A liberal think tank has spent a bunch of money on a study try to help Democrats not sound like lunatics.
Here’s a list of words and phrases they are telling Democrats to STOP saying if they want to sound like normal people 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/hnRBRYxRwy
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) August 22, 2025
Here’s a list of words and phrases they are telling Democrats to STOP saying if they want to sound like normal people
Democrats’ Woke Word Salad: How Radical Rhetoric Has Made Them Sound Like Fools and Forced Desperate Studies to Salvage Their Image
In a hilarious yet telling clip from his radio show (ABOVE), conservative pundit Scott Jennings recently mocked a new memo from the center-left think tank Third Way, which essentially begs Democrats to stop using bizarre, alienating jargon if they want to avoid sounding like complete lunatics. Jennings, a CNN contributor and host of “The Scott Jennings Show,” laid out the absurdity: Democrats are now being advised to ditch terms like “birthing person,” “the unhoused,” and “heteronormative” because, as he put it, these make them come across as out-of-touch elites captured by radical ideologies. This revelation underscores a broader evolution—or devolution—in Democratic rhetoric, where once-normal language has been twisted into a pretentious word salad that repels everyday Americans. As conservatives have long argued, this shift toward “woke” lingo isn’t just linguistic; it’s a symptom of the party’s embrace of cultural Marxism, identity politics, and critical race theory (CRT), which have alienated voters and forced Democrats to commission expensive studies just to figure out how to talk like normal people again. The Third Way memo, titled “Was It Something I Said?”, is a damning indictment of how far Democrats have strayed from mainstream America.
Circulated to anti-Trump forces, it blacklists 45 words and phrases across six categories, warning that such “tortured language” creates distrust among voters who fear being canceled or simply don’t understand the jargon.
Terms like “privilege,” “microaggression,” “holding space,” “systems of oppression,” “cultural appropriation,” “existential threat to democracy,” “radical transparency,” “stakeholders,” “food insecurity,” “person who immigrated,” “cisgender,” “deadnaming,” “patriarchy,” “LGBTQIA+,” “BIPOC,” “allyship,” and “involuntary confinement” are all on the chopping block.
Even “Latinx,” a gender-neutral term invented by progressive academics, is flagged as off-putting. Jennings quipped that Democrats need consultants to tell them not to call mothers “birthing persons” or criminals “incarcerated people,” highlighting how captured the party is by trans ideology and soft-on-crime activism. This isn’t just funny—it’s a sign of desperation. As Fox News reported, the memo admits that such language makes Democrats sound like “enforcers of wokeness,” alienating swing voters and handing ammunition to Republicans. This linguistic lunacy didn’t happen overnight. Democrats’ evolution into sounding like fools stems from their wholesale adoption of progressive ideologies that prioritize divisive identity politics over common sense. As The Heritage Foundation has documented, cultural Marxism—repurposed through CRT and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives—has infiltrated the Democratic Party, turning it into a vehicle for radical social engineering. CRT, which views all aspects of American life through the prism of race and oppression, has led to jargon like “systems of oppression” and “white privilege,” phrases that Heritage experts warn promote the lie that America is inherently racist.
Identity politics, as outlined in Heritage reports, promises empowerment but delivers division, remaking the constitutional order into one obsessed with racial and gender hierarchies. Under Obama and Biden, this manifested in policies and rhetoric that elevated fringe academic terms into mainstream discourse, alienating working-class voters who see it as elitist nonsense. Take “Latinx,” for example. Coined by left-wing activists to make Spanish gender-neutral, it was embraced by Democrats as a nod to inclusivity. But as Fox News has repeatedly covered, it backfired spectacularly. Hispanic Democrats in Connecticut tried to ban it from government documents, recognizing it as an imposition from white progressives that Hispanics themselves reject.
