Tag Archive for: pronouns

Pronouns and Publishing

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Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

The acceptance of philanthrocapitalism as the munificent foundation for globalism’s New World Order provides the philosophical rationalization for social engineering throughout the publishing industry. Over the last twenty-five years, the U.S. trade publishing business has been centralized and reduced to five main players. The Big Five are Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and MacMillan.

British-owned Pearson Education is the largest publisher of educational books, professional training manuals, and educational assessment services in America. Pearson Education was created when its parent company, Pearson PLC, purchased Simon & Schuster’s education division from Viacom and merged it with its own education division in 2011.

In February 2019, Pearson sold its U.S. K–12 business to the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management LP for $250 million. In July 2019 Pearson announced its decision to move to a digital-first strategy, and began phasing out the publishing of printed textbooks.

BlackRock and Vanguard are among Pearson PLC’s top ten institutional shareholders, and BlackRock is among the top three institutional shareholders of Cevian Capital, Pearson PLC’s largest institutional investor.

The Big Five publishing companies and Pearson publish digital and printed books that follow an ESG/DEI editorial formula. Let’s take a look.

Kiri Jorgensen, Publisher and Senior Editor at Chicken Scratch Books, posted an excellent article in The Federalist on July 13, 2023, “A Woke Children’s Literature Cabal Is Conditioning Your Kid to Be an Obedient Leftist.”[i]Jorgensen begins with a warning:

Children’s books are one of the most powerful tools parents have to help teach their kids how to be good human beings. From picture books being read at bedtime to novels being read by flashlight under the blankets, kids flourish in the safety of stories as they develop their belief systems. Resilience, respect, and many other noble traits are portrayed and experienced vicariously through books. What a powerful tool!

Having been a part of the children’s book publishing industry for several decades, and as a passionate participant, I have watched in growing dismay as the children’s literature, or “kidlit,” world has shifted and changed, and most recently taken a drastic plummet. Parents need to understand the destructive path this industry has taken, or they will discover too late as the damage hits home.

This shift in kidlit has been happening for a long time. About 25 years ago, novels that portrayed kids as environmental activists began to win awards. About 15 years ago, the award-winning books showed shocking, disturbing scenarios. Ten years ago, books that depicted sexualization and abuse at younger ages began to win awards. Then, five years ago, it shifted a bit more to where books focused on systemic racism and sexual identity won awards. Today, if books don’t include any of the above depictions, they are rarely published by medium and large publishing houses.

And it’s the medium and large publishing houses that supply schools, libraries, and bookstores.

During a 2015 writers’ conference for children’s book authors, a respected editor from a major publishing house admonished a writer over a character in his manuscript struggling with homosexuality. Jorgensen relates the incident:

“No.” She explained that in kids’ books, we must present the ideal as if it already exists. There can be no “being troubled by” gayness. There can be no “coming to terms with” sexual identity. The characters in our stories must immediately accept with positive responses any representation of modern social constructs. This immediately laudatory reaction to woke ideology is now required in kidlit. If an author doesn’t portray it as such, his book will not be published.

This pronouncement by the editor shocked me and many other writers there. The line had now been drawn. As writers, our hope of publication rested on our willingness to positively portray woke ideology.

The deliberate social engineering apparent in the Big Five editorial formula deceitfully presents woke ideology as normative, because familiarity breeds acceptance. Authors with a traditional point of view are not published. It is a form of censorship and distortion of reality that is reinforced at the library.

Jorgensen talks about the complicity of libraries, and how librarians have purged their shelves of classics and replaced them with woke books, from board books for babies to young adult novels. She reports that of 12,000 librarian donors to the 2020 presidential campaign, 93 percent went to Joe Biden.

The distortion of reality in books is reinforced by advertising and the entertainment media. Children are inundated with over-sexualized images of woke ideology on television, in movies, in video games, in school, and in the library. Jorgensen describes it as a normalization campaign:

Woke ideology has shifted from being the make-up of a book’s plot lines to the fabric of the setting—the normal backdrop of the story as if it exists that way in real life.

This normalization leads to acceptance, which leads to embracing. By weaving these social agendas into the “normal” background of a story, a child who feels shocked at a scene or description immediately shifts to feeling shame for being shocked in the first place. Kids will seek to replace their shame with acceptance. This is the power of normalization….

This is what we’re up against. The entire children’s book publishing industry—from authors to publishers to librarians—believes it should have the power to control your children’s minds. And it has systematically and progressively gained that access.

