“What’s in a word?”, asks Michael J. Knowles (1990 – ), host of the Michael Knowles Show, in a Prager University YouTube video entitled “Control the Words, Control the Culture.”

Knowles asks the viewer to consider the difference between an illegal immigrant and an undocumented immigrant, or the difference between a Christmas tree and a holiday tree. The answer, he tells us, lies in semantics. It is not the objects in themselves that are different, but the words used to define and describe them.

The manner in which we define and describe different things has a powerful effect on the way we view them. Our thoughts are processed and articulated through words. And it is through this articulation that our worldview is formed.

Language, therefore, is a vital cornerstone of civilisation. When it is used properly, it leads people towards truth and reason. But when it is abused, it leads people towards lies and irrationality.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is based upon written and verbal articulation. God’s first act of creation is the verbal commandment “let there be light.” Moses is commanded to write down the Ten Commandments. And Jesus Christ, the Messiah, is described as “the word of God made flesh.”

The left has come to realise that they can use language to manipulate the way people think. Through their domination of academia, culture, and media has ensured that it is their definitions and descriptors are the ones accepted within the larger culture.

The left controls language by using euphemisms to distort and obscure facts. These euphemisms make it easier for lies to be accepted by the larger populace.

Through their perversion of language, the left has all-ready been able to engineer significant social change. Would society have accepted gay marriage had it not been deviated from its original definition of the union of husband – man – and wife – woman? And would society have been so ready to accept abortion if those being killed were referred to as unborn babies and not as foetuses?

And the left continues to use language as a means to engineer social change. They refer to policies that favour groups based upon arbitrary factors such as race, gender, or sexuality as “social justice.” But to be just means to have “the quality of being fair and reasonable.” In reality, there is nothing just about the policies that comprise “social justice.”

Likewise, policies that unfairly favour non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual individuals in academia and the workforce is referred to as, alternatively, positive discrimination and affirmative action. In reality, such practices are discrimination.

Intellectual conformity is enforced in the name of “diversity”, opposing points of views are censored in the name of “tolerance”, and voices of dissent are silenced because they are dismissed as “hate speech.”

When you control the words, you control the culture. And when you control the culture, you control the future of a civilisation.