Like book clubs all over the country (or so I’ve heard), mine recently read George Orwell’s “1984.”

For me, it was the third time. The first time was in high school, and it was an assignment. The second time was about five years ago, and I read it on purpose. This time around – #3 – I got about halfway through the book and decided I just couldn’t go there again. My heart wasn’t in it. So to prep for our meeting, I perused my old notes and highlights instead. I’d made plenty.

I also read a bunch of articles about Orwell, who – as I mentioned – is having a moment here at the beginning of the second Trump administration.

Actually, he’s been having a moment for a while now. During the Biden years, I remember seeing Orwell memes a ‘plenty on social media – especially as Covid settled in. People cited the writer to kvetch about government overreach, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and censorship.

“We are living in Orwell’s 1984. Free speech no longer exists in America.” This was Donald Trump Jr. posting on Twitter on Jan. 8, 2021, the day his father was kicked off the platform following the Jan. 6 attack.

Around the same time, Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation – the conservative think tank that produced the Project 2025 playbook – said he rereads 1984 every few years. For him, its warnings rang most true in the left’s approach to Covid mandates – and the “canceling” of people who didn’t comply – and in their handling of transgender issues. Biden-era directives telling government employees to address co-workers with their preferred pronouns meant forcing people to “repeat a lie with their own lips,” Severino said. This reminded him of 1984’s ending, when protagonist Winston Smith has been beaten into submission and parrots the lies of The Party.

More recently, Vice President JD Vance gave Germany a good talkin’ to for criminalizing hate speech. “This is Orwellian!,” he posted on X. “And everyone in Europe and the U.S. must reject this lunacy.”

But the political right doesn’t have a monopoly on Orwell citations. Not by a long shot. More and more frequently, critics of the new Trump administration are referencing the writer to support their argument that it’s an authoritarian regime.

In a recent essay for New York Times Magazine, Matthew Purdy wrote:

“Warnings of language as a weapon of manipulation, obfuscation and oppression run through Orwell’s work. It is a reason you could be excused for hearing real-life echoes of scenes from ‘1984’ emanating from Washington. Trump’s airbrushing of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as a ‘beautiful day’ and the pardoning of violent rioters who, he said, had ‘love in their hearts’ recalls one of Orwell’s quotes: ‘The past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.’ The bureaucrat who gleefully bragged that ‘we’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day’ could have been deployed at Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon on the search-and-delete mission for references to race, but in fact worked at Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in ‘1984.’”

And Trump’s recent (repeated) claim that Volodymyr Zelensky started the war in Ukraine? It’s strangely reminiscent of a famous scene in ‘1984.’ In the midst of Hate Week festivities – dedicated to vilifying Oceana’s enemy, Eurasia – a startling announcement is made with no explanation: “Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.”

Intimations of our shifting alliances in the Russia/Ukraine war? Depends on who you ask.

“So it has come to this,” writes Purdy in NYT Magazine, getting to the heart of the matter. “All seem to agree we might be slouching toward ‘1984,’ but not on who is most Orwellian.”

While working on this column, I had this weird, recurring feeling that I’d written it before. So, I went to the Lowcountry Weekly website and did a search for “George Orwell.” Sure enough, I’d touched on the topic back in April of 2014.

The following is a chunk of that old column, which began with a quote:

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” – George Orwell

This Orwell quote has been floating around Facebook Nation lately. I keep seeing it, again and again, which isn’t particularly unusual. (That’s what FB memes do; they multiply.) What is unusual is that the adage keeps popping up on the pages of people who have very different values and, frankly, very different ideas about “truth.”

Rightwing conservatives, leftwing progressives, staunch libertarians, religious devotees, atheists… they’ve all been posting this meme, or, at the very least, “liking” it. Despite wildly conflicting and contradictory core beliefs, these folks all seem to have one thing in common: the certainty that Orwell had them in mind when he made the above statement. They all believe themselves in possession of the truth, and they all feel increasingly despised for speaking it.

This would tickle me if it weren’t so troubling – not so much for what it suggests about the nature of truth, but for what it says about the nature of us. About who we’re becoming.

It’s terribly tempting to embrace the persona of the maligned, misunderstood truth-teller, isn’t it? I know, because it’s my natural default mode, the fallback position I consciously battle every day. There’s something so enticing about that self-identity. You get to indulge your most arrogant, prideful, smarter-than-thou impulses, while simultaneously feeling all heroic and righteous and noble. (And put-upon; don’t forget put-upon!) You also give yourself permission to stop listening and learning (you already know everything, right?) and to stop extending love to those who don’t see the world as you do. (It’s one thing to love people who are simply misguided or mistaken… but people who hate you? Fuggedaboudit!) All in all, this way of seeing yourself is much easier, and it’s pretty darn satisfying… especially if you have a group of like-minded truth warriors with whom to commiserate/celebrate.

If you don’t – if you’re like me, and your ideas about truth don’t fall neatly into any of our increasingly rigid socio-political camps – it can be kind of lonely. But lonely self-righteousness has its own sweet appeal. It’s addictive. And, like most addictions, it should probably be resisted.

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Okay, so that’s all a little airy-fairy… and a bit off track. But I included this old passage because I found it somehow comforting (and kind of amusing) to remember that we were already “getting our Orwell on” – and struggling with competing realities – over a decade ago, long before the Biden era or Trump 2.0.

And it does my heart good to know that despite all our differences – and even our different versions of “truth” – none of us wants to end up like Winston Smith, trapped in an Orwellian nightmare. Here in the year 2025, our fear of living in “1984” might just be the one thing Americans still have in common.

It’s not nothing.

Addendum: In the interest of truth telling, here’s an Orwellian twist for ya! I’ve just learned that the “Orwell quote” in my 2014 column was misattributed. Despite the claim of a thousand Facebook memes, it’s actually the brainchild of someone named Selwyn Duke.