For want of the right word, a battle may be lost. And this is a battle President Trump has engaged, with the few sane people still around hoping he’ll win.
Mr Trump has commendably ordered federal employees to remove their pronouns from their e-mail signatures, firing another salvo at DEI insanity. I often describe it as such, but keeping in mind that there is a subversive method in that madness.
The woke Lefties know that the path to their autocracy lies through glossocracy, controlling people’s minds by controlling their language. To continue the military analogy, words are the units taking part in that battle, and surrendering even one of them weakens the position of righteousness.
Trump seems to understand that, and hence his order. But his troops still ceded his positions by allowing the woke Left to run away with one key word. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene unwittingly highlighted that retreat by displaying a sign outside her office, saying: ‘There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE “Trust the science!” ‘
The quotation marks around “Trust the science” can mean only two things in a world governed by proper usage. Either the phrase is a direct quote from a recognised source, which it isn’t, or Mrs Greene means one shouldn’t trust the science, which she doesn’t. Using quotation marks to add emphasis is as illiterate as it is, alas, widespread.
I wonder if Republicans have decided they owe it to their leader to support his cavalier disregard for proper syntax, but this is a separate matter. What concerns me here is that the sign is wrong on a more fundamental level.
Let me just give you what I consider the proper version and you’ll know what I’m driving at. The sign should read either “There are two sexes: male and female. Trust the science!” or “There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Trust the grammar!”
Know what I mean? Gender is a grammatical, not biological, category. Pronouns have genders, three of them; people have sexes, two in number.
The Left started the corruption of the term to add a dimension of self-identification and to downplay the ironclad biological distinction Mrs Greene has in mind. Yes, they say, biologically speaking there may be only two sexes, male and female, but that doesn’t matter one jot. What’s important is how a person identifies, which ‘gender’ ‘they’ (never he or she) chooses.
Letting the adversary corrupt language in this fashion is tantamount to ceding a vital position. That’s how battles get lost, and then wars.
Trump’s next executive order should be a ban on the use of the word ‘gender’ in that subversive meaning. But the marching order he has already issued is something all decent people should applaud.
But, unlike Trump’s declaration of war on wokery, his readiness to start a trade war is ill-considered. But not in every respect.
He is about to slap 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, along with a 10 per cent levy on China. Also, he “absolutely” promises to put tariffs on the EU which, Trump said, “has treated us so terribly”.
It’s wrong to pan these predictable announcements roundly. Tariffs may be imposed for good or bad reasons, and we should be able to know the difference.
As I understand the president, and he isn’t always easy to understand, the tariffs on those three countries are mainly punitive, with the transgressions committed by Canada and Mexico evidently seen as 2.5 times worse than those perpetrated by China.
Trump wants to punish America’s northern and southern neighbours for failing to control the flow of illegal migrants and illicit drugs across the border. If so, though its effectiveness remains to be seen, the punishment is just.
The same goes for tariffs on China, whose global economic conduct is appalling. Any step taken to slow down China’s quest for strategic supremacy should be welcomed, even if it comes at a price.
The EU is about to be penalised for mistreating the US, though Trump didn’t specify exactly which offences he means. That doesn’t really matter: the EU mistreats everything and everyone it comes in contact with, and in any number of ways, take your pick.
If Trump indeed plans to impose tariffs on America’s largest trade partners for punitive and strategic reasons, he’ll find no disagreement in these quarters. But he genuinely seems to think that the US will also derive an economic benefit, and there I think he is wrong.
“We’re going to put tariffs on chips. We’re going to put tariffs on oil and gas. That will happen fairly soon, think around the 18th of February, and we’re going to put a lot of tariffs on steel,” Trump said.
“Tariffs don’t cause inflation. They cause success,” he added, conceding, however, that there could be “temporary, short term disruption”. “But the tariffs are going to make us very rich and very strong,” he said.
The statement about inflation and success is simply wrong, as any economist will confirm. In his first term, Trump provided direct proof of this when he slapped tariffs on steel. As a result, he protected some 3,000 jobs in the US steel industry – while causing the collateral damage of about 70,000 job losses in industries dependent on steel.
America may get away with levying tariffs on oil and gas, considering that her own hydrocarbon industries are in rude health. Her economy may suffer if foreign producers retaliate in kind, but in general energy autarky is a distinct and good prospect for the US economy. That’s more than one can say for her other industries.
Imposing tariffs on chips, for example, is cloud cuckoo land, considering that 68 per cent of the world’s chips, and over 90 per cent of the most advanced ones, come from Taiwan – and most of the rest from China.
Tariffs will make chips more expensive, driving up the price of all products that use them, which nowadays is to say just about all products. When it takes more money to chase the same volume of goods, inflation ensues – this is plain common sense and the ABC of economics.
One wonders what they taught young Donald at Wharton, but whatever it was it certainly wasn’t that “tariffs cause success”. The disruption they’ll produce may indeed be “temporary, short-term”, but only if Trump stops them after a while. Otherwise they’ll cause lasting damage.
Trump does come both rough and smooth, and his bag of goodies is very much mixed. But on balance his first policies are at least interesting and mostly promising.
By contrast, our own government policies are a different mixed bag, delivering as they do both doom and gloom. There are things HMG can learn from the US president — but won’t.