According to reports, when Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, sales of George Orwell's "1984" spiked. It was a strange kind of comfort in seeing liberals suddenly rediscover a book that cautions against a powerful government that alters language, deletes inconvenient facts, and turns children against their parents. In my view, it is generally a good thing that more people are reading Orwell. The issue is that Democrats never seem to see themselves as the villains in the story.
They certainly didn't object when Barack Obama and Joe Biden pulled straight from Orwell's playbook while in office. In May 2016, his administration ordered that public school districts should allow students to use bathrooms that correspond with their ‘gender identity’, interpreting the term ‘sex’ in the 1972 Title IX statute to mean something different from the way it was meant when Congress originally passed it. The administration’s sampling changed the meaning of sex to include “gender identity,” in a way not all that different from what Napoleon did to the other animals in Animal Farm.
After Trump had reversed it, Biden brought back the reinterpretation of Title IX, once more allowing biological males to take part in girls’ sports and in girls’ locker rooms. He also repeated the 1984 storyline of altering words’ meaning to meet his party’s requirements. When the economy went into a recession in 2022, Biden’s administration literally redefined ‘recession’ so they could say “We’re actually not in a recession.” Even worse, private organizations such as Wikipedia promptly deleted and locked their articles on recessions to align with the new definition. Then came Biden’s own version of the Ministry of Truth: a Disinformation Governance Board intended to regulate ‘truth’, headed by the partisan Nina Jankowicz. Yes, it was scrapped due to public backlash, but he tried.
Related: Five Things Orwell Accurately Predicted About the American Left
With no Democrat in the White House now, Democrat governors have picked up Big Brother's baton.
One thing Orwell understood about the all-powerful state is that it can't tolerate the family or organized religion. In 1984, the state survives by turning children against their parents.
Massachusetts just proved that he was right.
In December 2024, Massachusetts child welfare authorities removed 15-year-old Sophie Kutzko from her devout Catholic parents' home after they refused, on religious grounds, to affirm a transgender identity that a counselor at her school initiated with their knowledge or consent. Sophie is 17 now, still a ward of the state under the Department of Children and Families. Joseph and Arlene Kutzko are suing to get her back.
"You start with school policies that refuse to inform parents when a child rejects their sex and claims another identity," said Vernadette Broyles, the attorney representing the Kutzkos. "That's part of a system that starts everything down the rabbit hole." She added there was "a direct school to DCF pipeline in this case as we have seen elsewhere."
A Massachusetts family says the state took custody of their teenage daughter after they refused to affirm her as a boy, citing their Catholic faith.
— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 14, 2026
The parents allege a school counselor socially transitioned their daughter without their knowledge, then reported them to the… pic.twitter.com/cpHWhMHTXb
This isn't confined to Massachusetts. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) signed two bills in 2021 letting minors hide abortions and transgender treatments from their own parents. And school districts across the country have quietly followed suit, concealing gender transitions from moms and dads who still, legally, have every right to know and reject.
When leftists started picking up Orwell’s 1984 after Trump took office, it wasn’t because they saw it as a warning; it was because they saw it as an instruction manual. Make no mistake about it: in blue states, there is a coordinated campaign to convince children that the state loves them more than their own families do. Orwell called it decades ago. The Democrat Party is out here proving him right.
