There is a process of consensual self-deception, which when carried to its limit, completely perverts the truth. There was a time when people who were wholly dependent on public moneys were referred to as “wards of the state”. Now they are described as “underprivileged”, when what is really meant is that they are unemployable. Entire underprivileged “families”, a term of convenience used to describe people living more or less under one roof, with no common father, perhaps not a common mother, have become packs of predators, only barely contained by a toothless “community police”, dozens of welfare and “protection” agencies and faceless armies of bureaucrats. So the new idea is to “intervene” by sticking them in cell blocks, oops, “core housing” until they are safe enough to be let out into “managed housing”, in other words trustee housing, for those familiar with other terminology.

Some bureaucracies not only do not know what they are talking about, they don’t want to know and would be glad if nobody else did. When George Orwell wrote 1984 it was explicitly modeled on the result of a mental merger between Stalin’s Communist Party and the BBC, in which Orwell worked and used as a template for the Ministry of Truth. He broadcast bulletins from the actual Room 101, one of the several radio studios in that facility. In the world of 1984 it is no longer necessary to make sense; it is only necessary to have won.

This kind of “rebranding” has been going on for a long time. But it seems to have picked up lately. And there is a certain blatant shamelessness in today’s barely concealed efforts that makes you think, “they’re going for the kill”; oops, I mean, “they’re doing it for the children.”