Earlier this year, Stanford University released a “harmful words” list that includes dozens of everyday sayings and verbiage that it deemed hateful for one social justice warrior reason or another.
For many, it was a sign that the Left had gone one step further into insanity. Unfortunately, that kind of speech code is nothing new. In fact, it seems to be ripped right out of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s playbook from 45 years ago.
The official title of the Stanford project is “The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” and billed as a “multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford.” The list included suggestions such as ditching the word “blind study” and instead saying “masked study.”
Why? Well according to The Harvard of the West, the frowned-upon word “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” Then it suggests ditching words like “pow wow” and even the word “American.”
It also instructed those using the manual to avoid gendered language in essentially all forms of communication — ie. saying “mail person” instead of “mailman.”
This attempt to control the conversation is nothing new. As mentioned, “RBG” as she is affectionately known by her fans, co-authored a book on the topic in 1977 titled “Sex Bias in the U.S. Code.”
Thanks to one classic newsletter from conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly in 1993, Americans were warned that RBG’s radical views would be a detriment to the nation as she was being nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton.
“How does it happen that a Supreme Court nominee whose only experience in private law practice was seven years as general counsel to the ACLU came to be praised by almost everyone as a ‘moderate’ and a ‘centrist’?” the mother-turned-activist said in “The Phyllis Schlafly Report” for July 1993. “My theory is: This just proves how easily men are fooled by a skirt. They deduced that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is ‘moderate’ because she isn’t a loud-mouth frizzy-haired, bra-burning, street demonstrator.”
Indeed, the best-selling author went on to fully expose Ginsburg for the extremist that she was.
“In fact, Ginsburg’s writings betray her as a radical, doctrinaire feminist, far out of the mainstream,” the conservative said at the time. “She shares the chip-on-the-shoulder, radical feminist view that American women have endured centuries of oppression and mistreatment from men.”
That was no exaggeration.
In “Sex Bias in the U.S Code,” RBG and her co-author suggested that the U.S. remove more than 20 words or phrases from all U.S. laws and substituted them with the sort of language advocated by Stanford today.
According to Schlafly, the activist-turned-judge went far beyond changing merely language. In “Sex Bias in the U.S. Code,” Ginsburg also advocated an entirely gender-neutral society in which women were drafted to combat, prisons were sex-integrated, prostitution was legalized, and the practical elimination of all single-sex organizations and places of education.
Though it’s doubtful the current woke army draws their inspiration on these matters to RBG, it should be noted that all of those goals are being pushed by progressives in America as we speak.
The gendered language aspect is already widely accepted. It’s only a matter of time before they start demanding the other items with the same zeal.
Ideally, Republicans give more pushback to that insanity than they did in the early 1990s.
That year, RBG was confirmed to the Supreme Court by a vote of 96-3 with 40 GOP senators casting their support. However, granted that America recently had dozens of Republicans support changing the definition of marriage, that dream doesn’t seem likely. Worse, we have no Phyllis Schlafly nowadays to sound the alarm on liberal loons either.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.