OPINION: Orewellian Political Supremacists Are Back: Doublespeak Covid Strategy Now Applied to Mass Shootings
The political supremacists are back: Opportunists and self-anointed elitists, who know best of course, and who exploit almost every tragedy to impose their values on the rest of us.
What George Orwell described as “doublespeak” by the Party (Big Brother), the pattern is the same when it comes to the most high profile issues of our time. Whether it’s climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, or mass shootings … the left’s prescriptions for indiscriminate, one-size-fits all restrictions on everyone’s lives are time and time again put forth as the only truth … despite the fact that history, science, and empirical experience provide contrary evidence.
As Orwell also, presaged: ““The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Unaware of, or unphased by, their own contradictory positions, it took the recent pandemic to expose the full hypocrisy of America’s leftwing supremacists, who, ironically, criticize the right for not following the science. And now, in the aftermath of the Texas school massacre, from President Biden to local elected officials to anti-2nd-Amendment advocates, these narrow-minded elitists are again singularly focused on universal gun-control measures as their prescribed solutions, even while California and the city of Chicago … each with some of the most strict gun-control laws and, simultaneously, with some of the highest level of gun violence, in the nation … stand as the glaring contradictions that are deliberately ignored by the left.
As with the pandemic lockdowns, mask mandates, and the vaccine, the proposals pushed the hardest by those in power to address mass shootings, are those that research shows are the least effective. But the left doesn’t care, it’s all about their doublespeak narrative, not the truth.
In the same way that Orwell’s Big Brother supremacists pushed such slogans that “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery”, and “ignorance is strength” in 1984 … today’s gun-control supremacists want us to believe that “less self-defense is more security”.
If we learned anything from the misguided global governmental response to Covid-19, it is that mandates and restrictions imposed on asymptomatic and non-vulnerable people ended up being a disastrous manifestation of doublespeak. It’s not hard to conjure up how Orwell might have phrased the contradictory concepts that Covid supremacists have been pushing on the American public: ‘lockdowns free us”, “masks uncover your safety“, “experimental vaccines are proven“, “infringing your rights is constitutional”, or “truth is false”.
We also see these same kind of Covid untruths when in it comes to mass shootings and the second-Amendment. The doublespeak concept that sanctions should be universally imposed on everyone, when only a miniscule percentage of our population is of root concern, is ludicrous at face-value.
Whether it’s a pandemic or mass shootings, history, research, and recent experience clearly support the opposite concept, that only the “vulnerable” (those pre-disposed to illness or violence) should be locked-down or restricted.
In what initially looked like it might be a heart-felt, non-partisan, and appropriately unifying national Presidential address following the Texas massacre, Joe Biden, America’s political-supremacist-in-chief … quickly devolved his talk into doublespeak; a divisive, simple-minded, and disrespectful rant.
Indeed, it is simple-minded to blame law-abiding second-Amendment supporters who are opposed to ineffective gun-control measures as the core impediment to solving the very complex problem of mass shootings. The agenda-driven left will not even consider other proposed solutions.
An effective approach must be comprehensive and multi-faceted; an approach that systematically tackles, one-by-one, each facet of the larger problem. From school security, mental health issues, enforcement of appropriately constructed red-flag laws, cultural rot in Hollywood and video games, the hate our children are being exposed to on social-media and in the classroom, to a non-vigilant public … we all must give up on the notion that any of us has the one silver bullet.
Ultimately, as we learned from the Covid pandemic, one-size-fits-all mandates and restrictions are ineffective and often produce destructive and unintended consequences. The same holds true when it comes to the mass-murder and 2nd-Amendement issues. Especially when these disproven proposals come from those who have appointed themselves as the sole source of expertise on the issue.
In straight single-speak, the notion that the 99+% of the healthy or law-abiding public should be restricted in order to address problem that affect or are caused by the less than 1% … has proven to be untenable.
As we now know now, the Covid-strategy should have been designed to impose strict prevention measures on only the “most vulnerable”, leaving everyone else to make their own rightful choices. This approach should now be applied when it comes to self-defense and gun-control. Only those who have somehow violated societal norms and legal tenets of co-living in peace should be subject to limitations or forfeiture of some of their second-Amendment rights.
But, just as Orwell wrote of doublespeak in his “1984” dystopian novel, today’s political supremacists believe they can control information by erasing history, putting forth false new narratives, imposing non-sensical policies that have no scientific basis, demanding that the public mindlessly comply … and then proudly washing their hands of the situation. Any idea to the contrary is now considered a cancellable crime under the “truth is false” doublespeak abstraction.
What happened with Covid tyranny, and what is happening now with the attempt to effectively destroy the second-Amendment, especially when it comes from the same crowd that believes “men can become pregnant” – it is clear that doublespeak from today’s political supremacists has hit an all-time level of absurdity.
The ultimate goal of today’s left is to tear-down America’s traditional values of religion, family, and individualism in favor of infantile notions that have no basis in reality. Yet these political supremacists – propped up by a compliant corporate media, big tech, and academia – and their obeisant hirelings – are either ignorantly unaware of or deafly unabashed by their own doublespeak. And yet, astonishingly, their agenda continues to move forward.
Orwell nailed it, presaging the tactics of today’s supremacists. In my own single-speak, the left’s “doublespeak truth is false propaganda”.
COMMENTARY BY Mike Stenhouse, CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a free market think tank. He was a major league baseball player in the 1980s and earned a degree in economics from Harvard University. Share your thoughts on this column at @MSten37 .