Former Trump administration Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was sworn in as Governor of Arkansas this week. Like so many other governors and presidents, she immediately signed a flurry of seven executive orders. Some were rather routine directives about the state budget and spending, but one of the orders is attracting a lot of attention from the woke crowd. Sanders banned the use of the term “Latinx” from official use in state government documents and publications. This is believed to be one of the first times that an executive order has been used to ban a word. That’s assuming, of course, that you think “Latinx” is actually a word and not some made-up leftist nonsense. (NBC News)

Within hours of being sworn in as the new governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order Tuesday banning the term “Latinx” from official use in the state government.

It is one of the first, if not the first, executive order of its kind, Tabitha Bonilla, an associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, told NBC News.

It was one of seven orders signed by Sanders, a Republican, right after taking the oath. The other ones focused on prohibiting Arkansas schools from teaching critical race theory, budgeting and spending as well as other government affairs.

In order to be consistent, we should question Sanders’ choice to “govern via executive order,” given how much that power is regularly abused by other governors and presidents. (Joe Biden most famously in recent memory.) But with that said, the sad reality is that executives from both parties do it, so when a given office flips back to the other party’s control, the new official probably feels pressured to “undo” what their predecessor did.

That doesn’t seem to be the case in Arkansas, however. I couldn’t find any previous orders or laws mandating the use of “Latinx” in official state communications. It’s also not clear whether the word even shows up in any current documents. Sanders ordered all state offices, departments and agencies to submit written reviews of their own documents to determine if the word shows up and change it to either Latino, Latina, or Hispanic.

I’m not pointing this out because I’m some sort of fan of Latinx. Actually, I find it both idiotic and offensive to Hispanic people. First of all, every survey we’ve seen on the subject shows that the vast majority of Hispanic voters do not care for or use the phrase, as Sanders pointed out in her order. It’s yet another woke effort to blur the lines between the genders.

The word shouldn’t sell well with most Hispanic citizens, either. Spanish is a language that is intrinsically gender-oriented in nature. Words describing human beings are broken down along those lines, with feminine words ending in an a and masculine words ending in an o. And it’s not just words applying to human beings. Animals and even inanimate objects are gendered. (La cocina, meaning “the kitchen,” is a feminine word.) Attempting to “trans” the words Latina and Latino is a strike against fundamental Latin culture.

And yet, the idea of banning words still flies in the face of most accepted conservative doctrine, even if the words are rather dumb. It borders on tampering with free speech, and we expect conservatives to not follow liberals down that path. Sanders could have simply told the various state offices to conduct a review and provided guidelines on changing the language if the word shows up anywhere. This really didn’t need to be an executive order.