Words as Weapons
How Political Language Stopped Describing Reality and Started Sorting People Into Tribes
Words as Weapons
How Political Language Stopped Describing Reality and Started Sorting People Into Tribes
By Brochan Thorn
Once upon a time there was a man named Joe. Joe loved ham sandwiches, but Joe didn’t get out much. He wasn’t “Hip.” He just wanted a ham sandwich. But somewhere along the way, without Joe’s knowledge or consent, the term “ham sandwich” had become street slang for something entirely different. Something vulgar and obscene, but it had crossed the fringe into common speech. So Joe goes out and finds a little bar and grill and orders a ham sandwich. And a few hectic minutes later, Joe is on the sidewalk wondering what the hell just happened.
And as old Aesop would say — the moral of the story is: When someone steals your words, they steal your voice. And you don’t even know it’s gone until you open your mouth.
Words. We use them every day. But so many people don’t understand the power and reach of words. Words make up a language, and a language allows all those who speak it to understand each other.
But language is like a living organism. It grows. It evolves. It becomes alive in prose and in song. Humans are travelers. Wanderers. Explorers. And as they travel and explore, their particular language follows them. When they settle in a foreign land, their language slowly inserts itself into the existing one.
So language is adaptable. It changes as people adopt new words from other languages, but it also goes through internal changes. Words like “gay” and “literally” have been completely transformed into something entirely different than what they originally meant.
It is also malleable. And since usage comes before definition, how media uses a word can redefine almost any word through repetition, especially in today’s world.
Which means words can be intentionally subverted. Weaponized.
There is a game being played with the English language. You are a participant whether you know it or not. It’s a con game and we are the mark.
The con is simple really and it uses simple tools. Here’s how it works. Sometimes a word comes into use that the repressed, the disenfranchised, and “the others” can identify with, a word that can be used to rally people around it.
And then the media wordsmiths will force it into the fire of the spin doctor’s forge, firing it, hammering it, folding it until it fits their needs, serves their purpose.
Then they will serve it back to you in your news feed. The old word with a new meaning will be blasted across the internet, on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and others until the word is useless to those who needed it the most. Just think of how the word “Christian” has been completely usurped to the point that my father’s generation would not recognize modern Christians as Christian. It was reforged. The con is in play. And the powerful authoritarian spin machine is so very good at this game that the general population might as well be in a chess match with the world’s best Grandmasters. This is not an accident. It is not the natural evolution of language. It is a strategy. And it has been deployed with the same deliberate precision as every other theft in the authoritarian playbook.
Let me show you the playbook in action. Not in theory. Not in school books, but in the words you read in a text this morning. The words in the meme you saw last night. The words that you can no longer use in polite company. Because the most effective word theft — and the one that hurts the worst — is the one you don’t notice until you need to use it, and find it’s already been stolen. All that’s left is a memory.
Woke
Let’s look at the word “woke.” You can’t consume any media nowadays, especially any right leaning broadcast, without hearing it.
The word originated in African American communities as far back as the 1930s and 40s. It meant: stay alert, stay aware, the danger is real, and if you fall asleep, you will pay the price. It was survival language. A warning siren. Danger. Stay alert.
When “woke” entered the mainstream liberal conversation, it began to subtly change. There was a segment of the population that was financially secure but also socially aware. When they used “woke,” they unwittingly intellectualized it to mean enlightened, sympathetic, understanding. And the authoritarian spin machine threw it into the pot with the crystal loving, incense burning, “commie loving leftists” that they had been conditioned to hate and put it on blast on every right wing media outlet they could. Those well read, left-leaning people didn’t intentionally subvert the word. They just weakened it by association. Because it wasn’t theirs, they lost its “danger, stay awake” meaning. It was ready to be stolen, renamed, and used against the “other.”
When Trayvon Martin and then George Floyd were killed, “woke” became the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter. It got a lot of media attention.
What I saw, from my own perspective, was fear. On both sides. But very different kinds of fear.
I was watching the news in a bar when the Zimmerman verdict came in. A white woman at a nearby table actually bounced in her seat and clapped her hands with joy when she saw the news. I have never forgotten that. Because behind the joy was something else. Something she would probably never name out loud. Fear of losing the privilege she never knew she possessed. White privilege. White fear.
