Kimberly Steele

Like tattoos and cigarette smoking, the F-word used to be edgy. The F-word was bad enough to be off-limits/verboten in the trashy horror I read throughout my childhood. The F-word used to appeal to me, especially when I was age 12 and crushed by insecurity. Using it with my few friends made me feel larger somehow. When I wrote my own first horror novel at age 31, I made sure that the F-word had a few cameo appearances.

The F-word comes to us from Germanic languages of the 16th century. In Swedish, a similar word, focka means "to sack" in the plunder and loot sense of the term. Its roots are potentially Indo-European from a verb that also birthed the Latin pugnus, which means "to strike".

Once the domain of longshoremen, edgy 12 year olds, Harley dudes, and late nite comedians, the F word has become the pillar of leftist Newspeak and the crucible within which they seek to reduce all human language.

By doing so, they have cursed and they have also cursed themselves.

Our culture's hangups are reflected in the word that rhymes with duck. We all know that its first meaning is "to engage in sexual intercourse". One of the worst swear words, it is second only to the word that rhymes with bundt for shock value. As much as we post-Feminist Sexual Revolution kids would like to think we're over Victorian prudery and horror over basic bodily functions like masturbation and sex, we are clearly still terrified of our bodies and ourselves. As proof, we have the two worst swear words in the American vernacular, one that refers to a woman's genitals and the other that refers to the act of sex. A distant third curse word is s**t, which means poop and doesn't pack anywhere near the punch of the previous two. There is a popular children's book about everybody pooping. Children's books about the other two subjects are mercifully absent. The F word reflects our culture's compulsive shame about sex.

The left loves nothing more than to project its own shame. Leftists of all colors are secretly ashamed of their privilege. Most of us are privileged, but it is leftists who have become so uneasy with their guilty role in it, so instead of adopting a sense of noblesse oblige, humility, and gratitude, their reaction has been to deny that they are privileged and to chastise others (including historical figures) for being plunderers and rapists. Classic projection of the shadow.

The leftist who doesn't have the human decency to feel guilty about the small mountain of plastic garbage in her $120,000 car that runs on coal-generated electricity bellows about losing her childhood because of global warming. The leftist who sent back his food three times at the restaurant and then forgot to tip votes for a politician who has sneered at the working class and off-shored jobs so other leftists can have cheap nannies and suppliant food service workers. The leftist who champions black lives mysteriously lives in a 95% white neighborhood of gated subdivisions with no plans to move. The leftist with black skin and a persecution complex riots and steals in a scene straight out of the KKK playbook.

It's no wonder leftists feel like the world is closing in on them all the time and seek to blot out that feeling by spending lots of money or by calling out "privilege" like shouting fire in a crowded theater. Hypocrisy is its own inherent trap and sooner or later every religion dies of it. Leftists with their beloved religions of Atheism, Marxism, and Holy Progress are no different. But just like the F word loses its power once you've seen it and heard it a million times, hypocrites who scream hysterically about privilege find that the ears of the masses become numb. I think everyone senses this numb is the calm before the storm, and if the average leftist has any sense of self-preservation, they will look to calm discourse and rational exchanges instead of working themselves into a froth at the mere mention of the Orange Man or populism. There's only so much screaming allowed before the screamer gets backhanded, possibly into the previous century. Leftists probably wouldn't mind this, because a massive problem among them is the pretense we are all still in 1960, with all of 1960's racial oppressions of non-white people, gender conflicts, and wild economic potential. As a bonus, if you are mentally locked in 1960, you can still safely blame Russia for ruining everything while not understanding the grotesque failures of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Unfortunately for leftists, we aren't in 1960, and I have a hunch about the word they would choose to describe how they feel about it.