Think Tank to Democrats: Drop These 45 Phrases if You Want to Win
“Democrats are so cooked that they needed a memo to tell them that everything they say makes them sound insane to normal people.”
Democratic think tank Third Way published a memo to “All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA” on Friday. It’s dawned on them that Democrats could more easily connect with voters if they would simply stop using “words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying.”
The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness. To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.
Reminiscent of the constant revisions to the “Newspeak Dictionary” in George Orwell’s 1984, the memo features 45 words and phrases that Democrats should stop using immediately if they want to prevent voters from leaving the party. Frankly, it’s amazing they even need to be told.
The newly blacklisted words fall into six categories. The first group, “Therapy-Speak,” contains words that say, “I’m more empathetic than you, and you are callous to hurting others’ feelings.”
- Privilege
- Violence (as in “environmental violence”)
- Dialoguing
- Othering
- Triggering
- Microaggression/assault/invalidation
- Progressive stack
- Centering
- Safe space
- Holding space
- Body shaming
Totally agree — these words turn people off. The real surprise is that anyone thought they’d work.
According to the Third Way, the second group of words, “Seminar Room Language,” says, “I’m smarter and more concerned about important issues than you. Your kitchen table concerns are small… When we use words people don’t understand, studies show that the part of their brain that signals distrust becomes more active, undermining our ability to reach them.”
- Subverting norms
- Systems of oppression
- Critical theory
- Cultural appropriation
- Postmodernism
- Overton Window
- Heuristic
- Existential threat to [climate, the planet, democracy, the economy]
I’ll admit, I had to look up “heuristic,” which means “serving as an aid to learning or problem-solving through trial and error,” and I still don’t see how it fits into a political discussion.
The bigger problem with the rest of the list isn’t comprehension. It’s that people who use these terms come off as pretentious and disconnected. And outside of academia, most Americans reject “critical theory” and the concept of “systems of oppression.” These terms alienate rather than persuade.
As per the memo, the next set, which they call “Organizer Jargon,” says “we are beholden to groups, not individuals. People have no agency.”
To most of us, these terms — especially calling the homeless “the unhoused” and illegal aliens “persons who immigrated” — highlight just how utterly immersed in a bubble the Democratic Party has become and why they are no longer taken seriously.
- Radical transparency
- Small ‘d’ democracy
- Barriers to participation
- Stakeholders
- The unhoused
- Food insecurity
- Housing insecurity
- Person who immigrated
The next category addresses the language around gender and orientation, and it may be the most incendiary of all. As the Third Way frames it, these terms suggest that traditional views on gender roles are outdated or irrelevant.
I vehemently disagree. I think it says that Democrats have completely lost touch with reality. They can pretend all they like that men can become women and even have babies. That doesn’t mean the rest of us have to pretend along with them.
There are no gray areas here. There are two sexes. And, only women can get pregnant. Sorry.
- Birthing person/inseminated person
- Pregnant people
- Chest feeding
- Cisgender
- Deadnaming
- Heteronormative
- Patriarchy
- LGBTQIA+
The Democrats’ fixation on race has hurt the party.
- Latinx
- BIPOC
- Allyship
- Intersectionality
- Minoritized communities
Use of these words quickly began to grate, and soon even minority voters were leaving the party.
Finally, the last four words on the list relate to crime and prison.
- Justice-involved
- Carceration
- Incarcerated people
- Involuntary confinement
The Third Way suggests these terms say “The criminal is the victim. The victim is an afterthought.” Yes, they do, and as crime rates spike across the country, particularly in Democrat-run cities, voters are taking note.
Although the Third Way’s premise in this memo is a start, the avoidance of these words alone won’t bring the change they need. These words are simply the veneer of the toxic ideology the Democratic Party embraced and then internalized over the past decade.
It wasn’t just the Democrats’ language that voters rejected, but their efforts to rewrite history, reshape traditions, and impose new beliefs. And they demanded people adopt their new, woke worldview, and attacked those who refused to get on board.
The New York Times analysis showing that 2.1 million voters left the Democratic Party between 2020 and 2024 while Republicans added 2.4 million, shows the party is in deep trouble.
