Fox & Friends Guest Calls New Microsoft Word Inclusiveness Feature a ‘Mechanism of Mind Control’
Fox and Friends on Friday spent a good deal of time decrying a new Microsoft Word feature that checks text for non-inclusive phrasing and suggests corrections in much the way a spelling or grammar check work.
The feature detects words or phrases that might be considered non-inclusive or offensive, underlining the text with a purple line and offering suggested alternative phrasing.
The news was teased many times, and they covered it twice, once a bit jokingly among the hosts, and a second time in an interview of author and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who took the topic to a considerably more serious place.
“Microsoft Word has added a new inclusiveness feature that highlights phrases that might offend someone based on gender in their mind. Age, sexual orientation or ethnicity – goes down the list,” said Brian Kilmeade. Addressing the topic to Ramaswamy, Kilmeade added, “I can’t believe there’s 250 million Microsoft users, and now they’re going to be corrected if they’re not using politically correct terms.”
“Well, George Orwell said it well, Brian, the way to first control a society is to control its language, and he was right,” said Ramaswamy. “And the thing is, Microsoft is one of those companies that actually hasn’t been in the limelight on the social controversies on the woke orthodoxy. They’ve kept it behind the scenes. But now they’re effectively using the same tools that they use to correct for grammatical errors or spelling mistakes. It’s literally the same tools that now pop up to correct for political-correctness.”
Kilmeade offered some examples of corrections from the software, some of which the hosts had talked about in an earlier, lighter discussion on the show.
In the interview, after Kilmeade offered some of the same examples such as suggesting “dancer” in the place of showgirl, guest Ramaswamy had a … bigger reaction.
“This is a mechanism of mind control,” said the author. “It’s another example of the power that these tech titans have to control the entire mind of a society.”
“I think the fact that they’re using it to advance this political agenda is something that we’ve got to see through,” he added.
Ramaswamy said that, with regard to tech industry products, “you’ve frequently heard from people over the last couple of years: Great, if you don’t like the product, stop using it.'”
“Well, I think there hasn’t actually been realistic when you have network effects to these products, but at some point that dam is going to break and you’re actually going to see somebody take them up on that offer and create new high quality products in response. I don’t know. We haven’t seen that yet,” he said. “I think it’s going to happen in the next couple of years.”
There is another option aside from starting your own word processing software company, however.
As a Word user myself, I tried this out after seeing the interview. It took me a few minutes to find the place in the software you have to go to enable these optional features. Because they’re optional and off by default.
So rather than starting a new anti-Microsoft office suite in order to avoid being mind-controlled, you could always just, you know, not go search for and then enable these suggestions.
Watch the clips above, via Fox News.
