What do you know? The Centers For Disease Control has presented its staff with a list of words that are no longer to be used:
-
Vulnerable
-
Entitlement
-
Diversity
-
Transgender
-
Fetus
-
Evidence-based
-
Science-based
Y’all will be comforted to know that the CDC Elders are ready with alternatives to the forbidden words:
In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or “evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.
I guess this means that Tony Perkins, as a spokesperson for community standards, will be consulted to help decide what the CDC’s public policy recommendations ought to be regarding the spread of Chlamydia?
This is in addition, of course, to the EPA’s determination to scrub the words “climate change” from the national conversation. Those words have been systematically eliminated from the EPA’s Web site, and apparently the government has decided to deny that transgenders exist, too.
Control the language, control the vocabulary, and you control the public’s thoughts.
I saw this coming more than a year ago, when I predicted that the incoming administration would be hostile to professionals.
Under Trump the obsequious, the craven, the ignorant … will inevitably, necessarily, rise to the top, and professionals will find themselves working against longer and longer odds to keep the machine going, and doing it surreptitiously with the hope that nobody notices.
Naively, but to their moral credit, professionals throughout the government have done exactly what I predicted they would do: They have surreptitiously tried to do the right things even as the administration denies well-established science, ignores facts, declares that up is down, and undertakes to circumscribe the language of science itself.
So the EPA has hired somebody to hunt down the pros.
One of the top executives of a consulting firm that the Environmental Protection Agency has recently hired to help it with media affairs has spent the past year investigating agency employees who have been critical of the Trump administration, federal records show.
[ … ]
Mr. Blutstein, in an interview, said he was taking aim at “resistance” figures in the federal government, adding that he hoped to discover whether they had done anything that might embarrass them or hurt their cause.
My advice to them today is the same as it was a year ago: Get out. The government is in the hands of ignoramuses who view professionals as reproaches to their own incompetence — and with the election of Donald Trump they have the whip-hand. Only after you have left, and let the government grind to a halt, will the American Gothic crowd who support Trump realize that they’ve been pissing down their own well.