Remember when Vanilla Ice punctuated statements with “Word to your birthing person”? 

No? 

Okay, well, yes, his catchphrase sounded slightly catchier thirty-five years ago. But it’s 2025, and people use more words (to say less) than they did in the early 1990s.

Back then, resident assistants with diplomas in sensitivity training monitored speech in academic enclaves. (At Cornell, they surveilled facial reactions to gay pornography, a test that did not, thankfully, catch on.) They graduated and took their experiments to scale. 

Anthony Comstock and Carrie A. Nation doppelgangers increasingly wielded more power. Then their enthusiasm for policing speech bred resentment that found ballot-box expression in Donald Trump. Never in the history of the United States had the casting of a ballot for a candidate created so much catharsis. That catharsis was not so much for Trump as it was against everyone who had called the Trump voter racist, sexist, and transphobic.

Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our latest print magazine.

It turns out that Americans like the “free exercise” part of the First Amendment and despise scolds who put words in, or take them from, their mouths. Democrats, at least the smart ones, now confront this bad habit of grown-up hall monitors who disproportionately register to vote as members of their party. 

The group Third Way released a memorandum late this summer to “All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA” titled “Was It Something I Said?”. It overflows with what Democrats lack: common sense. 

“For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters,” the memo begins, “Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying.” 

The unsolicited advice concedes that such words, which were intended to “broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace,” have instead unleashed the opposite effect. The theme of the Democratic Party over the last six decades, for those paying attention, has been unintended consequences.

“To please the few,” the memo continues, “we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.”

Bill Wilson for The American Spectator

Democrats say “justice-involved” instead of criminal, “the unhoused” instead of homeless, and “chestfeeding” instead of breastfeeding.

The point, rather than being empathy, appears to be separation. The benighted say Hispanic. The enlightened say Latinx. If a Pew poll shows that 75 percent of Hispanics object to the use of Latinx, and just 4 percent refer to themselves as Latinx — no matter. Democrats will spread enlightenment to the benighted — and shame those recalcitrant types who impede. 

Other terms Third Way wisely counsels Democrats to ditch include “centering,” “dialoguing,” “deadnaming,” and “allyship” — or “cis” anything, a prefix that the late Norm Macdonald defined in 2016 as “a way of marginalizing a normal person.” 

Around the same time, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog lampooned the University of New Hampshire’s “bias-free language guide.” He noted that a poor person becomes, in the more sensitive vernacular, a “person who lacks advantages that others have; low economic status related to a person’s education, occupation, and income.” He punctuated that mouthful by saying, “It’s as simple as that.” When he questioned a co-ed about the offensiveness of the phrase “freshmen orientation,” she corrected him with “first-year orientation.” The Don Rickles–like dog-puppet asked, “Shouldn’t you be saying ‘first-year Asiantation?’”

Nine years later, Democrats finally catch up to the wisdom of the fools.  

It turns out that the very rhetoric that secures you the presidency of the University of New Hampshire student government bars you from the presidency of the United States. In other words, the bubbles in which progressives reside, work, and study reinforce an attitude and lingo alienating to everyone else. 

Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton all won the presidency, after all, without ever uttering anything on the Third Way list. Why did Democrats think they needed “heteronormative” and “BIPOC” — words that so clearly disconnect them from voters — to connect with voters? 

In a sense, the Third Way memo does what it warns against: It tells people what to say and what not to say. The reason why Third Way Democrats feel compelled to monitor the speech patterns of fellow Democrats stems from the president’s ongoing demonstration that the woke emperor has no clothes. More than reorienting foreign policy toward America’s just interests, appointing judges constrained by the Constitution, or closing the border to illegal immigrants, Trump’s greatest success involves broadening the parameters of speech. His example of speaking without fear of cancel culture gives every American permission to ignore the censors.

Donald Trump spoke on the stump as though he were speaking to construction workers, card dealers, and boxers because, well, he had spoken to construction workers, card dealers, and boxers throughout his entire professional life. Democrats imagined that his occasional curse word and bellicosity amounted to the formula for his success, so they borrowed his style. 

In a life-imitates-art moment, twenty-two Democratic Party senators all reacted to the president’s boasting of lowered prices with some variant of “$#!+, that ain’t real.” This contrived deployment of curse words by teleprompter in March continued with Kat Abughazaleh, who said in a scripted video announcing her candidacy in Illinois, “I say it’s time to drop the excuses and grow a f***ing spine.”

Democrats also expropriated another F-word Trump occasionally uses, “fight.” At a Stratham, New Hampshire, town hall meeting earlier this year, Representative Chris Pappas told the audience, “Fight, fight, fight.” In a September article titled “It’s time for Democratic leaders to fight — or step aside for those who will,” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi invoked some variant of “fight” eleven times. That same month, House Democrats in Kansas drew crowds for their “Fight Back Tour.”

But no witness identifies anyone in this precinct lineup of pencil-neck geeks, Barney Fife lookalikes, and anemic, vitamin-D–deficient Dems as either lovers or fighters. So “fight” and other F-words that come across as real and visceral from Trump sound forced and directed by a focus group.

So, too, does the Third Way admonition to refrain from “intersectionality,” “heuristic,” and “microaggression.” “Do not” always suppresses what one might do when left to one’s own devices. Smart Democrats may, in a rote, catechetic manner, pay heed to the advice meted out by Third Way. This does not address why they speak in a language foreign to those whose votes they seek. 

The reason for this tendency is that they essentially live as foreigners within America. Consider party panjandrums. 

Charles Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats, never even practiced law after obtaining a degree. He entered politics at 24, and he has remained in one elected office or another for the last fifty-one years. Joe Biden at least practiced law for about a year before launching a political career. From 1969 until earlier this year — fifty-six years — he more or less held or ran for office. Kamala Harris entered government in 1990 (the same year she passed the bar). Until her departure earlier this year, her primary paychecks came from tax dollars (this excludes any remuneration or in-kind contribution from Willie Brown).   

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Zohran Mamdani? The career paths of the next generation of Democrats do not appear all that different. Old bottles, new wine — same weirdos. 

The Third Way memo treats symptoms, not the disease. However sensible, no memorandum can retroactively reorient the life choices of progressive political animals. 

People who drop “Overton window” and “radical transparency” into conversations attended the likes of the Lawrenceville School or Choate Rosemary Hall, cloister themselves outside of Harvard Square or inside of Greenwich Village, watch MSNBC or CNN, listen to NPR, and otherwise do everything possible to curate a life in which they do not interact with normal people. 

This is the disease. Talking about the patriarchy or the social construction of gender is a symptom.  

The key phrase in the Third Way memo worth coaxing out of retirement, if just for the next few lines, is “cultural appropriation.” The attempt to curse like Trump, fight like Trump, and talk like Trump fails because the underlying premises fail. People do not support Donald Trump because he occasionally swears, displays a pugnacious spirit, or does not use the word “heteronormative” (though this last one helps). They support him because he is authentic. 

He does not need a Third Way memorandum or a focus group to know what to say. He just says it. Sometimes, to the regret of his supporters, he says it in a Tourette’s-like manner. But nobody doubts that what he says comes from his brain and not a consultant, speechwriter, or pollster. 

The Democrats want their politicians to imitate Trump without grasping that Trump’s inability to imitate anyone serves as the key ingredient in the formula for why he connects with Americans. 

No one dares to call it cultural appropriation.

Subscribe to The American Spectator to receive our fall 2025 print magazine.