Vanity Fair [unpaywalled] – “The administration’s attack on the AP, along with efforts to rewrite history and reframe reality, only reaffirms the maxim that language is power. The right-wing war on all things “woke” has relied on a critical weapon: language. Trumpworld’s culture-war arsenal may contain many things—a flurry of social media posts and videos, an army of sympathetic media propagandists—but all of these tools rely on language. It feels ironic to talk about the importance of language in MAGA’s rhetoric when Donald Trump uses so many malapropisms and shorthands to convey his ideas. Think of “the weave,” his tendency to tack back and forth between completely different, ancillary topics when speaking in public. But while Trump may not be particularly careful about every word—or any word, really—his administration and allies are laser-focused on their intrinsic power. They’ve used phrases like “biological reality” and “maiming” to dispute transgender people’s existence and rail against gender reassignment surgery. They’ve disingenuously used words like “energy emergency” to ramp up offshore drilling. One of Trump’s early executive orders combatted nonexistent “censorship”—in actuality, a catchall term for any effort to combat the misinformation and disinformation propagated by Trump and his allies…”