Most literate humans in the Western World are familiar with the story of the dystopian world of Winston Smith. The book is designed to make 'The Party' and its machinery of oppression look entirely infallible. A state like his could only exist with loud, constant, and obvious lies, much like the progressive left and their witting enablers in the media push on America today.
Orwell knew from his contemporary totalitarians, you had to seize control of truth itself. You had to redefine truth as "whatever we say it is." You had to falsify memories and photos and rewrite histories. No control could be total until you colonized people's heads too. Your people could be aware that all this was going on, so long as they kept that awareness to themselves and carried on (which is what doublethink is all about).
The upshot is, Winston Smith, like the soft skull followers of today's progressive ideology, are gaslit to hell and back. Winston is what passes for well-educated in his world; he still remembers the name "Shakespeare." Unlike the legions of snowflake, soft skull university educated of today, he's smart enough not to believe the obvious propaganda accepted by the populous, but it doesn't matter. The novel is about him being worn down, metaphorically and physically like today by those who will trumpet loyalty to their ideology and a media environment that actively enables their political lies. All the Winston Smiths of our world can see what the score really is, but doesn't seem to make any difference. But hey, at least we're all finally aware of the most important line in 1984, which is now also its most quote by the masters of projection, the progressive propagandist themselves: “The party [media] told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” That sums up the leftist infected media in a nutshell, wouldn't you say?
We are invited to consider whether we too are falling for The 'Party's' lies. The book-within-a-book that explains the shape of Winston's world turns out to be written by O'Brien, the master liar. All the in-universe truth the reader has to go on is Winston's word, and by the end — as he is tortured into genuinely seeing O'Brien hold up three fingers instead of two. If there is hope for America in the coming decade, it may come from uniting people under the banner of all that 1984 warns against — starting with the bare-faced lies that Orwell was most concerned about. Media lies that social media gatekeepers bolster, or choose indifference.
If we can't agree on basic facts of science and history, we're lost. The media promotes the left's rewriting of history. The so-called 'Party of Science' tells us race is a social construct and men are women, gender is fluid. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four," Winston wrote in his diary. "If that is granted, all else follows." By remaining skeptical about all we read, but still reading widely and clawing our way back to a world of truths that are as simple and as objective as math, we can prove that we finally learned Orwell's lesson. And we can make 1984 merely a masterpiece of a fictional world again.
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