stood up to trumpis -- and this is one of the most highly educated districts in the country, a beautiful country full of smart, engaged people who believe in government, institutions and believe in the rule of law and have no time for the value vulgarity of another trumpism, to paraphrase sinclair, it's hard to stand up against someone who is funding your campaign. elon musk funds your campaign, the national republicans fund your campaign. in contrast with us, we knock thousands and thousands of doors every day, we're outorganizing you, we have over 30,000 individual donors, our campaign is a campaign of the

people, and for the people, and when i get to congress, i'm not going to be represented, i'm not going to be accountable to some political party or corporate donors because i don't take corporate pac money. i'll be accountable to the people of new jersey seven because it's the people who we work for and the people of this district you've ignored for too long. thank you. >> our time is up and that includes new jersey debate night and after a quick break our panel is coming back with closing thoughts. i'd like to thank our candidates tom kean and susan altman, thank you for your time and for your responses. >> with one of the tightest races for control of congress in modern political history, stay ahead with c-span's comprehensive coverage of key state debates. this fall, c-span brings you access to the nation's top house, senate, and governor debates from across the country. debates from races that are shaping your state's future and the balance of power in washington. follow our campaign 2024

coverage from local to national debates anytime, online, at c-span.org/campaign and be sure to watch tuesday, november 5th for live, real-time election night results. c-span, your unfiltered view of politics, powered by cable. >> today on c-span, the presidenalandidates are on the campaign trail in the battle ground state of chan. at 1:30 p.m. eastern we'll b live with democratic nominee kamala harris as she rallies supporters in gra rapids. and after that, republican nominee trump will host a round table with voters live at 5:00 p.m. eastern. watch our coveren c-span now, our free mobile video app or online at c-span.org. ♪♪ >> book tv, every sunday on c-span2 features leading

authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. at 6:30 p.m. eastern, surgeon at johns hopkins university policy researchers looks at what happens when medical institutions make mistakes in public health recommendations with his book "blind spots." at 8 p.m. eastern, puitzer prize winner bob woodwd talks about war and the 2024 presidential election. stephanie baker bloomberg news looks at u.s. led economic sanctions against russia following vladimir putin's invasion of ukraine and she's joined by a senior fellow. watch book tv every sunday on c-span2 and fd a full program guide or watch anytime at book

tv.org. >> c-span is your unfiltered few of government funded by these television companies and more, including sparklight. >> what is great internet? is it strong? is it fast? is it reliable? at sparklight, we know connection goes way beyond technology. from monday morning meetings to friday nights, and everything in between, but the best connections are always there, right when you need them. so how do you know what's great internet? because it works. we're sparklight and we're always working for you. >> sparklight supports c-span as a public service, along with these other television providers giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> next, a conversation on how the words we use shape political language with a focus on words that have been deemed socially unacceptable over

time. from the american enterprise institute, this is about an hour and 20 minutes. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening and welcome to the american enterprise institute. i'm chris scalia a senior fellow here and this is part of the lecture series. part of aei's esteemed bradley lectures, america's premier public intellectuals to address the significant social and cultural challenges facing our nation as we approach our 250th birthday. we've distributed flyers, listing some of our upcoming

lectures. our next event scheduled for february will feature commentary editor speaking about the state of american culture. that's february 13th, so mark your calendar and bring a valentine. numerous online sources credit the left wing activist saul walensky, he who controls language controls. >> as aristotle says they're never wrong about quotations. the george orwell's novel remains so haunting, a depiction of how a totalitarian reseem can control people by cracking down what words they use. we sense some truth in the novelist angela carter's

observation that language is power, the instrument of domination and liberation. this belief that the words we use actively shape our political beliefs and behavior crosses partisan lines, but in our contemporary discourse, the left is especially inclined to try shaping political thought by imposing changes on our language. see, for example, trying to make latinx happen. are these assumptions about language as power true? can pronoun lists and fogable jargon usher in social reform? changes through linguistic manipulation instead have unintended consequence. we have one of america's foremost linguists, john mcwhorter from columbia

