By Will Ferrell
September 25, 2026
Before March 1861, a great many prominent Northern merchants and newspapers (New York Times and Philadelphia Press for instance) had found an amicable divorce with the seceded States of the South acceptable and the thought of coercing them to remain in the Union against their will unacceptable.
But in March of 1861, the North put in place the Morrill Tariff with its prohibitively high average rate of tax on imports of 47% ! And the Confederacy exposed that it intended to be a virtually free trade zone. This constituted a disaster for the North (given its long and unpoliceable border with the South), meaning their tariff really couldn't be collected and the decades of major Southern subsidy to Northern manufacturing and fisheries was at an end.
Suddenly the same businessmen and newspapers changed their tune severely. The New York Times, which in January had argued for peace rather than military conquest and subjugation of the South, in March said, "At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate States".1
But how did the Northern thought leaders sell this to the average Northerner, who was not generally tuned into or concerned about the profitability of the big money interests any more than the average American is today ? It is noteworthy that they did it without any mention of slavery.
"Preservation of the Union" was converted into a sacred and spiritual good by Northern thought leaders. As Confederate nurse Kate Cummings wrote in her journal on May 9, 1862: "I have conversed with a number of the [Union] prisoners; they all express the same opinion as the others, that they dislike Lincoln and the abolitionists as much as we do, but they are fighting for the Union."2 Almost to a man, Yankee soldiers gave "preservation of the Union" as their reason for fighting. (Never mind that many of them were conscripted-to wit, were slaves-or were being paid more than they could otherwise earn as an immigrant just off the boat.)
That uniformity of attitude was possible because Lincoln eliminated freedom of the press and freedom of speech, arresting any who attempted to use their First Amendment rights to oppose his war and imprisoning them indefinitely without charging them with a crime. Lincoln assumed a military dictatorship to prosecute his war (which like Trump he refused to call a war).
A "union" generally implies something entered into voluntarily, like a marriage you enter on the presumption that divorce is possible. When the US conquered and subjugated the South, it was behaving as an empire. An accurate and honest description-"Preservation of the Empire"-wouldn't have worked, would it?
A more recent US war of choice also employed a squirrelly phrase to justify invasion. WMD. "Weapons of Mass Destruction." Purposefully, no one ever said Saddam Hussein had some very destructive weapons (a more natural phrasing), like Russia, China, Israel, North Korea, Great Britain, Pakistan, and India also had. Thus, few asked why the US-with a military budget roughly 300 times ! the military budget of Iraq-couldn't defend the US from Iraq in the same manner it defended the US from other countries with destructive weapons. Weapons of Mass Destruction somehow became a golden expression...WMD a full-blown argument with nothing else said. "WMD can't be allowed!"
In 1787, the Hamiltonian forces wanted a strong national government. Whereas those truer to the libertarian spirit of the American Revolution wanted a looser federation of autonomous states. But the nationalists dishonestly claimed the label "Federalists" and branded their federation-desiring opponents "Anti-federalists." Once again very strong control of the few newspapers by the pro-Constitution partisans helped their choice of illogical language prevail.
If Hamilton and his allies had called themselves the accurate name "Nationalists", it is very unlikely that the Constitution would have been ratified. A main thrust of Patriots fighting the Revolution was to rid themselves of a dominant, distant, centralizing power. The Articles of Confederation was an expression of that sentiment. Pauline Maier, Gordon Woods, and other historians judge that a direct vote of the population of the 13 states would have rejected the Constitution-even with the subterfuge of the proponents pretending to be for a federal system.
For many decades, dictionaries have defined "vaccine" as a preparation of killed or attenuated organisms administered to produce immunity to a particular disease. When people say they have immunity to something, they mean they will not get it. They mean it is not a problem for them.
The emergency-use mRNA injection was not that type of preparation. And it did not provide immunity. Yet it was called a "vaccine" by all those pushing it on us. We were told, even mandated, to get "immunized."
Officialdom has changed definitions now to suit their purposes. But they surely knew they were using the words "vaccine" and "immunize" dishonestly and successfully to sell $32 billion worth (in the US alone) of a warp-speed-developed experimental injection. This was consistent with their dishonest demonization of several helpful therapies like Ivermectin, the existence of which should have prevented the emergency-use authorization. Brobdingnagian fortunes were made.
Suffice it to say "get your Emergency-Use-Authorized experimental mRNA injection" would not have induced 80% of Americans to get the Fauci jab. The purposefully inaccurate words they used instead made all the difference.
The last example I'll site of malicious linguistic programming is one of the most dishonest and most complexly dishonest word tricks of all: "Gender-affirming care" so shapes the interpretation before any argument is made...that I cringe when I hear it, as one does, on the lips of relatively enlightened opponents of the atrocious "treatment."
To begin with, castrating young boys and chopping the breasts off young girls can in no way be construed as "care." This pretense of a medical term totally obscures irreversible and horrible consequences like infertility and loss of sexual function.
Rather than affirming, such "care" denies the meaningfulness of every concrete scientific fact about sex. It denies the physical sex of its victims, a complex set of details immensely more complicated than genitalia and breasts. It pretends to represent a medical consensus that does not exist. It pretends to wrap itself in kindness and morality ("affirming") as it describes actions that are quite likely to lead to an irrevocably damaged life and not infrequently to suicide. And finally, the word "gender" itself is strategically vague, unlike the honest and clearly defined word "sex."
These are but 5 examples of such deceit. They have been very effective with both the little educated and the very educated. They have been effective in very important matters. Can we raise our consciousness to immunize ourselves against those who control the vocabulary in this way?
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1 Chapter 4 of When in the Course of Human Events by Charles Adams, p. 61-70 (for the quote [p. 65], but also for the first 7 paragraphs generally), (Bowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000).
2 Kate: The Journal of A Confederate Nurse by Kate Cumming (Author), Richard Barksdale Harwell (Editor), (LSU Press, 1998).
Will Ferrell is the author of the historical novel The Secrets of Sterling Shearin: The Noblest Cause, set in the period 1788-1801. Also a dentist and enthusiastic gardener living in North Carolina.