The “You’re a racist either way” charge (called a “Kafka trap”) is just one current example of the kind of nonsense used by our own culture’s thought police to cloud our minds and confuse us. Racism exists, of course, but claiming all whites are racist because they’re white simply trivializes genuine racial bigotry.

The secular world clearly controls the language game. Be careful you’re not taken in by it. Let me show you what I mean.

Since critical race theory is the latest worldview counterfeit (see July’s Solid Ground), consider this example of linguistic arm-twisting. Someone says, “If you say you’re not a racist, that just proves you are a racist.” How would you answer?

I suspect you already see the verbal sleight of hand—the ham-handed attempt at rhetorical manipulation. If you admit you’re a racist, you’re a racist. If you deny you’re a racist, you’re a racist. Racist if you do; racist if you don’t.

Even though the nonsense is obvious, the charge still catches good people off guard. What now? I have a tactical response to this challenge that I’ll share with you in a moment, but first let me show you what’s going on.

Nearly 75 years ago, George Orwell wrote 1984, a dystopian novel about a totalitarian world of mass surveillance and iron-fisted political/cultural suppression. The despotism was abetted in part by “Newspeak,” a clever manipulation of language that Big Brother employed to obscure truth and make it almost impossible to think clearly about any issue opposing the Party.

Orwell’s work was prophetic, though the world he warned of didn’t begin to materialize in liberal democracies like ours until decades later than he predicted. The practice of manipulating language to confuse or even silence opposition, used so effectively in Orwell’s time by Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, is now standard fare.

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