university. university an agree from stanford. the power of babble. nine nasty words, language in the gutter, which is frickin' great and most recently woke racism how a new religion has betrayed black america. he's published widely, a regular guest on the glen show with glen lawrie and a weekly newsletter in the new york times he discusses race, language, politics, and even music and musical theater. i especially recommend his piece if from last year about steely dan. dr. mcwhorter will speak for 25 minutes and after way engage in a discussion with aei's only dr. joshua katz. john and joshua will converse for about 20 minutes and then we'll turn to audience questions. afterwards, i hope you'll join

us for deep conversation and light refreshments in the adjoining gallery. but first, please welcome-- join me in welcoming john mcwharton discussing language and the left. [applause] >> thank you aei for inviting me. thank you. especially to chris scalia and joshua katz for wanting my company tonight, and i want to talk a little bit about what you could call an effort coming mostly from the left to create change through language, which can seem so wise at first, but also, of course, has pitfalls and probably frustrates a lot of us. one manifestation of that is that these days, especially over about the past four, maybe five years, one gets a sense that terminology keeps shifting under our feet that there are new ways of saying things this

if we don't say them in that particular way, we're creating some kind of tort. that can be a frustrating feeling because you like to feel like you have basic command over your own language and then you find out that you don't. and so, one is not to say, for example, homeless at this point, it is now unhoused. that's something that seems to have come from somewhere and often one is expected to subscribe to it. already you might have something coming from, especially some university where it's been stipulated, for example, by a list that came out of brandeis, another one out of sanford, that you shouldn't say crazy under any circumstances because that could be construed offensive to people who may have psychological problems. you don't want to say walk-in as in service in a store because that's biased against people who might not have the ability to walk, things like

that. it can make it difficult to know where to get on. and you know, that comes from many places. it really, it deserves, i think, more forbearance than we're always inclined to give it. of course, you can feel like there are a group of people who are trying to catch you out and, of course, there is a certain degree of smugness in some of the circles of people who are asking us to use vocabulary in this way. you get a sense that you're ahead of the curve, that there are people who need to be taught the right thing. that's a natural human impulse and it's definitely there. and that can certainly be kind of frustrating, especially because, if you take a historical perspective and it's not always easy to do that, but if you do, you look at what, for example, civil rights leaders or liberals in the past, and not in 1600, if there's a liberal then, but talking about, say, 1920, 1950.

what's interesting is that the dog that doesn't bark in those stories and by that, i mean how little concern there was, and this be a left or right applied, how little concern there was with what you call things. this is not to ideaize the past, but they're more interested in the concepts than the label that you put on them. if you created a label, it stuck. it didn't change, what you call it isn't something significant to think about. i think the people back then had something on us. there's something that's in the air among a lot of people calling themselves fostering change and thinking that language is going to have something crucial to do with it. and the thing is, the people who are insisting that we keep using these new terms are basing it on something that can seem extremely reasonable. it's a kind of streetness about language and psychology that gets out there, that i'm sure that everyone in this room has encounter either in

anthropology class as an undergraduate or some column in whatever newspaper, whatever it is that you read at this point, it's all over the internet, it's a hypothesis, named after two people, one is benjamin lee wharf that your thoughts, thought patterns and the culture that results from them are the product of particularities of the language that you speak. so the way your language happens to split up the world in terms of words and even the way your grammar works in a language are supposedly shaping the way you think. and so, for example, benjamin lee wharf who was very earnest, but the truth is, not to sound laddie da, he was an insurance, and he thought that hope didn't

have any ways of marking time, there was no present, past and future, everything just kind of is or with as as opposed to a normal european language that everything is about whether it was, it is, and this is an attractive idea that hopy psychology is about the circularity, about the cyclical, how the hopy see time as opposed to us european thinkers, imagine everything is linear wharf saw as rigid. now, the truth is that's not true about hopy at all. he had not studied the language enough. he was a charismatic speaker and imprinted an idea that still discussed in the humanities and social sciences today, your language shapes the way you think. people are always changing the

vocabulary on us is operating under illusion, it's what you're taught and fed all the time. if they're doing that that is changing thought. that's so deeply entrenched in america's thinking culture many of the people who don't know, formerly it's based on what's called wharfism. nevertheless, what is escaping a lot of the people, once again, something that requires pulling the camera back and thinking about the passage of time, be it linear or circular, that is when you change terminology it only works for a little while. by friend steven-- am i getting to the point where i'm going to start saying things like that about people i know? steven pinker who is kind of my friend, but i'm not going to use that term. steven talks about the human

