This is something that needs to be understood. However much we think leftists are ignorant, stupid, and even delusional and crazy, many of them are extremely clever; they know exactly what they are doing by using terminology which is very strange to an unaware individual, and this is done deliberately because the ultimate objective of leftists is to turn their benighted ideas into law and reality, and tragically, they've had successes.
An example of this is "racism." Historically, we were taught that racism was to view a person of another race as inferior or with hatred, contempt, derision, or any other such negative attitude simply because of that person's race/ethnicity. The left however has redefined racism to mean "prejudice + power," and this is why leftists repeatedly state that blacks cannot be racist.
Now, before I go on, I'd like to clarify I am not hateful towards blacks. I have in fact quoted Thomas Sowell, a man in his 90s who is a genius - an economist, a philosopher, a writer, a historian. I have more than 10 of the books he has written and hope to read them all between now and my retirement. Sowell dismantles and destroys many of the left's arguments; many blacks who are today conservative learned from him.
Sowell has pointed out that leftists have redefined such words to advance their causes. When it comes to "racism" and the left's claim that blacks cannot be racist because America was a historically majority white country and whites held the positions of power, it was not possible for a black person to be racist towards a white person. Never mind that there's been a black man in the White House for 2 terms; never mind that there have been black SCOTUS justices; never mind the fact there have been and are black governors, senators, congresspersons, and mayors.
Sowell easily destroys this argument by saying that if racism cannot exist if a said individual or people group does not have power, then the Ku Klux Klan today is not racist because it has nowhere the political clout and power and influence it had in the early 1900s. And a danger of this is that people who belong to the said group that can't be guilty of a given vice because of an innate and unchangeable characteristic (skin color) become extremely irresponsible.
Please watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2MUCwQ-QW8
Listen to what the black man says at 0:45.
Now imagine if this was a white man treating the said NYPD officer of Asian ethnicity this way...
Other words the left distorts are "greed" and "greedy" - if a voter resists proposed laws that will increase his taxes to benefit the poor, then that voter is "greedy" and guilty of "greed" - even if that voter's annual income is barely over the poverty line.
There's also "equality." The American system was built on equality before the law, but leftists now want equality of outcome - never mind innate differences in ability, talent, intellect, and so forth. Even in strength training we see equality is impossible!... a young man at 25 may do Starting Strength and then progress into the Texas Method and be personally coached by Coach Rip to the finest detail re: rest, food, and nutrition for 5 years, and while he'll definitely make outstanding progress, another young man blessed with better genetics who undergoes the same training and coaching will make better progress and at the end of the same 5 years, the latter young man will squat, bench, press, deadlift, and power clean more than the said first man.
Was there bigotry or discrimination by the part of Coach Rip or any other such problem? No - no two lifters will have identical results even if they are given literally equal circumstances and conditions.
Leftists also use the word "privilege..." white privilege, male privilege, the privilege of being born to a rich or well-off family or having both parents, etc. While it's true many people are born into very difficult lives, do those who were born into better conditions have an obligation to "compensate" for those who come from humbler backgrounds? And what about moral agency and personal responsibility? There have been stories of people born into poverty who made it big in this world, while I've personally met people born into lives where nothing was lacking and whose parents provided them with great lives in safe towns endowed with excellent schools.... and these people flunked their way through high school, didn't get a college degree, and lived unproductive and unenviable lives. Does privilege always help?
Leftists are manipulators, and few things are as powerful when it comes to manipulation than language, because words have enormous power - the power to make one feel. When a leftist has you feeling, he has won, because the moment you start feeling, you're no longer thinking. And leftists know this because they love to gulit-trip non-leftists into doing what leftists want. When they can't or won't deliberately use such words, they'll use vagueness - "this is not who we are." What a load of crap! Who are we? Since when is "we," the American people, a unified monolith? Even in 1960, when America was still about 90% white, a random white person from Los Angeles was culturally distinct from a random white person from Boston. Replace these cities with "rural Wyoming" or "central Wisconsin" or "a small town in Vermont right across the border with Quebec province." There was of course a shared, common American identity, but the vastness of America has always meant there was considerable cultural heterogeneity.
"That's not who we are?" - nonsense. It is yet more manipulation; it is guilt-tripping, and it is intentionally phrased in a vague way which makes the listener guess as to what is meant and it almost always results in the listener feeing obligated to morally defend his position as that phrase implies that any position which evokes a "that's not who we are response" is a morally/ethically deficient one.
Through experience, I've confronted people who do these things with the bluntest of terms short of direct animosity and profanity. I call them out for what they are, I cite hard, irrefutable facts and statistics, and I don't budge.
They stopped talking to me. They are not stupid enough to fail to see when someone can see through their bullcrap. And when that happens, they move onto someone more unsuspecting.