VICTOR JOECKS: 2024 echoes ‘1984’

The book “1984” is a warning. Today’s leftists are using it as an instruction manual.

George Orwell’s classic novel is set in a dystopian world where Big Brother controls the population through information control and surveillance. See if any of this sounds familiar.

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

During her career, especially when running for president in 2020, Kamala Harris took a number of radical positions. She praised efforts to defund the police. She once insinuated ICE was comparable to the KKK and suggested the agency should be rebuilt “from scratch.” She wanted to decriminalize border crossings. She co-sponsored the Green New Deal. She supported reparations, a mandatory gun buyback program and eliminating private insurance. She was in favor of banning fracking and plastic straws.

Those policies play great in San Francisco but not in battleground states. Not to worry. She’s flip-flopped on at least five major policy positions since becoming the presumptive nominee. Instead of exposing this duplicity, the mainstream media are participating in it.

“Harris is calibrating her policy pitch for going to battle with Trump,” The Associated Press wrote about her reversals.

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump happened just more than three weeks ago. The iconic photo of a bloodied Trump defiantly standing and pumping his fist went viral. Outside of conservative sites and social media accounts, it’s barely been seen since. The national media have largely moved on, eager to fluff up Harris.

Fewer than two weeks ago, pro-Hamas rioters stormed Washington, D.C., to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to Congress. They tore down U.S. flags outside of Union Station and raised Palestinian flags. They burned an American flag, vandalized monuments and assaulted U.S. Park Police. Charges against some of the few people arrested have been dropped.

An easy prediction: You’ll hear less about these two stories than Jan. 6 and Trump’s out-of-context “bloodbath” remark. It’s as if events that would make Trump look heroic and hurt the left never happened.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten …”

You can see this happening in real time. On Wednesday, I googled “Trump rally.” The top result was “Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta.” The same thing happened to Elon Musk and many others.

Recently, Meta AI refused to acknowledge that Trump was almost assassinated. Meta is the parent company of Facebook. It inaccurately labeled a fist-pumping photo of a bloodied Trump as “altered.” When people used Google to search for information on Trump’s attempted assassination, its autofill wouldn’t suggest his name.

Both companies claim they weren’t trying to rig results. Those excuses would be more believable if almost all mistakes such as these didn’t go in the same direction.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

Illegal aliens are merely undocumented migrants. Men who claim to be women are women. People voting for Donald Trump are a threat to democracy. Ramming scissors into the skull of an 8-month old preborn baby and sucking her brains out is health care. Israel is the oppressor for defending itself against genocidal terrorists. Diversity requires ideological conformity.

2024 looks a lot like 1984, but you get to help write the ending. Choose wisely.

Contact Victor Joecks at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.