Links
- Was It Something I Said? – Third Way
- Democrats urged to ditch ‘extreme’ jargon that alienates voters in new memo
- Words Democrats should avoid to stop sounding like ‘enforcers of wokeness’
- Dems Ban These Words to Stop Sounding Like ‘Crazy People’
- CNN host wonders if Democrats should drop the ‘Latinx’ framing
- Biden administration clings to ‘Latinx’ while Hispanic Democrats eye ban
- James Carville sounds off on Dems hemorrhaging support of Latino male voters
- Newsom’s viral ‘Latinx’ claim crumbles amid scrutiny of his own online records
- House Republicans move to ban Biden admin use of ‘Latinx’ with amendment several Hispanic Democrats support
- Progressive journalist doubles down bashing ‘birthing person’ language despite backlash: ‘I’ll never apologize’
- State takes on ‘woke’ language, introduces bill to ban terms such as ‘pregnant person’ and ‘chestfeeding’
- NYC top health official refers to White women as ‘birthing people,’ calls Black and Hispanic women ‘mothers’
- Nolte: No More ‘Birthing Person, LGBTQIA+’ — Fractured Dems Instructed to Talk Like Normal People
- Progressive journo Ana Kasparian unleashes on left’s obsession with ‘garbage’ identity politics: ‘I’m done’
- Liberals melt down after far-left journalist blasts ‘birthing person’ language: ‘F— off’
- Republicans mock Democrats for $20 million ‘Speaking with American Men’ study
- State takes on ‘woke’ language, introduces bill to ban terms such as ‘pregnant person’ and ‘chestfeeding’
- Empowering Parents with School Choice Reduces Wokeism in Education
- How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—and How Americans Can Fight It Back
- Democrats Just Revealed They Don’t Understand How Critical Race Theory Threatens Our Military
- The Radicalization of Race: Philanthropy and DEI
- Identity Politics Is All That’s Left
- Funding Leftism, Making Power Grabs: The Biden Administration’s Radical Agenda
- Empowering Parents with School Choice Reduces Wokeism in Education
- The left would like a word – all of them, in fact
- The secret reason Democrats just can’t seem to get their act together
Ben and Mal Antoni at Whatfinger. Heavy use of Fox News links above
From the people: The ‘woke’ words Democrats should cut from their vocabulary | Adam Wren, Politico A new memo identifies 45 words and phrases for Democrats to avoid, alleging the terms turn voters off. They span six categories — from “therapy speak” to “explaining away crime.” Democrats seem to think they can talk their way out of the political wilderness. Listen closely and you can hear it through the din of their all-caps Trumpian X feeds, their hourslong “manosphere” podcast interviews and their more frequent swearing. Nearly 10 months after the 2024 elections, and the party is still embroiled in self-recriminations over where they’re talking, what they’re talking about and, now, the actual words they’re using. Or, more precisely: which words they shouldn’t utter. In a new memo, shared exclusively with POLITICO, the center-left think tank Third Way is circulating a list of 45 words and phrases they want Democrats to avoid using, alleging the terms put “a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities.”
It’s a set of words that Third Way suggests “people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats.” They span six categories — from “therapy speak” to “explaining away crime” — and put in sharp relief a party that authors say makes Democrats “sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.” In the document, titled “Was It Something I Said?” Third Way argues that to “please the few, we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant,” according to the memo. Among the blacklisted terms: privilege … violence (as in “environmental violence”) … dialoguing … triggering … othering … microaggression … holding space … body shaming … subverting norms … systems of oppression … cultural appropriation … Overton window … existential threat to [the climate, democracy, economy] … radical transparency … stakeholders … the unhoused … food insecurity … housing insecurity … person who immigrated … birthing person … cisgender … deadnaming … heteronormative … patriarchy … LGBTQIA+ … BIPOC … allyship … incarcerated people … involuntary confinement. “We are doing our best to get Democrats to talk like normal people and stop talking like they’re leading a seminar at Antioch,” says Matt Bennett, Third Way’s executive vice president of public affairs. “We think language is one of the central problems we face with normie voters, signaling that we are out of touch with how they live, think and talk. In recent weeks, this has become a bit of a thing, with comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman highlighting how insane Dems can sometimes sound. Also, elected officials like [Delaware Rep.] Sarah McBride and [Kentucky Gov.]
