Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia...

Orwellian Doublethink hits new highs

At the 2024 Brownstone Institute Conference, which Chris and I attended last weekend in Pittsburgh, one of the speakers used a word I’d never heard before, but which made a lasting impression on me: Memoricide: The deliberate destruction and distortion of memories. The deliberate alteration of the past. He was describing the machinations of mainstream media and government propaganda: How they tell you you’re crazy for believing something everyone knew was true until 5 minutes ago. “Nobody ever thought that,” they imply. You’re crazy. The past you think you remember is not the real past. Ignore the evidence of your own eyes and ears.

All that stuff you think you saw? It never really happened…

The scary thing, as all good psychologists know, is that memories are malleable and vulnerable to the power of suggestion. They can be shaped and altered and distorted. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. We’ve all known for years that Joe Biden is cognitively impaired—and we most assuredly did not call you a right-wing conspiracy theorist for saying anything other than “Joe Biden is sharp as a tack” until the day before we decided to change the narrative and boot him out. (Double click on this short video if you want your media-consuming mind blown):

Sometimes, the machine literally alters the historical record:

The president calls half the country “garbage” and down the memory hole it goes!

More frequently, though, the process is quite subtle. The narrative simply flips. The previous narrative is never mentioned. It’s as if it never existed. Google’s algorithms downgrade any mention of it to page fifty-seven of your search results—and really, who has the time to scroll beyond page three? Wikipedia is quietly edited by an army of Soros-funded trolls. You can try to edit back to reality as you remember it, but there are more of them and they’re better-funded and they’re relentless. So you start to doubt your own memory. Or you sort of remember, but simultaneously believe the thing that contradicts your memory. This is what Orwell called “Doublethink:”

“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

―George Orwell, 1984

In the recently completed US election cycle, much of the Doublethink revolved around undermining any narrative that might make Donald Trump look reasonable.

This was NBC News when it looked like the COVID vaccine would be released before the 2020 election and it would be Trump’s vaccine:

This was NBC News a few months later, after it became Biden’s vaccine. All references to a “rushed” and “unsafe” vaccine had been flushed down the memory hole. The vaccine was obviously “safe and effective” and had always been so. To say otherwise was a far-right conspiracy theory or “misinformation.”

Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia and there has never been any doubt that the vaccines are safe and effective.

The wonderful thing about an uncensored internet, though, is that Doublethink can be called out in real time. I wonder how much of the “red wave” 2024 US election story can be explained by posts like the ones below—most of which, not coincidentally, come from Elon Musk’s X:

Time magazine before and after ultra-processed foods became a “far-right talking point.” The 2024 article came out within a few days of RFK Jr. endorsing Donald Trump for president

Doublethink, CNN edition…

Doublethink, New York Times edition

Doublethink, Chicago Teacher’s Union edition

Dr. Vinay Prasad recently pointed out this example of TDS inspired Doublethink by the American Academy of Pediatrics…

In an interview with Joe Rogan the day before the election, Elon Musk opined that if Kamala Harris were elected president, X would soon be shut down. It’s not hard to see why he would fear this—and why it is not an unrealistic fear—given the relentless campaign of lawfare and negative propagandizing he and his companies have undergone since he switched teams and declared himself a Trump supporter.

But people, it seems, are slowly catching on. With platforms like X and Substack leading the counter-narrative, the kind of propaganda outlined in this post is only fooling some of the people some of the time. Once you’ve peaked behind the curtain, it’s hard to unsee the Wizard. In the immortal words of The Who, we won’t be fooled again.

If Democrats want to know why they lost this election, they might ask themselves why smart, capable people like Musk, Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. have switched teams. They might ask themselves if they’ve gone too far this time—if they’ve come full circle and turned into the very thing they claim to be fighting against. And it’s not just in the USA of course. The left in Canada and Europe has also alienated a large proportion of the population with the same type of Doublethink and gaslighting.

For many—myself and Chris included—this is the sad (but true) story of our political transformation:

Joe Rogan believes that Elon Musk almost single-handedly saved free speech when he bought Twitter (now X). I fear he may be right. The dominance of the internet has given unprecedented opportunities to access heterodox opinions. But at the same time it has facilitated a degree of censorship and information control that Orwell could never have imagined. If there is a lesson to be learned from all of this is that we must remain vigilant in our fight to maintain a free and open internet.