The Weaponization of Words Shaping Our Democracy

Growing up in London, Ontario, when Carol Off had a question for her parents, her father would jet to his outdated encyclopedias to track down the answer.

He was “gripped by curiosity,” the journalist writes in an essay titled “Truth.” But contradictions from the faith demanded by his Catholic religion and his secular pursuit of truth troubled him.

When he got dementia later in life, his brain quieted, Off writes.

“My father no longer read, but he seemed more content and cheerful than I had ever known him.... He’d simply accepted that there were no complete answers, at least not in this world. But I often think about what would have become of him had his inquiring mind been infected with the virus of present-day disinformation that is influencing so many people.”

Defining what truth is — and then identifying the barriers to it in our current age of profit-driven, dysregulating and overstimulating media and media platforms — is just one ambitious challenge Off’s new collection of essays, At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage, takes on.

From the ancient Greeks’ and Romans’ robust analysis of truth, to the Donald Trump era of “truthiness,” as coined by Stephen Colbert, Off uses a plethora of historical research and present-day reporting to contextualize and ground the shadowy term — among other words she deems politically crucial and personally relevant.

In a time when the meanings of words — and the potential connections and progress they could bring — are fuzzy and fleeting, “freedom,” “democracy,” “taxes,” “choice” and “woke” are the additional words Off chooses to write on. The variety of her curation has the reader taking in the death of liberal democracy according to Russian President Vladimir Putin in one chapter, and the history of reproductive freedom in Canada and the United States in the next.

The book came after Off’s 2022 retirement from CBC Radio’s As It Happens, a daily news show bringing audiences in-depth conversations of people in the public eye — or simply those with unique stories to share — since 1968.

Reflecting on her time as host, Off said if people hadn’t “laughed and cried, got angry, learned something, were surprised, all in the same show... we failed you.” She hosted for 16 years.

In the years that followed, she wrestled with being inspired and fearful of the things happening across the country. She told The Tyee her book felt necessary to write.

“It’s been decades of reporting, travelling, interviewing, thinking, having a family and living in this amazing country,” Off said.

While it’s a convention in journalism that “we’re not the story,” she added, “you get to a point where you are entitled to have a point of view.”

After Off’s 25,000 interviews as a CBC journalist, she said she feels she’s accumulated some collective knowledge.

As for the book releasing in the lead-up to a Canadian federal election, if there’s one essay you should read, said Off, it’s the one on “truth.” It offers her warnings.

“You have to start listening carefully to the language that surrounds us — how it's used, manipulated — and hold on to what you know to be true,” she said. “It's not just Donald Trump or Pierre Poilievre. There's a whole movement coming out of the Kremlin. It's going to be difficult to tell the difference between what's a fact and what's a lie.

“As we enter this election period in Canada, we have to start understanding what's true and what isn't.”

The Tyee spoke with Off about the importance of talking to each other, how the themes in her book have shown up in this election period so far, the next frontiers of Big Tech, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Why did you choose to write on the power of these six words?

Carol Off: Language matters to me a lot. It's my trade. I noticed in the last year of interviews on As It Happens a general tone, rancour and anger that ran through many conversations, especially those with people in the U.S. I was conscious another element had entered our political landscape.

I've seen times when things are quite rough-and-tumble, but I've never seen people who didn’t just disagree with others — they hated the people they disagreed with and would not talk to them because they'd be giving them a platform. I thought, “Well, this is not a great place to be in as the planet burns.”

Why I chose these particular words is because when things erupt into violence or when societies break down, it often feels like it came out of nowhere. If you look back, you'll see the rhetoric was there much earlier. It’s this adversarial nature: “It's us against them.”

I feel we're in that moment where this language is at an early stage.

In the opening of your book, you write, “To accurately identify the causes of our anger and resentment, we need to be able to trust our language and each other; to agree on what it means.” Is this possible?

I've given up on the ideologues on both sides. They're not worth trying to convince of anything. Because we're in a dire situation, I wanted to stay with the people in the middle who are looking for a way to move ahead. The only way we can do that is by talking to each other.

I don't think you can say, “Well, this is the definition, and everyone has to agree with it.” I think you start talking about it and say, “Well, when you say that about freedom, what do you mean?”

This is happening increasingly at the grassroots level: community-based efforts of talking to each other. Which sounds bizarre. Throughout the United States and in Canada, these grassroots movements work to find common ground, to understand what we mean by these words.

What is true? What does freedom mean to us? What do we value within that? How do we all benefit from that? How do we benefit within a democracy? How do we stop the weaponization of words that are used to hurt people?

I don't see it happening at the macro level, at the leadership level, where they just seem to continue to have this adversarial nature. Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre just want to get into the ring and fight each other. What's in it for us? What do we get from these two men and their egos wanting to go after each other?

In the opening essay on “freedom,” you boil down polarizing politics to a few versions of the same dichotomy: property rights versus human rights, free to do anything versus free to exist, personal liberty versus social responsibility. Have these frames shown up in Canadian politics in the lead-up to the federal election?

We saw it in spades during the so-called “Freedom Convoy.” They came off strongly in favour of freedom from responsibility, from obligations to others, from government, freedom to do what you want.

That idea of freedom has been kicking around for a long time — it comes right out of the Ronald Reagan era. It's been building in the United States for years, and it was building less obviously here in Canada. Suddenly, there it was, in your face.

Of course, COVID created this feeling that you couldn't do what you wanted to do and live as you want to live because you had to take care of other people. People went nuts. It shouldn't surprise us that Pierre Poilievre supports that [idea of freedom] because he comes from a libertarian background. He's always believed that the government shouldn't be in people's lives.

