If Americans are getting great at anything other than screen time these days, it is buying into Orwellian definitions. The political right has more than it’s fair share, but now the political left is doubling down, as pointed out by Christopher Rufo:

George Carlin pointed out that every euphemism is a red flag:

Here’s a Carlin excerpt in transcript form:

I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms or euphemistic language. American English is loaded with euphemisms, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse . .

And now, in on of the more notable twists of fate for the insane year of 2020, we have the absolute worst messenger, Donald Trump, leading the charge against Critical Race Theory. Trump, historically tone deaf on this issue if not outright racist, has decided to attack CRT purely for political advantage. Biden has pushed his head into the sand on this issue, along with many other public voices, including the moderator of last night’s presidential debate, Chris Wallace. No, CRT is not “racial sensitivity training.”  CRT is not the modern version of the Civil Rights Movement.  It is the opposite.  It is a pernicious misguided embrace of racism as a tool for fighting racism. On the political left, this embrace of CRT is a worthy example of kayfabe.

Kayfabe – In professional wrestling, kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ (also called work or worked), as a noun, is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as “real” or “true”, specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this “reality” within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.

Most of those in the spotlight know that they are speaking nonsense, but they are either cowards or actively pulling political strings. The result is cringe-worthy political theater with no good end in sight. It is my belief that those politicians on the political left, almost without exception, know that CRT is antithetical to the teachings of Martin Luther King and that CRT is setting back the Civil Rights movement by several decades. Dividing people by “race” was a bad idea 400 years ago and it remains a bad idea. One of the worst ideas anyone has ever had.

In my view, the first racist act is choosing to believe that “race” is a real thing and that it should somehow matter for reasons other than setting exposures in portrait photography. Without this starkly wrong initial move, racism would be impossible. The far right and the far left are now in agreement on this unscientific belief and they are acting as equal and opposite forces giving rise to hate and violence throughout the political spectrum.  The last thing we should be doing is covering up a bad idea like CRT with a euphemism, especially when courage and honesty are the best approaches and an important presidential election is only a few weeks away.