I like this one, I must admit. It’s punchier than “birthing people” yet less objectively goofy than (cringe) “Latinx.”

And it’s a nice allusion to socialism’s roots. If The People are victims of economic “violence” then logically they’re entitled to use violence to reshape the order that’s oppressing them.

It’s ironic that she chose student loans as the vehicle to launch this phrase, as the thought of Gen Z deadbeats being bailed out by Uncle Sam for their own poor choices after I was forced to pay off my own loans does fill me with violent impulses.

Let’s make it plain: student debt is policy violence.

We’ll keep fighting to relieve families across the country, to make sure our policies & budgets reflect their lived experiences & that we build this grassroots movement to #CancelStudentDebt together🧵

— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) December 17, 2021

“‘Policy violence’ makes me think of the bill from Schoolhouse Rock with like tattoos and a knife threatening college students,” said Joe Cunningham.

If anything is “violence” in this equation, isn’t it the steep tuition extorted from kids desperate to obtain a credential that’ll improve their earning potential? Pressley should huddle with the extremely woke administrators at American universities if she wants to end the “violence.”

Like “birthing people,” which also came to fame after a member of the Squad used it, the idea of deprivation and inequality as a form of “violence” isn’t new. “Discrimination against a workingman is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical needs is violence,” said Coretta Scott King in 1968 shortly after her husband was assassinated. The Poor People’s Campaign borrowed that logic a few years ago in describing legislation that adversely affects impoverished people as “policy violence.”

And now, three years later, “policy violence” somehow includes the freely contracted debts of middle-class kids who bit off more than they could chew in pursuing higher education, bypassing cheaper alternatives in the process. I wonder what the family income cut-off is to qualify as a victim of “policy violence” these days. $100,000?

If you’re going to stretch the definition of “violence” to demonize things you dislike, which leftists routinely do to Orwellian effect, you would think the touchstone for deeming a policy “violent” would be that it involves actual violence — like abortion, say — or that it at least really does land squarely on the poor by design. Using it in the context of a bougie hobbyhorse like student-debt forgiveness is a supreme example of the Squad exposing who their actual constituency is, namely, extremely woke white yuppies.

Incidentally, student debt isn’t the only thing that qualifies as “policy violence” for Pressley. Another:

Evictions are policy violence. Housing is a human right. I won’t stop fighting for your families.

To our #MA7 community, you have rights and resources available: https://t.co/Cqj3A7NSqZ

— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) August 31, 2021

Dan McLaughlin wants to add to the list too:

Things that are violence:

-Allowing people to borrow money to go to college.

Things that are not violence:

-Dismembering children in the womb
-Riots
-Abandoning poor people to the mercy of street criminals
-Surrendering Afghanistan to the Taliban https://t.co/DkMV98PLqA

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) December 17, 2021

The only thing that isn’t violence is … actual violence, which either isn’t happening or is “fiery but mostly peaceful.”

Via Judson Berger, I’ll leave you with this lesson from last year on What Isn’t Violence. It remains an open question to me whether Squad members like Pressley do more to advance their own pet causes than they do to enhance the GOP’s appeal.

"Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral" –@nhannahjones on CBSN pic.twitter.com/GGteXRFwAr

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 2, 2020