Trump Wins the Words Battle While Democrats Speak a Foreign Language, by Daniel J. Flynn

Remember when Vanilla Ice punctuated statements with “Word to your birthing person”?

No?

Okay, well, yes, his catchphrase sounded slightly catchier thirty-five years ago. But it’s 2025, and people use more words (to say less) than they did in the early 1990s.

Back then, resident assistants with diplomas in sensitivity training monitored speech in academic enclaves. (At Cornell, they surveilled facial reactions to gay pornography, a test that did not, thankfully, catch on.) They graduated and took their experiments to scale.

Anthony Comstock and Carrie A. Nation doppelgangers increasingly wielded more power. Then their enthusiasm for policing speech bred resentment that found ballot-box expression in Donald Trump. …