Benito Mussolini is now seen as a rather comic figure. Old newsreels show him standing on a balcony, hands on his hips, his chest puffed out as if inflated by an air-pump. His gigantic square jaw thrusts imperiously toward his near-hysterical people.

Like dictators everywhere, he knew that the yearning to live free was born in all of us. That’s why he sought to portray freedom as the gateway to decadence, inefficiency, and weakness. He even celebrated his own iron grip on the Italian people when, in 1934, he said, “We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty.”

Words are like box cars or 18-wheel trucks: they carry freight. That’s why brutes like Mussolini seek to fill them with their own meanings.

When Death Is Suddenly Healthy

It’s also why ambitious politicians refuse to discuss honestly things they find disconcerting but appealing to their voters. Take Hillary Clinton in her new book, What Happened.

“Reproductive health,” she writes, includes “pregnancy, fertility, birth control, miscarriage, abortion, labor, birth.” All part of the grand pageant of life, beauty and —

Hey, wait a minute: “Abortion” is “reproductive health?” No. Abortion is an optional surgical procedure that destroys the life of an unborn child. It’s about death, which, insofar as medical science is to be believed, is not considered healthy.

But that’s not all: Planned Parenthood endorsed her because she supports America’s largest abortion corporation. Why? Because, she says, it is “intimately connected to the day-to-day lives of Americans from all classes and backgrounds.”

That’s true. Planned Parenthood is an equal opportunity predator. It offers abortions to women in pearls and pumps and to their housekeepers, indiscriminately. Of the slightly under one million abortions performed in the U.S. in 2015, Planned Parenthood was responsible for 328,000 of them. It remains the undisputed champion of dehumanization and death.

And lest we forget, Hillary’s favorite “reproductive health” organization markets the organs of tiny babies and, the data suggest, targets minority populations.

So Much for “Choice”

Mrs. Clinton is dismayed by Senator Bernie Sanders’ suggestion that “Democrats should be open to nominating and supporting candidates who are anti-choice.” “Anti-choice?” George Orwell, please call Il Duce.

Men and women make a choice when they decide to have sexual intercourse. The lure of passion is no excuse for the surgeon slicing into a living person.

Yet she claims, “I’ve been working for a quarter century with Democrats and Republicans alike to reduce the number of abortions.”

Why? If abortion is about a woman’s volition and health, why seek to curtail it?

Then Mrs. Clinton says something truly breathtaking: “When personal views on abortion become public actions — votes on legislation or judges or funding that erode women’s rights — that’s a different matter.”

This is clarifying. Mrs. Clinton seems to equate personal convictions with neutral preference. Some people like vanilla ice cream, others strawberry. Some guys like Ford trucks, others like theirs “Ram tough.” And some women want to give birth, others don’t. So, let’s quit making such a big deal out of these non-essentials and go watch a movie. Right?

Wrong. On what basis does Mrs. Clinton oppose, say, child abuse? Could personal views have anything to do with it? Or is her opposition based merely on social convention or majority opinion as, apparently, her beliefs about marriage and homosexuality have been?

Mrs. Clinton cites dubious data that correlate the defunding of Planned Parenthood with increases in abortion. This is embarrassing. It assumes that Planned Parenthood is necessary for women to obtain chemical contraceptives. This from a woman who wants life-threatening abortifacients to be sold without prescriptions to adolescents.

The Core of a Sexual Religion

She concludes her exercise in dishonesty with this: “I say let a woman decide.”

Decide what exactly? Mrs. Clinton derides Republicans for being “anti-science.” Science demonstrates that the unborn child, from conception, is a human being, a person, with DNA distinct from her mother. In size and development only is she different than a baby at birth. She has innate value independent of her mother’s “choice,” just as someone missing a limb or who lacks intellectual capacity is different than a person with full mental and physical development. I trust Mrs. Clinton does not think killing such “burdens” on society as the mentally or physically disabled is a matter of choice. But if not, why not?

In the first years of the Soviet Union, a popular slogan was, “Two plus two equals five.” It was intended to encourage the Russians and other subject people to work so hard that the latest “Five-Year Plan” could be achieved in four years.

Responding to this absurd one-liner, Poland’s Solidarity Movement made a rallying cry of a very difference slogan: “Two plus two always equals four.” Put another way, while words can be twisted, reality can’t.

Hillary Clinton speaks of “reproductive health” and “choice” with a sense of sanctity. These words are, to her and to other strident feminists, the core of a sexual religion. A religion grounded in the insistence that people can do what they want, when they want, and accountability for their decisions is cruel, demeaning, and offensive. Two plus two will be made to equal five, no matter what.

Mrs. Clinton should quit pondering her electoral loss and instead ask herself what happens to the little life within the womb when the abortionist’s incisions begin to dismember it. Unlike a failed candidacy, that’s something truly worth considering.