Phrase for phrase, the Biden authorities erases Trump’s language of racism, xenophobia and hatred

WASHINGTON – Days after President Biden took office, the Bureau of Land Management added a picturesque landscape of a winding river to the top of its website, which had a photo of a giant wall of coal on it during the previous administration.

In the Department of Homeland Security, the term “illegal alien” is replaced by “non-citizen”. The Home Office is now ensuring that its stakeholder mentions include “tribal” (with an uppercase “T” as Native American preferred, it said). The least popular two words in the Trump dictionary – “climate change” – are popping up again on government websites and in documents. Environmental Protection Agency officials have even started using the hashtag #climatecrisis on Twitter.

One of the most damaging examples of the Trump administration’s myriad attacks on human decency during its tenure was the radical overhaul of the language our administration used to carry out its duties. Of course, Trump’s semi-literate tweets, riddled with misspellings and punctuation or capitalization errors, were the most visible manifestation of a deliberate dumbing down and coarsening of government language. His daily barrage of tweets also served to hide the fact that Trump rarely held press conferences that may have exposed his embarrassing lack of knowledge. Most of Trump’s tweets, while the media highlighted them incessantly, were not informative and even less were particularly original. Usually they repeated or parroted an idea or statement someone else had made on Fox News.

However, the real attack on government language took place in the departments and agencies that were under the control of Trump’s agents. For example, references to “climate change” were quickly banned from the halls of the EPA, and research reports and websites were forcibly cleaned to remove their mention. The Department of Agriculture has also removed “climate change” from its website and replaced it with “weather extremes”, while the Ministry of the Interior has advised its staff to refuse terms such as “science-based evidence”.

Revisionism, however, went much deeper than simply advancing an anti-science agenda that denies the climate. As Karen Greenberg, who wrote for Mother Jones in 2018, explained, words suggesting compassion, tolerance, or recognized diversity or inclusion have also been deliberately and systematically eliminated by federal agencies. She cites a case in which US Customs and Enforcement (ICE) officials insisted that the word “refugee” be removed from the panel description of a conference program before ICE officials agree to appear. Similarly, references to the United States as the “nation of immigrants” have been removed from the USCIS mission statement. And, as noted by the New York Times, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered Justice Department officials to use the deliberately derogatory term “illegal alien” in all of their communications when describing someone who did not legally enter the United States is “.

The Trump administration’s attack on language, which implied tolerance of underrepresented and marginalized populations, quickly began to affect the way the agencies would draw up their budgets.

As Mother Jones’ Greenberg noted in 2018:

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, this year’s household inquiry carefully excluded such descriptors from their mission and purpose. Originally falsely reported as a policy decision to ban certain words from use in the agency, CDC officials simply read the new administration’s tea leaves and quickly cleared their budget inquiries of keywords now poisoned in Trump’s Washington and described their mission. These were words that were suddenly seen as red flags when it came to using government funds to help the less fortunate or the discriminated. Examples of this were “vulnerable”, “aspirational”, “diversity”, “transgender” and “fetus” – and as science is now falling into disrepute for its findings on fossil fuels, the terms “evidence-based” and “evidence-based” have also been discarded scientifically sound. “

There is no doubt that this ubiquitous attempt to redefine language itself was a focus of Trump’s White House. Trump adviser Stephen Miller is quoted in the Times article as saying, “The battle over the lexicon is actually the central battle.” Of course, he would know, since he was the driving force behind some of the government’s cruelest and most inhumane acts, such as its infamous “child separation” policy. In order for such a policy to be successful, an attempt had to be made to dull or redirect the feelings of general horror that such policies evoked among decent Americans. Setting the parameters of the language to describe it was a key component of this. A practice that was tantamount to a state-sanctioned kidnapping fell under the strict-sounding category of “zero tolerance”.

Control of language is a hallmark of almost every absolutist and despotic form of government, from autocracies to extensive dictatorships. Used on an unprecedented scale by Miller and others of its kind, it provided a ready-to-use tool to restore social norms in line with their goals, identify perceived enemies, and denigrate those the government deemed “undesirable.”

Greenberg put it strikingly well:

[A] bold attempt to use language as the door that leads us from one reality – that of the last 250 years of American history and its progress towards inclusion, diversity, equality for minorities, and freedom and justice for all – to another, that of An oligarchically led transformation that focuses on intolerance, racial and ethnic divisions, discrimination, ignorance (rather than science), and creating a state of unprecedented heartlessness and greed.

In this regard, what the Biden government is doing (as soon as possible) is not only necessary but critical to the continued growth and development of this nation. Shear cites the deep-sixing of the Trump-inspired “1776 Commission” and its “Report,” which attempted to rewrite history through a prism of white supremacy. Resuming the Bureau of Land Management’s creed to “Preserve the Health, Diversity, and Productivity of America’s Public Areas”; Revisions to the State Department’s mission statement imposed by Christian fanatic Mike Pompeo and overall “to remove and through the language and images that represented (Trump) anti-immigration, anti-science and anti-gay rights policies to replace words and images that are broader and better suited to the sensitivities of the current President. “

Language has been used and invoked to justify the most heinous acts and human impulses, but it has also helped stimulate positive change, refine and uplift people. It is very clear that the Biden administration understands this distinction.