“This is a product of the systemic settler-colonialist imperialist cisheteropatriarchy, and we must engage all key stakeholders to build capacity among our organisers to create lasting, impactful change on Turtle Island.”

(Not a real quote, but it may as well be one.)

I hate sexism, racism, and colonialism too, but stop with the fucking jargon, for god’s sake. It just makes your valid points sound like abstruse academic talking points that everyday people won’t understand. They throw out these terms as though everybody self-evidently knows what they mean. (Turtle Island sounds beautiful and poetic… but nobody outside Indigenous or “””BIPOC””” [Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, an unnecessary acronym] activism knows what it means.)

No wonder idiots like Trump and DeSantis (or Boris Johnson, or any other right-wing “populist” rabble-rouser) get so much fucking traction. They’re full of shit, but they know how to talk like a regular person. Listening to some of this jargon makes my ears bleed, but I feel I have to put up with it because as a Multiply Marginalised Person™, I have to adopt the same bullshit rhetorical style that they all use. I push back against it as much as I can, but I can’t seem to get my colleagues to ditch the woke jargon (not to mention nonprofit and business jargon… if I hear the words “key stakeholders,” “capacity-building,” or “impactful” one more time…).

If you can’t make your valid points sound like anything other than academic waffle, then you are a bad rhetorician and need to learn how to share your ideas outside woke academia or organising circles.