One of the most effective ways that Marxists advance their agenda is to change how we talk about things.   When clever rewordings replace the truth, it’s easier to fool people.

For example, the Washington Post this past week said a transgender plaintiff “was designated female at birth, but identifies as male.”

In the blink of an eye, a biological fact – that someone was born a girl – is brushed aside and replaced with a term that implies that male or female sex is assigned, not a natural phenomenon.

In fact, the idea that your sex is “assigned at birth” is an increasingly common description. It validates the Gnostic-based insanity that one’s sex has nothing to do with physiology, just what goes on in people’s heads.  By this reasoning, birth records can be altered to distort reality, which is a way to lie officially.  And to force others to do so as well.

Gavin Grimm, who is now 21, sued the Gloucester County, Virginia school district in 2015 to force them to allow her to use boys’ facilities.  Two years later, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court but was set aside when President Donald Trump overturned a Barack Obama gender identity school mandate.

But last Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the school board had violated Grimm’s 14th Amendment right against sex discrimination. The high school had offered a gender-neutral bathroom, but the plaintiff’s attorneys rejected that solution, as did the two Obama appointees who sided with Grimm. A George H.W. Bush appointee dissented.

They drew from the bizarre Bostock opinion in June written by, of all people, Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, which expanded the definition of “sex” in the Civil Right Act of 1964 to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”  Just like that, the Court put every institution in America that won’t kneel to the LGBTQ gods in jeopardy of ruinous lawsuits or even governmental sanctions.

Given the Court’s reasoning, how could any sex-based distinctions, predicated on real and important differences between the sexes, be maintained? Sports teams? Locker rooms? Bathrooms at any business of any size? Private schools?

The transgender movement, for all its caring rhetoric, is not really about eliciting compassion for sexually confused people – something we should embrace. It’s part of the Marxist Left’s campaign to overhaul society and force people to lie.

Anyone not toeing the line, which keeps changing, is “canceled.”  That means being censored, fired, shut out of promotions or jobs, and de-platformed on social media.

Over the years, the Left has peppered our discourse with advocacy-filled descriptions. “Choice” long ago replaced abortion, “gay” replaced homosexuality, and “hater” and “racist” became all-purpose descriptors for anyone dissenting from the Left’s worldview. Erasing biology is just more of the same.

Sometimes, the ideologically-driven changes are more subtle. Journalists now capitalize racial terms, as in Black people and White people. The adjectives, which describe merely one important aspect of the human race, instead become the whole. No more thinking about people just as fellow human beings created in the image of God. Race must be first and foremost in everyone’s minds.

Herded into identity groups, we’re more easily divided and manipulated. Regardless of the impressive racial progress that America has achieved since eradicating slavery and Jim Crow, the media are utterly obsessed with race as the only aspect of humanity worth talking about.

But if America’s “systemic racism” is the main driver of the riots that have raged for the last three months, why are mobs beheading or defacing statues of Jesus and Mary and black heroes like Frederick Douglass or Arthur Ashe, burning churches and Bibles, and looting stores in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile?

There’s method to this madness. Racism is an excuse to pour gasoline on a larger cause – that of taking down America as we know it and replacing it with a socialist utopia. The founders of Black Lives Matter, after all, admit to being “trained Marxists.”

During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s (which is still with us), activists began forcing journalists and medical professionals to use the term “living with HIV,” as a way to de-stigmatize the disease. You could get kicked out of a medical conference for talking about “AIDS infections” or the “AIDS disease.” They’d not hesitate to beat the drums for “living with covid” if they thought it would advance their cause.

Language is a formidable instrument for human progress when used properly.  But, all too often it can be abused, destroying souls, families, or even entire societies.

The most profound and positive use of language in history was when Jesus offered Himself to everyone on Earth, saying, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” and when the Gospel writer John referred to Him as simply The Word.

Amid the current chaos, we need to work hard to preserve America. And, we need to pray that the Marxist-inspired madness and abuse of language will crack up, a victim of its own hostility to truth.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com. You can follow Robert Knight on Twitter @RobertKnight17 and his website is roberthknight.com.