treadmill. you have can crippled 100 years ago, and wasn't considered a slur, and what used to be crippled handicapped, so disabled became the new term of art and now we say differently abled. it needs to be changed because whatever the attitudes you're trying to ward off by changing terminology are like gnats and settle down again. what is now known in this area, tanis temporary relief, it was difficult to get through home

relief. by my count, the 50's because of negative associations with home relief, take them or leave them, they decided that home relief wouldn't work anymore because it was a negative term and people said it was a smear so that's changed to welfare, and if you can pull out any associations that you've seen have, it was a beautiful term, welfare. what you would use that gorgeous word for was now was about helping needy families. by the time the '70s, that word tarnished as well. goes on and on. for example, when i was a kid a person who was on the street, so to speak, was called a bum, or a tramp and that was by, you know, enlightened people, as well as people who disparaged. my mother, god bless her, was a social worker and social work teacher she didn't say bum in

disparagement, that was the term. that changed to homeless. once again a beautiful term because it takes away all agency, it doesn't put fault on the person and implies, via omission, that it's society's fault the personality doesn't have a home. nothing wrong with homeless, whatever one thought of the bum, the tramp or hobo, and they've settled down on homeless. the simple fact, it's not going to work and i've seen the cycle with homeless, unhoused will feel the same way in roughly 20 years and then we'll need a new term. something that happens right under our noses and this is something i didn't really think about until two weeks ago when i realized whoops, there went another one. it used to be you called something affirmative action. and then that became problematic in terms of associations and so one said racial preferences. now we talk about something called dei.

all that is, 95% is a new way of saying preferences, because of the associations that many people have with preferences and whether or not they're fair. dei is tarnishing as we speak and it will be replaced, i think, rather sooner than homeless was. i think that the message in all of this is that all people on both sides of the aisle, but i think in the case of now, it's mostly the left, would benefit from understanding that what you need to change is the thought, or the society rather than thinking that changing the language is going to do anything significant. it's not that it does nothing. so, for example, benjamin lee wharf made some mistake in early work and shown by many geik cysts, aspects of your language could channel your thoughts about this much, things only detectible in sophisticated and artificial experiments, a little bit. a tiny bit, but not enough that

changing the words that we use to refer to controversial things can be thought of as a truth useful form of politics. so, hopefully, that's a fashion that will change and i'm going to come back to that when i finish in terms of what i mean by change. but then there's something else, which is uniquely confounding, especially if you're over about 40, i would think. which is the use of "they" the pronoun, that one is to say, roberta is in the hospital and they got their hair cut. and that's the new use of they. that can feel really different from you grew up using pronounce the way they were used before this new usage of they. and i have noticed that many people have an intense discomfort with this new usage, listening to the kids do it or people who are not kids, many people are reading it as some sort of forced indication of a

certain position on gender politics and the very existence of gender. it seems almost designed if you're over a certain age which i definitely am at this point, to make you trip up. you're not sure they want or they wants, and nobody can tell you it's a problem. however, with the new they, i'm of two minds, it's not about being wishy-washy, but once again, the passage of time. first of all, the truth is, there are languages in the world with fewer pronounce than english is trying to have at this point and everybody gets along fine. i could choose many right now for no particular reason, there's one called barrack. it's spoken by a negative 17 people in new guinea and it's very complicated language only one word for you just like in english which is strange, you in the singular and you in the

plural. and one word for he, she, it, they are. everybody is fine. there's an i and a we, but the only way they distinguish between singular and plural. and indonesia, and there are some languages in south america, you don't have to be a fertile pronounce to be a language and context takes care so much. one thing we know that, you watch people 14 and under, they use the new they with a fluency they knew never in america they wasn't used that way and they did it. they are managing it in the same way as all of us manage something. and this is a comparison that's going to make some of you angry and i'm just sorry, but it's this: billy and me went to the store

is a perfectly legitimate sentence. you've been taught it's supposed to be billy and i because you would never say me went to the store. i know, i know. that's something that a couple of people made up in the 1700's because that's the way it happens to have worked in latin and everybody loves latin and english was supposed to be like latin because english wasn't sophisticated yet so you have to say billy and i rather than billy and me. shakespeare would not have recognized that rule and didn't. it was something that happened very naturally for reasons that i'm not going to go into here because they would go too much in the weeds, but the idea that we're not supposed to see billy and me went to the store because you don't say me went it would make no example for the french speaker, i don't have to go to new guinea. and all of us, including me, in public circumstances learned to not to say him and me like

