Americans live in an ocean of statist propaganda—of messages that, directly or indirectly, promote more power for government, especially the federal government. The propaganda takes the form of communications on health, the environment (including “sustainability”), government programs, and consumer issues. Usually, we don’t notice this propaganda any more than a fish notices the water in which it swims. But if you look, you encounter it everywhere: on billboards, in our newspapers, in radio “public service announcements,” and on the internet. I’ve even seen environmentalist propaganda on public buses and garbage trucks.

To a certain extent, we can document the phenomenon statistically. In a recent Townhall column, I mentioned the results of a Google Ngram I performed in 2021. Google Ngram uses the texts of published books to report the frequency of words and phrases over time. I searched it to find out how often 20th and 21st century American books used derogatory terms toward conservatives and how often they used comparable insults toward liberals.

The results of the Ngram showed that conservative people and positions were branded as “right-wing extremist” far more often than liberal people and positions were characterized as “left-wing extremist.” There were similar imbalances in the use of “far right” versus “far left,” and “ultra conservative” versus “ultra liberal.” These results are........

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