The word “freedom” was tossed around quite a bit at the U.S. Democratic National Convention. For example, vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz talked about the freedom to make your own health decisions, or freedom for kids to go to school without worrying about a mass shooting. Are progressives reclaiming this word, or is there a level of pandering there?

The two years of writing the book was a dark stretch for me. I thought things were going into a dark place, led by people like Donald Trump. Then suddenly this woman, Kamala Harris, walks onstage and says, “We're taking this word back.” Not only did she reclaim that word as I am attached to it: free to make choices about your body, from want and fear, to have society feed you if you have nothing to eat — but then to steal from the heart of the right-wing view of freedom.

When Tim Walz said, “Mind your own damn business,” he referenced this other kind of freedom, which is freedom from interference, from the conservative MAGA movement censoring books, getting librarians fired, taking over school systems and saying when and how you should have children.

These are huge things that traditionally belong in the domain of the American right wing. Suddenly, not only had they reclaimed the progressive idea of freedom — they just reached in and grabbed the whole idea of freedom of the right. And [the right] is left holding this bag of censorship and restrictions.

It was, to me, so amazing that within a period of a few weeks, they turned things around and owned this word that I had been in despair of ever owning again.

In your essay on “truth,” Big Tech is a major theme. Thanks largely to social media, the online world is hooked by rage, and news agencies are no longer in control of how people consume their news. What is the best way for news outlets to get their readers to their sites without falling into the habit of rage farming and clickbait? How can we engage with the news authentically again?

If you're allowed to blow your own horn, The Tyee is a perfect example of how you do it. You engage your community. Tell them stories no one else is telling them.

How do you compete with the noise of Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and those Big Tech platforms trying to pull you into their orbit? That's going to take a larger educational effort for people to understand they're not getting the news about their communities from those websites.

We have some government programs in this country helping to fund some journalism. There have been a couple of important laws passed by the Liberal government, like the online harms bill, which helps people like you and me who are getting attacked online and making it difficult for us to do our job. There’s the Online News Act — these are important initiatives.

I’d like to see more. But Pierre Poilievre says the first thing he's going to do is to cancel those things. He’s going to defund the CBC. He says the marketplace will determine what people get. As a populist, he knows that if people have independent sources of information that are getting to the bottom of things, he can't just tell people anything he wants to.

It's difficult for populists to function if people have independent, reliable sources of information.

What have you found is the best way for journalists to cover disinformation and misinformation without further fuelling it?

We're doing a really bad job right now. There is this convention in our business of [both-sides-ism]. You get mainstream media covering one of the most horrendous ideas in recent history: Donald Trump said he's going to round up as many as 20 million people — families, children, grandmas — drag them from their homes and workplaces, use the military, the police, the National Guard, and put them in camps and deport them. The New York Times reports on that, and then they say, “What's Kamala Harris's idea for the housing shortage in the United States?” As if these are equivalent things.

They know that if Donald Trump says outrageous things — like he did about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating people's pets — that that's going to hijack the media landscape for weeks.

We know it's not true, but that's what hijacked it. He says women are executing their babies at birth in Virginia. These are insane things, and yet the journalist said, “We've checked the facts, and we find that there are no women murdering their babies in Virginia. We've done our homework. We find that there are no Haitians eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio.”

These conventions of journalism simply don't work. This is a whole different ball of wax. This is not somebody that you cover normally. We’re failing so badly to point out what dangers lurk in so many of the things that are now passing for politics.

There's a part in your essay on “choice” where you quote Margaret Atwood talking about branding being an important part of any movement, referring to our use of “reproductive freedoms” instead of “pro-choice” these days. From a summer of “Kamala Harris is brat” to an entire rebrand of the GOP post-Trump as president, what role do you think branding plays in today's politics?

What surprised me the most during that debate was just how openly people use the word “abortion.” Over the decades, “choice” was developed as a word so that women could talk about this or advocate for it without using the word “abortion” because people found it uncomfortable — especially men.

We skewed the whole language into a bunch of euphemisms to hide what it was about. Reproductive freedom, not just reproductive rights. It goes back to [the freedom to choose], but not as this brand name. Now I think we don't have to cover for it anymore. I don't think we have to play this marketing game that Margaret Atwood so rightly points out isn't taking us down to a good place. We can now just start talking openly about what it is that we're referring to.

What was your favourite essay in At a Loss for Words?

“Woke.” Because it was the hardest one. When I launched into it, I was sorry I did, because I'm not part of the community that is being victimized by this anti-woke movement. It's a way to bring odious, racist, sexist, bigoted ideas into the public domain. You just smuggle them in, under this guise of “I'm not racist, I'm not sexist, I'm not a misogynist, I'm just against all this woke stuff.”

No one wants to define it. Wokeism is whatever you want it to be: the woke radicals, woke Marxists, woke extremists, woke mindset — what on earth does this mean? It doesn't mean anything because it's not supposed to mean anything. It's just a way for people to say mean things.

It can be an interesting experience for a journalist to write about their personal and family lives. How was that for you?

Journalists have to let you know where they're coming from when they report. I thought the best way to do that was to show where I came from, who my father was, who my family was, what values they had, because I think that everything I write in the book, I get from the experience of growing up in that family, growing up in Winnipeg and Ontario, growing up with values of social justice, fairness and equal rights.

My father would say, “Well, of course, you have to take care of each other.” He wouldn't see that as being an activist thing or progressive. He just thought that was a decent thing to do.

Carol Off’s ‘At a Loss for Words’ is out now from Penguin Random House Canada.