Carol Off wants to take the word ‘freedom’ back from the far right

When former CBC host Carol Off started writing a book calling on people to reclaim the word “freedom” from the far right, she thought she would be dismissed as naive.

Then Kamala Harris began her run to become U.S. president.

“The first thing out of her [Harris’s] mouth, practically, was freedom,” Off told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe this. This is exactly what I, in my dreams, was hoping might happen.'”

Off’s book, At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage (Penguin Random House Canada), which is available starting Tuesday, traces what she calls the manipulation and weaponization of language through the lens of six words: Freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice and taxes.

Off’s interview with Köksal was her first time back in the As It Happens radio studio in Toronto since she stepped down as the program’s host in 2022. 

Over her 16 years in the host’s chair, Off interviewed more than 25,000 people from across Canada and around the world. But during her last few years, she said, she began to notice a shift in those conversations. 

“People were so angry with each other,” she recalled. “Now this rancour is so familiar, we don’t even even talk about it. It’s just  background noise. But at the time, it was just growing.

“I also became aware that people were giving up on some really important ideas of civil society.”

Democracy, she said, “became a dirty word.” Taxes, which she said once represented our commitment to society and each other, became about politicians “stealing” our money. Woke, a word with roots in Black liberation, was co-opted as a term of derision and used as “a vector to bring odious ideas into the public space.”

And freedom — a word she once associated with liberation from the Nazis, or the rise of the civil rights movement  — “became a word about doing whatever you want.”

She heard the word on the lips of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, seeking to stop Joe Biden’s certification as president and keep his predecessor, Donald Trump, in power. 

She saw it on display again at Freedom Convoy rallies in 2022, when thousands of demonstrators occupied downtown Ottawa to protest COVID-19 restrictions.

“Freedom was [once] the clarion call of people who were oppressed, people who didn’t have what they needed,” Off said.

“We need to reclaim this word … from those who were giving out this message of anger and rage, and saying, ‘We don’t have to care about others anymore. We don’t need to wear a mask. We don’t need to do things for others,’ and then wrapping that in a flag, a Canadian flag, and calling it patriotism.”

Democrats go patriotic 

The Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Harris campaign in particular seem to have similar ideas. 

Vice-President Harris and her running mate for VP, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have repeatedly used the word freedom during their rallies, and Harris enters and leaves the stage to Beyoncé’s 2016 anthem, Freedom, featuring Kendrick Lamar.

Freedom was repeatedly invoked by speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago earlier this month, when delegates brandished signs with the word printed against a backdrop of Democrat blue.

It was just one element of what commentators have noted was a convention drenched in the trappings of American patriotism, from the red, white and blue backdrops, to crowds shouting “U.S.A.”

“It is remarkable to me that the Democratic Party gets to be the party of beer, and football and freedom,” David Karpf, a strategic communication professor at George Washington University, told CBC.

That kind of patriotic rhetoric, Karpf said, has largely been the domain of Republicans since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the war in Iraq that followed, which many on the left, including some members of the Democratic Party, opposed.

“Democrats had to work to demonstrate their patriotism because it was not presumed,” he said. “Now they’re able to lay claim to those terms in a way that seems natural and really works because of how far the Republicans have drifted and how extreme they got on policy.”

But the meaning of the word, he said, changes depending on who’s using it. 

“Words like freedom are vessels that we collectively imbued with meaning, and the meaning that we collectively imbue them with changes over time.” 

While freedom has been used by Republicans to mean freedom from taxes, vaccines and masks, or even as a rallying cry for war, Karpf said the Harris campaign most often uses it to mean reproductive and medical freedom in the face of a wave of Republican anti-abortion legislation following the fall of Roe v. Wade.

Off also traces the changing rhetoric around abortion access and reproductive rights, and women’s rights more broadly, in her chapter about “choice.”

“A defining thing in my development as a woman, and my development as a person, was to see what it was to come from what my mother had, so limited in her choices, and to be where I am now, where I’m with women who have so many choices, and now to see those choices threatened,” she said.

While the U.S. election is far from over, and too close to call, Off said the Harris campaign has made her feel less alone. 

“The world was waiting for this to happen,” Off said. “It couldn’t have been so spontaneous, so instantly grabbed by so many millions of people, if it wasn’t … that deep down, so many people wanted a Kamala Harris to walk on stage and say what she’s been saying.”

‘Own these words’

Off argues that bad actors deliberately manipulate words to keep people angry. That rage, she said, is then amplified by social media companies that profit from outrage.

And without a shared language, it becomes more difficult to talk to each other and bridge those divides, Off said.

She said her book is a rallying cry for people to engage in good-faith dialogue, drown out the loudest voices from the fringes, and, most importantly, reclaim the language that, she argues, defines a society in which people look out for one another.  

“We need to be extremely conscious of the language that’s around us, how words are being used, how they’re being used against us, how they’re being weaponized,” Off said.

“So listen to how woke is being used, listen to how democracy is being used, listen to how freedom is being used — and own these words, because they’re your words. Don’t let them have them.”