George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 warned about a “Big Brother” state-run Ministry of Truth with total narrative control over the information citizens received.
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If any country today resembles 1984, most Americans would name Iran. Iran has a “leader” Mojtaba Khameini, the son of the late Supreme Leader, who has never been seen in public, even at his father’s funeral, but is ever present in large billboards and the occasional bellicose policy statement broadcast over state-controlled media.
Today, 1984 has gained traction as a political metaphor for far-left commentators, but clearly not in its original meaning. For them,1984 means truth has been corrupted, even “weaponized,” by the powerful so that citizens today face different political narratives manufactured by multiple factions competing in a fractured media environment with no single “Ministry of Truth.”
Under normal circumstances, competition in the marketplace of ideas should be viewed as positive, whereby the best and most factually accurate win. Except that in our postmodernist age, which rejects the Enlightenment notion that there is one “truth,” there are only “narratives” with no agreed upon ways to judge false narratives from true ones. Indeed, truth itself is viewed by the far left as a construct of the powerful.
So, while Orwell imagined a single, centralized “Big Brother” controlling information from the top down, today’s fractured media landscape achieves the same dystopian result through decentralization. Instead of one state-run Ministry of Truth, a hyper-fragmented media ecosystem creates multiple, competing “Ministries of Truth.”
Going one step further, left-wing critics argue that media fragmentation has modernized the core horrors of 1984 in specific ways:
We no longer decide which of these competing narratives we accept because we are forced into competing hyperpartisan and very separate “echo chambers” based on complex corporate algorithms which show us only what we want to see. Americans today, they contend, live in separate realities created by corporations feeding us narratives of our own choosing to keep us engaged.
While the left argues that tech billionaires are the gatekeepers of media content (and they were until Elon Musk bought Twitter and opened it to all comers as X), the reality is that users themselves create content which is not judged on its veracity but on the number of users it generates, which in turn drives ad revenue. This is vastly different from the Big Brother of 1984, or modern Iran, where leaders pump out only a single narrative designed to keep the elite in power.
Moreover, the far left assumes that American corporations are the sole players in the media space. It ignores the global marketplace of ideas not controlled by corporate America: the BBC, funded by government-issued licenses in the UK or Al Jazeera, funded by the Qatari government, itself closely aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, which functions as the mouthpiece of its terrorist progeny, Hamas — or even Chinese state media.
The Radical Left’s War on Truth
We must reiterate that George Orwell, himself a socialist, believed in the concept of truth as an objective, verifiable reality. How else could Big Brother’s lies be repudiated? Far-left postmodernists reject that construct. Competing narratives are not judged by one objective standard and found to be true or false in today’s marketplace of ideas. We have entered a dangerous world where media fragmentation has produced competing narratives, some of which are factually false, but all of which are equally valid to their respective audiences.
In Orwell’s world, truth denial took the form of “doublespeak,” a way of distorting, even reversing, reality to obscure facts which are undeniably evidence-based with the objective of obscuring them.
The progressive left, whose journey has embraced anti-capitalist and anti-semitic tropes and morphed into “ Democratic Socialists,” is a prime example.
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Doublespeak in domestic policy
The radical left’s war on capitalism is laced with doublespeak. Landlords, private property, and “the rich” feature prominently in this war but only as villains.
Cea Weaver, Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, castigates private property as a weapon of white supremacy, an inversion of what it actually is: a pathway to wealth for all Americans, particularly African Americans. Black owners of million-dollar Harlem townhouses were outraged, as well they should be.
The “rich” in this age of confiscation have been used as a prime target, with Mamdani looking into a camera lens in front of the $238 million penthouse owned by billionaire investor Ken Griffin, who is pouring billions into new construction in Manhattan and who has made sizeable philanthropic donations to the city. By presenting Griffin as a villain, doublespeak serves to distort these realities.
Doublespeak in foreign policy: The Israel Exception
There is no cause or country more scrutinized and vilified than the tiny nation of Israel, with nine million citizens, including two million Arab Israelis with full rights, a country where Christians, Druze, and Bedouins also live in harmony. It is the only democracy in the entire Middle East, making it a natural ally of the USA. This, from the perspective of jihadist doublespeak, makes it a tempting target in their religious, ideological and cultural wars.
Language, not violence, is now their tool. When soft words like “resistance,” “liberation,” or “context” are used to describe Hamas, that choice is doublespeak because it hides or sanitizes what the 1988 actually said. In plain English, it called for Israel’s destruction through jihad, rejected negotiated peace with antisemitic passages about Jews and world power. Rewritten in 2017 to make it appear more respectable, it never erased its original foundational idea, the destruction of Israel, as a religious imperative.
But Hamas and its genocidal agenda have gained steam in America with the insertion of Qatari money on U.S. campuses to fund alternative narratives inside Middle East Studies programs and the insertion of chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, a project linked to American Muslims for Palestine, a group which has been accused of acting as a support structure for Hamas-aligned activism.
Mamdani has made himself master of doublespeak. He inserted “Palestine” into the St. Patrick’s Day parade, aligning their cause to the Irish fight for self-determination, while labeling Israel’s own such fight “settler colonialism.” He has denied Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, ignoring the multiple Islamic Republics which use the Quran as the constitution.
He has led the call to label a legitimate pro-Israel advocacy group, AIPAC, “a monster,” raising “dark money.” By using loaded language, he makes Jewish advocacy look evil while treating the other side’s much darker Muslim Brotherhood-linked associations as normal. He has ignored or excused genuine extremist-linked groups such as AMP, the godfather of campus SJP chapters, one of which he co-founded, and their pro-Hamas campus activism.
Conclusion
George Orwell’s 1984 remains relevant because his central warning was about the corruption of truth through the manipulation of language. Orwell understood that whoever controls words can ultimately shape how people perceive reality.
A free society depends on our willingness to distinguish fact from fiction, evidence from propaganda, and honest debate from political doublespeak. That standard must apply consistently, whether the distortion comes from the Left, the Right, corporations, foreign governments, or activist movements.
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