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

I have said it a thousand times.

Ideas matter.

What is taught today in our classrooms will be practiced tomorrow in our culture. Teach self-actualization rather than self-restraint in your schools, and you are going to get a bunch of self-obsessed, perpetual children throwing tantrums in your streets.

Garbage in. Garbage out.

Teach narcissism, and you get a bunch of narcissists.

Spend more time showing young boys how to use a condom than teaching them how to be men of character and don’t be surprised with Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein.

Teach lechery, and you get lechers.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will become the philosophy of the government in the next.” Hitler agreed, “Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state.”

Why do you see a gaggle of arrogant adolescents strutting the halls of Washington, D.C.? We produced them. We taught them to behave this way. We created this monster. This situation is of our own making. These people are our fault. They are the product of our local schools, our colleges and our universities.

Some of you might be tempted to dismiss this. You might be inclined to say that you don’t care that much about this topic because you’re not in college any longer, or you don’t have children or grandchildren headed off to the ivory tower this fall. This is the next generation’s problem.

Well, you’re wrong.

This is your problem, and it’s your problem in spades.

Just turn on the news.

Just read the paper.

Just pick up your smartphone or open your laptop.

If the burning cars, destroyed monuments and broken windows in Minneapolis, Seattle and New York haven’t caught your attention, what will? If tearing down statues of Frederick Douglass isn’t a bridge too far, what is?

Our culture is collapsing right before our eyes, and it is clear where the responsibility lies. Our nation’s educational establishment is to blame.

If we don’t admit this and admit it now, our country and culture are lost.

John Adams once wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He knew that for any nation to survive, it must have a moral and religious glue to bind it together, or it will die for lack of definition.

It will suffer the fate of the Bolshevik, French or Cultural Revolutions. It will fall for the lies of the likes of Robespierre, Lenin or Mao.

The American experiment was and is the singular exception to the guillotine and the gulag.

Why?

Because ours was a revolution driven by the Creator rather than the created. It was a revolution grounded in self-evident truths rather than self-righteousness arrogance. It was a fight for liberty rather than license. It was a battle for freedom rather than safety, for principles rather than power.

And where do these principles, these moral and religious truths, come from? They are passed from one generation to another through our schools. Our Founding Fathers knew this. This is why they founded Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and Yale — all chartered expressly in the principles of biblical Christianity.

All these colleges were created to educate a free people, a moral people, a people who could and would control themselves, a people of personal restraint, a people of private and public virtue. These schools were founded to create a nation of biblical character and individual integrity.

Remove this cornerstone from our culture, and the house crumbles. When our schools rot, the fish stinks from the head down.

Our nation stands on the very precipice of hell, and your local school district thinks fomenting victimization, anger, balkanization and division is the solution.

Your neighborhoods are burning, and your schools rush to throw the gasoline of resentment, recompense and revenge on the fire.

Your teacher unions and many of their members march in solidarity with Marxists while they malign capitalism. They defend the destruction of Antifa. They applaud the divisiveness of BLM. They wave their rainbow banners while disparaging our country’s flag. They deny the science of X and Y chromosomes while calling you a science denier. They extol socialism while condemning free enterprise. They teach the racism of critical race theory. They tout the intolerance of intersectionality. They demand the privilege of denouncing your privilege. They use your sons and daughters as pawns in their ugly game of power and politics. They proudly boast of judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.

And they teach your children to do the same.

Yeah, that’ll solve the problem, won’t it?

The house is aflame, and your schools hold the match.

Dr. Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). This article was originally published at The Washington Times.

Statues depicting prominent figures in U.S. history have been coming down across the nation. The actions of those portrayed are being reevaluated through the eyes of some who feel their past bad deeds outweigh any of the good they accomplished, with no regard given to the common mores of past centuries. Someone living four centuries ago is held up to 21^st century standards.

