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Publication Date: February 10th, 2026
Image Remixed from the Economist: depiction of inflationary words?
The most essential tool of the human species is not the flint axe or the silicon chip; it is the word. Language allows us to coordinate our neural maps of reality so that we may cooperate, trade, and coexist. But language is a delicate ecosystem. When we inflate the meaning of words to score political points, we don’t just change the conversation; we debase the currency of communication itself.
Before we even get to the specific definitions being mangled in Hudson, we must address the linguistic "tell." Whenever you hear a neighbor or Substacker talk about "showing up," "doing the work," or "making space," you are not witnessing an act of profound contemplation; you are witnessing a verbal tic and the prequel to politicized language and propaganda. These hackneyed, lazy phrases are the linguistic equivalent of a neon sign signaling that the speaker is about to propose a radical "progressive" idea while pretending it is a unique moral virtue. These terms don’t describe actions; they describe a posture, a vibe. They are designed to insulate the speaker from the rigors of data-driven debate by draping their policy preferences in morality, the robes of secular priesthood.
As George Orwell famously observed in Politics and the English Language:
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who ought to know better."
Today, we are witnessing a "Language Inflation" that mirrors the economic kind: as we print more emotional meaning into technical terms, the actual value of those terms plummets toward zero. While the American Right has its own semantic gymnastics, here in the deep-blue Hudson Valley, now a primary habitat for the leftist activist, our problem is the hyper-inflation of "Displacement," "Community," "Violence," and the ubiquitous "Justice."
The word "displacement" is currently being used by local housing advocates to describe the common, if painful, reality of rising rents. To understand why this is a category error, we must look at the history of the term.
A Historical Fact Check: Historically, "Displaced Persons" (DPs) emerged as a legal and humanitarian category in the wake of World War II. Between 1939 and 1948, millions of individuals, primarily Jews surviving the Holocaust, but also ethnic Poles, Balts, and Ukrainians, were forcibly uprooted by Nazi genocide or Soviet expansionism. These people were stripped of citizenship, herded into labor camps, or forced to flee "liquidation" squads. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the later International Refugee Organization (IRO) were established specifically to handle this crisis of statelessness.
To equate the tragic, violent uprooting of millions by totalitarian regimes with the fact that a trendy bistro opened on Warren Street and your landlord raised the rent by 15% is a moral and intellectual failure. It is undeniably difficult when housing becomes unaffordable. But high rent is not a "monster in the night" or a biblical plague; it is the predictable result of supply and demand, exacerbated by regional inflation, regulation, and local property taxes. We cannot "protect" citizens from the price of bricks without forcing the government to choose one group over another. If prices go up, you move or you make more money. It is that simple.
The second casualty is the word "community." In the classical sense, this referred to people living in a geographic area. However, it has grown to mean "people that I like and who agree with me." "Community" now implies a morally superior collective identity, prioritizing group solidarity over individual agency or market outcomes.
We saw this play out in the 2025 mayoral race. Former Mayor Kamal Johnson and his most vocal supporters, many of whom are employed by the local "aid-industrial-complex," seized the high ground with the constant refrain that their movement was about "the community" and "my community." By doing so, they cast the ultimate winner of the race, Joe Ferris, as someone who did not stand for "The Community™." This narrative persisted even though Ferris received more votes from actual residents without the backing of a dozen local NGOs, paid helpers, or the benefits of incumbency. It even turns out that he was taught in high-school by none other than one of the original Bliss Towers leaders. Indeed, according to this Gossips of Rivertown article, “Malcolm Bliss, the son of Elah and Roger Bliss, Roger Bliss being the person for whom Bliss Towers was named.”
One local resident went so far as to publish a manifesto of prescriptions for how new residents should behave, including where they should donate, how much they should sell their homes for below market value, and even suggesting racial discrimination when choosing which stores to frequent, to join the club of "Community™" and achieve the status of "Neighbor". The author writes:
"Vote like a neighbor. As soon as you arrive, register to vote here. Support housing justice, tenant protections, and infrastructure for everyone."
