Fighting back against leftist language lies in 2026

American Thinker ^ | 2 Jan, 2026 | D. Parker

[MtnClimber]

This year will feature a barrage of bee ess from the left because every year is like this.

Here are what they are, and my top five ways of beating them at their own game.

1. Self-labeling with positive-sounding words:

This is the left's perennial favorite in lying with language – always labelling themselves with positive-sounding words that automatically convey a false impression of compassion and probity, putting them two steps ahead whenever anyone uses them.

False impressions are created by the labels progressive, liberal, democratic, and even socialist. After all, who can be against progress, liberty, democracy, or being social?

That is also why we need to stop playing along.

Fighting back is easy in this case – just refer to them as the far left. This negates those positive vibes and frames them properly as the extremists in our society.

2. The 'democratic' in democratic socialism.

We've already touched on this one, but it deserves extra treatment for this year, and with the rise of the red/green alliance and New York City's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Before the Bolsheviks began rounding people up in the middle of the night, they played a similar game to the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, calling themselves the real democrats. The "democratic" part easily goes out the window when the system breaks down, or in more modern times, when votes can be bought with other people's money.

Fighting back means refusing to play their little label games. Drop the false "democratic" label or refer to it as socialistic slavery.

3. Capitalism, the pejorative for economic freedom, or the free enterprise system.

Of course, while the lefties love their positive self-labelling, they equally enjoy applying pejoratives to cast freedom in the worst possible light. This is just taking a page from their playbook.

[MtnClimber]

Conservatives should claim the color blue. Red has always been the color of the left.

[Alas Babylon!]

Illegal aliens are NOT migrants, immigrants or refugees. They are illegal border crossers.

[HIDEK6]

“Capitalism” is Free Enterprise.

[BroJoeK]

"Conservatives should claim the color blue.
Red has always been the color of the left."

I had always blamed NBC's Tim Russert in the 2000 election for the switcheroo which made blue Republicans red and red Democrats blue on political maps.

Today, I don't think Russert did that, at least not by himself, and he was far from the first.
Most of the Leftist media had been using Red=Republican on their maps for years before the 2000 election.
So, Russert was far from the first and, indeed, NBC may have been the last to change colors, while Russert was first in 2000 to begin talking about "red states" as Republican and "blue states" as Democrats.

As the most respected voice in television in 2000, once Russert started talking about "red states" and "blue states", so did every other Leftist media outlet and so today does every influencer I've ever seen.

Indeed, you may not remember it, but I certainly do, in 2000 when Russert began talking about "red states" and "blue states", someone who adopted those terms, without any objections that I can remember, was Rush Limbaugh.

And so, in 2000, we had Russert and Limbaugh talking about Republican red states, and with that, the debate was over.

[MtnClimber]

On military maps, blue is the friendly forces and red is the enemy forces. I think that is the reason the media adopted those color designations.

[Freee-dame]

Almost all historical and literaryreferences to communism used the color red. I believe the left did the flip so that young people reading about the horrors of communism would not really learn that it was leftists who caused millions to die and billions to suffer needlessly

Red is also the main color in the flags of the biggest communist countries in the world. I think it is too late to change.

[MinorityRepublican]

Before about 2000, there was no fixed national standard in the U.S. for using red and blue on electoral maps. The colors were inconsistent and often reversed from what we’re used to today.

We're stuck with the colors for the electoral map because of the election of 2000 and by that time, the internet was truly starting to take off.

[daniel1212]

It used to be that red was the color of the left. Being a Red was synonymous with being a commie, and then the colors were inexplicably switched for the year 2000 election. Many of these pages have noticed how this has flipped the discussion on its head. This is something that needs to be addressed, because, as usual, we of the pro-freedom right have accepted this inversion of reality for far too long:

I reacted to that switch by the Left years ago, in a color coded contrasting chart .

[BroJoeK]

MtnClimber: "On military maps, blue is the friendly forces and red is the enemy forces.
I think that is the reason the media adopted those color designations."

2000 Presidential Election by county:

Exactly right.
Imho, it was deliberate and knowing precisely what they were doing -- flipping the historical script to make conservative Republicans look like aggressive outsiders and radical leftist Democrats symbolically defending the homeland.

But at the time there was no push-back, because Republicans like Rush Limbaugh did not object to it, at least not that I remember.
I suspect Limbaugh was not unhappy about seeing election maps showing the entire American heartland colored red and just a few patches of blue along the coasts.

Finally, their switcheroo helped Democrats lock in the narrative about how "Republicans are the new racist Southern Democrats", and that's the part which galls me the worst.

2024 Presidential election by county:

I think the way a Rush Limbaugh would see these maps is as aggressive Red Republicans working to turn the last blue counties into red-blooded Americans.

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[Freee-dame]

I did not know this fact about military maps. The left is so sneaky in their actions.

[SovereignVA]

“Misinformation,” “malinformation,” and “disinformation” have no place in a conservative’s lexicon. They are squishy terms created by the left for control.