For readers who still doubt the complicity or extensiveness of children’s book publishing in woke indoctrination that Jorgensen exposed, I invite you to review a few of the books I found listed on Amazon’s July 2023 list of Pronoun Books for Preschoolers:

Under Amazon’s search heading Children’s Books, Growing Up & Facts of Life:

  • The Light of You, by Trystan Reese and Biff Chaplow, March 1, 2022. Ages: 3–5

The book cover illustrates a pregnant man, his male partner, and two children smiling.

Amazon book summary:

A new baby is joining the family, and the whole community joins in to celebrate! Bringing gifts to celebrate the baby with art, music, jokes, cuddles and delicious food, they also bring their love and support for the pregnant transgender dad who will give birth to the baby soon!

  • My Own Way: Celebrating Gender Freedom for Kids, by Joana Estrela, March 1, 2022. Ages: 3–6

Amazon book summary:

Small children are often asked to choose between a gendered binary—”boy” or “girl”, “pink” or “blue”. This colorful picture book smashes these stereotypes and encourages the reader to follow their own way!

Amazon editorial reviews:

  • “Reminiscent of Todd Parr…this book offers support and acceptance” ―Angela Leeper, Booklist
  • “An encouraging, cheerful introduction for younger children” ―Patricia D. Lothrop, School Library Journal
  • “An encouraging guide to considering gender identity” ―Publishers Weekly

Marxist cultural terrorism is tearing American families apart, destroying children’s ability to reality-test, creating racial tension, and fomenting race wars. Why would the Big Three leviathans of institutional investing, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, join with the Big Five publishing houses and the philanthrocapitalists in supporting cultural Marxism?

This critical question is answered at the end of the Dodd interview in Chapter 9:

Griffin: How have the purpose and direction of the major foundations changed, over the years, up to the present? What are their purposes and directions today?

Dodd: One hundred percent behind meeting the cost of education, such as it is presented through the schools and colleges of this United States, on the subject of our history—to prove that our original ideas are no longer practical. The future belongs to collectivistic concepts. There is just no disagreement on this.

Griffin: Why do the foundations generously support communist causes in the United States?

Dodd: Well, because, to them, communism represents a means of developing what we call a monopoly—as the organization, we’ll say, of large-scale industry into an administrable unit.

The “administrable unit” perfectly describes the operations of the globalist managerial Unistate.

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

Please visit Linda’s Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

[i]  A Woke Children’s Literature Cabal Is Conditioning Your Kid to Be an Obedient Leftist; https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/13/a-woke-childrens-literature-cabal-is-conditioning-your-kid-to-be-an-obedient-leftist/

The Politics of Pronouns

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Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

In an information war, fought without bullets or bombs, language is weaponized. The globalist campaign promoting gender fluidity in order to destroy individual selfness manipulates spoken and written language to achieve its goal. Perversion of pronoun usage in the English language has a particularly destructive political purpose. The enemies of national and individual sovereignty are revising language to reflect human existence without the boundaries of self. Words matter. The switch to third-person plural, gender-neutral language is a weapon of mass psychological destruction that begins in early childhood.

Consider this: young children who do not learn the first- and second-person individual and possessive pronouns I, me, mine, you, yours, he, him, his, she, her, hers do not learn to name or identify themselves or others as individual gendered selves. Without a personal, individual, gendered, identifiable self, children become confused, destabilized, and vulnerable.

Instead of singular pronouns, young children are intentionally being taught to use the third-person plural pronouns they, them, theirs, so that they identify themselves in terms of the non-gendered collective. It is linguistic demolition of the individual. Plural pronouns effectively erase the concept of an individual self from the English language, and support the replacement of the individual with the preferred non-gendered collective identity.

Globalism’s tactical strategy is to have the Left focus its Marxist ideological values of diversity, equity, and inclusion on cultural and educational institutions. The incremental strategic objective is for those values to be accepted as normative, then become social policy, and ultimately become the law of the land.

This is how globalism’s linguistic hoax works to change the hearts and minds of America’s children in classrooms K–12 and online. Disingenuously presented as diverse, equitable, and inclusive language to make people feel respected and included, gender-neutral substitutions are promoted as empathetic, kind, and caring. Grammarly, the popular cloud-based typing assistant, instructs writers on “How to Use Gender-Neutral Language at Work and in Life“[i] in an article by freelance journalist Devon Delfino, June 17, 2022:

Gender-neutral language is simply a way of talking about people without assuming their gender. For example, it’s referring to someone you don’t know as “they” rather than using the pronoun “he” or “she,” or addressing a group as “everyone” rather than saying, “Hey, guys.”

