There’s this bit in the fourth Harry Potter book where Mad Eye Moody is teaching the kids about the unforgivable curses in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Moody brings up the killing curse, and what it actually takes to make it work. He says, “you could all get your wands out and point them at me and say the words, and I doubt I’d get so much as a nosebleed.” The point being that words are not enough. There has to be meaning to them.
That’s the problem I have with conservatives right now. They try and co-opt the language of the left for their own means, and it’s about as real-world effective as me pointing a stick at someone and screaming “crucio.” The right understands that being called racist or sexist or dishonest is bad, but they don’t quite get that actually doing those things is bad. They obsess about the labels, and the game is to shove those labels off onto other people in a weird ploy. All they seem to care about is avoiding the label, not the actions that prompted someone to assign it to them in the first place.
Words are not magic. When we call something racist or sexist or a lie, we’re describing a tangible thing. We’re not just being mean to win. If conservatives want to be taken seriously, they need to stop trying to play a vocabulary version of Calvinball and attempt to learn what people are actually talking about.