On November 5, 1605 Guy Fawkes was caught in the cellars of the Parliament building in London in what became known as the Gunpowder Plot— a conspiracy to assassinate King James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the English throne.
Guy Fawkes was arrested, tortured, and executed.
And his name, ‘Guy’, became an extreme insult. If someone called you ‘guy’ in the early 1600s, fists might fly— after all, it referred to a traitor who tried to murder the king.
The term ‘guy’ was also used to insult people’s looks or clothing, as the public often burned effigies of Guy Fawkes that were made to look grotesque or shabbily dressed.
Over time, though, ‘guy’ took on a different meaning. Today it’s just an informal way to refer to a man.
This is common in languages. Over decades… and even centuries… words tend to change meaning.
In the last few years, however, a handful of people have hijacked languages, and decided for everyone that words have new meanings.
But they never give us a nice new definition you could look up in the dictionary. The words mean whatever they want them to mean at any given time.
And that has been the fate of many words, for example, violence and genocide.
According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, violence is, “the use of physical force so as to injure.”
But over the past few years, woke activists have hijacked this word and redefined it to meet their absurdly broad criteria. Misgendering a trans person, for example, is considered “literal violence.”
Transgender actor Laverne Cox may have started that trend as far back as 2014, claiming “Misgendering trans people is an act of violence.”
More recently a school district in Philadelphia, plus various “Gender 101” university courses, have claimed the same.
Call me old fashioned but I always thought violence required actual physical contact.
But they don’t stop at violence.
The Trans Radical Activist Network (TRAN) claims that deliberate misgendering of trans people is akin to participating in a genocide against them.
The Daily Kos, a progressive political website, claimed Trump’s plan to ban gender reassignment surgery and puberty blockers for minors was, “a genocidal plan against all transgender existence in the United States.”
Growing up I recall the word genocide being used exclusively to describe holocaust-level atrocities— the murder or attempted murder of entire ethnic groups or minorities.
Pol Pot waged genocide against millions of Cambodian intellectuals. Hutu militias wiped out hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s.
Yet today, people who are against transgender athletes participating in women’s sports are accused of committing genocide.
Another example: In 2019, Finnish politician Paivi Rasanen tweeted a Bible verse that was considered homophobic.
She was investigated for two years and ultimately indicted on three counts of “war crimes and crimes against humanity”. She was found not guilty, but the prosecution has appealed.
These terms— war crimes, crimes against humanity, violence, etc. have been completely hijacked by the woke mob… and they have no real definition anymore. Genocide means whatever some rabid activist wants it to mean.
This is why Canada’s new ‘hate speech’ law caught my eye.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government recently passed the “Online Harms Act”, claiming that it’s all about protecting children. And that certainly sounds like a noble intention. After all, who could possibly be against protecting children?
But the bill also states that, “Every person who advocates or promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.”
It also demands life in prison for any crime, “motivated by hatred based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.”
Now, I happen to be in favor of free speech… and that even extends to offensive, idiotic speech that has no place in a civilized society. So throwing someone in prison for life because of words seems ridiculous to me… especially given the bizarre double standard of woke justice.
Bear in mind that criminals who commit actual violence are routinely turned back onto the streets because bail is ‘racist’. But hate speech is considered a crime that may now carry a life sentence.
If genocide still meant ‘the systematic murder of entire groups of people’, this new Canadian law might not be too scary.
But we live in a world where some very powerful people think that misgendering someone is akin to genocide.
Trudeau in particular has already bent laws to increase his own authority. He silenced his opposition throughout 2020-2021, and when the Freedom Convoy protested his mandates, he de-banked them, imprisoned them, and denied them bail.
He seized authority that voters never gave him, and he used it to hurt people.
Does anyone honestly think that this new law won’t be abused to do the same thing? The government could lock somebody up for life based on ideas which no longer have any defined meaning.
What is Justin Trudeau’s definition of genocide? Or violence? Or war crimes? What is his definition of hate?
I’d love to know. But I doubt they’ll ever tell us.
And that’s the problem with these woke people— they love to accuse people of things, but they never define the thing that they accuse people of.
Inspired Idiots like Trudeau are on a crusade, and are delusional enough to think they are actually making the world a better place.
But destroying things as fundamental as language, and threatening life in prison over whatever the definition happens to be today, makes people less free.
This is a guy who smeared the Freedom Convoy— protesters with legitimate grievances against the government— as “misogynistic and racist”, and wondered aloud “do we tolerate these people?”
And when a government starts pushing life in prison over behavior that they can redefine in their sole discretion, it should be pretty easy to understand why you ought to think about a Plan B.
