Conservatives share memes and videos of Democrats saying something 180° today from what they said only a few years ago. They should, of course, because people need to be reminded of this. But conservatives must also recognize that the double standard, historical revisionism—all this was anticipated by George Orwell more than three-quarters of a century ago in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It is not that Democrats work from a double standard because they’re hypocrites—they are this, for sure—but because it’s a strategy to disrupt rational thought. The hypocrisy is collective and entrenched. It’s an epistemic, like the principle of Taqiyya is Islam, which permits Muslims to lie about their intentions. It’s presented as a noble lie (self-preservation) while serving the purpose of Islamizing nations.
Recall George Orwell’s concept of “Doublethink” from the novel. That’s the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs or thoughts simultaneously and not feel the need or urge to give up one for the other, as any rational person would. After all, either something is true or false—even if presently undetermined. But if you believe in the integrity of truth, you’re a brute, entirely unqualified to have a say in the destiny of your nation.
Doublethink is rationalized today as the sophisticated intellectual ability to hold or justify incompatible ideas under the guise of complexity, nuance, or “systemic thinking.” The cognitive maneuver is praised as “dialectical flexibility,” a concept popular in academic or political culture, where progressives are licensed to tolerate contradiction without resolution as a form of advanced cognition and sophisticated thinking.
In psychology, this ability is known as “cognitive dissonance management,” the psychological skill of maintaining a sense of internal coherence even when beliefs conflict, typically by reinterpreting facts or rationalizing motives. Other psychological terms describe this phenomenon. “Cognitive polyphasia” is the coexistence of contradictory modes of thought within a single mind or society, each activated depending on context. Then there is “motivated reasoning,” which I wrote at length about recently, where one intellectualizes a contradiction so that it seems principled rather than self-serving (see When Thinking Becomes Unthinkable: Motivated Reasoning and the Memory Hole).
While psychology has shown that this ability, however specified, is in many instances pathological, the pathological instances have been normalized by postmodern relativism, all the fashion in academia, where consistency and truth are treated as “contextual” or “constructed,” even “rigid,” allowing contradictions to coexist without embarrassment. It’s an intellectual shift from brute-force contradiction to rationalized incongruity—an error dressing itself in the clothes of critical theory, pluralism, and sophistication.
The contemporary paradigm is the slogan “Transwomen are women.” The slogan follows the formula illustrated in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” As Walter Benjamin, in the epilogue to his essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” told us, continuous war keeps society obedient and unified; in this sense, it “preserves peace” internally. This is a mark of fascism, Benjamin warned. According to the Party in Orwell’s novel, true individual freedom, the freedom to think, speak, and write as you will, leads to chaos. One must avoid “Thoughtcrime,” which your managers will define. Submission to the collective, governed by an enlightened technocracy, is the only real democracy. The ignorance of the populace—“Listen to the experts! Follow the Science!”—is the source of the Party’s power. Today, “Freedom is Slavery,” if rendered explicitly, would appear as such: “Compliance is Empowerment.” So, mind those pronouns!
Each slogan functions as a paradoxical truth enforced by conditioning—training citizens to accept contradiction as coherence. How Neanderthal is the majority for its inability to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously. Wait, they can? See, that’s why they’re Neanderthal!
Here’s another one from Orwell: “We’ve always been at war with East Asia.” This is the one that Abigail Spanberger, campaigning to be Governor of Virginia, commits without a hint of awareness. As Barzoo asks, “Was she asleep when Obama was deporting children at record numbers?” Remember that from Nineteen Eighty-Four? That’s the technique of retroactive rewriting of history to fit the current narrative needs of the power elite, combined with collective forgetting that the past was ever different. (See What Lies Behind the Double Standard on Deportations?)