that, you have to say he and i. and learn to pick up your clothes off the floor, you get good at it because people don't think you're a good person if you say him and me went to the store. all of us went through it. no child grows up saying he and i went to the store. sylvia for no reason, and would you say me went to the store. if she were french she would say we. it's something somebody made up. if we can master that, say he and you went to the store, if we can master the they. however, as i said two minds. here is the second mind, which is that it's hard, it's really hard and honestly, sometimes the fluent use of the new they can even be awkward despite all efforts otherwise, especially in writing. i was reading, what was it, an

article in the new yorker? yeah. and it was about judith butler, the literary theorist and now goes by they. the article describing things that judith butler has done and places they have gone made it hard to understand who the they were. in a situation where there are several other people and there's potentially violence that's going to happen. no violence did happen and then it said they asked why do you have that in your hand and i asked, if i may, her they or the people who are surrounding they and the person they is with. these sorts of things are very tricky sometimes and now what? i'm going to say this here for the first time. i have-- i'm not advertising it, but i have a book coming out and it's on pronounce and it's coming out in april, available on amazon, it's in april and i of course discuss the first they,

and i'm funny about it, and that's how i've felt, it's a new thing, it's not going away. we can master new ways of using pronounce all of us do start at eight with him and me went to the store and we can still do it, even though we're not eight. if i'm honest and i've held off from saying this because i want to be a cheerleader if i can, and i don't want to be unmodern, i get the feeling, and i could be wrong and it will be online, me being wrong, i'm okay with that, i get the feeling that they has peaked. i have the feeling among people who have been using they that way, that it was something that was an experiment that was especially popular about five, six years ago, and it will always be with us, but i'm noticing more and more that many people i've known, young people i've known who wanted to be addressed as they, and only they as much as possible then, have let go of it as they've gotten a little bit older.

i've noticed among many students, it's common to say that one wants to be called he or they, or she or they. in other words, my sense of it now, as somebody who is trying to feel the culture and can only do it because i'm in it, is that the they is now beginning to be seen as a sign of a kind of advanced way of thinking, a way of getting beyond the gender binary, which is fine, but that you don't necessarily require it in the sense of trying to change the language itself, and if that's the way it turns out that it's been i think we need to wait another five years to see. i think we're seeing something general, which also applies to the vocabulary that i talked about at the beginning, which is, one thing that we may be seeing is the enrichment of or emergence of a kind of jargon and of course, there is is a particular jargon that many groups use, but that a certain roughly artistic/academic group

also activist group, so three a's, artistic, academic and activist group, are inclined to use. a classic example of that, as chris mentioned is latinx. latinx is clever you want to get beyond the gender binary and last i heard about 3% of latinos use it and they're almost all in the three a groups that i talked about. and given that i live in a heavily latino neighborhood, and i first heard of latinx 10 years ago, i've never heard a single person use it and i'm surrounded by spanish all day. and it's used in certain circles and now what? there's nothing wrong with that at all. nothing wrong with those people having certain jargon. a lot of the vocabulary users, a lot of use of they exclusively, i suspect although we have to see, might be that we're seeing a certain jargon

emerge and that's acceptable. human beings send to separate into certain groups and express subconsciously or consciously, a sense of membership in that group among other things, first you think of clothes and hair and also with language and it can be quite subconscious. so, for example, here is one that you may have never thought of. generally, men say us. women say um. nobody teaches that and never think of that. if you measure it among people, groups of people and there are men and women involved. a woman is um, and a man says uh. you can think of why it would be, one interlizes depending on which side of the fence you're on that would creative something like that. and semi conscious, chris mentioned to me sometimes writing about musical theater, something that we fans of that

do, no matter what we are elsewhere in the world, the way you signal that you can have a certain kind of conversation when you're surrounded by other people who can't, you refer to one of the stars of new york musical theater by just their first name. if you say audra, bernadette, laura, you instantly know who you're talking to. i don't know if i've thought of that consciously, but it's that. they, and-- >> we'll break away from this program momentarily to take you live to the u.s. senate for what we expect to be a brief pro forma session and we'll return to this event shortly. ...