Luckily, the English language is relatively gender-neutral in many respects. For instance, many nouns (think: “writer,” “president,” or “acrobat”) are gender-neutral. However, that doesn’t mean that gendered language is uncommon. In fact, gendered language has been a part of our lexicon for a long time. (The United States’ Declaration of Independence even proclaims that “all men are created equal.”) So, you may not realize when you’re using gendered language, even as it shapes how you see the world.

Using gender-neutral language is an important habit because it demonstrates respect for people of all backgrounds, genders, and beliefs, and it includes everyone in the conversation. This is an especially helpful way to show support for members of LGBTQIA+ communities. And while not everyone finds the language people use about them important, it’s best to land on the side of using inclusive and empathetic language….

It can feel awkward or forced when you start implementing gender-neutral language. That’s normal. The important thing is to keep at it so that it has a chance to become a part of your everyday communication. That way, you’ll not only be able to use inclusive language but also be better able to perceive the world in those terms….

Whether you’re just now adopting gender-neutral language, or you’ve been using it for years, Grammarly’s sensitivity suggestions can help your writing be both inclusive and up-to-date.

In January 2021, Bloomberg[ii] reported that “Grammarly Is Now the 10th Most Valuable U.S. Startup.” Grammarly is valued at $13 billion after new funding; $200 million came from investment firms Baillie Gifford, BlackRock, and others. BlackRock Investment Management Company, ticker symbol BLK, is the world’s largest asset manager. In September 2023, global database online platform Statista reported[iii] the total assets under BlackRock management at $9.43 trillion.

BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink also serves on the World Economic Forum Board of Trustees. Fink is often considered the architect of woke capitalism, which uses the metrics of globalism’s new currency, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), to pressure the companies it controls into compliance with its subjective social goals.

An article by senior news reporter Jekaterina Drozdovica, published on Capital.com[iv] April 13, 2023, “BlackRock shareholders: Who owns the most BLK stock?” reports:

According to the data from WallStreetZen as of 13 April [2023] …61.87% of BLK shares are owned by institutional investors. This means that over half of the BlackRock Inc. shareholders were investment firms and asset managers, similar to BlackRock, which hold shares on behalf of their clients.

BlackRock’s largest institutional investors are Vanguard Group, Inc., BlackRock Inc. (the parent company of BlackRock Investment Management), State Street Corporation, Bank of America, Temasek Holdings (Private) Limited, and Charles Schwab Investment Management. This means that the same globalist entities driving Agenda 2030 control the firms they invest in and initiate their political agenda without disclosing the source.

For example, Grammarly pledges its commitment to the responsible[v]innovation and development of AI:

At Grammarly, we’re guided by the belief that AI innovations should enhance people’s skills while respecting personal autonomy and amplifying the intelligence, strengths, and impact of every user.

Remember that words matter. What Grammarly means by responsible innovation is that which comports with globalism’s Agenda 2030, which is diametrically opposed to both national sovereignty and sovereignty of the individual.

Grammarly is just one example of how BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, the Big Three institutional investors, influence social policy by exerting their enormous financial power through boards of directors and proxy voting outcomes of the businesses they control. It is no secret that outside of small, independent mom-and-pop stores, the American business sector is being centralized, much like the media sector.

Businesses that appear to be competitors are controlled by the same institutional investors, and speak with the same diversity, equity, and inclusion voice regarding social policy. For example, BlackRock and Vanguard are in the top three institutional investors in both Coca Cola and Pepsi. Institutional investors currently own 68.75 percent of Coca Cola and 74.33 percent of PepsiCo.

In publishing, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books & Media and HarperCollins are both owned by News Corp. Whether the product is soft drinks, children’s books, young adult books, graphic novels, K–12 textbooks, graduate-level textbooks, medical textbooks, movies, videos, or clothing, globalism’s diversity, equity, and inclusion narrative will be evident throughout in plural pronouns, book content, plot lines, music lyrics, training manuals, or screen prints on T-shirts.

The manufacturing, distribution, and sale of any product or service in the American economy is affected by the administrative choices of globalism’s Big Three and the socialist policies of Agenda 2030 they support. Currently, the Big Three control over $22 trillion in assets, which represents a 20 percent ownership of America.