We’re not here talking about reinterpreting history in light of new evidence. That is the work of reason. One must change one’s mind when confronted with facts and rational reinterpretation. Rather, here, it is, in the Orwellian sense, the deliberate falsification and reflexive forgetting of the historical record to align with current ideology. Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” (or Minitrue in Party Newspeak) is the bureau of revisionism. There, to “send something down the memory hole” means to erase all traces of it. There is no literal memory hole; it’s far more sophisticated than that now. The Ministry of Truth of today is comprised of the web of sense-making institutions: culture, education, media—all controlled by the Party.
Spanberger also demonstrates Doublethink in her continued support of Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia Attorney General. Private text messages surfaced in which he used graphic and violent language about a Republican lawmaker. In one message, he fantasizes about shooting the GOP House Speaker and even references harm to the Speaker’s family. Once the texts were made public, Jones confirmed they were real and issued a public apology, calling them inexcusable and shameful. But he did not drop out of the race—a race for the state’s top law-enforcement office.
Prominent Democrats who had endorsed Jones condemned his language in strong terms—characterizing it as beneath the standards of public service, disgusting, offensive, etc.—yet most have not formally withdrawn their endorsements. Party leaders have tried to walk a line between acknowledging the seriousness of the comments (putting the assassination of Charlie Kirk and two attempts on Donald Trump’s life out of their minds) and maintaining political unity. Some have said that his apology was sincere and that voters should decide his fate; others avoid direct answers when asked if they still supported him.
In the recent gubernatorial debate between Spanberger and Winsome Earle‑Sears, the Republican candidate, Earle-Sears, pressed Spanberger about whether she still endorsed Jones in light of the text messages. Spanberger called the texts “abhorrent” but declined to withdraw her endorsement of Jones, saying instead that “it is up to voters to make a choice.”
Contrast this with the fallout from private text messages by members of the New York State Young Republicans organization that expressed antisemitic, racist, and violent sentiments. The leak caused widespread outrage and led to swift disciplinary action on the Republican side. National party officials publicly condemned the messages and demanded that those responsible step down. The New York State organization was suspended by the state party, effectively shutting it down, and the individuals involved lost their jobs or resigned from leadership positions.
Finally, Orwell identifies a cognitive strategy called “Crimestop,” the antidote to “Crimethink,” which refers to the act of thinking thoughts that challenge or question Party orthodoxy. Crimestop, the mental discipline of automatically blocking or suppressing any such forbidden thoughts before they take shape.
Crimestop is a tool of cognitive control similar to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), or neurolinguistic programming (NLP). (See Why is CBT Credible, but Not NLP? What About Dark CBT/NLP?) Crimestop trains citizens to detect even the faintest impulse toward critical reasoning and to neutralize it instinctively.
These mechanisms work hand-in-hand with Doublethink and historical revisionism. Doublethink allows individuals to hold contradictory beliefs—for example, accepting that the Party has always been right even while knowing personal memories suggest otherwise—without recognizing the contradiction. Historical revisionism reinforces this process by constantly reshaping the record of past events so that the Party’s present narrative always appears consistent.
In combination, Crimestop, Doublethink, and historical revisionism create a self-reinforcing mental environment where reality itself is subordinate to the Party, and citizens are conditioned to police their own minds as thoroughly as the state does. Many rank-and-file Democrats are not deliberately hypocritical. This is the way progressives think about the world. Combined with profound ignorance, reinforced by the collective self-perception of cognitive superiority and the practice of cerebral hygiene, they confidently express their views without reservation (see Bluesky and the Progressive Practice of Cerebral Hygiene). It is also why they feel they are justified in using harassment, intimidation, and violence against those who do not share their worldview. (See Tesla and Propaganda of the Deed; Charlie Kirk’s Killer is in Custody and the Specter of Antifa; The New Fascism of the Left: A Critical Analysis of Contemporary Antifascism.)
Never put it past progressives—the illiberals—to figure out a way around Orwell’s warning. They want to live in Airstrip One. They want you to live there, too. And they know you don’t want to.
freedom and reason 