In this worldview, you are clearly not "voting like a neighbor" unless you support "housing justice" (an undefined moralism that has arguably harmed housing supply in Hudson) and "tenant protections" in a state that already possesses the most draconian protections in the country, that again limit more housing supply. As for "infrastructure for everyone," a phrase as vacuous as it is redundant, one wonders what other kind of infrastructure there could possibly be. Clearly, if you want something funded by the government you slap the word "infrastructure" on it and then voila... now your hard-working neighbor is made to pay for it with the highest taxes in the land
***That’s right, New York has the highest taxes in America. Read our take on it here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DSVxSkwES2n/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==***
We saw this tribalism again when a leader of a local non-profit, having raised millions in funds, asserted through her COVID-19 mask that Union Street "has no community." This is a fascinating bit of cognitive dissonance. Union Street is home to the former Mayor (for now), the current Common Council President, the USPS where most residents run into one another, the Courthouse, and the Spark of Hudson. The street is busy, often jammed with construction vehicles and school bus pick-ups, that converting it into a one-way is an evergreen petition. If a street full of families and taxpayers, civic institutions and civically focussed not-for-profits, is not a "community," then the word is merely a weapon of exclusion against those with the "wrong" income or political affiliation.
Perhaps the most dangerous instance of language inflation is the redefinition of "violence." In both law and logic, violence requires a physical act of force. Words are not violence. Hurt feelings are not violence.
By coding ideas they disagree with as "violence," activists engage in what Steven Pinker calls "Concept Creep." They move the goalposts of civil discourse to expand the definition of harm. The logic is transparent: if speech is "violence," then it is morally permissible to use force or censorship to stop it.
We have seen this last year at public events where our very own Sheriff or District Attorney spoke on “criminal justice reform” panels. Activists attempted to remove residents from these forums before they have even spoken a single word, merely out of a preemptive fear that those residents might peaceably express a differing point of view. When activist residents feel empowered to attack speech at events where duly elected protectors of speech are present, Hudson has lost the plot. While Pinker is a polemicist for reason, he often warns that when prose becomes too "hot," it can trigger a defensive tribal reflex in the reader's brain. We will therefore let the cool light of reason do the heavy lifting: when you cannot win an argument with logic, you redefine your opponent’s speech as a physical assault to justify silencing them.
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Our Editors’ Suggested Further Reading: Why It’s a Bad Idea to Tell Students Words Are Violence by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.
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Finally, we arrive at the current activist obsession: appending the word "justice" to every noun in the dictionary. Progressives have discovered a clever semantic hack: if you add "Justice" to a good or service you want for free, then anyone who opposes you is, by definition, "unjust."
In his book Enlightenment Now (2018), Steven Pinker explains that as society becomes safer and more moral, our threshold for what we consider "unjust" drops, a phenomenon known as **Concept Creep (**first coined by ****psychologist Nick Haslam).
Pinker notes that "Justice" used to refer to procedural fairness (equal treatment under the law). It has since, unwisely, "crept" to include "Distributive Justice" (equality of outcome) and "Social Justice" (rectifying historical group grievances). The danger is dilution: when "justice" is used to describe every social disparity, it loses its power to mobilize people against actual instances of corruption.
In Rationality, Pinker further critiques the use of "justice" as a "sacred value" that shuts down empirical debate. If an issue like housing is framed as "justice," anyone who questions the proposed solution is framed as being "against justice." This prevents a rational analysis of costs and trade-offs. Social activists would be well served to remember that the linguistic gun they load today can be turned on them tomorrow. Imagine if a future administration creates a "Tax Justice Office" and argues that it is inherently unjust to tax one human being at a higher rate than another. They might even call it theft… by that logic, if you oppose their flat tax proposal, you are effectively "fighting justice." How dare you?
At the risk of sounding like a local substack that is overly prescriptive, we will point to authorities like The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker and other great books on writing that point out that specificity is helpful. When you want to say that the "community feels left out," check yourself. Instead, say "long-term residents on Street X are frustrated by a specific policy or action Y."
This more specific framing will help elected officials solve the root problem rather than struggle to figure out what exactly you mean by the amorphous "community." Ultimately, there are many communities. Unless you have won an election in your ward or across the city or state, you should be careful about speaking on behalf of people who did not authorize you to do so.
If you wish to advance your cause, do the difficult work of persuasion: change your neighbor's mind so that you can influence his vote through respectful discourse. But do not attempt to change the meaning of a word as a linguistic shortcut to moralize or tabooize that which you cannot achieve through reason or the ballot box.
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Last edited/updated:
February 10th, 2026
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