Woke Words On the Chopping Block As Democratic Party Brand Is Deemed ‘Toxic’

In an interview this week with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Vice President J.D. Vance advised Democrats to “Stop sounding like crazy people,” as Democrats struggle with their self-inflicted identity crisis after their shellacking last November.

Vance’s simple advice didn’t fall on deaf ears.

Center-left think tank Third Way has released a memo to POLITICO’s Playbook containing a list of 45 words and phrases for Democrats to avoid in order to connect and reconnect with normal, everyday Americans or “normie voters,” said Matt Bennett, Third Way’s executive vice president of public affairs. “Normie” is obviously not on the chopping block.

What is on the chopping block are words and phrases that Third Way says, “have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant” and include six categories from “therapy speak” to “explaining away crime” that makes Democrats “sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.”

In POLITICO’s Playbook exclusive report entitled, “Can Dems talk their way out of the wilderness?,” Third Way alleges certain “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.”

Per Playbook, the blacklisted terms include:

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.

Bennett told Playbook: “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.”

Lanae Erickson, Third Way’s senior vice president added, “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. 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.”

The memo further highlights that Democrats are afraid to speak up against violent crime and cultural issues from fear of anticipated backlash from their progressive colleagues. “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.

In 2024 during his State of the Union Speech, President Joe Biden referred to Laken Riley’s murderer as an “illegal” alien and received backlash from immigrant rights groups and regret from his campaign staffers.

Last March, Governor Gavin Newsom faced controversy over comments he made on his podcast regarding transgender athletes in women’s sports. The remarks were made during an interview with conservative activist Charlie Kirk and sparked significant backlash from within his own Democratic party and the LGBTQ+ community.

Democrats have lost also their edge with their former base of Latino and Black voters who turned out for Trump and Vance in record numbers. Today’s Democrats must have forgotten that in 2022 the party blacklisted their “gender neutral” term Latinx after numerous polls from 2016 to 2020 showed that the term wasn’t connecting with Latinos, and only three percent of Latino’s identified themselves as gender neutral.

Democrats have also lost their voter registration edge over Republicans during Joe Biden’s presidency.

As reported by The Globe, “between the elections of 2020 and 2024, Democrats lost 2.1 million voters compared to Republicans’ gain of  2.4 million voters. In swing states like Nevada and North Carolina, Democrats are on life support as registration advantages have plunged. Representing a cross-section of age groups and demographics, voters have resoundingly rejected the rhetoric and policies espoused by the Biden administration and the Democrat party at large.”

What this memo’s creation ultimately reveals is that Democrats invented and weaponized language to advance their political power through a subset of self-perceived victims and screaming advocates. Now that Feminists, LGBTQIA+ members, and DEI grifters are a threat to the Party’s power, their fight against the patriarchy or privileged will be on-hold or memory-holed while Democrat’s figure out how to police speech while selling their new-found authenticity to “normies.”