Like a flag, it’s a symbol and not th thing. Yet wars are fought over symbols like flags and boarders that are not real.
Opposites arise together. There would be no up without a down, no good without bad, they define each other.

Conservatives use words as weapons. This was apparent to us older folks as the twisty maze of definitions snots like Bill Buckley used to color words like freedom, liberty and so on.

The color was the goal. To make his/their rich privileged white boy meaning the accepted one.

Since those days, republicans have been taken over by a cult mentality. Words are used only for effect. To objectivize "others" not in the cult, to build cult cohesion which is commonly built around a monoculture and racism, the engine that powers fascist wannabes, and to make targeting others fun and easy.

Since the words bear no relation to actual meaning, they vary, as in the cult's outrage du jour, and statements often contradict themselves, as they target others and "justify" their own sins and crimes.

This happens with projection, where "every accusation is a confession" so the meaning changes to suit the cult's unity.

A cult generally has no purpose but to cohere the cult by legitimizing delicious sins and crimes normally off-limits to ordinary "schmucks", to benefit the leader, and always at the expense of the zombified cult members.

I ran into the codewords/dog whistles of "woke", "agenda" and "playbook" on a thread in the tech-bro Hacker News forum. And threw them right back.

The GOP cult uses words only to harm others, with no regard to meaning in any sense. "It means what I want it to mean".

As with all cults, the hard core in resistant to logic, because their only logic is cult logic.

As with advertising, the jingle is attractive, until you find that the product is eating you. More so every day.

Reality is all gray.

How about the German Democratic Republic?

Ideology twists words. You know the absolute truth and others don't accept it? Convince them--and if that doesn't work, before pummeling their bodies into compliance pummel their thinking into compliance.

Always has, always will. That's how self-righteous power works. It's why in a properly structured democracy, speech and press are free to undermine it and power centers aren't given enough authority to impose the definitional shifts. What screws the system is when different parts of a decentralized system team up to be de-facto centralized. Then it's shifting towards authoritarian in function but democratic in form (and there are countries that are like that, with the de-facto centralization imposed from above, but in a few cases the centralization happened from the side).

Lenin was a master of shifting definitions. So was Stalin. Hitler was a master of the pernicious practice. Mussolini, not bad. Castro had his stellar moments, Chavez was a piker, but then again he was a low-ranking formerly failed coupster so expectations can't be high.

Take "democracy." It reeks of goodness. So it's warped every chance an ideology can get. Or we make sure to "frame" things properly (odd, how "framing" a person is a bad thing ... Then again, Sir Isaac did it late in life).

Who can forget the "German Democratic Republic"? That bastion of RW fascism. Ruled by a Communist Party whose goal was to achieve utopian communism via building socialism. But, again, they went on and on about how they were "deepening democracy" and "perfecting democracy." Such speech sets my teeth on edge.

One doesn't have to learn from history--it's a free country, after all, pass the test and get your piece of paper--but one really shouldn't assume nobody else has.