A large segment of white America does not fear the police. They fear replacement by the other. They don’t fear the men who kill Trayvon Martin or George Floyd. They celebrate them. George Zimmerman. Kyle Rittenhouse. The policeman with his knee on the neck of a Black man. When they heard the word “woke” in connection with Black Lives Matter, something had to be done. They made sure of it.
Now. Snap your fingers.
And just like that — “woke” lost its original meaning and became a slur. An insult. A word you can no longer say in certain rooms without the conversation stopping.
The left didn’t weaponize “woke.” They left it weakened like an abused teenager, ready to be snatched up by a cult.
The Words They Weaponized
“Democracy.” “Republic.”
These two words have been set against each other so successfully that millions of Americans now believe they are opposites. They are not — and the confusion goes back to the beginning.
The Founders were inventing something that had no name. Nothing like it had ever existed. They reached for the closest available words — “democracy,” which to them meant the mob rule of ancient Athens, and “republic,” which meant the Roman Senate, itself no model of stability. Neither word fit. Both carried baggage. So they argued, distinguished, debated, and ultimately built something that was neither and both at once.
Alexander Hamilton called it “a representative democracy” in a letter to Gouverneur Morris in 1777. Madison called it a republic in Federalist No. 10. They were describing the same government. The words were imperfect containers for a new idea — and that imperfection has been exploited ever since.
Because here is the accepted truth: a republic is a form of democracy. Remove the democratic elections and what do you have? You have a dictatorship with better branding.
Because when someone says “we’re a republic, not a democracy” today, they are not making the Founders’ nuanced argument about direct versus representative governance. They are using the naming confusion of 1787 as a weapon in 2026. They are suggesting that majority rule itself is un-American. That elections producing the wrong result are illegitimate. That the will of the people is a threat.
The Founders couldn’t agree on what to call it. But they agreed on what it was for. It was for we the people.
“Socialist.”
This word once had a precise meaning. It described a specific economic and political philosophy — collective or government ownership of the means of production. Actual socialism. Documented. Definable. Debatable on its merits. But I am regularly confronted by those who seriously think that Hitler was a socialist just because it’s in the name. He was not a socialist. The Nazis put “socialist” in their name the same way they put “workers” in it — to steal the loyalty of people they intended to destroy. The first thing they did when they took power was arrest the actual socialists.
Today it can mean anything left of center — school lunch programs, environmental regulation, healthcare, paid family leave, the minimum wage. Applied so broadly and so consistently that it has been emptied of all descriptive content and functions purely as a pejorative. A sound. An alarm.
When a word can mean anything, it means nothing. And that’s the point. You can’t debate a policy if you can’t name it accurately. You can’t organize around an idea if the idea’s name has been poisoned. And you can’t express an idea when the words you need now mean the opposite.
“Antifa.”
This one is different from the others. It’s not a word that had a clear meaning and was corrupted. It’s a tactic and an ideology — anti-fascism — that was converted into a proper noun. A group. An organization. A conspiracy.
Anti-fascism is a practice. It describes what you do — you oppose fascism, sometimes through direct action. It is not a membership. There is no Antifa headquarters. No leadership structure. No membership rolls. No hierarchy to infiltrate or arrest or hold accountable. Just people, independently, who decided fascism was worth opposing.
But somewhere between 2016 and now, the right wing media machine took that tactic and that ideology and turned it into a thing. A noun. An enemy. They could now say “Antifa attacked” the way they’d say “The FBI attacked.” They could blame property damage on “Antifa” as if there were someone to blame. Someone to arrest. Someone responsible.
The genius of the theft is that it took something that describes what you do and made it sound like what you are — and then like what you are is an organization.
Which means anyone who opposes fascism by any means becomes “Antifa.” There is no way to distinguish between a Black Lives Matter protester in Portland and a window-breaker in Seattle and a person who punched a Nazi at a rally in DC. They’re all “Antifa” now. The word has been emptied of meaning and filled with whatever the accuser needs it to mean.
And that’s the point.
“Elites.”
Theoretically means entrenched powerful interests. The people at the top pulling the levers.
Weaponized Usage: a schoolteacher with a graduate degree is an elite. A scientist at a public university is an elite. A journalist at a regional newspaper is an elite. Yet a true elite billionaire who funds the campaigns of the politicians calling teachers elites is not an elite. He is a patriot.