Andy Beshear are begging their colleagues to just be normal again.” “People can’t relate to something unless it has some edge about it,” Lanae Erickson, Third Way’s senior vice president, tells Playbook. “And we had shaved off all of our edges in an attempt to never make anyone upset about anything.” The group doesn’t base its list on any specific polling. And the authors don’t offer specific counter recommendations for these terms. But they do outline the values their vision of the party includes. “We will never abandon our values or stop doing things to protect those who need help, encouragement, trust, a second chance, acceptance, a fair shake, and the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness But as the catastrophe of Trump 2.0 has shown, the most important thing we can do for those people and causes is to build a bigger army to fight them,” the memo reads. “Communicating in authentic ways that welcome rather than drive voters away would be a good start.”
It’s worth noting that in certain parts of the country, a lot of people, especially now, do talk in this language and use the phrases Third Way recommends against, even if it doesn’t scream big tent enough. It’s also worth noting an inherent irony in all of this: it’s hard to police how politicians talk at the same time that you’re asking them to be authentic. The memo’s authors write “we are not out to police language, ban phrases or create our own form of censorship. Truth be told, we have published papers that have used some of these words as well. But when policymakers are public-facing, the language we use must invite, not repel; start a conversation, not end it; provide clarity, not confusion.” “The Democratic Party brand is toxic across the country at this point with way too many people — enough that there’s no way for us to win a governing majority without changing that,” Erickson said. “Part of the problem was that we were using words that literally no normal people used — that we were sticking to messages that were so overly scripted that they basically sounded like nothing.”
What about bright spots for the party? Erickson cited three potential 2028 Democratic presidential contenders who she says are good examples of how to communicate: Beshear, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). – “Gallego is doing a great job talking about economic success,” she says. “He goes into communities and he’s like, ‘I want you to have a big ass truck, if that’s what you want.’” – Buttigieg, she said, is “doing a great job of going into spaces that are maybe not hostile, but unusual spaces for him to be in and having real conversations about complicated topics, like transgender people in sports, and saying, ‘you know, I think you should have empathy toward people that are figuring this issue out for the first time. And you should have empathy toward transgender kids and their families.’ But he’s not afraid to say those things, and he’s getting yelled at.” – And Beshear is “getting this so exactly right, talking about how these terms aren’t even what those communities use to call themselves,” she said. She recalled Beshear “talking about the fact that ‘justice-involved individuals’ is not a thing that any justice-involved individual would call themselves.
They would call themselves incarcerated, call themselves convicted, or they would call themselves a whole lot of other things, but that’s not what they or their families would call themselves. So inventing terms that the people that we’re talking about and trying to protect don’t even use, and then enforcing that that’s the only way you can talk about those people, is crazy.” So, can Democrats really talk their way back to power? It’s an Aaron Sorkin-eqsue idea to think that everything can be solved by the right words and a compelling speech. (And it’s one that the party has been tantalized by, on and off, for decades.) Of course, Democrats face bigger and deeper problems — a yawning voter registration gap among them — and are still figuring out which policies to advocate. In some ways, Third Way is reaching the same political conclusion VP JD Vance arrived at during his interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham this week.
“I mean, look, the autopsy for the Democrats, some free political advice from the president of the United States is: stop sounding like crazy people,” Vance said. Vance’s remarks came on the same day he had burgers with the National Guard troops at Union Station. Which is itself a glaring reminder of some of the stakes if Democrats don’t get this right. Erickson mentioned crime as a key issue on which Democrats need to recalibrate, citing Trump’s “invasion of D.C.” “It shows that people don’t think Democrats want to hold criminals accountable at all,” she said. “Like we don’t care about violent crime and we don’t care if someone hurts someone, that they should be held accountable. That’s not true. We’re afraid to say that because we’re afraid that someone is going to criticize us for being too ‘tough on crime.’” Third Way sees it as a place to start. “We need to reflect on the ways that our bubble and our fear of being criticized by anyone on the left has led to a problem with both our policy and our language,” Erickson said. – Owen Gregorian Tweet
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