Mark Steyn has an entry, "Caving In," on his site, and the first word to leap off my monitor was "Orwellian." I am, with my focus on Orwell -- see, for instance, Orwell On Fact and Reality -- in excellent company. Steyn lays out the striking parallels between Orwell's Ministry of Truth (1984) and our own CNN, Facebook, Google and Twitter. They are the direct descendants of the Ministry.

Last month Steyn contributed to Hillsdale College's Imprimis series, and closes the piece with a meditation on language and its uses and abuses. A couple of paragraphs if you don't mind:

I’ll end by pointing out that the Left wins because it seizes language. Take the policy of letting people vote who are not U.S. citizens and shouldn’t be voting. The Left calls this policy “counting every vote.” Therefore someone who wants to make sure voters are citizens is opposed to “counting every vote.” If we don’t take back the language, we will lose the truth. Even on FOX News, I have noticed, news anchors now talk about “gender assigned at birth,” as if that’s something different from one’s biological sex. There may be 57 genders, but there are only two biological sexes.

Don’t surrender the language. Reclaim the language. It’s the first step to recovering our civilization.

Orwell would like to meet Steyn is my guess.

I submit that in his contribution yesterday (6/6/2021) to The Catholic Thing, "Those Dead Dogmas," Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap. did exactly that for the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. The article is a model of clear, positive exegesis. Check it out, especially if, like me, you are not a Catholic.