Union, to individuals still condemned to live behind the Iron Curtain — especially to those who were well aware of the suffocating mendacity that permeated communist societies.  Rod Dreher's book gives the same advice to Americans today, especially to Christians who are expected to mouth obvious lies or face social ostracism and economic devastation — punishments administered occasionally by leftist judges and government officials but most frequently by tech giants, woke corporations, and P.C. media sycophants.  

Dreher was inspired to write his book by heroic dissidents who refused to bend the knee to communist tyrants and saw a similar tyranny becoming ensconced in the United States.  These moral giants are astonished that the primary beacon of freedom during their years of oppression has become a society where speech and actions disapproved by secular elites are regularly squelched and punished.  Religious freedom, for example, is being reduced to the freedom to gather in congregations where (at least for now) marriage is affirmed by a priest, rabbi, or minister, a freedom that doesn't extend beyond meeting walls to how a baker runs his business.

Admittedly, the totalitarianism Americans face is not the "hard" Soviet variety of which socialist-sympathizing Millennials are overwhelmingly ignorant.  Those regimes committed horrific crimes against political prisoners.  To cite one example given by Dreher, a row of twenty or thirty priests were shot in the face, one after the other, as each affirmed his faith in God.  America's "soft" totalitarianism, by contrast, flourishes thanks to an unholy alliance of tech, media, academic, corporate, and political powers that are eager to punish anyone brash enough to express un-woke opinions above a furtive whisper.  Under this soft totalitarianism, Americans are now compelled "to engage in doublethink every day.  Men have periods.  The woman standing in front of you is to be called 'he.'  Diversity and inclusion mean excluding those who object to ideological uniformity.  Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result."  I might add to that short summary the lie that America is a racist country, that law enforcement and our judicial system are institutionally racist, and that America was founded in 1619 upon the bedrock principle of white racism.

The ascendancy of this soft totalitarianism has been in the making for well over a half-century and gained substantial momentum in the sixties and seventies with the rise of what Philip Rieff called a "therapeutic culture" within which "the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish."  Dreher further notes that this culture "goes hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which, along with ethnic and gender identity politics, replaced the failed economic class struggle as the utopian focus of the post-1960s radical left."  These "cultural revolutionaries," the author adds somewhat surprisingly, "found an ally in advanced capitalism, which teaches that nothing should exist outside of the market mechanism and its sorting of value according to human desires."  My less pretentious translation of that sentence would be the following: Madison Avenue has promoted for decades the notion that nothing is more important than comfort, leisure time, and feelings of pleasure so shallow that "happiness" seems to represent an exalted ethical principle.

Clearly, this "live and let live" philosophy (if it ever was sincere) has been superseded by a doctrine of ruthless cultural and political conformity, since the happiness of "oppressed groups" requires a world in which using the "wrong" pronoun for another's "gender identity" is considered the equivalent of a violent assault.  Moreover, in today's cultural calculus, unequal group outcomes are taken as prima facie evidence of racism, sexism, or a plethora of hateful "phobias."  Supercharging this morass of mendacity is the rise of "surveillance capitalism," where privacy has been ceded to woke corporate entities in exchange for convenience, thus providing these leftist groups an unprecedented level of information about the lives of consumers.  That same information is then used to shape the future actions and beliefs of those individuals according to the economic, cultural, and political whims of tech giants.

What is sadly lacking in modern American society, Dreher observes, is allegiance to a set of principles (especially Christian principles) that transcend the ubiquitous desire to be happy.  He relates the story of a Hungarian woman who, after thirty years of Western consumerism, is now inundated with the same secular advice from associates that has become common in American culture.  They urge her to divorce her husband, put her child in daycare, and get a job that will make her happy.  The woman, however, doesn't want to dismiss her maternal duties or end her marriage.  Rather, "she worries that her friends don't grasp that suffering is a normal part of life — even part of a good life, in that suffering teaches us how to be patient, kind, and loving."  The lady doesn't want to "escape her problems," but rather "wants them to help her live through them."

One of the things that impressed Dreher in his conversations with the numerous anti-communist heroes was the soul-satisfying lives they achieved via faith, family, and moral integrity even in the midst of suffering.  On the other hand, he despairs of a society where individuals have become increasingly isolated and reduced to Brave New World addicts hooked on feelings of well-being provided by the Conditioners in charge.  Thus, his question directed to Christians is whether they are truly disciples of Christ (i.e., followers) or merely admirers — whether they are willing to suffer for their faith or whether their primary allegiance is to the gospel of wealth, comfort, and success ("Moralistic Therapeutic Deism") that's proclaimed in numerous churches.    

Dreher's dissident models did not seek martyrdom, but they were unwilling to propagate and live out official lies.  "Let their rule hold not through me!"  By drawing strength from their families, meeting in small groups, and secretly printing and distributing forbidden literature, they were strengthened to avoid the fate of an inward-only dissenter who "eventually becomes the character he [constantly] plays."  A motto employed by some of these intimate groups (one that Dreher also adopts throughout his book) is the triple-injunction to "See, Judge, Act."

Unfortunately, a grave failure on Dreher's part to "See" and "Judge" correctly is contained in his repetition of an endlessly repeated leftist lie about "the US federal government's [i.e. the Trump administration's] failure to respond effectively to the Covid-19 pandemic."  Later, Dreher says, "Politics are so divided by rigid ideologies that it is difficult for the US federal government to get anything done" — a naïve late-September observation I trust the author wouldn't repeat following the torrent of perverse executive actions the Biden administration has issued in just five months!

 Fortunately, such errors in judgment are few in this work that provides poignant examples of moral (e.g., Vaclav Havel) and spiritual courage in the face of overwhelming state brutality and that identifies numerous fissures in American society (broken families, loss of historical memory, corrupt centers of power) that have prepared the ground for the utopianism that serves as the deceptive lure for a freedom-denying totalitarian culture.  Accordingly, Dreher challenges Americans to see the clear signs of totalitarianism in their midst and to act positively to oppose its spread.  In particular, he calls on Christians to resist living by lies by embracing true discipleship, a commitment that requires a willingness to suffer for one's faith.