Their use of new, less alienating language won’t matter unless the party tacks back to the center — and so far, there’s little indication that will happen.
Conservative commentator Greg Price said what many of us were likely thinking after reading this memo: “Democrats are so cooked that they needed a memo to tell them that everything they say makes them sound insane to normal people.”
Democrats are so cooked that they needed a memo to tell them that everything they say makes them sound insane to normal people. https://t.co/dnu2h27H4E
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 22, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
If these words are dropped, most Democrats will be reduced to wild gestures as if they are trying to hold in gas while in public.
Not that this will have any effect on them. Wonder how long it will take the left to label this “Think Tank” as all the phrases they suggested?
That would be their natural instinct.
Eric Swalwell doesn’t bother with holding.
Truth-in-lending laws exist so that would-be borrowers know the score, know what they’re getting themselves into.
Now imagine if we had truth-in-voting laws requiring all candidates to take truth serums.
Ds would never be in office.
Jazz hands?
So they basically told them to be silent.
Or lie.
“You said the secret woid, here’s your hundred dollars.”
Notice there was no mention of why the words turn off the majority of people, just don’t use them.
Dimocrats, please, PLEASE don’t stop what you’re doing. The rest of the nation needs the comic relief.
.
Take heart, friend, and note this phrase from Third Way: The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.
The Leftist mindset conflates “intent” with “effect” to the point that the former supersedes the latter. IOW, effect doesn’t matter, intent is what’s important.
They’ve never realized that intent is non-transferable. Normal people instinctively understand that their actions are judged primarily based on their effects, not their intents. But the Left never learned this.
When the Left metaphorically “burns down the village to save the village,” they see themselves as saviors because that was their intent, but the rest of the world sees them as the arsonists they are because they burnt down a village.
So I expect most on the Left will keep on using these incendiary and divisive phrases because the intent is to “include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace,” and with such perfect intent they’ll be left wondering why the effect is the exact opposite.
Only 45? Now that Trump is back in office, shouldn’t that number be 47?
People aren’t leaving the dem party because of words. They’re leaving because of radical behavior.
I wonder what ‘heuristic’ means they’ll try next to win over voters.
Maybe, being less crazy?!?
I’ve never have a problem with heuristic, as i have always looked at it as somewhat synonymous with empirical.
But for proggies it’s a noun. Coming out of the CS field, to us it means an entry in a table of “rules of thumb” that helps reduce an overly exhaustive procedure to only those branches that historically make probabilistic (or social, in the case of AI) sense. Most of the time I have heard proggies toss around “heuristic,” they seem to be misusing it to mean “parameter.”
Can you give an example or two? The first half is the use of the word I’m familiar with, but socialists using it as “parameter” is not.
This.
My very first reaction was that this Democrat think-tank was still committing the original Democrat sin — that is, acting as if any hellish no-man’s land state is defensible as long as you can make a pretty enough map of it. (And don’t forget the musicals… musicals like Hamilton, or Evita, or The Celebrated Tractor Driver, or Triumph of The Will.)
They told the Democrats to stop using the words that describe offensive concepts — but not to abandon the offensive concepts themselves.
“You can continue to BE crazy — just don’t talk about it!”
Normal people would have no problem abiding with this, but those who have embraced a progressive identity use this language to affirm membership, so they won’t be able to stop. All cults use idiosyncratic phraseology to reinforce separatist ideology. The process resembles the creation of neologisms, which is a frequent symptom of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. It sounds crazy to those outside the group, but verbal signaling of shared delusions does reinforce the ties to the group that compensate for the loss social function created by defective reality testing.
It is their thinking and their policies, who they are. The words are just evidence and eliminating them means nothing. Nine months have passed since the election and there has been no substantive change whatever, except for more wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth.
add rending of garments
I am looking forward to the lamentations of their women… but only those with a va jay jay.
Dramacrats: Still believing the messaging is the problem and not the content.
Indeed I was just about to make the equivalent comment. Not the messaging, but the message.
They will just come up with new words. The question will be what replacement words can they come up with.
One thing for sure, they will steal a lot of perfectly good words and repurpose them to have disgusting meanings.
One of the main purposes of the Left using that kind of phrases is to reinforce the difference between themselves and the American people; who they consider to be inferior beings subject to the Left’s will.
