The White House’s 2025 Black History Month proclamation reveals systematic bias through calculated linguistic choices that reinforce racial hierarchies. Its superficially celebratory language masks a deeper pattern of exclusion, evident in pronoun usage (“they/their” vs “we/our”), selective representation (focusing on conservative figures), and strategic omissions of civil rights history. Drawing on well-known Critical Discourse Analysis frameworks, the rhetorical structure of the White House language systematically positions whites as the unmarked norm while othering Blacks as perpetual outsiders – a pattern particularly evident in its consistent use of racial qualifiers before “American.”

Through careful examination of language patterns, word choice, and rhetorical structures, the proclamation reveals concerning patterns of marginalization masked behind celebratory language.

Exclusion Through Language

The proclamation’s systematic othering operates through precise grammatical choices that linguistically distance Blacks from American identity. This manifests in three key patterns:

First, consistent use of third-person pronouns (“they,” “their”) rather than inclusive first-person (“our,” “we”) when discussing Black achievements, creating what linguists term “exclusionary deixis.”

Second, passive voice constructions that minimize Black agency, as in phrases like “have been among our country’s most consequential leaders” rather than active constructions that center Black leadership.

Third, the repeated qualification of “American” with racial modifiers creates a linguistic hierarchy where unmodified “American” implicitly means white, while others require hyphenation – a pattern dating to segregationist discourse.

Selective Representatives

The proclamation’s careful curation of Black representatives reveals a calculated political strategy through three distinct patterns.

First, it pairs historically radical abolitionists (Douglass and Tubman) with contemporary conservative voices (Sowell and Thomas), creating a false equivalence that obscures these figures’ sharply different stances on systemic racism.

Second, by elevating only conservative Black voices from recent decades, the document implicitly delegitimizes modern civil rights leadership and progressive Black thought.

Third, in choosing Tiger Woods as the sole cultural representative, the proclamation not only reduces Black cultural achievement to athletics but specifically selects an athlete known for distancing himself from Black identity – reinforcing the document’s broader pattern of elevating those who minimize racial critique.

Strategic Erasure

The proclamation’s most revealing feature lies not in what it says, but in what it systematically erases through calculated omission. This erasure operates on three temporal levels to minimize Black resistance and agency:

Historical erasure: The document entirely omits the civil rights movement, obscuring the mass mobilization and collective struggle that forced institutional change. By jumping from abolitionists directly to contemporary conservative figures, it creates what historians call a “silence gap” that erases decades of organized Black resistance.

Contemporary erasure: The proclamation ignores modern Black excellence across multiple fields – the scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators who continue to shape American culture and technology. This omission reinforces the document’s reductive focus on athletics and conservative politics as the only spheres of Black achievement.

Future erasure: By avoiding any mention of ongoing systemic challenges – from wealth inequality to criminal justice reform – the proclamation preemptively delegitimizes current civil rights advocacy. This creates what critical discourse analysts term a “closure effect,” where past achievements are used to suggest that no further struggle is necessary.

Together, these carefully crafted omissions work to present a sanitized narrative that erases both historical resistance and contemporary critique.

Political Manipulation

The proclamation’s rhetorical strategy systematically subordinates Black history to political self-promotion through several calculated moves. The document’s pivotal phrase – “as America prepares to enter a historic Golden Age” – reveals this manipulation in three ways:

First, it repurposes Black achievement as merely instrumental to a future defined by the current administration rather than celebrating historical contributions in their own right.

Second, it employs what critical discourse analysts call “temporal displacement,” shifting focus from historical injustices to an imagined future while avoiding discussion of present-day challenges.

Third, by positioning the administration as the agent of this “Golden Age,” the text transforms what should be a commemoration of Black resistance and achievement into a vehicle for white political authority – a rhetorical move that paradoxically reinforces racial hierarchies within a document meant to challenge them.

