France Moves to Ban Woke Language. America Must Do the Same
Americans are well aware of the linguistic fights at home surrounding preferred pronouns, birthing people, and how to properly refer to members of the Hispanic diaspora. Sadly, the war on words is not a purely domestic one as the left has brought these battles worldwide.
Debates over so-called inclusive language have made their way to France, where a cadre of activists are attempting to butcher the tongue of Voltaire, Hugo, and Sartre with a series of massive grammatical and orthographic changes in the name of gender neutrality. Yet unlike at home, the French government is fighting back.
The French Senate approved a measure last week that would, if passed by the French parliament, ban the use of such language in education and official documents.
French President Emmanuel Macron has strongly denounced woke language saying that French needed to “keep its foundations.” L’Académie Française, the government body responsible for determining proper French, has also railed against the proposed changes.
“By advocating an immediate reform of orthography, the promoters of inclusive language violate the evolution of language according to a brutal, arbitrary and unconcerted injunction,” the body wrote in a flowery open letter.
They have reason to be concerned.
Activists have spent years attempting to make French, a language with gender hardcoded into its grammar, more gender neutral. They’ve been successful in many of the same arenas as their American counterparts.
French educators and academics routinely push for gender neutral French in their classrooms, while companies like Netflix and Microsoft have begun using it in their products.
While France’s government has recognized the threat posed by leftist assaults on language, America’s government has been all too willing to join the woke mob in destroying English for equity’s sake.
Woke language has become the standard for official documents under President Biden, and the full force of the federal bureaucracy has been empowered to enforce it.
In a 2022 memo, Biden’s Government Accountability Office began forcing its staff to use so-called inclusive language, banning words like “man-made” or “manpower” to avoid sexism.
The same memo also pushed employees to use leftist jargon in place of more accurate terminology. For example, government officials were told not to say illegal alien but instead undocumented migrant.
Biden’s personnel choices seem hell bent on promoting language that pushes leftist ideology as well.
Admiral Rachel Levine, a man in a dress who currently serves as Biden’s HHS Assistant Secretary for Health, visited a gender clinic in Alaska that refuses to use the term “mother.” Instead, the clinic uses dehumanizing terms like "gestational parent," "birth parent," "carrier" and "egg producer."
All good for Levine, who gushed about how important and amazing the clinic was in spite of its disgusting terminology for women.
The left’s attempts to induce woke language through federal pressure has already had disastrous consequences. Children are exposed to radical gender ideology that makes them question their biology, and Americans who refuse to give into pronoun pressure are liable to lose their jobs.
Saul Alinsky famously mused in his influential “Rules for Radicals” that “he who controls the language controls the masses.” The left has clearly taken this message to heart and is attempting to control the masses with their woke language games.
Thus, America faces a choice. It can continue to go down the road leftist radicals want and push for radical language that controls our lives. Or it can follow France’s example and nip “inclusive language in the bud before it infects everything.
The next crop of conservatives who enter the federal bureaucracy must be prepared to roll back the left’s assaults on linguistics. It may seem a minor thing on which to expend precious political capital, but the words and phrases we use matter immensely.
How a policy is defined is almost as important as the policy itself, thus allowing the left to dictate the literal terms of politics is putting the right at an extreme disadvantage. A ban like the French are proposing in school and official documents would go miles towards removing some of the strength the left currently has.
France has set the path, it is up to America to follow it.