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Those wacky right-wing shit-stirrers at Campus Reform, the Harass-Your-Liberal-Professor site that targets college and university faculty for allegedly doing woke indoctrination, have found a whole new thing to worry about.
This week, they sent one of their “reporters” to George Mason University to interview ordinary students about the latest leftist threat in America, even though the supposed threat is nonexistent and has nothing to do with George Mason U, or even with Masons, which seems like an oversight since they secretly run everything.
So what’s the new threat from The Left? According to the article, there’s an “emerging movement to change the spelling of the word ‘women.'” Or at least Campus Reform and a few other right-wing nutters seem to want other righties to believe there is, only in addition to the old 1970s freakout over “womyn” as an attempt by Those Crazy Feminists to erase men, there’s also the ongoing freakout over transgender people, as we saw with post-Dobbs gripes any time someone wrote “pregnant people.”
The only problem with this supposed “emerging movement” is that it pretty much exists only in the heads of some right-wingers. Big surprise: it’s a work in progress by professional Culture War hype man Chris Rufo, who also brought us the right-wing freakout over “critical race theory” in kindergarten classes, has helped stoke the ongoing panic over trans people existing, and is some of the “brains” behind the war on drag queens.
Previously:
Here’s The POS Who Scared Your Conservative Relatives With Lies About Critical Race Theory
Who’s Attacking Children’s Hospitals Today?
One of Rufo’s favorite tactics is to find an obscure document on a website somewhere and inflate it into a claim that some institution is officially advocating or pushing an outrageous agenda. Last fall, I detailed how Rufo blew up the existence of some ill-advised “see also” links at the very end of a slide show into a bogus claim that Chicago schools were “promoting” kinky BDSM sex toys for trans kids, which of course was utter bullshit he happily promoted to any right-wing media source that would run it.
That’s exactly what’s happening with the nonexistent “movement” to change the spelling of women to wimmin, too. Earlier this month, Rufo found an obscure document on a University of Texas at Austin website and shopped around a claim that he’d found evidence the university officially wants to change the entire English Language. That probably came as a huge surprise to everyone in the UT administration, because the now-deleted document (archived link), titled “Language Matters, a Glossary of Terms,” was appended only to the diversity commitment page for the Financial and Administrative Services department.
As we all know, as goes the Financial and Administrative Services department at the University of Texas at Austin, so goes the nation.
And there it was, Rufo tweeted, the incriminating proof that the University of Texas is indoctrinating young people with 1970s third wave feminism, right between entries on “White Supremacy” and “Woke”! Also, we now feel a little icky knowing that, just as we do, Rufo highlights things using MS-Paint.
Please try not to be too shocked by the definition, which we’ll note is descriptive, not a demand for anyone to use the term:
Wimmin: A nonstandard spelling of the word ‘women’ used by feminists to avoid the word ending in ‘-men,’
We should add that the preface (archived) to the glossary also treated the contents as a suggestion, not a mandate for language use in either the department or the university as a whole:
Having a common language for talking about and across difference is important for mutual understanding and partnership. The language of diversity is evolving and requires awareness, understanding, and skill. This glossary, though not exhaustive, is a tool to give you the words and meanings to help make conversations easier, respectful and empowering.
OMG IT’S JUST LIKE ORWELLIAN NEWSPEAK! (Yeah, of course a wingnut website called it “Orwellian”)
So there’s the entirety of the emerging movement to change how we spell a word: An entry in a now-deleted glossary that was on one UT department’s diversity webpage. Aren’t feminists crazy?
A cursory search for the first sentence of that preface turned up only a single source that wasn’t right-wing media reporting on the fake outrage, a 2022 seminar for a travel industry trade show, so lord only knows where the thing really originated. We found some, but not all, of the first few definitions in the glossary of a 2020 book called “Coaching for Equity,” so we suspect the document is one of those things that gets copied and passed around in diversity and management circles. Clearly we must purge DEI programs from all American institutions to prevent woke radical leftists from imposing Orwellian language codes on our children!
So anyway, here’s the dumb fucking video of the Campus Reform “reporter’s” trip to interview George Mason U students about what the woke language commissars are trying to do. We can only assume GMU was chosen because Fairfax was a convenient drive for the videographer or the reporter.
Big surprise, the students all thought that the University of Texas shouldn’t force people to change the spelling of “women,” and we have great news: It isn’t actually happening and never did.
Rufo’s tweet from earlier this month did get covered on Fox News, the Daily Caller, and somehow, the Austin CBS affiliate, and other weird little right-wing sites that insisted UT was forcing the change on faculty and students, so great job, well done, Chris.
If nothing else, this fuckwankery might make for a mildly interesting example of the early stages of a manufactured disinformation campaign, although who knows whether it’ll actually gets any traction on the Right. Now that there’s a video of a bunch of sensible college students rejecting the latest Woke Language Mandate, it might go somewhere.
Or maybe not — compared to the other moral panics being pushed in rightwing media these days, this one seems like a quaint throwback. How is anyone supposed to be moved to wave AR-15s around at school administrators over spelling?
[Campus Reform / American Association of University Professors / Campus Reform]
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