MARK JUDGE: Exploding the Left’s ‘Language Virus’ with William S. Burroughs.

In 1986, the unclassifiable countercultural writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) laid out his thoughts about language:

My general theory since 1971 has been that language is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus … has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.

In his book William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll, author Casey Rae sums it up this way:

In the Burroughs worldview, language is a mechanism of what the author called Control with a capital C: an insidious force that limits human freedom and potential. Words produce mental triggers that we can sometimes intuit but never entirely comprehend, making us highly susceptible to influence.

The modern left is unabashed about wielding language as a virus—or, really, as a form of control. “Supercut” videos by critics of corporate leftist media, like Tom Eliot, reveal the media figures and politicians repeating the same words and slogans over and over again: President Joe Biden, despite drooling on himself, is “sharp.” Kamala Harris has brought the “Joy, joy, joy” back into politics. Conservatives are “weird.” Abortion is “healthcare.” These word storms rip through the country via television, radio, and social media, infecting hosts from D.C. to California. Millions of people mindlessly repeat them as if they have been infected with some kind of mentally impairing disease. It’s a virus worse than COVID.

As Tom Bethell of the American Spectator, a very non-Burroughs-esque writer, wrote in 1981,“Bees in a hive don’t ‘talk’ to one another, but they do have an effective system of communication, and they all work toward a common goal, different bees performing different functions. ‘There is no need to posit an overarching conspiracy,’ [Joe Sobran of National Review] wrote recently. ‘The world collectivist movement goes forward. None of its constituent parts — Communist, socialist, liberal — runs the whole thing; they don’t even consciously cooperate, for the most part.’ But they manage never to sting one another.”