Monday, September 8, 2025

Part I

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A Rebrand for Liberals? The Political Left Looks to Change Its Language But Not Its Ideology

Was it something I said? Evidently a good many Democrats are asking that question partly because of their 2024 electoral defeat, but also because in the meantime, since the election in 2024, the party has been losing voter registrations fast. Now, don’t count either political party out. You go back to the early 1970s, you go back to even the 1990s, there were people who said, “It really doesn’t look like the Republicans are going to be able to be a winning party again,” but, of course, that wasn’t true. And so you shouldn’t count out the Democrats either, but the Democratic Party is in a very difficult position right now, and that’s because the big issue in politics is not what just happened, but where are the voters going?

And here’s the point: the voters aren’t going in the direction of pregnant people. That has caught the attention of at least some who are trying to advise the Democratic Party on how it can move forward. A group known as Third Way, that’s a think tank sometimes identified as center left. And that means not quite so liberal as some of the other groups, not quite so ideologically on the Left, but still it’s a Democratic Party movement. It is a think tank dedicated to electing Democratic candidates, and it wants the society to shift left, but it wants to do so with better marketing. So, Third Way is put out a memo to the Democrats which is entitled: “Was It Something I Said?” And the subtitle, well, let’s put it this way, it’s addressed to, “All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA.” So, they’re addressing a memo to the opposition to the Trump administration and the Republicans.

That is they’re talking to the Democratic Party. They identify themselves as the author, Third way, and then they go on to say this: “For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find that perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying. The intent of this language,” they went on to say, “is to include broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace, but,” they note, “the effect of this language is to sound like the extreme divisive, elitist and obscuratory enforcers of wokeness.” They say this: “To please the few we have alienated the many, especially on culture issues where our language sounds superior, haughty, and arrogant.”

Now, I’ll just say all that certainly is true. They do sound, well, let’s just put it this way: “superior, haughty, and arrogant,” but they also sound extremely leftist. And here’s a group that basically wants the leftism but wants better language. That’s a very interesting thing for us to observe today. We’re looking at an attempted rebranding, not only the Democratic Party, but of leftist positions in the United States. And so what’s being encouraged here is to change the language. Note very carefully, don’t change the ideas, just change the language. Third Way is effectively saying to the Democratic Party, “We’re entirely with you on wanting to shift the culture left. We just don’t want you to scare the culture while you’re doing it, and certainly scare voters away in elections.”

They go on to say things like this, “Why the tortured language?” That’s the language used by many Democrats. They say, “After all, many Democrats are aware that the words and phrases we use can be profoundly alienating, but they use it because plain, authentic language that voters understand often rebounds badly among many activists and advocacy organizations.” Okay, now, that’s really interesting. They’re not suggesting that when the Democrats or liberal candidates use normal language, they get into trouble with normal people. And instead what they are saying here is that they get into trouble with the activists in their own party, in their own movement. Here’s a huge problem right now for the political left: if they even just get a little bit out of line, well, this memo tells you what happens, their own advocacy groups, their own activists beat them up.

They go on to say, “These activists and advocates may take on noble causes, but in doing so, they often demand compliance with their preferred messages. That is how ‘birthing person’ became a stand-in for mother or mom.” They then summarize, “And if we don’t think more carefully about our language, many in America will be banking on help from Donald Trump and Republicans because Democratic levers of power will be few and far between.” So, it’s a candid statement. It’s an amazingly open statement. It really is like reading someone else’s mail, but they post the memo on the internet. They explicitly call for a change in vocabulary. 

So, we’re going to be thinking today about the worldview implications of vocabulary, and we’re also going to be thinking about the worldview implications of an attempted rebranding with a more subtle vocabulary.So, what are they talking about? Well, they have several classifications of language they say that Democratic candidates and office seekers should avoid, such as the first category therapy speak. So, they say, “Don’t use words like privilege, violence, dialoguing, othering, triggering, or microaggression, assault, invalidation.” So, well, wait just a minute, how about the word violence? Isn’t violence a pretty clearly understood word? Well, of course. The problem is that they have to define what is not the right use of violence that will scare voters off, and they say it is as in the phrase “environmental violence.”