Regressive Bias in Language

Even basic style choices reveal bias. The proclamation uses lowercase “black” when referring to Blacks, ignoring current editorial standards that recognize “Black” as proper noun when referring to racial and cultural identity. This deviation from contemporary standards suggests either careless oversight or a deliberate calculated rejection of linguistic norms around racial discourse.

The proclamation’s framing of “black American” rather than simply “American” perpetuates a deeply rooted linguistic tradition of exclusion dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s successful “America First” Presidential re-election campaign of 1916.

This horribly racist slogan, emerging from earlier racist nativist movements, established a rhetorical framework where “American” implicitly meant “white,” while all others required qualifying adjectives – “Black American,” “Chinese American,” etc. By consistently placing racial and ethnic identifiers before “American,” this linguistic pattern reinforced who could and couldn’t claim unmodified “American” identity.

The 2025 proclamation returns to this long-gone error: even in a document meant to celebrate Black achievement, the text never refers to its subjects simply as “Americans,” but always with the preceding racial qualifier. The White House thus has resurrected Wilson-era KKK rhetoric that “America First” linguistically marks certain races (“black Americans”) as perpetually denied the category of “true” Americans.

Drawing on theories of “linguistic subordination,” this pattern of modified Americanness serves to continuously reaffirm a racial hierarchy where whiteness remains unmarked and normative, while other identities are perpetually marked as different and secondary. The intentional racism in “America First” is thus to signal to non-whites they are American second and thus always outsiders.

Institutional Power Through Language

The above analysis hopefully has clarified how the White House’s 2025 proclamation operates as an instrument of racial hierarchy by implementing three interlocking mechanisms of linguistic power:

First, it employs grammatical structures that systematically position Blacks as objects rather than agents of American history – from exclusionary pronouns to passive voice constructions that minimize Black agency.

Second, through strategic representation and calculated omission, it constructs a narrative that delegitimizes collective resistance while celebrating individual achievement in ways that reinforce existing power structures.

Third, its temporal manipulation – moving between selective past and mythologized future while avoiding the contested present – creates what critical discourse analysts call “narrative closure,” where acknowledgment of historical figures serves to deny contemporary injustice.

These patterns matter because presidential proclamations don’t merely describe reality – they actively shape it. Military intelligence officers know this. Disinformation and propaganda experts recognize this.

When the highest office in American government employs linguistic strategies meant to subtly reinforce racial hierarchies while appearing to celebrate diversity, it reveals how institutional power operates through corrupted language to maintain racial hierarchies while denying their existence.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dropped an eXcrement (formerly known as a Tweet) at 1AM about the Jevons Paradox, apparently hoping to reassure shaken American investors that efficient AI breakthroughs will drive benefits to Azure’s centralized and inefficient AI empire.

There’s delicious irony here – Nadella just predicted his own disruption. It’s like watching Microsoft circa 2006 reassure investors about their Vista strategy (later known as the “smell of death”) meant to corner all access to the Web, just as Unix was ramping to completely eat their lunch (Linux, MacOSX, etc).

“Where do you want to go today?” Clearly not to Azure’s premium-priced AI plantation.

…a kind of digital plantation economy—featuring resource monopolies, extractive forms of exploitation, and monocrop “ecologies”—based on the “Server Farming” (aka, data center) industry through which some 70 % of the world’s Internet traffic flows. …in which the manipulation of history, the accumulation and control of ‘arable’ (digital) land, and the dispossession of social processes under quasi-feudalistic property rights encourage unequal, unsustainable, and often violent cultures and political ecologies.

History. It matters.

William Stanley Jevons, of paradox fame, wasn’t writing about maintaining monopoly power. He was documenting how efficiency improvements democratize access to technology, sparking waves of decentralized innovation that reshape entire industries. In other words if you reduce the cost of technology by half, demand may be expected to more than double. History repeatedly shows this reshaping actually and usually dismantles, not reinforces, incumbent power structures.

Take the Carterfone case of 1968.

