The Political Redefinition of Meanings & How the Status Quo Benefits
The redefinition of words and phrases by those in political power is nothing new, especially for what has to be identified as today’s fascist Left. Under the “kinder, gentler” moniker of Progressivism, they have been establishing redefinitions to their political advantage since the Wilson administration. Since then, the fascists (and this is by literal definition) have turned redefinition and the manipulation of words and meanings into an art form.
Because our education system doesn’t teach contemporary American history, the vast majority of Americans don’t understand that our country has suffered under several fascist presidential administrations in the 20th Century alone. The administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson were all fascist administrations to some degree. In the 21st Century fascism again exposed its head in the Obama and now Biden administrations.
In each of these administrations, the country witnessed the redefinition of words and phrases; acts that manipulated the American lexicon and socially engineered the populace, all to the benefit of those in power at the time.
A great example of fascist redefinition during the Wilsonian era comes in the rebranding of institutional eugenics to mainstream the practice into “polite society” as Planned Parenthood.
Eugenics, championed by Margaret Sanger – a rockstar of the Progressive movement – is defined as:
“...the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.”
The idea behind eugenics was to improve the human race by culling the “undesirables” – or as Hillary Clinton would say, the “deplorables.” The use of the word “eugenics,” however, needed to be jettisoned after Hitler and the Nazis used the theory’s rationale to justify the Holocaust, which say the mass extermination of Jews, Christians, Gypsies, people with disabilities, and (hypocritically for the many that were within the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy) homosexuals.
Today, eugenics has been redefined as “women’s health” as offered by Planned Parenthood. The fascist redefiners played the long game in transforming the practice of eugenics (the culling of the undesirables) into women’s health provided by Planned Parenthood.
As an aside, Sanger was every bit as much a genocidal racist as Adolf Hitler. In addressing a memo outlining the “Negro Project” by American Birth Control League director Clarence Gamble (heir to the Procter & Gamble corporation). Sanger wrote:
“[W]hile the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions, and doubts. We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
Another example of fascist redefinition comes to us in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which, building on two horrendous events – the enactment of the 16th Amendment and the creation of the Federal Reserve System – changed our economic system forever.
The Future of Freedom Foundation’s Jacob Hornberger writes:
“...The New Deal, however, succeeded in permanently establishing an entirely new economic system in America, one we commonly refer to today as the welfare state and the regulated economy.
“Roosevelt’s system was based on using the force of government to take money from people in order to give it to other people. That’s what Social Security was all about. It was also based on the power of government to control and regulate the economic activities of the people. That’s what the SEC was all about.
“To make Americans feel good about what was happening, Roosevelt did his best to convince them that they weren’t really abandoning the economic system of their ancestors but instead actually saving it. In actuality, the New Deal was rooted in the same philosophy and ideas on which Mussolini’s fascist system in Italy and Stalin’s and Hitler’s socialist systems in the Soviet Union and Germany were based.”
In fact, Mussolini was revered by Roosevelt, who corresponded with the fascist dictator regularly until the entry of the United States into World War II. Roosevelt called Mussolini an “admirable Italian gentleman.”
As Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review preserved:
“America's image today of Benito Mussolini and his Italian Fascist regime is, to a considerable extent, a product of Second World War propaganda...During the 1920s and early 1930s, Mussolini and Fascist Italy were generally well regarded in the United States...
“President Franklin Roosevelt expressed admiration for the Italian leader, and sent him cordial letters. In June 1933, Roosevelt praised Mussolini in a letter to an American envoy: ‘...I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.’ In another letter a few weeks later, the President wrote: ‘I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with the admirable Italian gentleman.’”
As James Huntzinger points out at AffluentInvestor.com:
“Statism in its fascist form attempts to secure economic growth and prosperity by fusing a ‘partnership’ between business and the State, absorbing business into the State in this process.” While communism [when] faced with existing institutions that threaten the power of the state – be they corporations, churches, the family, tradition – the Communist impulse is by and large to abolish them, while the fascist impulse is by and large to absorb them. Essentially, fascism is a form of hyper-interventionism amounting to socialism.”
Today, Roosevelt’s New Deal has been redefined from its fascist socialism to be a set of societal “safety nets” even though the overwhelming majority of what it achieved established collectivist socialism in the United States. Again, the fascist redefiners played the long game in transforming socialism into the benevolence of capitalism.
As outlined in a module at Academic-Master.com – not exactly a pantheon of conservatism, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative was also a dramatic redefinition of socialist programs into programs promoting “economic and social equity.”
According to one module contributor:
“Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society project was an attempt at socialism...The vision was made a reality through the implementation of various laws in education, housing, civil rights, healthcare, and social security...According to the critics, federal government funding also encouraged the poor to depend on ‘handouts’ instead of focusing on productive activities.”
Johnson’s Great Society was redefined from the socialist-based fascism of wealth redistribution and government dependence to mean “the proper use of the government to improve the lives of American citizens.” One more time, the fascist redefiners played the long game in transforming socialism into the benevolence of government.
So, we shouldn’t be surprised that today, the power-elites, so desperate in their quest to hold on to powers – and this is applicable to both the Left and the Right in our political spectrum (from Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders to Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and the Never-Trumpers), are attempting to manipulate and redefine the concept of “populism.”