Now, here is something we need to watch. The activism of the left has attempted to critique conservative positions by claiming that they, “Do violence.” That doesn’t mean throwing a chair across the room, it doesn’t mean setting off a bomb or setting a fire, instead it just means hurting someone’s feelings. And that’s why, by the way, the category here is therapy speak. Let me tell you the first time I heard this. It was from a feminist theologian who was back in the 1980s using this language, first time I’d ever heard it, in order to say that if you don’t agree with her and you use patriarchal language such as “he,” and this comes down, of course, even to language about God, then you are quote, “Doing violence against women.”

Now, honestly, the first time I heard this, I was a very young man in my 20s. I’m hearing this coming from someone, and she means it seriously, but it’s very hard to take it seriously. But since then, this has become just the kind of language you expect on the cultural left in the United States, and, of course, not coincidentally, that means also in many academic spaces. Other language to be avoided under the category of therapy speak include: safe space, centering, holding space, body shaming and progressive stack. They go on to say, “Be aware of words proliferating in elite circles that have closed off open conversations, and have made it uncomfortable for many people to engage in hard topics.”

Now, I just want to come back and say, if they think that’s all the problem they’ve got, then this is not going to help them at all. And I don’t want them to get any help for that matter in terms of pushing their ideas, but it is really interesting that if they think just stopping using these words is going to help, they’re going to need to understand that the words are a big problem, but the ideas behind them are a far bigger problem and they’re a far bigger turnoff to voters. If you are thinking about such things as, say, “safe spaces and centering,” then you are in a form of language, and you’re probably very much in the thick of a worldview, that quite honestly really can’t be communicated openly to conservatives or mainstream voters without disclosing exactly what you’re about.

Now, the academic language I mentioned, that’s a separate category here called “seminar room language.” That means as in doctoral seminar. So, they say, using this language implies, “I’m smarter and more concerned about important issues than you. Your kitchen table concerns are small.” Well, let me just say the obvious. If you hang around academic circles in elite academia, let me just let you in on a secret, that’s exactly what they think. They really don’t care what goes on in kitchen tables across the country. They think all the action is in, well, to use one of their phrases, “intellectual space.” So, what are the words they suggest or terms that Democratic candidates should avoid? Terms such as “subverting norms, systems of oppression, critical theory, cultural appropriation, postmodernism, Overton window, heuristic and existential threat, especially when referring to the climate, the planet, democracy, the economy.”

So, you can’t really make this stuff up. And by the way, one of the accusations that is at the very base of conservative concern about the Left is that they have just given themselves over to a new form of Marxist thinking and logic in the form of critical theory. And so they say, “Stop using the categories of critical theory.” Don’t say, for instance, the two words, critical theory, don’t say systems of oppression, don’t say subverting norms, but you’ll notice they want to keep making the very same arguments. They’re just saying, “Hey, let’s clean up the language and don’t sound like a doctoral student.” 

The next category they warn about is what they call “organizer jargon.” These words they say imply, “We are beholden to groups, not individuals. People have no agency.” Okay, I’ll simply stop and say even in saying, “Don’t use jargon,” they can’t help using jargon. They use it even when they’re saying, “Don’t use jargon.” “People have no agency?” That’s, well, it’s philosophical language, but it’s also jargon. Just say that to someone. Say in normal conversation in a grocery store, and they will exercise their agency by tuning you out. 

So, here are some of the terms they suggest not using: “radical transparency, small D democracy, barriers to participation, stakeholders, the unhoused.” Okay, that’s a big one, by the way, because it’s been, the Left that’s been saying, “You can’t use homelessness or the homeless, you have to say the unhoused.” Well, it turns out that a lot of people just blink when you say that, not even understanding what you’re talking about. “Food insecurity,” by the way, that’s supposed to mean people who are either hungry or might be at risk of being hungry, “housing insecurity” and, “Person who immigrated.” So, you say, “What is that a stand-in for?” Immigrant, but person who immigrated, that comes up later in this document as well, especially in suggesting that people, well, on the left, they’ve argued for a long time people shouldn’t be said to be “in prison.” Rather they are “stuck in a carceral system.” 

