We’ve all heard them: “A rose by any other name is still a rose.” “Put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still a pig.” “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.”

The first saying illustrates that altering the name of something can influence how you feel or think about it, but it doesn't change the actual nature of that thing. The second saying indicates that adding aesthetic elements to something does not alter its fundamental reality. The third saying is known as “The Duck Test.” This idiomatic expression conveys a straightforward idea: if something behaves like a specific entity, it is likely that it truly is what it seems to be.

All of these, in one way or another, apply to the Democrats' latest affliction, the inability to “Call a spade a spade” (I snuck that one in); it seems that the word gang is now a four-letter word to the radical left.

Unless you’re woke and afraid of the English language, It's not particularly difficult to call something by its name — unless, of course, you exist in a woke parallel universe where doing so is considered an act of betrayal.

In Seattle, three people were killed when rival gangs decided to air out their grievances at a civilian gathering at the “Bite of Seattle Food Festival.” A local TV station, KOMO-TV, called it what it was, reporting it as “a suspected gang-related gunfight in the middle of the crowded event.”

If you are Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes and want to divert attention from the fact that your department lacks a unit dedicated to gang crimes, you can't refer to them as gang crimes. As a result, the flowering chief adopted a new misleading term for them: "small groups."

During a news conference, Barnes defended his attendance at a Black Law Enforcement Executives' conference in Texas that coincided with the shooting. His absence from the city has been a point of contention, as reported by the New York Post, due to his frequent trips to Chicago, where his family still resides.

Small groups? Were they having tea?

Also, why is there a segregated Black Law Enforcement Executives' conference, and what are they teaching at that conference that they wouldn't teach if whites were there?

The excuse that Barnes offered for his absences wasn’t even a real excuse. To be honest, he blew off the citizens of Seattle when he said:

“I wish that I had a crystal ball and we could schedule gun violence, but we can’t.”

Seattle’s delicate flower of a police chief then added more lame rhetoric.

“In Seattle, the problem of gun violence is worsened by small groups.”

“And in our city, 0.01 percent of the population is connected to 52 percent of our shootings, most of which are young people. Which is why our department partners with community members, with our mayor’s office, without our prosecutors, our federal partners, some of whom are here today, to find the underlying causes of this.”

I’m not surprised that the wokeism surrounding the word gang has also shown up in Asheville, North Carolina. I’ve been there on many occasions, and it definitely leans hard left.

Like Barnes in Seattle, the interim police chief of Asheville, Jacquelyn “Jackie” Stepp, also referred to the suspects in a recent shooting as "a group of individuals who know each other" and stated that they were "committing acts of violence against each other."

Damn, these tea parties are getting dangerous.

What's really strange is that this interim nerd in Asheville looks a lot like the newly elected communist mayor of Seattle. Both are definitely mirror breakers, and both act like they fall asleep to Karl Marx.

How bad is it? How deep is the liberal madness? Stepp and other Asheville law enforcement officials avoided answering media inquiries about whether the shootings were gang-related, consistently referring to "two groups of individuals" who were familiar with each other.

It’s sickening how weak and phony the left is. That’s why they feel so comfortable corrupting children; their idiotic arguments can’t stand up to adult reasoning, so they attack impressionable children and pretend they’re enlightened.

Seattle and Asheville are two extremely woke cities. So woke that, to them, the word ‘gang’ is too frightening to even say. These are two cities that are protected by snowflakes that will melt under the weight of one small word.

Do you feel safe now?

Milt Harris——Bio and Archives

Milt spent thirty years as a sales and operations manager for an international manufacturing company. He is also a four-time published author on a variety of subjects. Now, he spends most of his time researching and writing about conservative politics and liberal folly.