Business developer Steve J. Sands published an informative report on his website December 28, 2022, “Who Owns Corporate America“:[vi]

Three fund management firms, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, represent 40% of the shareholders of all listed firms and 88% of the S&P 500 index. In addition, they are now the dominant shareholder in 88% of the firms listed on the S&P 500.

Isaiah McCall from Medium.com states in his blog post:

BlackRock’s absurd liquidity means that if you look at just about every major publicly traded company in the world, you’ll find that BlackRock is its first, second or third-largest shareholder. Go ahead, try it.

Globalism’s Big Three exert enormous influence on the changing landscape of American culture. The seismic shift in education and the workplace that supports collectivist plural pronouns and blurs boundaries between male and female is another aspect of the coordinated attempt to destabilize Judeo-Christian morality, Judeo-Christian sexuality, and American family norms. It is the politics of pronouns.

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

Please visit Linda’s Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and her website: lindagoudsmit.com 

[i]  How to Use Gender-Neutral Language at Work and in Life; https://www.grammarly.com/blog/gender-neutral-language/

[ii]  Bloomberg; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-18/grammar-checking-app-is-now-the-10th-most-valuable-u-s-startup#xj4y7vzkg

[iii]  Statista reported; https://www.statista.com/statistics/891292/assets-under-management-blackrock/

[iv]  Capital.com; https://capital.com/blackrock-shareholder-who-owns-most-blk-stock

[v]  responsible; https://www.grammarly.com/responsible-ai

[vi]  Who Owns Corporate America; https://stevenjsands.com/who-owns-corporate-america/

Superstar Athlete Livvy Dunne Mocks Leftist Terminology While Posing For Photo With Troops At NASCAR Race

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Popular college gymnast and social media influencer Olivia “Livvy” Dunne mocked gender ideology while posing for a photo with troops at a NASCAR race on Sunday.

Dunne, who has 7.5 million followers on Twitter, stood between two U.S. Army members and smiled as she sarcastically presented her preferred pronouns. 

Dunne played the popular TikTok sound “My pronouns are U-S-A!” over the video. She mouthed the saying into the camera while striking a pose between the service members.

The video received roughly 437,000 “likes” on TikTok and was positively received by her followers.

“you just went from a 10 to an 11 for this,” one follower said in reference to her physical appearance.

“thank you for your support,” one follower commented with an American flag emoji.

“God bless you and America,” commented another follower.

“She’s a conservative too,” commented another follower with a series of emojis indicating adoration.

The NASCAR video that she posted on Sunday already has more than four million views on TikTok alone and has nearly half a million likes.

In the video, Dunne, standing next to two young uniformed U.S. Army soldiers at the race, states: “My pronouns are U-S-A!”

Dunne has rapidly become one of the most marketable female athletes in collegiate sports. The LSU gymnast reportedly became a millionaire at 18 years old by leveraging her immense social media following to secure brand deals. The social media superstar reportedly inked deals with EA Sports, Body Armor, Vuori, and American Eagle Outfitter, according to The Sun. Dunne ranks second on Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) valuation, according to collegiate sports website On3.

AUTHOR

COREY WALKER

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: Olivia Dunne Goes Viral (Again) With Pair Of New Videos

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Political and Scientific Censorship Short-circuits the Quest for Truth

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Those who seek to streamline online discourse, according to “official standards”, end up impoverishing public debate.

Over the course of the past decade, numerous regulatory authorities, both public and private, have increasingly positioned themselves as guardians of the integrity of our public sphere, standing watch over the content of information, and flagging or suppressing information deemed to be harmful, misleading, or offensive.

The zeal with which these gatekeepers defend their power over the public sphere became evident when billionaire Elon Musk promised to undo Twitter’s policy of censoring anything that contradicted leftist ideology or questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. There was an uproar, a wringing of hands, and lamentations, as “experts worried” that Twitter would collapse into a den of “far right” extremists and misinformers.

Sound and fury

Threats by the EU Commission to fine Twitter or even completely ban the app in Europe, if it did not enforce EU regulations on hate speech and misinformation, show that the hand-wringing over Twitter’s potential embrace of free speech is much more than empty rhetoric: the European Commission has declared its intention to force Twitter to revert to its old censorship policies if it does not play ball. According to Euronews,

The European Commission has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must do much more to protect users from hate speech, misinformation and other harmful content, or risk a fine and even a ban under strict new EU content moderation rules.

Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for digital policy, told the billionaire Tesla CEO that the social media platform will have to significantly increase efforts to comply with the new rules, known as the Digital Services Act, set to take effect next year.

