We Are All Living in George Orwell’s World Now

As Vice President JD Vance dressed down European officials over two days last month for criminalizing far-right speech, his outrage built to the unkindest cut of all. “This is Orwellian,” he trumpeted, “and everyone in Europe and the U.S. must reject this lunacy.”

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A day later, Orwell reappeared — this time wielded against President Trump after his truth-mangling suggestion that Ukraine was somehow responsible for Russia’s invasion. Even a fellow Republican, Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, couldn’t resist: “Putin started this war,” he posted on X, adding, “I don’t accept George Orwell’s doublethink.”

And as Trump unleashed a torrent of norm-puncturing executive orders — declaring newly forbidden words here, renaming a body of water there, making assertions that seemingly mean their polar opposite — so many references to “1984” have flooded the political conversation that it feels as if nearly half the electorate joined the same book group. After the White House took facts on a loop-de-loop, claiming that officials who revealed details of strike plans in Yemen on a Signal chat had not disclosed classified information, hundreds of people posted the same Orwell quote on social media: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” T-shirts with the same line are available on Etsy for as low as $16. So is one with a fake Orwell quip: “I literally wrote a book to warn you all about this.”

Orwell is the long-dead British writer whom no one will let rest in peace. He remains forever current, thanks to his novels “Animal Farm” and, especially, “1984,” easy-reading teenage favorites — one an animal fable that skewered Stalinist totalitarianism, the other a satire of an all-seeing, all-controlling ruling party epitomized by Big Brother. He was an inveterate democratic socialist, but his writing established him as a champion of fearlessly independent political thought and an enemy of political expression dominated by “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” as he wrote in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.”

Warnings of language as a weapon of manipulation, obfuscation and oppression run through Orwell’s work. It is a reason you could be excused for hearing real-life echoes of scenes from “1984” emanating from Washington. Trump’s airbrushing of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as a “beautiful day” and the pardoning of violent rioters who, he said, had “love in their hearts” recalls one of Orwell’s quotes: “The past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.” The bureaucrat who gleefully bragged that “we’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day” could have been deployed at Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon on the search-and-delete mission for references to race, but in fact worked at Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in “1984.”