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War of the Words [1]
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Date: 2025-04-14
You guessed it, this post is yet another in my series entitled, “Words Matter.” I’ve often thought to myself that George Orwell would have been much better served with a title such as this instead of using the date 1984 (which is 1948 flipped sort of, ‘48 is when he wrote it). If you go back and read that classic again, you’ll see that’s what he’s actually talking about — e.g. how to reengineer reality to facilitate managing an authoritarian regime using the language itself.
In the book, Orwell illustrates how this is very much a bottom up approach, controlling the dictionary (vocabulary), adjusting history and culture and of course using all of that to control behavior. When he wrote it, the book was meant to a) document how Stalin had done essentially the same thing in Russia and b) warn us that it could easily be repeated elsewhere, including in Western societies (like England). Today’s generation of Faux Populist leaders and activists are instead using the book more like a playbook unfortunately — and the crazy part is how few people seem to recognize that.
1984 also introduced the idea of the Surveillance Society in a way that hadn’t yet been achieved in his day — it fits within the larger context of control of words and thus thoughts (providing the feedback mechanism). But in order to know what you’re looking for — you must first define and redefine the rules and their associated lexicon.
How does this explain what’s happening now? Let’s take a look at just some of what the Trump 2.0 Regime is trying to do within their very ambitious scope:
They are redefining key themes and terms — for example changing the notion of fairness and justice on its head in order to support government-sanctioned oppression by characterizing anything that benefits ordinary people as “woke” and then vilifying it.
They are attacking education at all levels: a) defunding local public schools across half of the nation, b) eliminating the Department of Education and c) taking funds away from perceived bastions of free thought (major universities).
They are attacking all forms of media that they deem to be critical or unbiased; a) blocking them at the WH and in other government contexts, b) suing media outlets that are critical or even fair, c) changing the rules for how the mediums are managed and accessed (at the FCC).
They are attacking Free Speech by tossing out foreign students with valid visas who spoke out in protests, coercing companies and law firms into giving them free services and advocating on their behalf.
They are attacking Science and other knowledge structures because they represent information that cannot be totally controlled to suit the purposes of the state.
While we may have referred to some of this previously as Culture Wars, this goes well beyond that — it is now a society-wide attempt at transformation. This movement is a deliberate attempt to remake the world into the twisted image that has been the hallmark of most Faux Populist Far Right movements over the past century; a world devoid fairness and driven by cruelty. Each part of their reality, the one that they wish to impose on the rest of us, is based upon eroding our current worldview, word by word, concept by concept. Their view does not depend upon or care for evidence — all of their truths are rooted a priori in the language itself, leaving no room for dissent.
This is the war that we’ve been fighting for decades. It was a guerilla movement on their part for a long time and then it came out of the shadows about 10 years ago and is an open conflict at the highest levels of global politics. In order to win this war, the first step is to recognize that it’s occurring. Anyone who had doubts before the inauguration of Trump 2.0 that this was happening, must now begin to see that any remaining pretense has been completely stripped away.
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