George Orwell’s classic novel “1984” points directly to the answer: While all the usual tactics of would-be tyrants and dictators are playing their usual role in today’s America – from bribing supporters and collaborators and promising them ever more advantages, to demonizing opponents and weaponizing all the institutions of government against them – one utterly devastating additional element enables all the other tactics to work. Yet it remains, for many people, largely undetected and invisible:
The elites are changing America’s language itself, so that people’s words – and therefore, their very thoughts – inevitably come under the control of the ruling class. It’s a way of bending reality in real time, so that what is illusion appears to be true, while what is real and true appears to be lies, misinformation, “conspiracy theories” and “extremism.”
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