We Are Living Nineteen Eighty-Four By Victor Davis Hanson

[mystery-ak]

   We Are Living Nineteen Eighty-Four   
By Victor Davis Hanson

September 25, 2018 6:30 AM

Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the progressive agenda. 

George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer fiction. We are living it right now.

Google techies planned to massage Internet searches to emphasize correct thinking. A member of the so-called deep state, in an anonymous op-ed, brags that its “resistance” is undermining an elected president. The FBI, CIA, DOJ, and NSC were all weaponized in 2016 to ensure that the proper president would be elected — the choice adjudicated by properly progressive ideology. Wearing a wire is now redefined as simply flipping on an iPhone and recording your boss, boy- or girlfriend, or co-workers.

But never has the reality that we are living in a surreal age been clearer than during the strange cycles of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In Orwell’s world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry, rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead, regimented ideology — the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of one’s life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality — warps everything from the use of language to private life.

more
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/kavanaugh-nomination-battle-like-orwells-1984/

[dfwgator]

I'm pretty much ready to leave this country.    I've pretty much lost all hope.  And when they ask me about how things are in the US, my response will be, "Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys."

[massadvj]

Let's not forget Orwell's warning that the path to tyranny was first to subvert the language.

Today the word "gender" has been redefined to mean whatever people think it means for them.  The word "marriage" now includes relationships not envisioned or imagined in the original definition.  The word "contraception" now includes various methods of abortion.  Perhaps the most cynical term of all is "reproductive health," which of course means terminating a human in the womb.  All of these, and many more, are now accepted into the vernacular.

The use of pop culture by progressives to degrade and render tradition meaningless is relentless.   There is a movement right now to refer to all people as "they" so that we will not offend transgenders.  Thus, anyone referring to someone else as "he" or "she" will be labelled prejudiced.

As a libertarian-leaning conservative, the one that bothers me most is the cavalier use of the word "rights."  As in the "right to health care" or "the right to a fair wage."  This completely circumvents the meaning of the term as it has been used and understood throughout history.  By stealing the word and changing its meaning, the left has taken away the opportunity to refute certain policies that violate individual rights.

We have Trump and a tenuous hold on the congress.  But the other side owns and runs pretty much everything else in the culture, including corporate America, which by and large no longer supports personal freedom and free enterprise. 

There is still an imbalance of power toward the left.

[Fishrrman]

A GREAT piece by Mr. Hanson, it should be read in its entirety by everyone in this forum.

An excerpt:
"Testimony? No longer relevant. It doesn’t matter that Kavanaugh and the other alleged suspect both deny the allegations and have no memory of being in the same locale with Ford 36 years ago. In sum, all the supposed partiers, both male and female, now swear, under penalty of felony, that they have no memory of any of the incidents that Ford claims occurred so long ago. That Ford cannot produce a single witness to confirm her narrative or refute theirs is likewise of no concern. So far, she has singularly not submitted a formal affidavit or given a deposition that would be subject to legal exposure if untrue.

Again, the ideological trumps the empirical. “All women must be believed” is the testament, and individuals bow to the collective. Except, as in Orwell’s Animal Farm, there are ideological exceptions — such as Bill Clinton, Keith Ellison, Sherrod Brown, and Joe Biden. The slogan of Ford’s psychodrama is “All women must be believed, but some women are more believable than others.” That an assertion becomes fact due to the prevailing ideology and gender of the accuser marks the destruction of our entire system of justice."

more:
"Rights of the accused? They too do not exist. In the American version of 1984, the accuser, a.k.a. the more ideologically correct party, dictates to authorities the circumstances under which she will be investigated and cross-examined: She will demand all sorts of special considerations of privacy and exemptions; Kavanaugh will be forced to return and face cameras and the public to prove that he was not then, and has never been since, a sexual assaulter.

In our 1984 world, the accused is considered guilty if merely charged, and the accuser is a victim who can ruin a life but must not under any circumstance be made uncomfortable in proving her charges.

Doublespeak abounds. “Victim” solely refers to the accuser, not the accused, who one day was Brett Kavanaugh, a brilliant jurist and model citizen, and the next morning woke up transformed into some sort of Kafkaesque cockroach. The media and political operatives went in a nanosecond from charging that she was groped and “assaulted” to the claim that she was “raped.”"