Are we in a recession? Yes. Prior to recently every definition of a recession defined it as two quarters of negative economic growth. The economy is in that situation. No doubt about it. The numbers tell the story.

But a funny thing happened to the definition after the Biden administration denied, despite the data, that we were in a recession. Suddenly Wikipedia, Facebook, Polifact, and other online woke sources began defining recession in a very flexible way so to keep in line with the administration’s spin. They utilized the new Biden Dictionary as their only source.

How very Orwellian. How very Stalinesque. So let’s get this straight. The president of the United States and his administration are consciously employing techniques pioneered by perhaps the most evil regime in the history of mankind, Stalin’s Russia.

Well, as any of you who read this column know, I am no screeching meemie conspiracy theorist. I prefer facts rather than confirmation bias. However, the facts remain. In this regard, Biden is channeling Stalin. And it’s just not concerning the economy.

Assault weapons? Really. Isn’t any weapon capable of assault? So the spin uses a clearly redundant phrase to frighten people who don’t know any better. It’s semantically herding the sheep.

Abortion is health care? For who? Not for the child. Can we define the taking of a human life as health care? If so, the aforementioned Soviet despot was Marcus Welby writ exceedingly large.

Are people like Lia Thomas women? Of course not. They are men who are scammers or who are seriously mentally ill. But the Biden administration and their political, media, and cultural hangers on can say with a straight face that Thomas is a woman, contrary to obvious facts.

I have some insight into this. For two decades I was a political consultant and I also played with the language to some success. Though, I was in politics, not government. There is a difference. Politics is just marketing and only that. Government is the application of politics with, one would hope, a sense of right and wrong, duty and rights, order and liberty. Politics affects government. Government affects lives.

To prove the marketing point, I would ask clients who did not understand the power of language control to look out the window and tell me what color the sky was. They would generally answer blue. And I would tell them to look again. They would repeat it was blue. I told them it was bright green.

They would disagree. I repeated it was green. Then they gave me a quizzical look until I explained that in politics the sky was literally any color I said it was as long as I could convince a majority of the people of my position. Yes, actually green. Ironically counterfactual? Absolutely. And that’s what Biden is doing, a tried and tested political move to change the nature of the definition and thus the debate. It’s merely a semantic pivot.

Remember the Orwell line in 1984, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” We can now add “Recession is prosperity. Infanticide is healthcare. Men are women.” The additions, and no doubt many more to come, are straight out of the Biden Dictionary. Noah Webster is not happy.