The word has been surgically separated from its economic meaning and reattached to a cultural one. It doesn’t mean wealthy and powerful anymore. It means educated and skeptical of the movement. It is a word designed to make the people most equipped to recognize the theft sound like the thieves.
“RINO.”
Republican In Name Only. Originally meant insufficiently conservative on policy.
Today it means: anyone who criticizes Trump. Liz Cheney — one of the most conservative voting records in the history of Congress — became a RINO overnight. Not because her policies changed. Because her loyalty did.
The word no longer describes a policy position. It describes a relationship to a single man. Which tells you everything about what the party has become and nothing about what conservatism ever meant.
The Words That Were Stolen
“Patriot.”
Functionally appropriated to mean specifically MAGA aligned nationalism. In actual usage today it signals a very specific ideological identity — one that has nothing to do with love of country in any universal sense and everything to do with loyalty to a movement. If you love your country and question the movement you are not a patriot. You are the enemy. But the truth is that allegiance to one party or one man does not make you a patriot.
Theodore Roosevelt said it best:
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
— Theodore Roosevelt, Kansas City Star, May 7, 1918
“Freedom.” “Liberty.”
Claimed almost exclusively by the right in current usage. Despite the left having equally strong liberty-based arguments — bodily autonomy, civil liberties, freedom from surveillance, the right to read what you choose — the vocabulary of freedom has been so successfully colonized that using it from the left sounds like an imitation.
The right didn’t have better arguments about freedom. They had better marketing and a ruthless propaganda arm. And they understood, earlier than anyone else, that if you own the word you own the concept.
What Happens When the Words Are Gone
George Orwell understood this before anyone else named it clearly. In 1984 he invented Newspeak — a language being deliberately reduced, year by year, so that by the time the reduction was complete, it would be literally impossible to think a thought that challenged the state. Not because the thought police would arrest you, but because you would have no words for the thought.
Orwell’s Newspeak worked by removal — take the word out of the dictionary. What we’re watching works by corruption — leave the word in the dictionary but fill it with poison. The effect is the same. You reach for the word, and it’s no longer a tool. It’s a weapon aimed back at you.
We are not in 1984. But we are watching, in real time, the reduction of the political vocabulary available to people who want to think clearly about power.
“Socialist” emptied of meaning so you can’t describe economic policy accurately. “Elite” inverted so you can’t identify who actually holds power. “Patriot” captured so you can’t express love of country without joining the movement. “Woke” poisoned so you can’t name racial awareness without sounding like the enemy.
Every word that goes this way makes the next theft easier. Because you cannot organize resistance to something you cannot name. You cannot warn your neighbor about a pattern you have no vocabulary to describe.
The theft of language is the theft of thought itself. And how do we move forward without thought?
Take the Words Back
English was my best subject in school and I was a voracious reader. Reading in the school libraries, escaping into the world of words, is how I learned. This gave me a unique understanding of the evolution of words. And as I continued reading year after year, watching the words evolve in plain sight, I became used to the natural pattern of the evolution. However, what’s been happening in the last several decades is different. The difference is palpable and it is sinister.
Our vocabulary is being hijacked. It is under attack by a system that rewards the weaponization of language because weaponized language generates engagement, and engagement generates profit, and profit generates more weaponization.
Can words be reclaimed? Maybe. But we need a counter to Fox-style state television. These are not only the thieves — they are the ones writing the new definitions. And if we can’t be heard, how do we change anything? CBS has already fallen. Paramount paid Trump $16 million, canceled the most critical voice on late night television, and installed a conservative opinion columnist with no newsroom experience to run CBS News. CNN may be next. The Ellison family — Larry Ellison is one of Trump’s biggest donors and closest allies — is closing in on Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company. This is not a coincidence. This is a hostile takeover of the truth.
I still have more questions than answers. But losing the words is just the first trip in a long fall.
No authoritarian regime has ever fallen because of words alone. But words make people aware of the real choices. They shine a light on the evil among us. They give hope to the hopeless.
So let the voice of we the people be heard.
Brochan Thorn is still listening. And getting angrier by the day.
Brochan Thorn is an independent writer and lifelong student of history.