Okay, the next set may be the hottest of all. The head in the memo is Gender Orientation Correctness. The group says, “These say your views on traditional genders and gender roles are at best quaint. Such terms include birthing person and inseminated person.” I will just state that now that’s a new one. I think we’ve all heard people who present themselves as serious talking about “birthing persons.”

I’ve discussed that phenomenon on The Briefing, but now you have an, “inseminated person”. Without going into detail, why would they have that second category? It is because the issue of abortion and what they package as reproductive freedom is so central that an inseminated person might decide that she doesn’t want to be a birthing person. And so now you see the contingency that is built in. I just want to step back for a moment and say if you have to say, “Don’t talk like this,” you’ve already gone over the waterfall. They go on to list some other terms: pregnant people, again, instead of a pregnant woman, chest-feeding, cisgender, dead-naming, heteronormative, patriarchy and LGBTQIA+. Interesting, they suggest not using that. Instead LGBTQ I guess is supposed to be enough.

And so they go on to say that coming from the right are cruel attacks, but they say, “We really need to be careful in the language that we’re using.” And they’re also saying, we need to build a big coalition, “not confusing or shaming people who would otherwise be allies.” Speaking of critical theory and that jargon, the next category is, “the shifting language of racial constructs”. And, of course, this is a minefield, as the memo acknowledges, but they suggest not using Latinx. Now, one of the interesting things about that is that that term, Latinx, instead of Latino, Hispanic, et cetera, it was invented as an intersectional term for the Left, in particular related to those who would otherwise be described as Latin, Hispanic, et cetera.

But the most interesting thing about this is that the actual Hispanic and that Latino community has disparaged the word. As a matter of fact, about the only place you’re going to find it is among ideological think tanks and on university campuses. It is a dead word when it comes even to many of the people who it claims to include. Other terms they warn not to use include “allyship, intersectionality.” There, again, intersectional theory. They’re saying just don’t even utter the word. Use all the ideas, enforce the ideology, run on it, but just don’t use the term. Also, “minoritized communities,” so instead of minorities, you act as if there has been some kind of violence against these groups, minoritized communities, just don’t do that. You can hold that belief, the document clearly says, just don’t use that in your campaign language. They also suggest not, “explaining away crime with terms like justice involved incarceration, incarcerated people, and involuntary confinement.”

I’ll just end the list there. I think what we see is a transparent effort to try to say, “Okay, the language isn’t working.” What they’re not acknowledging is the ideas aren’t working. They understand that the language is politically toxic. What they do not acknowledge is that the ideas and ideologies behind these terms are themselves toxic. And I also say, just thinking about how this applies in the political realm, it’s hard for me to see how this works. You can change the language, but the ideas to anyone with a modicum of intelligence are going to be recognized as being the very same. And frankly, I don’t think the left in the Democratic Party is going to let other Democrats get by without using these terms because they have been arguing, using the very language we just talked about here, they have been arguing that any other language is a form of verbal or linguistic violence.

It’s hard to imagine how they can say, “Okay, we’ll just ignore that until the next election.” But I also am counting on the fact that voters in the United States will recognize that what you have here is a repackaging of very, very bad ideas. Now, it is to, I would say, our advantage to some extent that this very, very toxic ideology has been, well, revealed in very toxic language. But I don’t see how you’re going to be able to communicate these ideologies without tripping up on the language because you’re not going to be able to go back to saying pregnant woman, when you have bought entirely into the LGBTQ, non-binary, the entire thing. You really can’t do that.

