How the Media and Left control discussions--by re-defining words, and banning terms

Novelists George Orwell and Ayn Rand recognized that when totalitarians re-define well-known terms, and use the force of government to ban the use of other terms, it changes the way most people think.

Leftists--whether ruling in government or trying to wreck a society--are masters of vocabulary changes to push their agendas.  And nowhere is this more clear than the fight over illegal immigration.  (Note the term "illegal.")

Take the longstanding term "illegal alien." In the past it's been used to describe a foreigner who crossed the US border illegally.  Straightforward.  Until recent it was politically neutral, exact, and descriptive--a term used by both the Supreme Court and Internal Revenue Service.

But open-borders advocates screamed that the term must no longer be used, arguing "People are not illegal."  It was grade-school-level "logic" that appealed to supporters and the young.

What followed was a slow Orwellian devolution.  First the media changed their style-books to agree with open-borders pushers that the term "illegal alien" was no longer allowed.  Instead the style-books demanded that it be replaced with "undocumented alien," implying that the person in question simply didn't have his legal documents with him or her.  Much more soothing.

But the term "alien" still implied the person wasn't a US citizen.  Advocates of open borders worried that this might invite extra scrutiny of the person, so the style-books quickly changed terms again, this time to "undocumented immigrant." 

The Obama administration actually issued an order directing all federal agencies to stop using the term "illegal alien."

Simultaneously the left--indistinguishable from the Mainstream Media--began deliberately, cunningly, falsely implying that conservatives opposed "immigrants," rather than *illegal* immigration.  The mainstream Media continues this deliberate conflation to this day, most often in the Media's description of Trump desire to enforce U.S. borders as being "anti-immigrant."

The same tactic of the Left and Media changing what they push as *correct* terminology is seen in the term both use for cities that deliberately encourage the violation of U.S. immigration law.  These are outlaw cities and states, but the Media calls 'em "sanctuary cities."

These are cities and states that allow advocates of illegal immigration to ignore federal law by encouraging illegal aliens to live there.

The term is designed to invoke sympathy for "victims."  Of course the Left would never apply the same logic to, say, a corporate CEO who deliberately chose to violate one of the thousands of environmental rules, but then we've come to expect contradictory positions from them.

A more honest description of sanctuary cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles would be "secessionist cities." They are, after all, asserting a states-rights position, arguing as did the Confederate states that the federal government and our Constitution ultimately have no power over their decisions.  Of course the Left would loudly reject that argument if a state or city wanted to violate, say, the Clean Air Act.

Supporters of "sanctuary states" would have a fit if some other state were to announce that it would no longer obey or enforce federal environmental laws within its borders, but ignore the same logic when it advances their vital agenda.