Some statues have been removed by local municipalities, while others have been pulled down  or even decapitated and dragged into a lake. Such was the case with Union Civil War Colonel Hans Christian Heg’s statue. The statue of the abolitionist, who was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga, stood on the grounds of the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison. In other cases, when statues were targeted for removal, it was a little more understandable – they portrayed Confederate generals and other military leaders. The removal of Heg by a violent mob made little sense. One of the mob leaders cleared up the confusion, telling the Chicago Tribune that the statue was removed because it portrayed Wisconsin as racially progressive, when slavery had never really ended but rather continues in the state through the prison system.

Viewing the protest-turned-mob leader’s words through the lens of history, one can’t help but be reminded of the Russian and French Revolutions, and even of events out of Mao’s little red book. Activists may say that suggesting such comparisons is alarmist or dramatic, but the proverbial slippery slope is there for a reason.

Now Illinois’s beloved President Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself, is one of the historical revisionists’ targets. Lincoln, born February 12, 1809 in Kentucky, lived in Indiana from ages 7-21, then moved to Illinois. In 1831, at age 19, he made his first flatboat trip to New Orleans. Historians believe that it was on that or another trip to the Crescent City that he witnessed a slave auction. What he saw forever changed him. Lincoln is first recorded as publicly speaking out against slavery as a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1837.

Lincoln went on to become president and was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, with the Civil War beginning just over a month later on April 12. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was issued September 22, 1862, which stated that if the Confederate south did not cease its rebellion by January 1, 1863, the executive order would go into effect. When it failed to do so, 3.5 million African-American slaves held in the Confederacy were freed. Lincoln then endorsed the passage of the 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the country as a whole.

The great orator and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass was a free black man who had escaped slavery. He met with Lincoln at the White House at least four times, but some historians believe the number was much higher. In his personal papers, Douglass said that the two men had different agendas when they first met and would argue, but they grew to be good friends. After his first meeting with the President, Douglass said to a group of abolitionists in Philadelphia, “I will tell you how he received me – just as you have seen one gentleman receive another, with a hand and a voice well-balanced between a kind cordiality and a respectful reserve.”

Was Lincoln recorded as having said things that sound racist to our ears today? Yes, he was. We know when he lived and we know he wasn’t perfect. We also know that he was leaps and bounds ahead of many in his day. He was a good man and a good president who freed the slaves. He was assassinated by the then-well-known actor John Wilkes Booth for freeing the slaves and defeating the Confederacy.  Lincoln, along with 450,000 white and 40,000 black Union soldiers, gave their lives to end slavery.

Now, students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison want to remove President Lincoln’s statue from campus because of things he said that they disapprove of and a homesteading act he signed that gave Native American land to white settlers and designated it to become the campus of their university. In Washington, D.C., protests continue to call for the removal of the Emancipation Memorial Statue in Lincoln Park. The statue, dedicated April 14, 1876, was paid for by an association of former slaves. The dedication speech was given in front of President Ulysses Grant by Frederick Douglass.

In his speech, Douglass described Lincoln’s assassination as an act of “malice” that had “done some good after all. It has filled the country with a deeper abhorrence of slavery and a deeper love for the great liberator.”

Although he developed some mixed feelings about Lincoln in the years following his death, Douglass went on to say that “no man who knew Abraham Lincoln could hate him – but because of his fidelity to union and liberty, he is double dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever.”

Much has been said about the position of the freed slave positioned next to the standing Lincoln. A reporter interviewed Marcia Cole, a member of the Female Re-Enactors of Distinction (FREED) as she stood near the statue in Lincoln Park. Cole portrays Charlotte Scott, an African-American woman from Virginia who gave the first $5 she earned towards the statue. Cole told the reporter that she was there to speak on behalf of Miss Charlotte, who would not want the statue removed.

“People tend to think of that figure as being servile, but on second look, you will see something different, perhaps. That man is not kneeling on two knees with his head bowed. He is in the act of getting up. And his head is up, not bowed, because he’s looking forward to a future of freedom.”

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois! 