AT&T insisted only their premium hardware could be trusted on their precious network. Thomas Carter, blocked from this artificial scarcity, created an elegantly simple acoustic coupler that worked better than AT&T’s “premium” solutions. Sound familiar? DeepSeek just did the same thing with AI, achieving GPT-4 level performance on “inferior” chips while spending 6% of what OpenAI did.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates hated the Carterfone economics so much he literally penned an angry open letter saying anyone trying to “hobby” or innovate in tech was his powerful Seattle lawyer father’s worst enemy.

The Gates family’s pattern of using legal force to maintain barriers and monopoly went beyond technology given how they curated Microsoft’s workforce to be only 2.6% Black, as documented in a $5 billion discrimination lawsuit. I think I recently read an insightful book about exactly the kind of hard-working person the sprawling Gates’ family empire tried to hold down: Percival Everett’s “James” cleverly tells the classic American story about the systemic barriers erected by elites in power who practice willful ignorance.

And on that note consider how rural communities around the world repurposed “premium” national telegraph wire suppliers into barbed-wire fences to keep the fancy hats out, as well as build early “local area” inexpensive networks for private communications. Innovation meant technology made to work for the people, rather than being controlled by distant corporate masters.

…Washburn adopted Bessemer steel for continuous rolling, creating “a revolution in the wire business, substituting … a better and cheaper material for very many purposes.” Most notably, Washburn acquired patents for barbed wire and greatly expanded its fencing-wire business during the peak decades of America’s westward expansion—showing that efforts to improve telegraph wire also yielded significant spillover effects in other economic sectors.

The pattern has been clear for decades if not centuries or more: when monopolists try to maintain control through Silicon Valley notions of “digital moats” and artificial scarcity, they unintentionally spark innovations that ultimately undermine the de-regulator’s push to centralize power. A power struggle naturally ensues.

Microsoft was in a position to have led the charge toward more efficient, democratized AI. Instead, they poured billions into an unnecessary artificial scarcity model with notions of primarily enriching a tiny group of tech oligarchs who greedily predict “societal disruption”, sounding like modern slavery dreams on ketamine. Now they’re looking down the same slope of reality that AT&T, IBM, and countless other would-be digital plantation owners discovered: humanity wants freedom and inevitably innovates toward independence from those intoxicated by oppressive control.

The real Jevons Paradox is that more efficient AI will accelerate the exact decentralized innovation that historically dismantles corporate empires built on artificial scarcity. Just as the Magna Carta forced kings to recognize they couldn’t maintain artificial scarcity of rights and justice, American tech barons are about to learn they can’t maintain artificial scarcity of computing power. While Silicon Valley elites educate their children about the divine right of VCs, places like DeepSeek are demonstrating that AI, like law and liberty before it, becomes more powerful as it becomes more distributed.

Will cheaper AI increase usage and benefit Azure? That’s like asking if the cheaper phone benefited AT&T or led to its breakup so that a cheaper phone could benefit from freedom of choice with infrastructure providers.

Perhaps that explains the 1 AM timing of the CEO’s eXcrement using some random inexpensive phone using some random inexpensive network.

Today’s CNN report about suicidal North Korean soldiers in Ukraine should terrify anyone who understands institutional collapse.

I’ve spent decades studying how societies descend into authoritarianism and as a security professional, I’m watching patterns that I know all too well emerge at unprecedented speed in American institutions.

Consider what we’re seeing in Ukraine: young North Korean soldiers carrying handwritten loyalty pledges, documenting each other’s “disloyalty,” removing protective gear to prove dedication, and detonating grenades rather than being captured.

These aren’t just tactical choices – they’re the end result of a system that values loyalty to false prophets above all else, including human life.

Now look at what’s happening in American federal institutions. The Office of Personnel Management is installing new centralized communication systems that shatter decades of security protocols. Career civil servants are being illegally replaced by startlingly young loyalists. Traditional agency independence is being deliberately dismantled.

These parallels aren’t subtle to an expert in authoritarian dangers.

Here’s what makes this moment uniquely dangerous, requiring additional expertise in cybersecurity: technology is accelerating institutional collapse beyond anything we’ve seen in history.

