Skip to 31:56 and listen to Ana Marie Cox lose her mind (ex “actually you literally did”):
Please understand what I am about to tell you is not a slight against you as a person. It is an indictment of only your behavior and the behavior of people like you and a request you acknowledge reality.
You folks are discredited. The war is over and you lost. You are officially an index item (maybe that) in a high-school textbook 40 years from now. What you must do is find a new, more productive and useful avenue to channel your energies. Please join us, people who actually are helping.
Now who are you?
You are the Democrats who are over-sensitive about language. You are one of the many chiefs of the language police department— or at least you were. 2016 exposed that you cannot pursue your agenda and win elections. That was a winnable election and to get it we needed folks in traditional democratic strongholds. I know lots of good, reliable democratic voters who voted trump MOSTLY because they were sick of political correctness. They don’t like it. It pisses people off and it does nothing to help.
They were voting against your “speech codes”
They were voting against your “language policing”
They were voting against your “parental scolding”
They were voting against sanctimonious over-sensitive ninnies.
You’re not popular. And the worst part of what you do is that it doesn’t even help. You are not helping when you scold others for their language. You’ve done nothing to move the needle in a positive direction
Democrats like you have simply got to become tougher about language. The PC shit is over, nobody wants what you’re selling. You must make yourself tougher, more buoyant, more impervious to language you do not like or find distasteful or find uncomfortable. It is absolute insanity to expect the world to mold around you instead of you preparing yourself to confront the world. (There’s probably some mis-attributed quote from RFK/MLK that says you should make the world fit you or something like that, that does not apply here. This is about ideas and words.) You have got to be able to listen to arguments or ideas or language with which you disagree. When you hear something shocking or offensive or just contrary to your belief system you should not attempt to suppress the other party or ignore them. You need to interrogate them and push back against gross ideas. Anything else is just burying your heads in the sand.
If you must be judgey and sanctimonious about something then hit this way: if someone says something you judge offensive or out of boundaries, just imagine that the things they say is because they’re not as enlightened or elevated as you. Pity those people then engage them. That way you can still feel morally superior and you’ll stop pissing people off.
We need you back in the “real” fight. Language-policing and putzing around on the internet having a conniption every time someone says something controversial does not help move the ball down-field. The stakes are too high right now to indulge you folks or let your very irritating censorious tendencies carry the day.
Bottom line: get tougher, never scold or language-police another human being, and engage the person who said something you think is out of line instead of trying to “correct” them.
We love you, just please devote your energies and passions to things that are worthy of your time.
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Update: Your attitudes and ideas on language are not original, they were not developed in a vacuum. It was either via a college campus which provides a very dangerous echo chamber environment or in times/places where your political ideology was ascendant so you felt you had room to focus on items very far down on the todo list. That's not the case anymore. Your context has changed and your ideas no longer match up to reality. I thought that we made fun of conservatives for living in a bubble and never facing reality
As expected, comments got a bit vitriolic & acrimonious (got our first “you’re whitesplaining”) but overall I think this was a success. These conversations couldn’t’ve even happened years ago. To the many lurkers who want to see an end to this stupid practice of language policing, note the names below. These are the folks who need to be disabused of their ignorance/mis-impressions of this issue. Treat them with compassion. We cannot run a unified effort against Trump and this nightmare Congress until we get our house in order when it comes to these language/confronting-reality issues.