Subotai Bahadur
Another reason for using these kinds of phrases is the “lemming effect”. That is why:
1. If one person kneels, they all must kneel (even Pelosi who is so old it took 35 minutes to get back up kneeled)
2. If one person uses a certain word it will be repeated 100 times by other democrats within 48 hours.
3. If one person flees Texas to Illinois, you will need 15 buses to carry the rest of the lemmings.
4. If one person wears a button that says “Black Lives Matter” the store that sells buttons will run out stock.
5. If one person drives their car with all the windows down on a hot day, all the others will be doing it by tomorrow.
6. If one wears baggy pants……
If one wears a mask while alone in the car…
If one talking head newscaster says it…
more trickery from the lefty
how about add these truths
yes we are mentally ill
but so are you …vote for us
we love you criminals b/c thats the way you are
we know we are elites …but you are our street armies and we love sacrificing you
“I’ll admit, I had to look up “heuristic,” which means “serving as an aid to learning or problem-solving through trial and error,” and I still don’t see how it fits into a political discussion.’
It’s mostly a mathematical concept. The dictionary doesn’t provide an adequate explanation. To appreciate what heuristics is all about see George Polya’s book, “How to Solve it.” One of the best and most influential math books ever written. You can download it for free. Wikipedia provides links or you can use any good search engine. A book everyone can benefit from as it shows a general approach to problem solving. You don’t need to be a mathematician.
You are absolutely correct: heuristics has nothing to do with a political discussion. The leftists use the term to sound learned. One sees this kind of pretense in other contexts. Like using “optics” instead of “appearance.” Optics is a branch of physics which deals with the propagation of electromagnetic radiation and interaction with matter. One of the best guides to clear writing: Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language.” He explains how pretentious words are used as propaganda tools.
In “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the HAL 9000 computer’s name “Hal” is from “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer.”
Yeah, that’s the narrative. But it really came from IBM, one letter down.
“I still don’t see how it fits into a political discussion.’”
Example: Don’t locate state GOP HQ in the south side of Chicago.
Maybe quit being marxists? Government may be a necessary evil, but it isn’t the solution to all our problems.
Ssshhh, don’t HELP them! 😀
I went to the Third Way website to see the kind of material they produce. I looked at their “Climate and Energy” sub pages, and in particular the entry: “Top Line Impacts of OBBBA on US Energy Production.” Author: John Hebert. What is his background? Physics? No. Engineering? No. Chemistry No. Economics? No. Political Science? Yes. Of course his essay on the effects of recently passed “Big Beautiful Bill” was all politics and nothing else. Planted Axioms: the usual “Climate Change” narrative. The wonders of EV and the need to subsidize. Everything one would expect from the usual suspects. Even before the election of Trump, the EV industry was having severe problems as the reality fails to live up to the hype. The Third Way people want to force us into EVs by government edict. This from the boosters of democracy.
Helpful! Thanks!
Under the headline is a picture of the mentally deficient individual who pretended to be president—inference: you must come clean on the Biden coverup if you want to win.
Birthing/inseminated person sounds horrible, not inclusive but dehumanizing.
Hey Joan, I see you’ve been inseminated. When’s your offloading date?
Congratulations on becoming a spawn point! When can we expect Player Two to arrive?
I’m glad you rightly referred to Third Way as a democrat think tank. They try to position themselves as independent.
As Lyndon Johnson once said, “You can’t polish a turd”.
But today’s Dems are trying!
So they’re saying that the policies are fine, it’s just the “messaging” that’s the problem.
Good. Keep believing that and keep losing.
In a broader sense, they’re saying that American voters are dumb enough that if Democrats just update the packaging with less-ugly pictures, that people will eat their turd sandwiches believing it’s filet mignon.
I don’t expect most Democrats to take this to heart, though. These phrases have become central to their “inclusive” identity.
Let’s check in on the progress post ’28 election to see if they followed through.
Speaking ’28 election, I ordered my Vance/Rubio 2028 bumper sticker yesterday.
Early yet but for now seems like a solid investment.
While we are at it, could we also ban the use of the term “undocumented”? This term makes absolutely no sense to me when reporters write about someone as being “undocumented” or politicians speak about the ‘undocumented”. Do they mean that the person is in possession of no identifying documents (I’ll bet the “Maryland man” and the Indian truck driver who attempted stupid U turn in Florida possessed documents), or do they mean that the US Federal or state governments have no documents regarding that person, or do they mean that there is no other country that has documents concerning this person? I actually think none of the above. And when reporters use that term, how do the ensure that this characterization is true? It seems to merely be a euphemism for illegal alien. The sooner we use the right term, the better.
We know for a fact that the Biden administration GAVE these people documents when they arrived, so unless they actually sneaked across the border uncaught (which is no longer the bulk of them), they are not undocumented.
Illegals with an ICE Form I-200 (Warrant for Arrest of an Alien) can even use it as identification to board aircraft.
Another term that I would proposed to retire is “underrepresented groups”. What does that even mean? First it is not clear what is the standard demographic profile that one uses to assess a sub-population: National, state, local, international or the demographic profile of applicants in some selection process. Second is there is an implied, and profoundly incorrect, assumption that all activities, endeavors, jobs, professions, participants, etc. are equally desirable to all demographics. Third is that this implies some agreement on margins – say within 10% or is it 20%. And finally, since the demographics of the nation, state, …. is not static over time, one needs to be constantly reassessing demographic representation. All of this is frankly silly.
You have a point. Quite a few labeled as underrepresented are actually overrepresented proportionally to their demographic numbers, some quite heavily so.
That list of propaganda phrases is laughably short, and it features plenty of notable omissions.
The Dhimmi-crats’ propaganda lexicon is ever-expanding and ever-evolving.
Start with “social justice,” “environmental justice,” “economic justice,” and, all the other wretched permutations of the “justice” label.
Start with “climate justice” and save the polar bears from freezing to death during the next global cooling.
Leftists wont stop using the terms, while any ‘moderates’ will continue to be shouted down or ignored. The current dem party is beholden to the fringe.
I don’t see anything wrong with postmodern or stakeholders. I didn’t realize leftists had co-opted those words. Use of those words isn’t limited to political debate.
They are beholden to the crazy side because they are the foot soldiers
“Stakeholders” is the word proggies use when they want to give their Karens justification for controlling something that is none of their business. That’s why people hate it.
“Equity” used to be a fine, respectable word in bth law and finance. Now it’s arsenic.
I’m old enough to remember when postmodern was about art, and stakeholders was used for business or investing. Lefties don’t own those terms.
Can we please bring back negro, hophead, wetback and/or beaner, red-blooded, patriot, Christian, bent, fag, commie, pinko, wuss, master, mulatto, dame, Boy Scout, shrew, harridan, virago, quack, hippie, freak, oriental, and real man, just for starters?
Hey. I’m doing my part by bringing back “chick.”
Some yes some no.
Stop using every pushback on the left as your chance to piggyback and act exactly like the trope they throw at the rest of us.
You remind me. I forgot half-faggot.
Rappers captured the market on “bitch” and ho.”
They get lauded for it.
I will be called a misogynist for stating it.
Don’t forget the big N!
I don’t know why they care . Just say you hate Jews and will give people free food and houses like Mamdopey and then you can win over a good portion of the moron pregnant people loving vote.
NY facing lost decade. Consider relocating if you can. The city is in decline.
I don’t live in NY and never have, but I agree. The new democrat playbook is just love all things Islam, communist, violent and hateful to Jews. Say antizionist as much as you can and threaten to arrest Israelis for existing. Probably send american jews to re-education camps (or Columbia university), and “center” (to use a woke word) your whole political campaign around the fake non existent country of palestine. Now that’s a winning combo! make a couple of slick tic tocs with you in keffiyah and we are looking at our next senator, representative, who knows president? The democrats think eventually they’ll get the muslims to start loving gay and trans-people and hate the nuclear family, because hey we all can agree to hate Jews. They may just be right.
Couple of others off the top of my head: “problematic”, “harm reduction”, “our democracy”. Probably a few more that I’ll think of later.
I find the “subverting norms” particularly infuriating. I’m old enough to remember a time when such “norms” included families of married opposite-sex parents and their 2+ biological children. THOSE norms got subverted long ago.
