Don’t confuse a “white nationalist” with a “nationalist” who is white. Words are like weapons and must be used with care.

For this reason and others, journalists try to communicate with a set of guidelines detailed in The Associated Press stylebook. The manual is updated routinely and with major shifts in news topics. It is important the public know what media mean when using words and phrases that can take on meanings of their own.

What is largely a simple guide for determining capitalization and punctuation, some consider a political arbiter that favors widespread media biases. A minor style change controversy erupted shortly after Barack Obama’s election in November of 2008.

“Out of the blue, the Associated Press quietly issued a new style rule that took effect at 3 a.m. Nov. 14,” reported The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation. “As a result of this 3 a.m. call, the AP will sound a more formal tone when referring to the president of the United States for the first time in its news reports.”

AP style had long allowed first references such as “President Washington,” “President Reagan,” or “President Clinton.” Beginning with Obama, it would be “President First + Last.”

“Carping skeptics will glom on to this historic change as the latest example of the news media’s lovesick casting of Obama as an exceptional being,” the Signal observed.

The latest AP style alert came after the racist rally and terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Va.. The AP published an article by John Daniszewski, the AP’s vice president for standards, explaining proper use of “white nationalists,” “white supremacists,” and a few other terms that describe groups and hateful ideologies.

The AP’s definition of “racism” is “the broad term for asserting racial or ethnic discrimination or superiority based solely on race, ethnic or religious origins; it can be by any group against any other group.”

Here’s the guideline on “white nationalists” and “white supremacists”:

“White nationalists say that white people are a distinct nation deserving of protection, and therefore they demand special political, legal and territorial guarantees for whites. White supremacists believe that whites are superior and therefore should dominate other races. Depending on the group and the context, AP writers are free to determine which description most aptly applies to a group or an individual in a particular situation.”

The article did not highlight the important distinction between “white nationalists” and “nationalists” who are white.

President Donald Trump campaigned on a “nationalist” platform. The populist uprising that elected Trump includes nationalists who are white. This does not make them “white nationalists.”

While “white nationalists” have the creepy vision of a nation reserved for whites, “nationalists” may be white, black or of any ethnicity. They merely promote the “America first” policies Trump campaigned on.

A “nationalist” can advocate nationalism for any country, without advocating a special place or status based on demographic considerations other than citizenship or residency. Nationalists reside in Mexico, Nigeria and all other countries.

The Gazette will strive to use labels that accurately describe any group’s self-described cause or ideology.

Misuse of labels and other words, no matter how slight, can insidiously distort reality to the point of causing grave consequences. George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” described how a totalitarian government controlled thoughts of the masses by redefining words. Through redefinition, Orwell’s pretend government ruined the concept of “equality.”

We don’t have to look at fiction to respect the importance of agreeing on definitions.

“The power to redefine language becomes the power to mold a twisted new reality,” explained then-Stanford scholar Cameron Van de Graff in a 2014 article published by the Hoover Institute. “Hitler, by co-opting the languages of religion and science, stole their credibility and lent his own words a veneer of authority. In employing such tactics, Nazism didn’t merely attempt to distract the populace, confuse the issue, or obfuscate the truth; rather, Hitler and his propaganda apparatus succeeded in redefining the truth, recasting the issue, and reeducating the people.”

We should all avoid the temptation to carelessly cast political opponents as monsters with labels that don’t fit. Calling the political blowhard next door a “Nazi” or “fascist” only dilutes terms that describe a regime that killed more than 6 million Jews.

If everything is hate, nothing is hate. Let’s be careful with words, so we don’t confuse and lead each other in dangerous and fictional directions.