MSNBC’s horrendous little Bespectacled Neoliberal Person of Color™ Turtle Man, a kind of NPR superhero archetype, Ali Velshi, hosts a regular segment his producers have branded the “Banned Book Club” — the implication being that he’s some sort of subversive rebel treading where few dare and where the governing authorities forbid, despite the fact that he’s a talking head on literal de facto state media.
Related: CNN, MSNBC Go on 'Hiring Spree' of Former Biden Regime Officials Ahead of 2024
This week’s painfully strained segment revolved around George Orwell’s infamous dystopian novel, “1984.”
You’ll be shocked — scandalized — to learn that the modern reference point Velshi selects for “1984” is Donald Trump, likened to the Inner Party leadership and Big Brother.
It’s essentially just your standard “Orange Man Bad” tirade with a glossy veneer of literary analysis.
Talk about reality inversion! This is amazing stuff.
One could manage to literally fill volumes analyzing the ways in which the corporate state, not Donald Trump, channels the Inner Party on a daily basis, seemingly, as the aphorism goes, taking “1984” to be an instruction manual rather than a dystopian warning of unchecked government power.
The Two Minutes Hate, for instance, is the daily practice of inducing rabid, irrational hatred of a menacing political demon as a way to channel popular energy into the service of the state.
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.
-George Orwell, 1984
Comparing Trump to Hitler — the ultimate boogeyman, for obvious reasons, the fact that Mao and Stalin had much higher body counts notwithstanding — is a proverbial national pastime of the corporate state media at this point, a near-daily occurrence.
Via ABC News (emphasis added):
Former President Donald Trump defended anti-immigrant comments he made earlier this week that critics said echoed racist sentiments of Adolf Hitler -- saying Friday he knows nothing about the leader of Germany's Nazi Party and is "not a student of Hitler."
In a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt Friday, Trump was asked about comments he made at a recent rally in New Hampshire where he said illegal immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country."
"First of all, I know nothing about Hitler. I'm not a student of Hitler. I never read his works," Trump said to Hewitt. "They say that he said something about blood. He didn't say it the way I said it, either, by the way. It's a very different kind of a statement. What I'm saying when I talk about people coming into our country is they are destroying our country."
At a campaign stop in Iowa, he said he has not read "Mein Kampf," the manifesto written by Hitler that provided the philosophical basis for Nazi Germany and, ultimately, the murder of more than 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
Trump reiterated that he hadn't read the manifesto during his conversation with Hewitt, saying that he "never knew that Hitler said it."
Related: You’ll Never Guess to Whom Hillary Clinton Compared Trump (Actually, You Will)
In further irony, it was the corporate state media that pulled a page straight out of 1984 when it literally rewrote history, based on the flimsiest of evidence, to smear George Orwell himself with the brush of “misogyny” and “homophobia” with the strong implication that he was a wife-beater.
Via The Telegraph (emphasis added):
George Orwell was a “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” man who wrote women out of his story, according to a biographer of his wife.
Anna Funder said that Orwell was a brilliant writer but a complicated man whose personal life was at odds with the “decency” of his writing.
She has produced a biography of Eileen O’Shaugnessy, Orwell’s wife – highlighting the contributions O’Shaugnessy made to his work, including helping him to write Animal Farm.
According to Funder, the darkness that runs through 1984 is a reflection of Orwell’s soul..
“He desperately wants to be decent, and wanting to be decent is an honourable thing, a noble thing. But writing a book like 1984, which is violent, misogynist, sadistic, grim, paranoid: that comes out of a writer’s flaws.
“It takes someone who is those things to go deep inside themselves and pull that vision out.
“A decent, everyman underdog, the ordinary person that he might have wanted to be, would not have had those visions…
She added: “That’s a very curious thing that’s going on. He’s not ‘a man of his time’*, it’s not to be excused and thought of as ‘back in the day’.”
Mind you, if you have the stomach to peruse this little hitpiece on a long-dead literary icon who can’t defend himself, the entire libelous accusation of sexism is lobbed posthumously by the biographer of Orwell’s dead wife.
At no point in the screed is any concrete evidence of Orwell’s alleged misogyny — like a quote attributed to him or a contemporaneous account of some incident — relayed to the reader. We are simply meant to take the feminist biographer’s word for it, with no firsthand or even secondhand evidence.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
-George Orwell, 1984
Then we have the elephant in the room: the largely forgotten but certainly not vanquished, sure to return in a new veneer, “Disinformation Governance Board.”
Related: 'Disinformation Czar' Nina Jankowicz Emerges From Hiding to Celebrate Herself on Cable News
Via Homeland Security (emphasis added):
A new board at the Department of Homeland Security will focus on countering misinformation and disinformation, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told lawmakers today, with Wilson Center fellow Nina Jankowicz separately confirming that she would be executive director of the board.
During a hearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security to discuss the president’s fiscal year 2023 budget request, Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ohio) stated that disinformation is a “huge threat to our homeland” and said Mayorkas has “noted that it’s a concern of yours at the border with human smuggling organizations peddling misinformation to exploit vulnerable migrants for profit.” Citing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on tactics used in the 2016 election campaign, she added that “foreign adversaries attempt to destabilize our elections by targeting people of color with disinformation campaigns.”…
Mayorkas replied that DHS has “a number of different offices engaged in this critical effort” as part of their mission set including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which recently published infographics explaining information manipulation and how bad actors use social media bots as well as an update of the Disinformation Stops With You infographic set…
Nina Jankowicz, who studies the intersection of democracy and technology in Central and Eastern Europe as a Wilson Center global fellow, has advised the Ukrainian government on strategic communications, and is the author of How To Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict, confirmed on Twitter that she would be executive director of the board.
Now, anyone with an ounce of sense who knows the slightest thing about politics understands well that the U.S. government is the largest purveyor itself of misinformation in the world, making it the least worthy entity on the planet of the designation function of truth arbiter. The sadism and cynicism of the U.S. government running a “Disinformation Governance Board” is nearly beyond description.
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.
-George Orwell, 1984
