Words Are the Weapons of Autocracy
On the flu, fever dreams, and freedom
Oh, I had such plans for Midstory when I last wrote weeks ago. I wrote to you about our new direction of highlighting the stories of unruly midlife women who refuse to stay quiet during this terrible time.
And then I got quiet.
After a planned vacation/husband work conference during the last week of January, a few days later I tested positive for both Influenza A and B. It’s now 11 days later, and I am just starting to feel human again. (Yet right now, as sweat soaks my shirt, I am asking myself the question probably asked by countless perimenopausal/menopausal women recovering from this virus over the centuries: Is it a hot flash? Or is it the flu?)
When you feel ill and your temperature hovers between 102 and 103 for days, everything feels sort of surreal. Has my cat always been this loud? Have her teeth always been so big and does she want to eat me? Was it a fever dream that I was performing “Pink Pony Club” on stage at the Grammy’s last night? Why am I waking up in a pool of sweat in the middle of the day, shivering relentlessly? Did the president say he was going to turn Gaza into a strip of beach condos, or did I imagine that?
As all these nightmarish executive orders and attempts to dismantle our government flitted across my feverish consciousness, I almost felt as if it were a gift that the urgency of the situation could not penetrate deeply into my psyche.
Well, now I’m back, and I’m seeing the world clearly without (mostly) the filter of illness, and I’m feeling like most of you: overwhelmed, sad, angry, desperate to do something, anything.
I’m not a legal scholar or a government employee. I’m not an international aid worker or a health researcher. I’m not an intelligence officer. I’m not the parent of a trans or disabled child (so far) affected by these orders.
I have no expertise in much of what is going on, but what I am is a writer, and a former history teacher with a doctorate in education policy, and I can tell you that I can’t stop thinking about how fast our language is changing, and this scares the crap out of me.
A War On Words
According to the president and many of our tech overlords, the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America.
In the face of all that is happening, is this a small and petty thing to be upset about? The changing of one word on a map?
No.
In Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum — a midlife woman and scholar who’s been sounding the alarm on the ways that autocrats use propaganda for many years — writes about how language itself becomes one of the primary battlefields in the fight against authoritarianism.
Yesterday, Associated Press reporters were blocked from attending events at the White House because the AP has not changed its stylebook regarding the Gulf of Mexico.
Right now the Associated Press is refusing to comply. Its executive editor is Julie Pace, a fortysomething long-time champion of press freedom. She wrote in response to the Trump administration’s, “It is alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism. Limiting our access to the Oval Office based on the content of AP’s speech not only severely impedes the public’s access to independent news, it plainly violates the First Amendment.”
The message is clear: if journalists do not go along with this regime’s state-mandated changes to our language and culture, they will be punished and lose access.
It’s not just the journalists. Across the government, certain words and phrases have been banned. For instance, at the National Science Foundation, workers combed through current NSF projects to determine if they used certain forbidden key words.
The Washington Post reports,"The words triggering NSF reviews provide a picture of the sievelike net being cast over the typically politically independent scientific enterprise, including words like 'trauma,' 'barriers,' 'equity' and ‘excluded.’”
In Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” certain words are deemed “patriotic” and others “subversive” and “anti-American” and schools are compelled to teach “patriotic education.”
Across all departments, unacceptable words are being scrubbed from federal websites.
In the New York Times, Simon McCreesh references Orwell and writes:
“Across government, a war is being waged in wordplay. It is fought in executive orders, official statements from the White House, press briefings and all manner of communiqués, internal and external. The very language that Mr. Trump and his administration are using to smash the federal bureaucracy is now also the official language of that bureaucracy, because it is being dictated by the man doing the smashing.”
As writers, we believe — more than believe, we know it in our souls — that words matter. Words have power. Language is how we make sense of our reality, how we share our experience, how we connect with others.
A war on words is a war on all of us.
We as writers have a special duty not to comply.
I’m alarmed every day by the cruelty of this administration and the rapid destruction of our democracy. But amidst my despair, I’m also hopeful when I hear leaders like Jamie Raskin, AOC, Tim Kaine, Elizabeth Warren, countless judges and lawyers, activists, writers, and independent media trying to push back against the insanity. The same hope I feel when every day people take a stand and resist. The community here on Substack also gives me glimmers of hope.
I wish it were all a bad dream. It's sickening and heartbreaking, more and more each day, but we can still wield our words, as you say. Thank you for writing this, and I'm glad you're rounding the corner. Flu is the worst.