‘One more question…’: Brandon Gill puts liberals on the language hot seat

Since taking office, the Trump administration has ripped “woke” language out of the federal code and off of government websites. If reporters include pronouns in their e-mail signatures, the administration doesn’t return their e-mails. 

Texas Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Tex., has taken up that cause in Congress. At House Oversight hearings, the 31-year-old freshman from a safe red district has asked witnesses if they can explain or defend the language used by their organizations. Could 23andMe’s former CEO unpack “neopronouns?” Could a liberal NGO expert define a “birthing person?” Did Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker want to defend a 2017 tweet urging people to protest anti-trans laws by using bathrooms designated for the opposite sex?

“So you’re admitting that this is just a political circus?” asked Pritzker. Congressional witnesses, as a rule, try not to make news with their answers, and Gill’s questions tend to get non-answers.

Why does he ask them? Gill talked briefly with Americana about the strategy he’s taken into these hearings, and this is an edited transcript of the conversation.

David Weigel: What’s your inspiration for asking these questions? What are you trying to learn, for example, when you ask 23andMe’s CEO whether “E” is a pronoun?

Brandon Gill: There was a time between 2014 and 2022 when leftists in academia and the media would use this kind of weird, woke, far-left vernacular. It would include all kinds of bizarre pronouns and words that most Americans have never heard before, or even thought about. And they used it not just to sound intelligent — falsely, I think — but they used it as a means of promoting themselves and working up the corporate ladder or the academic ladder.

In other words, all they had to do — if you were the 23 and Me CEO, for instance — was repeat these weird, woke words, and that would put you in the leftist establishment’s good graces. I just wanted to ask her about it. What do these words actually mean? And I’d see if she could tell me. Because not only were they promoting these weird pronouns, they were making insinuations that if you don’t use them, you were contributing to a higher suicide rate for trans youth. That’s a big claim. You ought to be able to explain what we need to what words we need to be using.

So what did it say to you — another example — that Emily DiVito of the Groundwork Collaborative didn’t want to define “birthing person?”

What it says to me is that when you ask people directly, what do these things mean, it becomes really clear to me and her and everybody else in the room that these are bizarre terms that normal people don’t say. Whenever they’re put on the spot to either define what the woke words mean or explain the context, they don’t want to do it, because they know how ridiculous they sound. They know they sound like idiots explaining this. I think that most of these people have never had anybody ask them directly: Can you explain this?

Having asked a bunch of these questions of witnesses, how much do you think the “great awokening,” as it was called, was ideologically motivated, versus how much these institutions were following trends? What was the balance between people who said “I just read Judith Butler, and I want to incorporate this in our language,” and people who shrugged and went along with it?

I think that you had a core of true believers, primarily in academia. They were the ones who really wanted this. The incentive structure in academia right now is not to pursue truth; it’s to come up with some novel idea or concept. Whether that concept is true, or leads to truth, or has anything good in it — it doesn’t really matter. Everything is about novelty.

So, a bunch of college professors sitting in their ivory tower, twiddling their thumbs, come up with these weird terms. And then the leftist media, which is looking to completely undermine our culture and our civilization, and knows that these things turn social norms on their head, pick up these concepts and promote them. When businesses adopt this, it’s a mixture of trying to get into the good graces of people that they find to be popular and cool. It’s all just virtue signaling. Occasionally you’ll meet some true believers in the private sector, but it’s mostly driven by ESG, and things like that.

Do you think the organizations that did use this language need to explain themselves, or why they’ve changed?

Well, one of the reasons that they’re pulling back from it is that they don’t derive any additional social or political power or capital from promoting these terms. You could say they have an obligation to explain what they meant, and they do. But at the core, I think, they were using these as this sort of a Machiavellian means of, you know, coalescing political power behind themselves, coercing other people into their ideologies.

These things are so contrary to common sense and to just normal, everyday lived experience that they realize, if they can make you, as George Orwell says, not believe the evidence of your eyes and ears on these things, and they can make you do anything. I do think that the power they had over people is fading away. And they realize it. Their whole charade has been exposed. That’s the purpose of these hearings, just to show how hollow these people are and how the language really was used for power.