(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show, Jonathon discusses the left ramping up Orwellian attacks on language in the abortion, transgender, and euthanasia debates.
Jonathon begins the episode by underscoring how language is central to debating every political issue, as noted by George Orwell in his 1984 novel.
“George Orwell really understood that if you can actually limit the number of words people are permitted to use to discuss an issue, you can box people into an enforced conclusion,” Jonathon said.
The host emphasized that while we’re not quite seeing 1984 levels of language censorship yet, we are seeing this language manipulation starting to unfold in some very important political debates.
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Jonathon first looked at the “transgender” issue and how people who correctly identify a “transgender” individual by their biological sex are accused of “misgendering” them.
“If you referred accurately to “Caitlyn” Jenner as a male, which he is, you would be accused of ‘misgendering’ even though you correctly gendered Mr. Jenner. And so, it’s really, really absurd to see the situation that we find ourselves in,” he said.
Jonathon then noted how transgender activists recognize that narrowing down the language used to discuss gender ideology makes it difficult to discuss without caving in and using their language. The host noted the example of how nearly all mainstream media outlets began referring to “sex-change” surgeries as “gender-affirming care” instead of “transitioning.”
“Why did they not want to call it ‘transitioning’ anymore? Because they recognize that even when they said the word ‘transition,’ there was sort of an implicit acknowledgment that you were ‘transitioning’ somebody from one thing to the other. So you’re transitioning a male into a female or a female into a male. But, of course, the premise of gender ideology is that if somebody says that they are female, they were always female; they were never male. And so ‘transition’ is too much of a concession,” he said.
Later in the episode, Jonathon turned to the abortion debate and noted a recent story from France where that country’s Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (Arcom) fined the French television station CNews 100,000 euros after journalist Aymeric Pourbaix stated that abortion is the leading cause of death worldwide during a February broadcast.
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The host read from Arcom’s decisions, which stated that the channel had failed in its “obligation of honesty and rigour in the presentation and processing of information because abortion cannot be presented as a cause of death.”
“In other words, abortion, which ends the life of a developing human being in the womb, that’s what abortion is for. You are not allowed to say that on French TV. They’re trying to make it essentially illegal for saying that abortion is a cause of death, even though that is indisputably true. … It’s just truly ludicrous,” Jonathon said.
For more of Jonathon’s analysis, tune in to this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show.
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