In 2022, former President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board. The Board was formed to counter misinformation that might threaten national security.
It didn’t take long for people to compare the new board to the propagandistic Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s dystopian classic, “1984.” Biden scrapped the idea a few months later.
Published 76 years ago, “1984” still resonates with readers. Orwell dramatized concerns about government power and even today offers relevant criticisms of elected leaders. Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board was not an aberration; every U.S. president of the last 30 years has triggered comparisons to Big Brother.
In President Donald Trump’s first term, the White House contested media reports about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. When NBC’s Chuck Todd questioned the administration’s stance, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, referred to “alternative facts.” Critics compared this to Orwell’s “doublethink” — the act of believing two contradictory ideas at the same time.
In 2013, an activist sued the Obama administration over the National Security Agency’s surveillance program. The judge in the case characterized the government’s ability to collect and analyze every phone call in the country as “almost Orwellian.” Indeed, “1984” featured telescreens and hidden microphones so the Thought Police could monitor people.
The NSA’s powers were enabled in part by the USA Patriot Act of 2001, championed by former President George W. Bush after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Former Vice President Al Gore called for the Patriot Act to be repealed, comparing it to an Orwellian world.
Former President Bill Clinton famously tried to avoid political and legal accountability by redefining words during Ken Starr’s investigation: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” said Clinton. Orwell used similar verbal gymnastics with Newspeak, the politically reengineered language of Oceania, which decreed that “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.”
Orwell’s “1984” cautions readers to beware government efforts to shape a narrative. In the book, the protagonist Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth. Whenever the totalitarian apparatus known to the public as “Big Brother” finds an inconvenient fact — if an industry misses an official production forecast, or if there is a setback in the war — Smith’s job is to pull up old newspapers and edit them to reflect the current situation. Big Brother didn’t fail to predict this wheat shortfall; he expected it.
In Orwell’s world, “thought crimes” are the worst offense against Big Brother. The Thought Police seize people who are guilty of thought crimes, always arresting them at night, they then disappear forever.
Big Brother knows that to control language is to control thought. Smith’s friend Syme works on the Newspeak dictionary. The goal of this dictionary is not to catalog new words but to vaporize existing words.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” said Syme. “In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
Americans are not powerless against a slide toward totalitarianism. Our national character values an individual’s right to make choices. The rights of speech and assembly enable us to challenge government overreach. And the U.S. Constitution places limits on power through its checks and balances.
For readers who last read “1984” back in high school, consider reading it again. Orwell shows what can happen when the State seizes control of ideas, language and narrative. After publication, Orwell explained he wasn’t merely describing communism or tyranny. He was warning free people to guard against Big Brother.
Orwell was warning us.
