The latest manifestation of liberalism in hyper-speed: liberals want to eliminate ordinary words as racist

Here is more on the initiative from MoveOn.org and a group called Colorlines declaring that such terms as “illegals,” “illegal aliens,” and “illegal immigrants” are racist and should be eliminated from our language.

In connection with this, a friend tells me that last night Bill O’Reilly had on a spokeswoman for Colorlines and he said to her, “Ok, I appoint you head of U.S. immigration. What is your immigration policy? Do we let in everybody in the world who wants to come here?” And the woman replied, “We just want people to be treated as human beings.” O’Reilly asked her the question again, and again she refused to answer, until O’Reilly gave up. So these people have no rational position, they just have whacky, gnostic slogans that criminalize ordinary reality, ordinary language, and causal reasoning, as I discussed here.

I would have put O’Reilly’s question otherwise: “If you were the head of the U.S. immigration agency, how would YOU refer to people who have entered the United States illegally?” That would have been more to the point and harder for the lady gnostic to avoid.

Come to think of it, I would also have asked her: “Since murder, rape, and armed robbery are disproportionately committed by blacks, and thus lead to the stereotyping of blacks as violent and dangerous, are ‘murder,’ ‘rape,’ and ‘armed robbery’ racist terms that should be eliminated? If not, why not, since, according to you, any term that results in the association of a nonwhite group with unlawful activity is racist?”

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However, examiner.com’s report on this is incorrect. It says:

In yet another case of Orwellian political correctness run amok, a video posted at MoveOn.org says calling illegal immigrants “illegal” fits the definition of a hate crime and calls for the word to be banned when used in the context of immigration.

None of the text or the video at moveon.org and Colorlines says that calling illegal aliens “illegals” fits the definition of a hate crime, nor does it call for the term to be banned. Instead, it calls on people to “take the pledge” and not use the term “illegals.”

News articles, whether on the left or the “right,” that fail to use direct quotes to show what the other side has said but instead paraphrase it in their own words are not to be trusted. Only direct quotes are to be trusted.

Buck writes:

In the video the female narrator says: “as we have seen in the past, hateful language can be deadly,” which is immediately followed by video of Professor Smith saying: ” “illegal” functions like a racial epithet. It’s a way of legitimizing violence against a group of particular people because of who they are. (0:38) That’s the definition of a “hate crime.”

LA replies:

Fair enough. Still, there is a problem in writing a paraphrase of what someone else has said and not providing a direct quote. Because the direct quote was not provided in this case, we had to look for the direct quote to determine that the paraphrase was correct.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 28, 2012 03:09 PM | Send