Eighty years ago, in his essay "Politics And The English Language," the great George Orwell described how manipulated language advances ill-motivated political interests: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The Left long has used language to facilitate its control of society, and the American Left and its media mouthpieces have made language manipulation a political art form. This has cluttered the minds of far too many Americans who then habitually spew nonsense about politics and society.

Conservatives must stop surrendering the war of words to the Left. America is a center-right country and, with clearer thinking and more precise language, our politics can more consistently reflect this reality. Here are a few examples — among many — as to how we might accomplish this:

Conservatives recently have been drawn into a debate as to whether today’s hard left Democrats are merely “socialists” or are full-blown “communists." But why? Most Americans can’t articulate a difference between socialism and communism. And the distinction is fundamentally immaterial in any event. Like fascism and “progressivism,” socialism and communism both are variants of Marxism — the destructive ideology manufactured by a 19th-century reprobate who argued that society inherently pits interest groups against each other in........

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