Populism’s contemporary definition reads:
“[A]ny of various, often antiestablishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that offer unorthodox solutions or policies and appeal to the common person rather than according to with traditional party or partisan ideologies; grass-roots democracy, working-class activism; egalitarianism; representation or extolling of the common person, the working class, the underdog, etc.”
Key in this contemporary – or manipulated definition – is the first-string definition, “antiestablishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that offer unorthodox solutions or policies and appeal to the common person rather than according to with traditional party or partisan ideologies.”
We have been hearing the rattlings of this redefinition since before Donald Trump took office. The American people, exhausted at the political opportunism of the ruling class, i.e. the inside-the-beltway, connected elites, professional politicians, and well-financed special interest activists. The people – horror of horrors – were threatening to elect an “outsider”; a “populist.”
In 2016, radically-Left Slate.com declared, “Donald Trump’s campaign has been constantly referred to as a populist insurgency within the Republican Party, consisting as it does of an anti-Washington message designed to stoke working-class anxieties.”
Again, in 2016, Politico suggested, “Is Donald Trump the perfect populist, one with broader appeal to the right and the center than his predecessors in recent American political history – so much so it could put him in the White House?...Trump, in fact, has more appeal to the center than the conservative populists of the last half-century.”
In a 2020 retrospect, the now-diminished-in-stature National Review posited, “Conservative populists and nationalists can take some pleasure in Trump’s presidency, as it helped them assert themselves within the coalition as a force that needs to be reckoned with. It demonstrated that these views had a real constituency in the party.”
In their attempt to manipulate the meaning of “populism” into a political ideology, they executed a demonization of the word’s meaning to marry it to the “Great Upsetter of the Political Status Quo” – Donald Trump, the “Orange Man.”
In their proposed context, populism symbolizes “long-simmering resentments of the everyman, brought to a boil by charismatic politicians hawking impossible promises.”
Professor Cas Mudde, a Stanley Wade Shelton Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia, contends populism isn’t a fully formed political ideology like socialism or liberalism, but it is a “thin” ideology, made up of just a few core beliefs:
that the “elite are understood to be fundamentally corrupt and out of touch with everyday life”
that the politics of government should be an “expression of the ‘general will’ – a set of desires presumed to be shared as common sense by all ‘ordinary people.’”
So, populism, in its pure understanding, is interchangeable with the idea of real politics: the electorate – the people – coming together to form a consensus on what the common good is as well as to craft a sense of how our dissatisfactions relate (who is to “blame”) and how to force a change.
Yet, the status quo politicians and their lackeys in the propagandistic mainstream media – in cohort with their social media censoring counterparts, would have you believe that populism is the politics of intellectual barbarism and mob rule. Why? Why are those in the seats of power today so invested in redefining populism?
The answer is easy to come by. They don’t want anything to change unless that change solidifies their power and/or fills their bank accounts, regardless of all their lofty rhetoric about being “progressive” and possessing a desire to “change” the system.
The Guardian’s Peter Baker writes:
“...[P]olitical change, in other words, is the result of demands against the existing order, which must be fused together in a movement to change it – a movement that may look a lot like populism...
“But those who benefit from the status quo don’t want it to change; to this end, they might champion toothless approaches to collective decision-making: bipartisan consensus as an end in itself; the elevation of ‘rational’ experts over hot-headed partisans; ‘Third Way’ centrism that shuns ideological conflict in favor of ‘what works’ or mediation by liberal institutions...But nothing lasts forever, especially when the number of people who feel politicians are making their lives more precarious is rising. And then politics – real politics, which is to say populist politics – make a return.”
Understanding populism in its original, pure, and untainted definition is to understand that populism is inherent to our Republic, to true representative government. It finds, as Baker so aptly put it, “reality between democracy’s promises and the impossibility of their full, permanent realization.”
Populism, therefore, seems to be any commonly held belief that challenges the power-elite’s status quo; any consensus which arises organically outside of the dominant political culture, and that acts to oppose current political dogma.
Dr. Robert Malone, whose substack I wholeheartedly recommend, clarified our present political state as a “new political axis...between individual freedom to choose and collectivism.”
In their penchant for the politically opportune manipulation of the meanings of words, phrases, concepts, and ideology, the American fascists are using the media and the censors of the media to redefine collectivism; to redefine the hybrid of socialist-based oligarchic globalism to mean freedom.
We only have ourselves to blame if we fall for it. To that end, we only have ourselves to blame if we keep electing these grifters.
Today’s Headlines
26 Governors Create Border Strike Force ‘In the Absence of Federal Leadership’
Rhode Island Progressive Democrats Introduce Bill To Impose Double-Taxation On Unvaccinated
US Supreme Court Backs Biden On Denying Federal Benefit To Puerto Rico
Florida House Approves New Congressional District Map Despite The Whining Of Democrats
NBC Medical Expert Says Carry Extra Masks On Planes, Coerce Your Neighbors To Wear Them
Germany Rejects Putin's Demand To Pay For Gas In Rubles (Translation Required)
Cnn’s New Streaming Service To Shut Down A Month After Its Start
Florida House Passes Bill Revoking Disney’s Special Self-Governing Status
