Pete Hendrickson (@LostHorizons)

Farewell, 2021, year of weird speaking by George Will (with an important afterword by Yours Truly) At the end of 2021, a year of weird speaking, Americans learned from Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) that “student debt is policy violence.” Previously, Americans were lectured that “silence is violence” — that not voicing support for this or that supposedly oppressed group is violence against it. The proliferation of new forms of violence raises a question: Are old forms — say, a flash mob looting a Louis Vuitton store — still violence? Or is this just the vigorous articulation of intersectional consciousness against consumer culture’s commodification of everything, including commodities? Normal people, who might want to toss anvils to progressives drowning in their jargon, should modify George Orwell’s axiom that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” Today, the enemy of clarity is the scary sincerity of progressives who are politically inflamed about everything. Two percent of Hispanics, according to a national poll cited by Politico, approve of progressives designating them Latinx. In 2021, did Blacks and Indigenous People of Color suddenly start thinking of themselves as BIPOCs? Or did advanced thinkers volunteer to do BIPOCs’ thinking for them? In Dane County, Wis., home of the hyper-progressive University of Wisconsin, the sheriff’s office announced a new “philosophy”: Persons in jail are no longer “inmates,” they are “residents” or “those within our care.” The word “infrastructure” polls well because, in normal usage, it denotes glistening new airports and such like. So, congressional progressives decided that increased “investment” for school lunches — the word “spending” has been stricken from progressivism’s lexicon — and every other domestic purpose counts as “social infrastructure.” Including the Build Back Better bill’s provisions concerning “tree equity.” Note, however, that an Oregon high school — in progressive Portland, of course — hesitated before changing its mascot from a Trojan to an evergreen tree, which might evoke thoughts of lynchings. Colorado’s constitution forbids “any distinction or classification of pupils … on account of race or color,” a provision adopted in 1974, during the national recoil against segregation. Now, however, a Denver school is planning, when covid-19 permits, a “families of color playground night,” a project overseen by something not all elementary schools have: the school’s “dean of culture.” Continued: https://losthorizons.com/N/178.htm#4