2024 echoes ‘1984’

The book “1984” is supposed to be a warning. Today’s leftists are using it as an instruction manual.

George Orwell’s classic novel is set in a dystopian world where Big Brother controls the population through information control and surveillance. See if any of this sounds familiar.

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

During her career, especially when running for president in 2020, Kamala Harris took a number of radical positions. She praised efforts to defund the police. She once insinuated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was comparable to the KKK and suggested the agency should be rebuilt “from scratch.” She wanted to decriminalize border crossings. She co-sponsored the Green New Deal. She supported a mandatory gun buyback program, eliminating private insurance and reparations. She was in favor of banning fracking and plastic straws.

Those policies play great in San Francisco, but not in battleground states. Not to worry. She’s flip-flopped on at least five major policy positions since becoming the presumptive nominee.

Instead of exposing this duplicity, the national mainstream media is participating in it.

“Harris is calibrating her policy pitch for going to battle with Trump,” the Associated Press wrote about her reversals.

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump happened just over three weeks ago. The iconic photo of a bloodied Trump defiantly standing and pumping his fist went viral. Outside of conservative sites and social media accounts, it’s barely been seen since. The national media has largely moved on, eager to fluff up Harris.

Less than two weeks ago, pro-Hamas rioters stormed Washington, D.C., to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to Congress. They tore down U.S. flags outside of Union Station and raised Palestinian flags. They burned an American flag, vandalized monuments and assaulted park police. Charges against some of the few people arrested have already been dropped.

An easy prediction: You’ll hear less about these two stories than Trump’s out-of-context “bloodbath” remark and Jan. 6. It’s like events that would make Trump look heroic and hurt the left never happened.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten …”

You can see this happening in real time. Last week, I googled “Trump rally.” The top result was “Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta.” The same thing happened to Elon Musk and many others.

Recently, Meta AI refused to acknowledge that Trump was almost assassinated. Meta is the parent company of Facebook. It inaccurately labeled a fist-pumping photo of a bloodied Trump as “altered.” When people used Google to search for information on Trump’s attempted assassination, its auto-fill wouldn’t even suggest his name.

Both companies claim they weren’t trying to rig search results. Those excuses would be more believable if almost all mistakes like these didn’t go in the same direction.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Illegal aliens are merely undocumented migrants. Men who claim to be women are women. People voting for Donald Trump are a threat to democracy. Ramming scissors into the skull of an 8-month-old preborn baby and sucking her brains out is health care. Israel is the oppressor for defending itself against genocidal terrorists. Diversity requires ideological conformity.

2024 looks a lot like “1984,” but you get to help write the ending. Choose wisely.

***

Victor Joecks is a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Email him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or follow @victorjoecks on X. To find out more about Victor Joecks and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM