Yes, but maybe it’s time to make these people define their terms. Otherwise, we let them get away with it & the brain dead don’t get any other message.
I read years ago that the pattern of brainwaves of someone watching the television are identical to those of a person asleep. It’s time to wake people up! For instance, Fox always has an R & a D debate each other in little segments. If every time a D said so & so is ‘extreme’, the R said ‘define extreme’ & then counter it with “How can we be extreme if we are essentially status quo?”, then we might begin to take back the conversation on our own terms. And show who really is extreme.
Yes, that's exactly what Orwell warned about the Communists' misuse of language. Totalitarian speech is always necessarily dishonest and relies heavily on loose or imprecise meanings of things to accomplish their deception. And physical violence, or the threat of it, is always the closer.
Some people believe in the forum of ideas, and that bad speech will always be driven out by better speech. Our own history demonstrates otherwise, as when the liberty interest was defeated by the business interest in the ratification of the Constitution with its Hamiltonian trapdoors and weasel-phrases, a situation that was only partly retrieved by Federalist James Madison's gracious accession (Hamilton continued to fight it, in Federalist 81) to the Antifederalists' demand for a Bill of Rights, which was possibly an even greater document than the Constitution itself, and, with Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, one of the greatest writings in all of human history.
It behooves us always to remember, the Bill of Rights was made necessary by the Federalists' new Constitution. So much for the Constitution's strength, by itself, as a liberty document, and for the Federalist party as champions of our liberties. (In office, they soon wrote the hateful Alien and Sedition Acts, and it was one of their party who first floated the idea, 20 years before the event, of "reorganizing" the South by force into a more cooperative posture.)
So the "marketplace of ideas" will not by itself protect us from bad, even evil, ideas -- and Charles Blow is here the embodiment of that evil, and The Old Grey Whore is the institutionalization of it.