A few years ago a friend joked that for victims of gun violence, the term “trigger warning” must be triggering for them. While he was being sarcastic, in an era where today’s progressives are indistinguishable from parody, they’re heeding that concern.
According to Fox News:
“Policeman,” “congressman” and even the gender-neutral descriptor “freshman” have been deemed “oppressive” at Massachusettsâ Brandeis University, a small, elite private school in Waltham, because they are “gender exclusive.”
ven the woke language of yesteryear has become problematic.The school suggests moving beyond the term “trigger warning,” because it can be connected to violence, the same as calling someone who has experienced trauma a “victim” or “survivor.”
Some left-leaning publications already opt to use “content warning” instead.
"Trigger Warning" is itself now "violent language" https://t.co/Wlin3whhF9 pic.twitter.com/aZqtLvDEYP
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) June 24, 2021
This serves as yet another reminder of how completely arbitrary the left’s language policing is. Today’s progressive speak is always a moment away from being the bigoted speech of tomorrow, only to be endlessly replaced by new terminology.
There’s no evidence that trigger and/or content warnings work either. According to a 2019 study on trigger warnings published in the peer reviewed Clinical Psychological Science journal:
Across six experiments, we gave some college students and Internet users a trigger warning but not others, exposed everyone to one of a variety of negative materials, then measured symptoms of distress. To better estimate trigger warningsâ effects, we conducted mini meta-analyses on our data, revealing trigger warnings had trivial effectsâpeople reported similar levels of negative affect, intrusions, and avoidance regardless of whether they had received a trigger warning. Moreover, these patterns were similar among people with a history of trauma. These results suggest a trigger warning is neither meaningfully helpful nor harmful.
But as usual, don’t expect reality to alter the progressive vision.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Dumb and Dumber: How Cuomo and de Blasio Ruined New York, Debunk This: Shattering Liberal Lies, and Spygate
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