The Doublespeak of the MAGA Regime
Orwell warned us
War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
If you can embrace these unspoken MAGA mantras, you are a good candidate for a job somewhere in the Trump administration. Whether you are a justice department lawyer, a prominent cabinet secretary, or even the Vice President, your professional survival will increasingly require mastering the linguistic proficiency known as Doublespeak – a technique that emerged in the most prophetic novel of the 20th century, George Orwell’s 1984.
What exactly is Doublespeak? To translate it into 21st-century terminology, think of it as gaslighting on steroids, in which there is no daylight – no available window of judgment by the recipient – between perception and belief. Something is simply “true” before it can be assessed and because every alternative to it must be false.
Over time, as all motivation for discernment is purged, there are no limits to the elasticity of belief. The audience will accept the force-fed “truth” in exchange for a visceral sense of safety and superiority.
For example, if you are among those who receive a dopamine rush from "owning the libs," you will, like a lab rat, respond positively to any stimuli that provides you with that sense of ownership.
If you live in terror of gang member immigrants, transgender athletes, or vaccine-obsessed liberals breaking down your door, you will be comforted by the claims of those who will destroy them to protect you. Whether there is any truth to the content you consume is irrelevant.
The origin of what is now a flourishing industry of 21st-century American Doublespeak began with the demonization of individual words. The right-wing playbook followed a simple three-step process:
Identify words or acronyms that may not be fully understood but are associated with the left.
Characterize these terms in "othering" language, exploiting the gap in understanding. For example, brand them as "elitist" in a way that emphasizes a nefarious agenda of “those people” who are not like you.
Repeat it over and over and over, until the negative connotations are so solidified that they overwrite their actual definitions even in the minds of those who once championed them.
I would consider myself a liberal adherent to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), a believer in the existence of systemic discrimination (CRT) toward people of color (POC), who is sensitive to the unique challenges of someone unlike myself (aka "woke"), which I act on through my volunteer activities in the community. A decade ago, this self-description would have been perfectly respectable and virtuous. Today, it could trigger some people into believing I’m also a pedophile.
The term Liberal was one of the early victims of this process. It is most accepted and appreciated in the context of "Western liberal democracy", referring to the principles of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, in which a reliance on science, reason, and critical thinking advanced human progress. These philosophical milestones laid the groundwork for our founding fathers to develop and implement a constitutional, representative government based on a vision (if not yet a reality) of universal human rights.
The downward spiral of Liberal began in the 70s and accelerated in the 80s under President Ronald Reagan, who succeeded in branding it as the source of flammable tropes like “Cadillac driving welfare queens”.
Acronyms are especially vulnerable to negative rebranding because they are not actually words with an instantly decipherable definition. By bundling positive values into "DEI", the once widely considered virtues of diversity, equity, and inclusion are first eroded, and then completely lost. And even if you were to unbundle CRT, very few people know what Critical Race Theory is. It doesn’t matter that this theory shifts some of the blame for the consequences of racism away from individual racists and more toward the inertia and injustice of a “system,” less within our individual ability (and therefore, responsibility) to eradicate.
For those who are properly primed, it is far easier to buy into the myth that racism no longer exists. A quiet mass acquiescence in that direction is well underway as institutions and corporations drop their commitments to DEI, and the NFL discretely removes their call to action to “End Racism”, providing actual racists with confirmation that racism is either over or back in vogue.
And then there is “woke” – a term that has been laced with maximum toxicity to impressive effect. It doesn’t matter that the opposite of woke is asleep – meaning, in this context, completely ignorant of someone else’s lived experience. Wokeness will now and forever be considered a third rail across the entire political spectrum.
The rebranding of these terms is effective because they give precedence to emotional reaction over actual comprehension. If you are under the influence of MAGA, it doesn't matter what these words mean, it only matters how they make you feel. Once the trigger is pulled, critical thinking is bypassed. They work as a call to action, signaling that the enemy is lurking and that you must believe and regurgitate the doublespeak of your protectors.
Orwell’s stark economy of language is part of the plot of 1984 – the premise that limited language leads to limited thought, eroding our brains into malleable objects of submission, ripe for manipulation and control through various authoritarian methodologies, of which Doublespeak is one. We are now under assault by a firehose of Doublespeak, but recent history offers the clarity of hindsight:
Freedom is slavery. There is now a broad MAGA effort underway to diminish the reality, severity, and even awareness of slavery in the minds of Americans, including the claim that enslaved people benefited from slavery as articulated by the Florida Board of Education teaching standards. By redefining one of the greatest atrocities in American History as something more like a vocational school, slavery becomes freedom and absolution is assured (even if we weren’t seeking it).
Ignorance is strength. "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening", said Donald Trump way back in 2018. By discrediting all of those who contradicted his assertions, he consolidated the attention and credulity of his followers.
Regrettably, this is a continuous work in progress, manifested in the Trump administration’s draconian cuts to anything dedicated to reducing our ignorance, including but not limited to the Department of Education, the Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and mainstream media access to tell us what the government is actually up to. Our ignorance is their strength,
War is Peace. The events of January 6th, 2021 led to several deaths, approximately 150 physical injuries, and an untold number of emotional wounding. The many hours of footage provide shocking evidence of the violence unleashed against what was intended to be a peaceful transfer of power. It was the culmination of Trump’s war on the truth of the 2020 election.
And yet, almost immediately following this American tragedy, Trump and his loyalists began working diligently to re-write history: The offenders weren't Trump supporters, they were Antifa or the FBI, or they were “tourists” peacefully visiting the Capitol. Those who were convicted of crimes were treated very poorly and therefore they should all be pardoned (and they were). Until finally, we are expected to believe that January 6th was actually “a day of love”.
Over the last four years, as the reality of January 6th was sent down a Memory Hole, war became peace.
We are in a period of high susceptibility to Doublespeak. As a nation, we are increasingly isolated, indifferent, and submissive, which is just where our current leaders want us to be.
We may be at a tipping point, one in which we will happily sacrifice critical thinking for the immediate gratification of an alternative reality that keeps us feeling safe and superior. The political and commercial marketplace has adapted to meet that demand.
Doublespeak is here, there, and everywhere, and it's not just a product of new and existing authoritarian governments – it is now also market-driven, with self-interested oligarchs engaged in the manipulation of the masses.Whether we can maintain enough awareness as our government seeks to blanket us with ignorance is an open question.