Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote, in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, that “he who controls the language controls the masses.” Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in…
Language is linked with thought. We talk about the things we think about. Thought is private. Others can only guess what we are thinking until we reveal our thoughts by speaking them or writing them down. Oppressors control speech in…
American Spectator senior editor Daniel Flynn published an essay for the Acton Institute today to mark the 73rd anniversary of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Flynn dives into the history of the British writer’s final and arguably finest work, which continues…
President Joe Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was confirmed by the Senate Thursday, shocked many people with her recent confession to the Senate Judiciary Committee that she could not define the word “woman,” explaining that…
Winston Smith of Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwellian fame identified Newspeak as both false and absurd — until he didn’t. “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery”; he’d eventually affirm the entire lexicon. After imprisonment and the torture applied to him there, Winston’s…
There is an Irish song much beloved in Australia that tells of a young man in Ireland who steals some corn and is sentenced to a penal colony in Australia but keeps hope alive because he is in love and…
So much for starting out 2022 in the spirit of unity. The nation’s leading newspaper used the fresh beginning of New Year’s Day to once again insist that Donald Trump and his supporters are an existential threat to our beloved,…
When you turn criminals into victims, you get more criminals. The corollary to this is that when you turn police into criminals you get fewer police. The results of this Orwellian role reversal of doublethink are playing out across America,…
In his novel 1984, George Orwell described in horrifying detail what happens when freedom of speech is taken away by tyrannical forces: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted … [T]he process…