Doxxing is the act of publicly revealing previously private personal information about an individual or organization via the dead tree media, the chattering class of the broadcast and cable outlets, social media or other Internet outlets.
A subscriber to my newsletter here on Substack suggested a term for the outing of progressive, leftist and Democrat beliefs and actions through any of the aforementioned sources should be called "orthodoxxing".
I liked it so much I told them I was going to steal it.
The progressive left sees themselves as some sort of secret society.
As Tyler Durden said in the movie, “The first rule is that you never talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you DO NOT talk about Fight Club.”
It’s like that.
They hide in plain view through distortions of the language that only members of the group understand. The words and phrases they use have different meanings for them when used in communication within the clique or group. For example, the commonly understood definition of racist is “a person who believes a particular race is superior to others”, inside the leftist cabal, it means “anyone who opposes us”. They tend to resort to inoffensive and anodyne sounding terms and acronyms like “Social and Emotional Learning”, SEL for short, which sound innocuous enough but hide the fact these are indoctrination programs that teach racism, hate and generational white guilt.
We have deciphered some of the more common linguistic twists, but we are discovering more every day.
That groups and cliques create their own means of communication isn’t unusual, cliques and groups often develop their own “in-group” languages all the time. You see it in the military, where a large portion of the communication is through acronyms – the mess hall has become the DFAC or dining facility, OPSEC for operational security or OCONUS for service “outside the continental United States”. Business has its language, as does medical community.
You see it in academia, especially in the dark and dank corners of the woke social sciences. My research has confirmed the area of “gender studies” is almost entirely constructed of language unintelligible to the layman, their papers are written in gibberish and tortured language so that only others similarly inclined toward wokeness understand what is being communicated (if they even do - most are afraid to admit they don’t for fear of getting kicked out of the faction).
These special modifications to language have four main purposes. They:
Make communication within the clique or group more efficient.
Signify membership in a specific clique or group.
Protect and secure communication within the clique or group from outsiders.
Control the members of the clique or group.
The reportage of the nightly news is rife with such in-group communication.
If you expose yourself to it long enough, you come to understand something about the “news” that is distributed by the mainstream media - the "news" serves as a bias confirming product the commentariat provides for the exclusive consumption of the nomenklatura.
But boy howdy, they do so raise their hackles when their true meaning is decoded because any duplication, distribution, saving, transmission, sending, reproduction and/or forwarding of their intent outside the leftist ecosystem is expressly forbidden.
Paraphrasing what Col. Nathan R. Jessup said to Lt. Daniel Kaffee in “A Few Good Men” - they can't handle the truth.
Life is so much easier when nobody has an opposing view, isn’t it?
That’s what the left’s French kiss of censorship is all about (as an example of their use of language, they call it “moderation”), but their adoption of across-the-board censorship is less an offensive strategy ad more of a defensive one. The “disinformation/misinformation” prevention crowd only wants to squelch your speech, certainly not because it is “disinformation”, rather because they are deathly afraid of hearing it (and having others hear it).
To control the language is to control the masses and their culture.
I know I overuse quotes from Hayek, but he literally wrote the book on these people. In Road to Serfdom, he recounted this story:
“… the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken support of the regime. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb report of the position in every Russian enterprise: ‘Whilst the work is in progress, any public expression of doubt that the plan will be successful is an act of disloyalty and even of treachery because of its possible effect on the will and efforts of the rest of the staff’.”
The American neo-Stalinists are no different. They book no dissent.
That’s why orthodoxxing to a progressive is like a cross to a vampire or a silver bullet to a werewolf.
It’s deadly – existentialist, even.
People secure in their positions invite challenge; they don't run from it. They seek out challenges to their hypotheses. They have no need to hide behind obscure language.
This may be your best essay on Substack.com, yet. I hope you receive comments listing specific examples of the Progressive's "code language". As part of the dying generation, I cling to the old standards: SNAFU and cluster-fuck.
Soon we will be living in a society nearly identical to the Weimer Republic, with mobs seeking out defenseless victims (Jews and Asians beware) and a fascist government able to control the media and re-write history to their liking. Both of those things, of course, have already begun (the mainstream media is careful to protect the identities and race of the mobs).
Keep up the good work. And I love the Hayek quote. While everyone has problems wading through original works of philosophy, I hope you continue to salt your writing with quotes by Spinoza, Swedenborg, Sartre, Keynes, and Nietzche. It expands our minds to see these eternal thoughts coupled with observations of contemporary life.
You’ve raised a good point. The idea that the truth can’t be allowed to be heard. Truth has its own power. It has weight, and is substantial. Evil/stupid/duplicitous speech cuts into those who hear it. It weakens people. It confuses them. When they hear Truth the hold the cult has on them starts to loosen. The Cult leaders can never allow this. Every cult needs to isolate its members from the rest of society. It can’t last buffeted by even normally truthful living.