And this is where conservatives are going to have to understand, you have to press the question: “Okay, that term you just used, do you mean it in its normal, everyday, English language usage?” And the honest answer would have to be no, they don’t. That’s not what they mean at all. I think it is interesting that this memo has been leaked out into the larger culture. Emma Withrow, writing for the Sinclair National Desk and as published in the Baltimore Sun, for example, she openly asked the question, “Can changing terms like birthing person help Democrats connect with voters?” She explains, “Democrats are being cautioned by a left-leaning think tank to reconsider their messaging strategies as certain terms might alienate voters and potentially help Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.”

Well, I just want to look at that statement again. I think it’s absolutely right, but it’s not just that the use of these terms on the Left from the left might alienate voters in the middle, it is also that this language is central to the ideas that are communicated. These ideas come from critical theory, therefore the jargon comes from critical theory. This comes from different forms of leftist ideology, including feminist ideology and transgender ideology. And that’s the reason why “pregnant woman” has given way to: “birthing person,” and I think this is where people on the stump in the election cycle are just going to have to ask the question, when you say, I don’t know, when you say pregnant woman, do you actually mean birthing person or pregnant person? What are you actually getting at here?

This is where I think there’s a very limited utility to this kind of political memorandum. I’m not saying it’s not smart, in one sense, kind of sinister in terms of its intelligence coming from the Left, but I just don’t think in the context of an actual election cycle, they’re going to get by with this because the ideas, and the proposals, the legislative intentions, they have to be very candid about. And frankly, the way they’re going to have to please their own ideological leftist base, I think means that this memo, if anything, is more likely to be interesting to people on the Right for what it says about the Left than it will be influential on the Left in terms of actually taking the advice.

I guess for people not on the Left, the interesting thing here is that this was put forward so, well, straightforwardly, so directly. And I think it’s also going to be interesting to see what kind of response comes to it, because I’ll just say I think some of the response is going to be couched in the language of critical theory, which is pretty much to deny everything that this particular group was suggesting.

Part II

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An Up and Coming New Democrat From Texas? He is a New Face, But the Liberal Ideas Are the Same

All right, a couple of other things. Just in terms of similar stories, The Economist, which is one of the most influential periodicals in Great Britain, has given some attention to James Talarico. The subhead in the article is “James Talarico Wants His Party to Fight for the Christian Vote in Texas.” Talarico is himself a seminarian in a Presbyterian school, as well as serving as a state representative. He’s young. He’s very articulate. He wears cowboy boots with the Texas Seal on them. He’s pretty much looking like Texas. And you could see this as plausible until you come to understand the policies are really the policies of the far Left and the Democratic Party. As a matter of fact, in this article in The Economist, we are told that he’s inspired, “by the energy of Zohran Mamdani, the progressive mayoral candidate in New York City.” So, there you have a Democratic Socialist. More on him in just a moment. You can’t really hide that in a place like Texas.

It is interesting that the religious angle shows up here: “The Democrat, who is in seminary training to be a pastor, wants to be the country’s loudest Christian voice against Christian nationalism. He believes that Jesus scrapped the Jewish legal system in favor of two sweeping values: love God and love your neighbor. That allows for gay people in church, demands healthcare for the poor, and discourages hoarding wealth in a way that morphs into a Bernie-like disdain for political mega-donors. It also requires loving the enemy.” Well, all I’ll say is this is just the typical leftist language coming from liberal theology, and those who are on the far Left of liberal institutional religion in America. There’s nothing new here.

It’s an attractive package in terms of having a young Democrat who sounds Texas, but when the issue of issues actually comes to the fore, as of course it will, well, it sounds like he’s pretty much just like anyone else on the Left. Again, he is saying he’s very inspired by Zohran Mamdani, who is a Democratic Socialist. To put it in language most Texans would understand, I don’t think that’s going to fly in Texas. I’ll also say The Economist seems to have a hint that might be true, but it’s also going to be very interesting to see if he even gets close to what he’s seeking or at least said to be seeking, which is the Democratic slot for the US Senate seat coming up in 2026.

And he’s going to have a lot of opposition and a lot of that opposition is going to try to offer an alternative to his suggestion here. And if anything, I’ll predict that that is likely to push further to the left, not to the center. That’s the way these things among the Democrats increasingly work.

