Opinion

One of the more curious shifts in modern culture is how often people blur the line between discomfort and oppression. Ordinary disagreements are described as violence. Criticism is labeled abuse. Offense becomes harm. Feeling challenged is treated as being unsafe. Increasingly, the language we once reserved for extreme suffering is used to describe everyday discomfort. That trend deserves more attention—not because real oppression doesn’t exist, but because it does. There is

Spend five minutes scrolling through political social media, and you’ll probably see someone called a fascist, a communist, a dictator, or even the next Hitler. Every election is framed as “the end of democracy.” Every controversial policy becomes “literal fascism.” Every political disagreement is treated like the beginning of a dictatorship. Political language online has become completely unserious. The problem isn’t that people criticize governments or political leaders—cr