You may doubt that what I am about to tell you is real. It sounds like a hoax. It’s not. I checked. It’s real. Illinois Democrats have passed a bill (HB 4409) that changes the term “offender,” as in criminal offender, you know, murderers and carjackers, to—wait for it—“justice-impacted individual.”
Maybe you aren’t surprised. Maybe you already know that this is just the latest move by Democrats to make it harder for the proles to talk with each other about the real world. Maybe, like me, you’ve read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” or Nineteen Eighty-Four and understand the function of newspeak.
It’s a term that has been floating about for awhile, as you can see above. To give you a flavor of what’s behind the term. the Minnesota social justice organization JIIVE (Justice Impacted Individuals Voting Effectively) claims that its “dynamic system allows the social welfare organization and political action committee political power to guide, educate, register, and effectively influence campaigns to regain equity that has been stolen through the slave trade system.” This is the attitude behind the term, which a brief Internet search indicates that the term has become ubiquitous in the leftwing penology jargon.
Here is a challenge for you. What is it that a “justice-impacted individual” does to cause him to be impacted by justice? Can somebody come up with a Orwellian euphemism for this? You know, the way the impact of doctors killing patients is lessoned in the popular mind by calling such events “therapeutic misadventures”? Or the way torture is euphemized as “enhanced interrogation” (“Verschärfte Vernehmung,” in the original German, a term coined in 1937 by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller).
The newspeak dictionary overflows with examples. But we can’t have justice-impacted individual “perpetrating crimes.” We need euphemisms for “perpetrating” and “crimes.” We also need to recode “crime victims.” What term should we use there to confuse people about what’s happening?
Some members of the Illinois house have pointed out that changing the term across government documents will cost taxpayers thousands of dollars. That’s a problem. But the much greater problem is the continual downplaying by Democrats of street crime—and who is overrepresented in the perpetration of street crime.
What is the goal here? That’s obvious, isn’t it? Changing language changes thought. Confusing language confuses thought. The goal is to create a specialized language that sanitizes the harm Democrat policies cause the citizens and make it harder for the people to be able to produce mutual knowledge around the intersection of progressive urban policy and street crime.
I don’t know if you heard Joe Biden’s speech at Morehead College the other day (I report on here: The Hunt Family and the Basket of Deplorables). He told the all-male graduates of the historically-black college that black men are dying in the streets. But he didn’t tell them who is killing them. This is called lying by omission. Biden’s goal was to make the graduates believe that white civilians and police officers are killing black men in the streets. In reality, the perpetrators are soon to be described as “justice-impacted individuals.”
freedom and reason 