With news of gag orders for a variety of crucial government organizations, press conferences flagrantly misinforming and scolding the press, and Kellyanne Conway’s usage of the phrase “alternative facts” to
create, in the minds of Trump’s followers, a second objective reality,
the Trump administration is rapidly becoming a regime of doublespeak.
And unsurprisingly, 1984, the 1949 book imagining a
totalitarian regime in England, and focusing so heavily on a form of
linguistic oppression called “Newspeak,” is now seeing its sales
skyrocket. As the Guardian notes,
“Newspeak” is, in the book, also an enabler of “doublethink,” which
George Orwell writes “means the power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” The
author elaborates in his novel: