Die Not By Lies
Why a dreadful mass shooting in Canada must bend its knee to Newspeak
When I heard that the most recent Canadian mass shooter, who gunned down two family members, and seven other people in a school, was a woman, I was shocked.
Shocked at both the tragedy, but also the rarity of such an event being undertaken by a woman. We all know that in the overwhelming number of school shootings across the USA, and now in Canada, the shooter is male. Often a young male with mental health issues.
Turns out that’s the case again. Except of course it was a woman. I mean all the headlines say it was a woman. The reports I heard were that it was a woman. And I was, as I say, shocked.
I’m not as shocked now. The shooting is still shocking, but not the gender issue. For here is what the headlines are wont to tell us.
In other words, a man. I mean, what can we believe any longer? Were nine killed? Was it at a school? Was it even in Canada?
Yet like linguistic lemmings, the mainstream media pours over the lofty heights of the language cliff, into the abyss of meaninglessness, before crashing onto the rocks of Looneysville below.
Their comfort is that at least they are piling up alongside others. Perish the thought that anyone in a mainstream media outlet goes out on a lonesome limb - risking social and commercial isolation - to state the truth:
This was a young man with gender dysphoria, whose mental state in general was very poor, but who was cosseted into believing his own myths in order to make life safe for him in a world in which everyone is out to get him.
Everyone out to get him? That’s generally how mass shooters at schools think, myopically focussed as they are on themselves. Turns out this was the case once more.
This is the true Orwellian state of language. When words are used to obscure truth, and to prescribe another truth altogether. Another term for that is lies. And in this latest tragedy, the institutions we are supposed to trust (that’s so 1980s!) casually lie to us.
