They Don’t Understand Orwell. At All.

On censorship and hypocrisy.

Photo by Kevin Kandlbinder on Unsplash

How charming it must be to invoke George Orwell while cheering the richest man on the planet as he systematically buries dissent on the platform he purchased with the explicit promise of “free speech absolutism.” How delightfully convenient to wave Nineteen Eighty-Four around like a talisman against “woke censorship” while a billionaire who wielded formal government power algorithmically suppresses people, whose crime is documenting, with receipts, exactly what they’re doing.

Let me be clear: they think they understand Orwell. They really, genuinely believe they’ve grasped his essential warning. They quote “2+2=5” to complain about pronoun preferences. They invoke Newspeak when discussing university land acknowledgments. They reference the Memory hole when someone gets fired for saying something grotesque on social media.

And they understand precisely nothing.

Orwell’s warning wasn’t about government bureaucrats policing language, though he certainly opposed that. It wasn’t primarily about academic administrators or activist minorities demanding accommodation, though he’d have had his critiques. His deepest fear—the one that haunts every page of his serious work—was about how power corrupts the relationship between language and reality until people lose the capacity to perceive truth at all.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Not your professor. Not the HR department. Not the activist demanding you respect their pronouns. The Party. Power itself. The machinery that makes you doubt your own perception, that fragments your capacity for coherent thought, that makes simple truths feel uncertain.

And who, precisely, has that kind of power now? The graduate student with a petition? Or the man who bought the public square, integrated it with government surveillance, and now determines algorithmically who gets heard and who gets buried?

I have 34,000 followers on X. A recent post got 678 views in 13 hours. That’s 2% reach. Strange. Meanwhile, Nazi accounts and conspiracy theorists get amplified. And my friends—my supposed allies in the fight against censorship—remain conspicuously silent.

Speaking of conspiracy theorists: Andy Mills, in his otherwise excellent podcast The Last Invention, frames me precisely as that—a conspiracy theorist with wild claims who thought his phone was tapped—worried about mercenary spyware, more precisely. Never mind that I documented JD Vance—as others have—openly discussing these ideas. Never mind that DOGE happened exactly as I described—young tech operatives systematically were/are dismantling democratic institutions, feeding decisions into AI models—literally laying off employees of the federal government and terminating contracts with these models, if various reporting from reputable outlets is to be believed. Never mind that the faction I named is open about their worldview. Have you seen the things Alex Karp has been saying lately? He’s left me on read when I’ve tried to discuss this framing. Presumably because acknowledging I was documenting rather than speculating would require admitting he buried the lede by treating substantive analysis of authoritarian capture as paranoid fantasy. Far easier to use me as narrative setup—the overwrought conspiracy theorist whose “wild claims” turn out to be “somewhat true” but not quite as dramatic as the real story about AI.

How’s that for Orwellian? Document a slow-motion coup with receipts, get dismissed as conspiracy theorist, watch the coup proceed exactly as described, then watch the person who dismissed you use your documentation as backdrop while reframing the story to be less threatening to power.

Funny thing: it turns out that the worldview I documented—the one animating the thinking of these people—is falling out of fashion now that a greater percentage of Americans actually know about it. Exposure, it seems, is quite the disinfectant. Perhaps that’s why treating my documentation as conspiracy theory rather than investigative reporting was so convenient. Can’t have the disinfectant applied too early.

Mills hasn’t responded to my attempts to contact him, so I’ll try to anticipate his response, which I imagine would be that despite all of this, this was not some top-down, shadowy, coordinated plan. But even I never quite thought that was the case. I thought it was a coherent worldview, of aligned interests, falling into opportunity.

Why? Because I’ve committed the unforgivable sin of pointing out that their side is doing exactly what they claim to oppose. That the “free speech platform” is less free than the one they mock. That algorithmic censorship by a billionaire with government power is rather more Orwellian than content moderation by a social media platform that doesn’t pretend otherwise.

Their revealed preference is exquisite in its clarity: they care more about the right to deadname trans people than about the systematic suppression of substantive political critique. They’re more concerned about some asshole being kicked off BlueSky for sustained harassment than about a credible voice documenting authoritarian capture being algorithmically disappeared.

“X is the least censored platform,” they insist. What they mean is: “It’s safe for Nazis and bigots, and if that means people like you get buried, well, that’s an acceptable trade-off.”

There are no solutions, only trade-offs. Indeed, Thomas Sowell. Indeed.

And the trade-off they’ve made is: they’d rather platform fascists than protect substantive critique of power.

Orwell was a democratic socialist who took a bullet fighting fascists in Spain. He spent his life warning about how revolutionary language gets captured, how “anti-establishment” becomes establishment while keeping the rhetoric. Animal Farm ends with the pigs and humans indistinguishable from each other—the rebels and the old power structure merged into one.

Look around. The “anti-establishment” figures have government positions. They’re billionaires and vice presidents. They’re not fighting power—they are power. But they’ve convinced people they’re still rebels because they’re cruel on the internet.

That’s the con Orwell would have recognized instantly. The one his self-appointed defenders somehow cannot see.

Perhaps because seeing it would require admitting they’ve been had. That they’ve defended the very authoritarianism they claimed to oppose. That when forced to choose between principle and tribal loyalty, they chose the tribe.

The wretched smell of complete moral collapse. And they wonder why I stopped building bridges.

No freedom of reach, indeed, Elon.

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