Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote, in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals,” that “he who controls the language controls the masses.”
Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in that quip channeling George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel “1984.”
“Newspeak,” the language of Orwell’s fictional single-political party superstate, was a tool devised for monitoring the people’s communications, prosecuting “thoughtcrimes,” and ultimately controlling and dictating the people’s very beliefs.
Conservatives have taken pleasure in poking fun at the modern left’s “Orwellian” tendencies—perhaps too much, actually, as overuse of the accusation has had the effect of limiting its potency.
But as the woke ideology metastasizes within the American left like the cancer it is, and as censors increasingly clamp down on anything sniffing of dissent to the regime’s orthodoxy, it is now clear that we are in a new age of Orwellianism.
This new age sees the regime and its enforcers pursuing the suffusion its orthodoxy at all costs, gaslighting dissenters to believe their own lies.
New data from the government showed that the American economy contracted for the second consecutive quarter, according to gross domestic product. That was, up until perhaps a week ago, the universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “recession.”
This was not a political issue. In fact, well-known liberal Democratic Party economists have often defined recession in exactly these terms.
Back in 2008, President Joe Biden’s current National Economic Council director, Brian Deese, stated: “Of course economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”
And in 2019, top Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein said that a “recession” is “defined as two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”
Democrats are singing a different tune. Karine Jean-Pierre, White House Press Secretary, stubbornly refused to admit that America is currently in an economic recession.
Deese apparently also disagrees with his old self of 2008: Following the release of the data evincing the second straight quarter of economic contraction, Deese stipulated that we are “certainly in a transition,” but also added that “virtually nothing signals that this period … is recessionary.”
The ruse works because it is transparent and obvious, almost to the point that it can be called comedy. As famed investor David Sacks tweeted: “A lot of people are wondering about the definition of recession. If a Republican is the president, a recession is defined as having two consecutive quarters with negative GDP growth. The definition is far more complicated and unknowable if a Democrat is president.”
Democrats similarly seem interested in changing the definition of “inflation,” which currently sits at four-decade highs and is disproportionately responsible for Biden’s dismal job approval ratings and Democrats’ unfavorable political outlook this fall.
Inflation is defined as an economic phenomenon in which there is too much money being chased by too few goods. To reduce inflation, you need to limit the money supply and/or increase production.
Just this week, around the same time as when the U.S. formally entered a recession, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., finally reached an agreement on a version of the White House’s long-sought after Build Back Better domestic initiative. The bill was renamed by Democrats to the Inflation Reduction Act, instead of Build Back Better.
The new bill includes nearly $400 billion in new government spending on energy- and climate-related projects. This fiscal boondoggle is exactly the opposite of limiting the money supply. It is the logical opposite of trying to put a fire out with a blowtorch.
Remarkably, it is the same ideologues who are eager to change the well-accepted definitions of “recession” and “inflation” who remain perplexed as to what exactly a “woman” is.
In March, then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, pointedly refused to define what a “woman” is. Her excuse was that she is “not a biologist.”
Related, in Matt Walsh’s excellent new documentary “What Is a Woman?,” the myriad “gender studies” professors and gender ideology-bewitched “doctors” interviewed by Walsh invariably define a “woman,” in circular fashion, as being “someone who identifies as a woman.”
Whether it is a Supreme Court justice herself or the vogue flatulence that now constitutes “gender studies” in the American academy, then, the left is incapable of defining what a “woman” is.
That confusion appears to be ubiquitous: Lia Thomas, the biological man who has been wreaking havoc in women’s collegiate swimming, was even nominated for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.
Alinsky would be proud of such an imperious enforcement of regime-approved orthodoxy; “he who controls the language controls the masses,” after all.
The left’s fundamental problem is that its haughtiness, fervor, and zeal for gaslighting us sane Americans is belied by its unpopularity. It is amazing that the left can speak and act this way, even though its most prominent avatar, Biden is as unpopular as he is currently.
Perhaps the impending November defeats at ballot box will make the left feel chastened. But don’t bet on it.
COPYRIGHT 2022. CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal offers a variety perspectives. This article is not meant to represent the views of The Heritage Foundation.
You have an opinion on this article? Send an email to let us know your opinion. letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Be sure to include the article’s URL, headline, and your name.
