When the federal promoters of comprehensive new laws and regulations started running into trouble with their claims about global warming, they decided to give their pet project a new name. So, the claim known as “global warming,” resoundingly denied by increasing numbers of weather experts, became “climate change.” The switch is designed to confuse people into accepting a variety of drastic measures to combat a non-problem that will regulate how they live.
Burn coal to produce electricity? It has to stop. Outlaw the combustion engine that’s in your automobile? That’s what these environmental dictators want. Al Gore actually called for such a measure in his book Earth in the Balance. He urged effort toward “the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine.” Doing so would surely impact people who use automobiles. Would it affect the earth’s climate? Competent scientists say no. But now, the climate-change “experts” are frightening people with their new terminology, not with global warming.
In 1992, the United Nations issued the massive Agenda 21, a comprehensive plan to enact controls over all human activity. The John Birch Society exposed this incredibly draconian drive toward what has been termed “sustainable development,” and people began to oppose its implementation. So a new plan that isn’t really new but a rehash of Agenda 21 has emerged. Its name is “Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” Will changing the name of this totalitarian plan change what was intended? Of course not! But the general public is supposed to think the new program doesn’t aim at a loss of freedom, the actual goal.
President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry recently produced a treaty with Iran that is supposed to keep that country from producing a nuclear weapon. Any treaty, of course, requires a two-thirds approval by the U.S. Senate. Knowing that they couldn’t get that many senators to go along, they renamed it a “deal” that requires only a majority. But it’s still a treaty. Giving this dangerous proposal a new name is designed to get approval by Congress while it fools the American people.
Social Security has been renamed a “Federal Benefit Payment.” But it’s not a “federal benefit.” It’s money forcibly extracted from wages and employers and it’s owed to the people whose money was taken from them over their lifetime.
The enormous “Food Stamp” program is a form of welfare given to tens of millions, even to illegal immigrants. It has come under fire in recent years for its enormity and widespread fraud. So its name got changed as well and is now the “Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program,” SNAP for short. Will it still make millions of people dependent on government? Yes. Will the program still be replete with vote-buying fraud? Yes indeed.
Finally we turn to the granddaddy of all the name-changing and twisting of definitions: inflation. It is not and never has been rising prices, which is what the government and the mass media want everyone to believe. Instead, inflation is creation and use of more unbacked money that dilutes the value of existing money. Prices don’t go up. The value of money goes down. More of it is needed to buy anything. Those who believe inflation is rising prices likely blame the grocer, the gasoline supplier, or the landlord. In the process, the government and Federal Reserve that caused the dollar’s value to shrink get off without a worry.
Switching names and promoting false definitions has become common. The American people have to be told how they’re being conned. Then, they’ll no longer be victims of clever but sinister name changes and word games.
John F. McManus is president of The John Birch Society and publisher of The New American. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
