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Monday
George Orwell’s 1984 continue to apply only too well to the Trump administration. Linda McMahon, former professional wrestling promoter and now Secretary of the Education Department, offered up this little nugget: “Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish…”
And then there’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. substituting his own crazed medical theories for peer reviewed scientific inquiry.
The systematic attacks on education, science, and fact-finding in general indicate the wholesale adoption of one of Big Brother’s basic dictums:
Ignorance is strength.
Even more than “Freedom is slavery” and “War is peace,” this declaration goes to the heart of Trumpism.
At one point in his journal Winston Smith notes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Big Brother’s response is to torture Winston until he sees the world as Big Brother wants him to see it. Holding up four fingers, he refuses to stop the electric shocks until Winston can no longer see reality as it is. Think of those shocks as a metaphor for what we are currently undergoing:
Perhaps the needle was eighty–ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.
‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six–in all honesty I don’t know.’
‘Better,’ said O’Brien.
Trump’s repeated blows against truth at all levels are intended to achieve such capitulation. Those who are succumbing, however, have less of an excuse than Winston.