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

There are a number of Americans of which every young boy and girl should learn. George Washington, Abigail Adams, Sam Houston, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Roosevelt, and Louis Zamperini. Zamperini (or “Zamp” to his friends) first achieved celebrity as track athlete in the 1932 Berlin Olympics. A head-strong young boy from Torrance, California, Zamp came out of nowhere to place 8th overall in the 5,000m event.

In 1943, as 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, his bombardier was shot down over the Pacific, more than 800 miles away from Hawaii. The survivors of the crash drifted in their survival raft for 47 days, battling hungry sharks and starvation to eventually land on the Marshall Islands. The Japanese captured them and imprisoned Zamp in a series of increasingly oppressive P.O.W. camps until the camps were eventually liberated and Zamperini returned home as a hero.

Do we belong to the same country which spawned Louie Zamperini? Some days it is hard to tell. By that I mean, think about some of the Americans who have accomplished the most memorable feats over the past 20 years. Lance Armstrong, won seven Tour de France titles and beat testicular cancer—admitted to a doping scheme, stripped of his titles. Barry Bonds, hit 762 home-runs in his career—allegedly used a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs during his career. Michael Phelps, won 18 Olympic gold medals during his career—has been caught hitting a bong and driving-drunk, suspended from all swimming competitions.

These three men have scaled the zenith of American achievement over the past 20 years. Yes, to some degree they are cherry-picked, since there have been other Americans who accomplished great things (Cal Ripken Jr, Nik Wallenda, etc.), but the fact that three of the most accomplished Americans in recent memory are a) athletes and b) of dubious character proves that our concept of remarkable has changed dramatically.

Do we still have true American heroes?

Or are we left with talented athletes as our best and brightest?

We absolutely do have true American heroes. They are all around us. Sadly we usually don’t know their names, or the particularities of the Hell they went through on our behalf, because they are often reticent to speak about their service. The Armed Forces of the United States of America are hero factories. They prepare the best of us to protect the rest of us. Even today, while these institutions are under attack by an effeminate administration which finds itself threatened by their selfless heroics and ruthless efficiency in the face of evil, even today there are still young men and women lining up to serve their country.

So why doesn’t valor engender celebrity in 21st-century America? For a number of reasons, the first being that we have become a cynical people who are motivated primarily by self-gratification and sensual pleasures. Much like a citizen in the late Roman Empire, honor has ceased to be the goal. We would prefer to experience the latest salacious indulgence than think about self-sacrifice.

Another reason is that the prevalence of moral relativism has watered down the potency of concepts like valor and honor in this country. As more people come to believe that there are no moral absolutes, they put little stock in those who live their lives as paragons of those absolutes. The average college student, who thinks that we each create our own morality, cannot accept the integrity of a man who believes so strongly in living honorably that he would give up his life to prevent Evil from achieving success. The terms Good and Evil are meaningless to this poor, befuddled student and so he is left unable to understand or appreciate the heroic individuals in our midst.

The exciting thing is that this Christmas Season, not one, but two films which depict true stories of valor, honor, and indomitable will, open nationwide. Unbroken, directed by Angelina Jolie, and American Sniper, directed by Clint Eastwood, tell the true stories of Louis Zamperini and Chris Kyle, respectively. While I have no clue yet how faithful these films will be to their source material, and the real lives on which that material was based, we have a rare opportunity to enjoy tales of American valor and skill on a scale not seen more than once or twice in a generation. The lessons these men can teach through the example of the lives they led are desperately needed today in America.

Unless we desire the fate of the late Roman Empire, we must recalibrate our concept of remarkable and once again seek the noble and honorable as our celebrities. Not for their athletic prowess, but for their intestinal fortitude and unbreakable will.

The first great challenge of my life was when, as a kid, I made the transition from a dissipated teenager to a dedicated athlete. Another was staying alive for forty-seven days after my plane crashed, then surviving prison camp. The best way to meet any challenge is to be prepared for it. All athletes want to win, but in a raft, in a war, you must win. Luckily, and wisely, I was prepared—and I did win.  ~Louis Zamperini