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Harmful’ Americans ‘Stuck on Stupid’
Duggan FlanakinDec 24, 2022
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
America, the long-popular term for the United States, can be spoken no longer. “America” therefore is – at least on campus - dead. Good riddance to that racist moniker!
We learn this from our friends at the Leland Stanford Junior University, named in honor of the son and namesake of 19th Century Republican U.S. Senator Amasa Leland Stanford. The elder Stanford, who served as Governor of the Golden State in 1862-63, was also a railroad executive whose son lived only to the age of 15.
According to Stanford’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative [EHLI], the term “American” is a racist insinuation that the U.S. is the most important country of the 42 nations in the Western Hemisphere. [Q: How many people are crossing the borders of the other 41?]
“Harmful” terms on the EHLI website are grouped into these categories – ableist, ageism, culturally appropriative, gender-based, imprecise language, institutionalized racism, person-first, and violent. But the public no longer has access to Stanford’s list that includes many more than George Carlin’s seven dirty words.
Listing forbidden words has been quite a fad on both the Left and the Right. Back in 2010, Tribune Company CEO Randy Michaels banned 119 "newspeak" words and phrases “from ever crossing the lips of anchors and reporters at WGN-AM.” That same year Buzzfeed listed 68 words you could not say on TV.
Today, of course, censorship has gotten much more sophisticated, as some of us have recently learned from Elon Musk’s release of the so-called “Twitter Files,” a release that has the Federal Bureau of Insurrection (sic) up in arms. [Wait – Stanford says this offends armless humans.]
We should not be surprised that Stanford is leading the banned words parade. In 2018, Stanford banned the use of the American* flag by any university club (more specifically, by the campus Republican club). In 2019, a former student accused the university of banning martial arts classes on campus from allowing community members (often instructors) to participate. On the other hand, the Stanford band is “the most banned marching band” in the country.