When Mao deployed Red Guards, when Stalin conducted his purges, when the Shah’s SAVAK began its campaigns – these transformations took years. Today, a centralized email system can expose every federal employee to loyalty tests instantly. Social media can identify and target “disloyal” staff within hours by running a single query statement like “DEI”. A teenager with an assault rifle can be placed in charge of critical systems with a single administrative decision.

By the time most people recognize automation of decline and destruction, the professional expertise needed to prevent catastrophic steps – like a button-click to end hundreds of thousands of lives – already may be done and unrecoverable.

When Twitter’s $44B purchase led to 80% value destruction, pundits laughed at Elon Musk as incompetent and cruel. They missed his actual intentions dog-whistled by him for years.

Hitler’s 1933 ‘Volksempfänger’ program was giving away radios at a 75% loss to destroy democracy and replace it with Nazi adherents. Both sacrificed billions to gain control of communication infrastructure, celebrating deceptive and illegal “exit package” tactics meant to accelerate end of freedom.

Seemingly “bad business” decisions of massive devaluation and loss make perfect sense when viewed as evil charity – tools for rapid institutional control and cult-like loyalty enforcement rather than profit-seeking ventures. The toxic exit packages are institutional suicide pills, similar to how Hitler’s “Night of Long Knives” eliminated opposition through emphasis on rapid “exits.”

The new appointees – averaging 29 years old compared to the typical 52 – are specifically being selected to lack the knowledge that would recognize catastrophic risks someone wants them to make… again (e.g. MAGA). When a 26-year-old was placed in charge of nuclear command protocols they didn’t understand how keeping authentication systems separate from general communications networks is critical to safety – literally the most famous catastrophic design flaw in all hacker history (e.g. 1983 NORAD near-miss and the infamous 2600 phreakers).

The patterns are clear: when loyalty becomes the only metric that matters, when youth are elevated specifically because they lack the judgment to resist, when technology enables instant implementation of control systems – you’re watching the death of professional judgment and institutional knowledge in real time.

Some will say this analysis is alarmist. They’ll say American institutions are resilient. They’ll say we’ve survived previous challenges. But they’re missing how technology has changed the game. The speed of institutional collapse in the digital age isn’t even comparable to historical examples that were measured in months and years. We don’t have the luxury of analog and physical warning signs.

The North Korean soldiers show us exactly where America is headed at warp speed because, unlike their 1980s view of the world, we are throwing $500 Billion at AI “end of society” announcements: young people primed to throw away lives based on loyalty tests alone, unable to adapt or think independently, following long-outdated patterns even as they die.

The time to recognize deadly devotion to loyalty over competence, to recognize the prioritization of control over effectiveness, is before it becomes irreversible. History is clear on this point: once institutional knowledge is purged, once professional judgment to protect lives is replaced by suicidal loyalty tests, once the young and inexperienced are given authority specifically because they lack the context to resist – the rushed slide into full institutional collapse becomes nearly impossible to stop. Even physical coercion becomes digital:

[Czechoslovakian] President Hácha was in such a state of exhaustion that he more than once needed medical attention from the [Nazi] doctors, who, by the way, had been there ready for service since the beginning of the interview. […] At 4:30 in the morning, Dr. Hacha, in a state of total collapse, and kept going only by means of injections, resigned himself with death in his soul to give his signature [for Hitler to seize power and invade].

We need to name what we’re seeing. This isn’t normal administrative change. This isn’t partisan politics as usual. This is the deliberate installation of North Korean-style loyalty systems in American institutions, accelerated by technology to a speed we’ve never seen before in human history.

The question isn’t why Trump regularly praises authoritarian leaders including North Koreans and what he would do to be like them – history has answered such questions too many times to count. The question is whether enough people recognize it right here and right now to prevent America’s institutions from following North Korea’s path towards youth rushing to blow themselves up and take down democracy, just to prove their absolute loyalty to Musk and his assistant Trump.