The Most Dangerous Words in America

For the better part of the past twenty-odd years, I’ve begun most of my classes with a prompted freewrite. A statement by 20th-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is not only a go-to prompt but an oh-so-apt declaration for our times: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Wittgenstein’s words stress how language defines what we can and can’t think, tantamount to shaping our reality. And the man should know, as he lived during the Third Reich, a regime that achieved its cruel success in no small part by controlling German discourse.

The American regime in power for a precipitous second reign is working overtime to not only disappear words but to pervert their meaning—no less than a hallmark of authoritarian rule.

Within the first 100 days of that rule, MAGA made clear that certain words were to be expunged from federal websites and communications—obvious Goebbels-esque shit—were to be disallowed for use by damn near everybody engaging the federal government for funds. At the time, the effort was much written about—recall a thorough, interactive account in The New York Times. But akin to many of this regime’s egregious transgressions, the story came and went.

The story did—but not its impact. For example, the literary world. Most of the writers I know (me included) have courted and/or been the beneficiary of a literary grant or fellowship. MAGA’s draconian rules on language have resulted in nixed funding for literary organizations and writers themselves, including the jeopardization of prime resources like the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as yielding strict terms on the language used to describe any academic or artistic endeavor seeking government aid. Its mandate couldn’t be clearer: Write about what serves the regime or be unfunded. Or worse.

The coercion of language by MAGA’s propaganda ministers should be a deafening, incessant alarm. In that spirit, I present the seven most dangerous words of 2025:

What’s the current regime perpetrating if not oppression: prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control? Nixing this word is equal to an attempt to keep their myriad harms from dominating our discourse. What would happen if the word oppression were, say, altogether disappeared? How, then, would we describe the sum of these actions: denying trans people health care; authorizing ICE to capture people from vilified groups and sending those people, sometimes minus due process, to foreign gulags; seizing billions from universities that allow students and faculty to protest what the University Network for Human Rights called “genocidal acts”. . . ?

White—of or relating to any of the various population groups considered as having light pigmentation of the skin. Think of another word that’s more of a threat to America’s purported ideals. White, as in, who’s a part of the white race, or owns proximity to it, and who doesn’t? White, as in power and resentment, the ideological engines of this regime. That white(ness) wasn’t on the regime’s list speaks to its intention to cloak its animating force. Criticizing whiteness nowadays is liable to be met with the bunk critique of reverse racism. Calling out the white (privilege and/or power) bent of MAGA has provoked serious physical harm, murder.

The word patriot—one who loves and supports their country—is dangerous because it’s been used as an alibi for untold abuses. In these perilous times, the truest patriots are not four- and five-star generals or war heroes but MAGA acolytes. Per the current propaganda, a true patriot is somebody intent on taking back their country, no matter if that reclamation of conspired advantage features lawlessness, violence, death; no matter if that seizure includes an attempted coup. Matter fact, the January 6 attacks—the way MAGA framed the rioters as heroes worthy of reprieve—have been essential to perverting the meaning of patriot, to distorting what protection of America’s declared ideals looks like forreal, forreal.

Merit—character, conduct, or qualities that indicate what a person deserves to receive—is a word at the heart of much of MAGA’s writ. Let them tell it, it’s all but impossible for someone other than a cisgender (best believe it’s a term they hate) straight white man to merit anything. Meaning people who fail to fit that identity have been cast as little more than undeserving recipients of identity-based charity. For proof of MAGA’s disregard for the true meaning of merit, peep the glaring inadequacies of its Cabinet members. In its world order, merit is a reward for allegiance, a debasement crucial to its goal of inflaming white resentment.

Using the phrase DEI (say the whole damn thing: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is now the quickest way to lose federal funding, which—whatever the strengths and weaknesses of DEI programs—seems to me like a First Amendment violation. Attacks on DEI have been weaponized into stark reductions if not the shuttering of whole departments, the gutting of organizations, targeted firings. By muting white privilege into the realm of the unspoken, the corruption of DEI assists the persistence of inequality, serves delivering the country back into the hands of those who claim they own it, as if the perennial have-nots ever did.

As in one of America’s two major political parties; it’s a word of high risk. Not in the least for its imprecision in characterizing a party member these days. A Republican describes anybody from a reasonable moderate to an uber-racist, uber-nihilistic, nat-con, secession-minded white supremacist. Was not the suspect in the assassination of a Minnesota politician and her husband a Republican with a hit list of Democrats? Per a 2025 report by the Vanderbilt University Project on Unity and American Democracy, 44 percent of all Republicans now identify as MAGA. The fact of their strong showing in the Republican party, an untold number radicalized, spells a serious threat to what’s left of our democracy.

A proper noun to round out the list. To say the word Palestine—a people besieged—or, more to the point, the phrase “Free Palestine,” is to utter syllables now capable (if not probable) of getting someone berated as an anti-Semite; kicked out of their university; fired from their job or blackballed in their industry; seized from their home and jailed by federal authorities; banned from this country with or without due process. . . . Name a word that reaps more consequence.

Again—this plotted American nadir ain’t a new thing on planet Earth. The tactics are so tried that the bipartisan nonprofit Protect Democracy—a self-described “cross-ideological nonprofit group dedicated to defeating the authoritarian threat, building more resilient democratic institutions, and protecting our freedom and liberal democracy”—published The Authoritarian Playbook to lay plain the methods. It describes seven common tactics of authoritarians: “Scapegoating vulnerable communities, corrupting elections, stoking violence, politicizing independent institutions, spreading disinformation, aggrandizing executive power, quashing dissent.”

Check mark(s)! Plus, note the main instrument for accomplishing all those objectives is language.

“Up is down and down is up,” one of my poet patnas texted me as response to America’s plight. Which I took to mean MAGA’s chicanery has succeeded in altering aspects of our national reality. According to an NPR/PBS poll last October, 88 percent of people who supported 45/47 were concerned with election fraud. Add to that telling stat the recent survey by YouGov, which found that 40 percent of Americans believe a civil war within the next decade is somewhere between “very likely” and “somewhat likely,” as well as another 18 percent who aren’t sure about the likelihood. All to say, it’s evident to me that MAGA intends to empty language critical to truth and justice of its true meaning and fill it with whatever substance best suits MAGA. And that, compatriots, is D-A-N-G-E-R.