“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
– George Orwell’s 1984

QUOTE of the DAY – “The Republicans have brought the QAnon caucus to the Oversight Committee, and you can expect them to run with the most ludicrous conspiracy theories one can ever imagine.”
– Freshman Congressman Dan Goldman, Democrat from New York

The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson - 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Time is short so I can’t get all into Christopher Hitchens’ Why Orwell Matters today. I tried, but a deep dive into that will have to wait for another day.

But I do want to posit what I think is a new word in the lexicon of modern propaganda that never appeared in George Orwell’s novel 1984.

The word is doublespeak, which is not the same thing as doublethink, which did appear in the book.

As I sit here in the rain and watch the government fall apart just south of here, I can’t be sure if this propaganda technique was invented by Vladimir Lenin, George Wallace, Steve Bannon or if Donald Trump came up with it all by himself. But there is no doubt that since Trump first began employing it in his 2016 campaign for president, it has taken hold in the Republican Party.

Now that they’ve seen how it can be employed to fool half the people all the time, it has replaced the need to tell the truth at all, ever, to seek political consensus and to govern.

Doublethink is the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts in one’s head at the same time, believing them both, even knowing full well that they could not both be true.

Doublespeak means saying the opposite of the known truth to convince the ignorant masses that you are on their side.

While any responsible, educated news reporter should know better than to let them get away with this, they let it slip by because it gives them the excuse they need to report “both sides” of every story, to appear “fair and balanced,” even when the story does not have two sides. That is a trick of “newsspeak,” a word that does command a large presence in the novel 1984.

So for today, I want to employ a related euphemism to reverse a bit of doublespeak.

It is contained in the headline: Republicans Weaponize the House to Torpedo the Federal Government.

Perhaps you already see where this is going.

Morale and reporting are so muddled now at both The New York Times and The Washington Post that I must turn elsewhere to show you an example.

At Politico, there is a fair and balanced story out today about what the Republicans now in control of the House are up to, under the headline: McCarthy names GOP members to run sweeping investigative panel

Speaker Kevin McCarthy has named a mixed bag of members to Republicans’ sprawling investigative panel, including conservative hardliners, leadership allies and Rep. Jim Jordan — who represents a combination of both — to lead it.

The California Republican, on Tuesday evening, appointed a dozen GOP lawmakers, including Jordan, to a select subcommittee on the “weaponization” of the federal government. Republicans are expected to use it to probe, among other targets, the FBI, Justice Department and the intelligence community — agencies at the center of some of their biggest recent gripes.

The panel is the product of the weeks-long negotiations between McCarthy and his right flank as he locked down the votes to ultimately win a historic, 15-ballot fight for the speaker’s gavel. Conservatives had initially pushed for a select committee, but GOP leadership instead offered a subcommittee housed under the House Judiciary Committee that Jordan also leads.

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As part of the inner-conference haggling, conference heads also added language that gives the panel authority to get access to information shared with the Intelligence Committee and review “ongoing criminal investigations,” a prospect that’s likely to spark push back from the Justice Department.

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It’s expected to be on the front lines of skirmishes with the Biden administration, particularly the Justice Department, as Republicans on the panel will be empowered to try to examine everything from Jan. 6-related investigations to the search last year of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Republicans have signaled they could expand their investigative scope to include agencies and issues like the Department of Education and big tech.

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The panel, which the House approved earlier this month along a party-line vote, is already a lightning rod for Democratic criticism, the Biden administration and their allies, who view it as a vehicle for Republicans to use their new majority to enact political revenge.

“Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy claim to be investigating the weaponization of the federal government when, in fact, this new select subcommittee is the weapon itself,” said Congressman Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York. “It is specifically designed to inject extremist politics into our justice system and shield the MAGA movement from the legal consequences of their actions.”

But Republicans have defended the decision to set up the panel as necessary to conduct oversight over the FBI and the Justice Department, two of the party’s biggest targets in recent years. They’ve also pointed to an inspector general’s report that found the FBI misused its surveillance powers to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser.

McCarthy argued that Democrats used their past two years of unified control of Washington to “target political opponents.”

“The government has a responsibility to serve the American people, not go after them,” he added.

That’s enough of the story to see what this is about.

For the record, if the Democrats had used the tools of the U.S. Department of Justice as they should have, some of these Republicans in the House would be behind bars today — not running Congressional committees attacking the federal government from within.

Related: Attorney General Merrick Garland Should Bring the Hammer of Justice Down on Trump — Or Step Aside and Let Biden Appoint Someone Who Will

It’s the weaponization of the federal government to use a torpedo to stop the weaponization of the government by the side that was trying to save and fund the damn government.

It would be great here to insert a dissertation or two on Steve Bannon’s love of Russian Bolshevik Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, but perhaps a simple link to a Wikipedia page will suffice.

I don’t know if Lenin employed doublespeak to twist the masses of people in Russia around his little finger or not. That would require more historical research than I feel like getting into today. But I think you get the point.

