[American Thinker] Just a few generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written as a warning about how freedom is lost to the tyranny and intolerance of totalitarianism.Animal Farm and 1984 were particularly apt for teaching young people at a time when the shocking revelations about Nazism and Soviet communism that were coming out in the 1950s and 1960s were hard to digest. Most important, what these works revealed was that a defining feature of totalitarianism is mind control. First, propaganda warps and destroys people’s grasp on reality. Second, propaganda is designed to foster groupthink, conformity, and collectivism, which marginalizes critical and independent thinking.
Orwell described the scope of the totalitarian enterprise, noting in one section of 1984 that, "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
In 1984, Orwell wrote, "Who controls the past controls the future." Orwell’s introduction of concepts and terms such as "newspeak, doublethink and thought police" are what we now experience as political correctness, misinformation, and cancellation. The analogs of "thought police" in 1984 are now the enforcers of political correctness and closed political narratives.
As Orwell notes, "the whole aim of newspeak and doublethink is to narrow the range of thought." Political correctness has the same goal and that’s why its adherents are so intolerant -- seeking to silence, cancel, and delegitimize people with whom they disagree.
As it turns out, social media and information technology have great power to narrow the range of acceptable thought. Google, which controls 90% of Internet searches, utilizes an AI-driven search ranking that can manipulate not only consumer preferences but also election outcomes. According to Robert Epstein, a Harvard Ph.D. who has studied Google for more than decade, Google’s ability to manipulate its search ranking algorithms has the power to change the choices of 15% of undecided voters, more than enough to change many recent close election outcomes.
The COVID-19 lockdowns and the death of George Floyd in May 2020 created an environment of fear. And fear of going to the polls gave Democrat activists and lawyers the opportunity to change election laws and protocols in key swing states to expand the utilization of mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, and lengthening vote counting deadlines. These initiatives enabled paid activists to manipulate voter registration and the vote count through fraudulent ballots -- undertaken to deny Donald Trump a second term.
Simultaneously, a full-blown cultural revolution came to America. What had been going on at many college campuses for decades came to cities across the country. With activism that created division, fear, and people turning on each other, it was as if Mao’s Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution 1960s and 70s had come to America.