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.”