Let me just quote Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, who sent out an email this week telling the truth about the Republicans in the House and what federal employees are going to have to contend with for the next two years.

“Extreme right-wing control of the U.S. House of Representatives once again puts federal employees working to administer and enforce environmental and public health protections squarely on the front lines of a battle they did not choose,” he said. “The new House leadership has made no secret of its plan to target government agencies and their staff with endless document requests and subpoenas in its efforts to weaken the federal government and take down the Biden administration.”

Among the more disturbing developments out of the new House are, he said:

The establishment of a “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federalization of the Federal Government” to investigate Department of Justice investigations.

The growing hostility to the basic mandates of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The passage of rules that prohibit government employees from bringing agency lawyers to depositions ordered by the House.

“With these changes, we anticipate not only continuing to litigate whistleblower cases, but also offering legal assistance for civil servants caught in the maelstrom created by these House investigations,” he said. “For thirty years, PEER has protected conscientious public servants while combatting politicized attacks on our environment and the federal merit system.”

I have written ad nauseam about Trump and Steve Bannon, and stand here today as only one of a tiny few who has ever beaten them in a public fight.

But if you would rather read an essay from a liberal newspaper to find out more, try this from The Guardian.

Bannon says he’s a Leninist: that could explain the White House’s new tactics

Excerpts:

“Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too,” Bannon replied. “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Two days after Lenin seized power in Russia almost exactly a century ago, he began an assault on the press – and his successors in the USSR did not let up for the next 70 years. In the few months between the overthrow of the tsar and Lenin taking power, a relatively free press had sprung up, almost all of it vigorously opposed to Lenin, who was written off as a dangerous demagogue. When his Bolshevik party mounted a successful coup and Lenin made himself, in effect, dictator of Russia, one of his first acts was to censor the press, which he called “a weapon no less dangerous than bombs or guns aimed at us … Why should we place it in our enemies’ hands?”

Three days after Donald Trump’s inauguration Bannon told the New York Times: “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen … I want you to quote this. The media here is the opposition party. They do not understand this country.”

Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” are not entirely different from the “objective truth … the greater truth” that Lenin used to call for in the USSR’s state-run newspapers. If Twitter had been around then, he would very likely have used it. Lenin was brilliant at producing a pithy phrase to explain a complex problem so that anybody could understand.

No one should directly compare Lenin’s seizure of power in a military coup in 1917 with the populist insurgency that has swept through America and elsewhere in the west through the democratic process. And the lies the communists told for decades are different from Bannon’s or Trump’s. But much of Lenin’s political style and strategy can be adapted to present conditions. He depended on constant conflict and drama. He deliberately used shock tactics. He was nearly always domineering, abusive and combative, and often downright vicious. He battered opponents into submission with the deliberate use of violent language, not because he was personally vicious – he wasn’t – but as a technique “calculated to evoke hatred, aversion, contempt … not to convince, not to correct the mistakes of the opponent but to destroy him, to wipe him and his organisation off the face of the earth”.

Breitbart, the website Bannon created, and the hate-filled language of alt-right politics, are decidedly Leninist in tone. Above all, Lenin needed to invent enemies he had to be seen to defeat. In post- revolutionary Russia it was the kulaks – richer farmers who were “sucking the blood” of poorer peasants, bankers who were war profiteering, the “elite” (a word Lenin used frequently) who treated the majority with contempt. He despised so-called “experts” who claimed a monopoly of knowledge. He often said that a worker with five days’ training could run a government department. He scapegoated opponents and labelled them “enemies of the people”.

Lenin abolished the existing legal system and started afresh. Within a few weeks his regime closed down the first freely elected parliament in Russia’s history – and the Soviets never allowed another one.

It would be wrong to assume that the next step for Trump is the abolition of Congress, or the construction of labour camps. But the unprecedented war by tweet between the administration and the judiciary over the president’s executive order on immigration has real echoes of Bannon’s revolutionary hero.

Lenin would very likely have identified 2017 as a revolutionary moment. He matters today not because of his flawed and bloody answers, but because he was asking questions similar to those we are asking today. In his quest for power, Lenin promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex issues. He lied unashamedly. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything; the ends justified the means. Lenin was the godfather of post-truth politics. Powerful people have learned depressing lessons from him.

Related: How Existential Anxiety Leads to Authoritarianism

Too bad half the American people won’t find out about this, since Fox News and conservative talk radio and many newspapers now owned by conservative news chain owners will not give the American public an alternative narrative. All they hear on all channels they pay attention to — including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube owned by Google – is the right-wing fascist propaganda.

For better or worse, that is where we are. If more people had the courage to share the truth with their conservative, Christian and Republican friends on social media, we might be able to make some headway against this doublespeak. If not, every election from now on will be a knockdown, drag out fight for every vote — with no guarantee of victory by those with an education and a mind of their own who see through all the BS.

Our future may no longer be dependent on the “survival of the fittest.” Our survival may depend on who can raise the most money and shout the loudest. What a sad state of affairs.

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