Censorship has recently occurred principally on two fronts: Covid “misinformation” and “hate speech.” Some forms of censorship are applied by agencies of the State, such as courts and police officers; others by private companies, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Google-YouTube. The net effect is the same in both cases: an increasingly controlled and filtered public sphere, and a shrinking of liberty of discussion around a range of topics deemed too sensitive or “dangerous” to be discussed openly and freely.

Censorship, whether public or private, has proliferated in recent years:

  • First, there was Canada’s bizarre claim that people had an enforceable human right to be referred to by their preferred pronouns
  • Next, UK police were investigating citizens for using language the police deemed “offensive”
  • Then, we saw Big Tech giants, in particular Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, censoring perspectives that dissented from their version of scientific and moral orthodoxy on issues such as transgender rights, vaccine safety, effective Covid treatment protocols, and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Now, advocates of censorship have argued that it is all to the good that vile, hateful and discriminatory opinions, as well as every conceivable form of medical and scientific “misinformation,” are shut out of our public sphere. After all, this makes the public sphere a “safe” place for citizens to exchange information and opinions. On this view, we need to purge the public sphere of voices that are toxic, hateful, harmful, and “misleading” on issues like electoral politics, public health policies, and minority rights.

Thin ice

While there is a strong case to be made for censorship of certain forms of manifestly dangerous speech, such as exhortations to suicide or direct incitement to violence, the hand of the censor must be firmly tied behind his back, so that he cannot easily decide for everyone else what is true or false, just or unjust, “accurate” or “misleading”, innocent or offensive.

For once you hand broad, discretionary powers to someone to decide which sorts of speech are offensive, erroneous, misleading, or hate-inducing, they will start to purge the public sphere of views they happen to find ideologically, philosophically, or theologically disagreeable. And there is certainly no reason to assume that their judgement calls on what counts as true or false, innocent or toxic speech will be correct.

The fundamental mistake behind the argument for aggressive censorship policies is the notion that there is a set of Truths out there on contested political and scientific questions that are crystal clear or can be validated by the “right experts”; and that anyone who contradicts these a priori Truths must be either malicious or ignorant. If this were true, the point of public discussion would just be to clarify and unpack what the “experts” agree are the Truths of science and morality.

But there is no such set of pristine Truths that can be validated by human beings independently of a free and open discussion, especially on difficult and complex matters such as infection control, justice, climate change, and economic policy. Rather, the truth must be discovered gradually, through the vibrant back-and-forth of dialogue, debate, refutation, and counter-refutation. In short, public deliberation is fundamentally a discovery process. The truth is not known in advance, but uncovered gradually, as an array of evidence is examined and put to the test, and as rival views clash and hold each other accountable.

If we empower a censor to quash opinions that are deemed by powerful actors to be offensive, false, or misleading, we are effectively short-circuiting that discovery process. When we put our faith in a censor to keep us on the straight and narrow, we are assuming that the censor can stand above the stream of conflicting arguments, and from a position of epistemic and/or moral superiority, pick out the winning positions in advance.

We are assuming that some people are so smart, or wise, or virtuous, that they do not actually need to get their hands dirty and participate in a messy argument with their adversaries, or get their views challenged in public. We are assuming that some people are more expert and well-informed than anyone else, including other recognised experts, and may therefore decide, for everyone else, which opinions are true and which are false, which are intrinsically offensive and which are “civil,” and which are “facts” and which are “fake news.”

Needless to say, this is an extraordinarly naïve and childish illusion, that no realistic grasp of human nature and cognition could possibly support. But it is a naive and childish illusion that has been enthusiastically embraced and propagated by Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in their rules of content moderation, and it is a view that is increasingly finding its way into the political discourse and legislative programmes of Western countries that were once champions of freedom of expression.

It is imperative that the advocates of heavy-handed censorship do not win the day, because if they do, then the public sphere will become a hall of mirrors, in which the lazy, self-serving mantras of a few powerful actors bounce, virtually unchallenged, from one platform to another, while dissenting voices are consigned to the shadows and dismissed as the rantings of crazy people.

In a heavily censored public sphere, scientifically weak and morally vacuous views of the world will gain public legitimacy, not because they have earned people’s trust in an open and honest exchange of arguments, but because they have been imposed by the arbitrary will of a few powerful actors.

This article has been republished from David Thunder’s Substack, The Freedom Blog.

AUTHOR

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society. More by David Thunder

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EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.