How long before Third Way is attacked as racist for using a term like blacklisted? 😇
Most on here might remember that I was against calling a “steal” in 2020 and didn’t see enough evidence to support it.
However, I find few circumstantial pieces more glaring than this sudden shift of over 2 million voters all in key battlegrounds. It really does give you a side eye inclination.
No changes to progressive fascist ideology of goals. The progressive fascists just have to hide what they are by using different words.
I wonder what their thesaurus will produce as replacements.
I agree with the almost all of the list as normal, every day people don’t use those terms in real life but it’s not only the words that turn off the majority of Americans, it’s the ideas behind them that people overwhelmingly reject.
What is wrong with incarceration or “incarcerated people”? People in jail are incarcerated.
Because it is another Democrat euphemism, another of their pretty maps created to obscure a shameful territory.
Prisoner, criminal, and felon are still perfectly good words. Same as women (birthing people), vagrants, beggars, or bums (unhoused people), illegal aliens (undocumented people), and Negros (colored… no, wait! People of color!)
Oh, and for the same reason “slave” has been replaced with “enslaved person”.
There’s nothing wrong with “incarceration”. That word is not on the list. The word you’re seeing is “carceration”, which only exists in the “progressive” lexicon. I’m not sure what the difference is, but it seems to mean something to them.
As for “incarcerated person”, it goes with the whole “progressive” avoidance of any term that uses adjectives of people; so one can’t say “colored person”, but “person of color”. Not “blind person” but “person with vision impairment”. So also, not “criminal” but “justice-involved person”, and not “prisoner” but “incarcerated person”.
I suspect “carceration” is intended to be the opposite of “incarceration,” and may be a euphemism/replacement for “parole” without labeling the person as a convict (or “justice-involved person”).
Suggested use: Jimmy’s carceration was approved, so he’ll be coming home soon.
(If you didn’t know better, that sounds more like he requested vacation time from work than that he’s being released from prison.)
I remember microagression was the 1st one of these I heard back under Obama’s 1st term and trigger warning. I worked for DOD and they were using it. I remember thinking micro-aggression just means your being rude and the other person is being oversensitive, so it’s a completely solvable interpersonal problem. Trigger warning practically played out as we are going to train on some heavy shit so for those of you who are going to have trauma flashbacks please leave the room. Overtime trigger warning I remember expanded to just about anything possibly uncomfortable or mildly emotional; to the point where it just seemed stupid, and we organically dropped it. But what I learned from this is that the newspeak language starts out seeming okay and then expands to include everything to the point where it stifles just normal everyday behavior, leaving us all fearful of each other or suspicious, after all they might be committing a microaggresion or you might be? And then boom there goes your reputation, your job and your livelihood.
But what I learned from this is that the newspeak language starts out seeming okay and then expands to include everything to the point where it stifles just normal everyday behavior, leaving us all fearful of each other or suspicious, after all they might be committing a microaggresion or you might be?
Newspeak “stifles just normal everyday behavior,” you say?
Orwell made that clear in 1984. Two quotes come to mind:
1. “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism –ed.], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” [emphasis mine]
2. “The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
And I feel it necessary to re-state the traditional observation: The Right reads 1984 as a warning; the Left reads 1984 as an instruction manual.
Without those 47 phrases, what would they say? not like they have a platform to run on.
It will take a lot more than dropping 45 phrases, or 4,555 phrases, to get me to vote for Democrats.
They need to drop all those who supported those 4,555 phrases. They need to start thinking, start placing America and Americans first.
Those things are not going to happen, so I’m not going to vote for a Democrat.
The radical leftist Dems are so superficial. It’s not the language they should be dropping but the ideology and policies behind those words and phrases.
I would add the word that’s short for National Socialist, and also “fascist” since they don’t know what it means anyway.
They know exactly what those words mean.
The one pronounced “Not-see” means, “Anyone we don’t like.”
And “fascist” means, “Anyone who disagrees with us.”
The purpose of Newspeak, after all — from Orwell himself — is not to maintain a word’s historical meaning, but to instead give it a new meaning that limits independent and critical thought.