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The Left Rules with Pejoratives
Our lefty friends — and their amen chorus in the activist community — rule by pejorative. You might say that is their real “political formula”.
Victor Davis Hanson is reminding us of this in a piece, “Genocide Hypocrisy”, about the eternal lefty narrative on The Gaza Genocide.
And you gotta say, lefty pejoratives work: they cow people and make them shut up.
So I thought: I need to understand all this better. And so, being a Thoroughly Modern Millie, I went to AI for help.
Yeah, whatabout “genocide”? Grok says:
The word genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, and first appeared in print in November 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
Then the Nuremberg trials got into the action, and the newly hatched UN, and
on 9 December 1948 the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
So you can see that, starting in 1948, “genocide” was something that non-state actors and globalists could swing around like a rattle to make a noise about conflicts that fall short of actual war between states. Because, after all, when a nation state engages in a war with another state actor, war is war. If you flatten Dresden and vaporize Hiroshima and go on to win in World War II, it’s all part of the action.
But everyone, especially the special people of which we’ve heard tell, likes to issue moral pronouncements. It is so soothing.
I decided that it is high time to get AI to tell me exactly what is going on with all these pejoratives as far as the eye can see, from “racist!” to “genocide!” Another job for Grok.
A pejorative is a word whose job is to lower someone’s status and end the argument. “Racist,” “transphobe,” and “genocide” can name real things. Used as insults, they mostly do something else: they mark the target as outside the set of people whose reasons count.
Here’s Grok’s full analysis about the power of pejorative:
Stops the exchange. If the claim is “you are a racist,” the next move is often defense or apology, not evidence about the original topic. The label replaces the argument.
Signals the in-group. Using the word correctly shows you know the current boundaries. Refusing it, or asking for a definition, marks you as suspect.
Raises the cost of dissent. Social, professional, and sometimes legal penalties attach to the label even when the underlying claim is ordinary disagreement. That is useful if the goal is compliance rather than persuasion.
Compresses a complex dispute into a villain. Policy fights over borders, sex-segregated spaces, or wartime conduct become character trials. The other side is not wrong; they are evil.
Inflates urgency. “Genocide” demands action that “war,” “crime wave,” or “contested medical protocol” does not. The stronger word recruits allies who would not mobilize for the weaker description.
Yes, but what do you do when you have been accused of being a “racist”? I tend to use all these pejoratives in my writing in a satirical fashion. Grok says you should “refuse the label as a substitute for an argument”.
But I don’t agree. I think that Rule 5 of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals — “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” — applies instead.
For instance, if some gay acquaintance accuses you of being a racist, a good response would be: “OMG, you are right. What’s the next step? Should you report me to the Ministry of Truth?”
And if your liberal friends starts descanting on the horrors of the Gaza Genocide, maybe you should tell them: “don’t just stand there: talk is cheap. Make a formal accusation to the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect (OSAPG).”
The main thing is not to accept the left’s narrative, and then make fun of it.
| Thu, 01 Oct 2026 21:27:18 GMT |
History of “Defund the Police”
I was reading a far-right piece hating on the moderate Democratic Party candidate for the US Senate in Michigan, Abdul Al-Sayed, that experts agree is an absolute moderate. The Islamophobic hate piece had dug up 10 of his moderate positions.
One of the moderate positions was “I believe we need to defund the police.”
Another position was: “[D]ecarceration generally is really, really critical.”
Now, I know that defund the police and decarceration mainlined in World War COVID in the campaign to canonize St. George Floyd, but, I thought, there had to be a back-story. So I asked Grok.
The phrase was not invented in 2020. It drew on decades of prison- and police-abolition organizing that treated policing as part of a larger “prison-industrial complex”
The history is the usual sort of activist narrative creation. It starts with W.E.B. Du Bois arguing that prisons and white-dominated police forces were “rooted in slavery and racial control.” Then, in the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party called for “community control of the police”. In the 1970s–1990s. Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and others expanded the critique from prisons to policing. Then we get 2014 and Ferguson and Alex S. Vitale’s 2017 book The End of Policing.
Whatbout Google Search? It has a three-point program, starting with “long-standing Black feminist and abolitionist organizing”, then proceeding to “Scholars and activists noted that modern policing models trace back to 18th-century slave patrols in the South and 19th-century efforts to control urban labor in the North”. It ends with “Alex S. Vitale’s 2017 book The End of Policing”.
Yeah. Whatabout Vitale’s book? Grok says:
Vitale argues that modern U.S. police are not mainly a public-safety service that has gone off track. He treats them as a tool of social control whose historical job has been to manage inequality—by race, class, immigration status, and political dissent… His preferred path is to shrink the police’s mandate and replace much of it with housing, mental-health care, schools, harm reduction, and community programs.
In other words, the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis were all about the funding:
Local groups such as Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block had already been pressing the city to cut police budgets and shift money to social services[.]
It’s always about the funding. We devoted activists don’t want no stinkin’ money going to racist-sexist-homophobe white policemen. We want the funding to go to compassionate DEI unionized social-service workers. Get it? Pure Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt friend/enemy distinction: fight the enemy and fund our friends.
And, of course, the whole thing is wrapped in the basic left-wing narrative going back to whenever that is now encoded in the Allyism meme that “we are fighting for the oppressed against the white male oppressors”.
And there is the fundamental culture of women, who don’t fight the foe, but “expect to be protected”. They just say: “I am never talking to her again” and don’t really see the point of policemen and prisons until they actually get attacked by a thug.
See, the guy approach to Lindsay Clancy is that if she kills her kids, she’s outta there, and a life sentence would be the compassionate option. But women, especially educated women, think about Clancy’s feelings and the need for more mental health services.
One fine day, we’ll see a return to the ugly truth about police and prisons. In our modern cities we really don’t know what to do about feral young men, except arrest and imprison them. Social services has nothing to do with the case.
Back in the day, before cities, I imagine that the men in the community just “took care” of problematic young men, and the women knew not to ask questions. I have no idea what the men actually did with the feral young men. I wonder what Margaret Mead thought about young men Coming of Age in Samoa.
| Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:38:32 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles — Sun Tzu
When the left ran out of real victims to patronize it started inventing “fake” victims.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
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