Part III

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Mamdani’s New Strategy: His Leading Candidate for NYC Mayor’s Platform is Looking Less Radical, but His Ideology Hasn't Changed

Okay, now we have to shift from Texas to New York, and in particular to New York City. And I want to mention in The New York Times, very interesting front page article. The headline: “As Mamdani Picks Up Steam, He Tones Down his Stances.” So, here’s an interesting worldview observation for us to make. Eliza Shapiros, the reporter front page article in the New York Times: “In the roughly five years since Zohran Mamdani first started campaigning for public office, he has argued that prostitution should be decriminalized. He has called to defund to the police. He has said that billionaires should not exist, and that the admissions test for New York City’s elite public high school should be abolished. But before he began his long-shot bid to become the Democratic nominee for mayor last year, he abandoned some of his most provocative views, and during the course of the campaign, he has sought to downplay others.” So, that’s the way it’s played. Now, by the way, mainstays in the Democratic Party in New York City and in New York State are scared to death by the prospect of Zohran Mamdani, because, after all, he is a radical. He is openly identified with the Democratic Socialist Party.

The end of this article has another very interesting section. Listen to this: “The most serious issue with Mamdani’s campaign is the extremism attached to it,” and that is coming from, by the way, Eric Adams, the current Mayor who’s running against him as an independent. And then we are told, “Last week, Mr. Cuomo,” that’s another opponent, Andrew Cuomo, former Mayor of New York, “sat in a ballroom in a Sheraton Hotel in Times Square and flipped through PowerPoint slides detailing the platform of the National Democratic Socialists of America, including its support for abolishing prisons and ending funding for police.” Mr. Cuomo asked, “Do you support these proposals? Yes or no?” And the people in the room made very clear, “No.” People have a right to know before they vote.

Listen to this: “The next day, Mr. Mamdani responded, ‘My platform is not the same as National DSA,’ as in Democratic Socialists of America. After days of speculation in the press about whether Mr. Mamdani agreed with the National DSA’s proposal to eliminate misdemeanor offenses, he said definitively for the first time that he would enforce misdemeanors as Mayor. He went on to say, issuing a blanket statement, we are told, to try to clarify some questions ‘If you cannot find a policy on my website, then that is not a policy that I’m running on.'” Well, here’s the problem. He ran on being a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He ran on gaining attention through many of these very leftist ideas.

Now, he says, because he’s running in a general election, that he doesn’t want to associate with all of those ideas, and that if they’re not explicitly on his website, he’s going to basically say he’s not running on those ideas. But the problem is he really kind of gained his politically, well, advantageous position by being young, Muslim, and claiming to be a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, even as he was running for the Democratic nomination for the Mayoralty there in New York City. So, all that’s just very, very interesting. Along these lines, just last week, The Washington Post ran a major article with the headline, “Inside House Democrats’ Plan to Recapture the Majority in 2026.”

The article sets out the plan to try to gain advantage with voters, but it also sets out the problem for the Democrats. It’s going to be very difficult for them to run from these ideas, even if they take, say, the suggestion, which is also covered in this article, by that interest group to try to change the language. The problem is not just the language, the problem is the ideas. I’ll just conclude these considerations today by saying, look, there are going to be challenges on both sides of the political equation by the time we get to the midterm elections in 2026. Generally, in terms of historic electoral patterns, the opposing party to the White House gains in these off-year elections, but it’s also clear it’s going to be a battle of ideas. But as these articles make clear, particularly on the Democratic side, particularly on the political left, it’s also a battle inside their circles when it comes even to the language that will be used.

So, it is interesting to see so many people here arguing simultaneously. We need to kind of tone down the language. The problem is there is absolutely no evidence they intend to tone down the ideas. This will have to end our consideration for today, but let me just tell you the problem on the conservative side is exactly the opposite. The problem for many conservatives is that when we hear so-called conservative candidates, we can’t be sure they’re as conservative as they sound. It’s the opposite problem. It can be equally dangerous.