miscellany

Do you know who invented the term “climate change”? Frank Luntz. The Republican “strategist.” Why? Because “global warming” was dangerous. Because it was true. Too frightening. Too real. Too self-explanatory, powerful, and strong. https://t.co/i06Q7qtq8s

— Bob Leonard (@BobOne4All) July 3, 2021

It was Orwell’s great lesson writ large. If you can disappear a thing in language, you can make people stop thinking it, and it simply … vanishes. The point of Orwellian doublespeak is to veil the truth with doubt, to filigree it with the shadows of complacency, to make the lie seem real. And the truth is that thanks to Luntz, the GOP, American media, and elites around the world following their lead, the dire threat of global warming soon enough became the anodyne sounding “climate change.” And who really worries about that? It makes you think you might be sitting on a tropical beach sipping a Mai Tai – not boiled alive by a killer heat dome.*