If there were any doubt about how thoroughly the Trump administration has drunk from the cup of Orwellian doublethink, it should have been dispelled when information itself was declared a “hostile and political act” on Tuesday.
In response to a plan at Amazon to display the additional tariff costs for consumer items, Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, blasted the concept, apparently reflecting the president’s own feelings and implying that the government would take punitive steps. Ms. Leavitt went further still, showing a photograph of Amazon leader Jeff Bezos and declaring that the company had joined forces with a “Chinese propaganda arm.”
Among the brilliance contained in George Orwell’s most-famous novel, “1984,” the concept of doublethink predicted this moment perfectly. According to Winston Smith, the protagonist, doublethink is “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word — doublethink — involved the use of doublethink.”
The above could serve as a series of checkboxes for an authoritarian regime. One that stands out in terms of present events is to reject morality while laying claim to it, as in the case of people deported without trial or separated from their children by immigration officials. The degree of racist hate, itself immoral, is matched by the administration’s public claims of righteousness. Doublethink is making a weapon of facts so that everyone is potentially guilty, instilling fear and, therefore, obedience. For example, recession is success in Trumpworld.
This cruelty has an objective: to anger the opposition into uprisings. Consider that Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Miller, an architect behind the administration’s most-repressive postures, warned that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker might be inciting violence in calling for mass protests against the administration’s overreach. We now hear a previously unspoken fear that the administration is trying to antagonize its opponents to the point of violence to declare martial law and suspend constitutional protections. This could extend to declaring the 2026 elections null and void in places it does not like the outcomes. By declaring citizens to be potential criminals, authorities make people afraid. Hinted-at investigations can ruin health, mental well-being, and cost money. An all-seeing administration, thanks to Elon Musk’s data mining of protected federal databases, can make our lives miserable without deporting us — and they do not have to go after that many people to instill fear.
So why write about such things in a local newspaper? We believe that we have a responsibility to be a small antidote to the so-called news some of our readers may receive from less objective sources. We cannot allow information to be criminalized without speaking up, as tiny as our voice may be.