The News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak Orwell’s observation that language shapes thought holds true for Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter.By Gerard Baker
‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Part of George Orwell’s genius lay in his insight that manipulation of language was essential to the revolutionary project. If you can command popular compliance with a lexicon that reorders—or even inverts—the widely understood meaning of political terms, you can remake society as much as you can with any law, mandate or act of force. Thought is constrained by the limits of language, and so language becomes a vital tool for placing limits on thought.
We don’t have a Ministry of Truth in America. But our political and cultural institutions have no shortage of eager propagandists creating a new glossary.
Take freedom. Since free speech is such a subversive threat to the orthodoxy, the term itself needs to be tightly defined. Academic freedom in particular must be rigorously regulated.
So, in the words of a recent letter setting out demands from faculty members at Princeton, all research and publication should be submitted for approval to a special committee to root out any “racist” thought.
This freedom will be achieved in part by ostracizing those who dissent. When Joshua Katz, a classics professor, objected to the proposals, his words—unlike those of the original letter-writers—were roundly condemned, including by the university’s president, Christopher Eisgruber. All this ostensibly because Mr. Katz used some hyperbolic language in describing a black activist group.
This vignette is especially telling because the term “racism” itself is another of those undergoing a careful redefinition.
It’s not racist, for example, when a senior editor at the Washington Post tweets that “white women” should “be happy we are calling for equality. And not actual revenge.”
So what is racist? Simply being white is, if you believe Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” the best-selling bible of modern racial thought now forming the basis of corporate training programs across the country.
Or take “violence.” You may think that smashing a statue or assaulting a police officer constitutes violence. But our media go out of their way to avoid labeling such acts as violent. A fine example of the genre was a June 7 BBC tweet: “27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protests.”
But if a U.S. senator writes an op-ed that calls for the lawful domestic deployment of the U.S. military where violent protests have overwhelmed police and National Guard troops, we’re told the writing is a form of violence that should be prohibited from publication.
These are abstractions. Surely there’s a wide measure of agreement about words such as “black” and “lives”? “Black lives matter” should be an uncontroversial assertion of universal equality. But some black lives are apparently more equal than others. The lives of the 250 or so black people killed by police each year seem to matter infinitely more to activists, media and Democratic party apparatchiks than the nearly 10,000 black homicide victims killed in 2017, the most recent year for which full data are available. All lives lost in violence are to be mourned, and a civilized society should dedicate itself to rooting out the causes of such violence, not on deploying a slogan to make a political cause from just some of them.
Nor is science immune to the new taxonomy. Laws of epidemiology have been rewritten so that public gatherings for the purpose of protesting perceived injustice are deemed immune to the risk of spreading the coronavirus, while gatherings for recreation and leisure are apparently life-threatening events.
And we now have an approved Newspeak to measure success when it comes to how states have handled the Covid-19 pandemic. Much of the media have widely condemned Republican governors of Florida, Texas and Arizona for policies that are said to be imperiling the lives of their citizens. Meanwhile, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was hailed as a hero last week by many of the same people when he announced that there had been no deaths in New York City. Mr. Cuomo’s state has recorded nearly three times as many Covid deaths as the combined total in those other three states.
It’s fair to acknowledge that President Trump too aggressively manipulates words for his own misuse. He has repeatedly made extravagant claims about his own successes. To claim, as he continues to do, that his administration’s handling of the pandemic has been essentially unblemished requires a degree of verbal flexibility well beyond the bounds of our common language. This careless rhetoric needlessly undermines the trust necessary for a healthy democracy.
But the president’s manipulations are generally more absurd than sinister. He is more Rufus T. Firefly in “Duck Soup” (1933) than Big Brother (“1984”).
The guardians of the new language have a more entrenched and more enduring power to reshape the way we talk and think about politics than Mr. Trump does. We are facing nothing less than a concerted, sustained and comprehensive effort to re-educate Americans in service of a radical ideological agenda.
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