Translation: it’s bad PR for my tribe. One of the privileges of occupying a position of hegemony is that you get to instruct your subjects in how they are allo

Translation: it’s bad PR for my tribe. One of the privileges of occupying a position of hegemony is that you get to instruct your subjects in how they are allowed to refer to power, and pathologize expressions that are offensive to it. Liberals have all these rules about how you are allowed to describe liberals—the idea that we should observe similar courtesies when describing the “reactionary right-wing” as you pejoratively put it is, naturally, absurd. So even an anodyne description like “liberal moral agenda” of what is objectively a moral agenda informed by liberal priorities becomes verboten, simply because it allows its adversaries to vocalize their opposition to it. Depriving the opposition of their own vocabulary and replacing it with one of your making is a classic move—anyone who fails to update their dictionary marks themselves as an enemy. Someone is indeed making conversation impossible to have, but whose fault is that, exactly?