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Orwell’s Boot, Huxley’s Soma, and America’s Ongoing Face-Plant
Look, I’m as tired as anyone of the whole “Are we living in 1984 or Brave New World?” debate. It’s become the kind of shallow intellectual flexing that passes for wisdom at dinner parties. But watching Trump deploy the National Guard to literally rake leaves in D.C. while RFK Jr. diagnoses random kids at airports? We need to admit which nightmare actually showed up to the party.
Spoiler: Orwell called it.
Even the Times Can’t Ignore This One
Ezra Klein and Radley Balko just dropped an op-ed that reads like satire but isn’t. Picture this: A President declares a “crime emergency” in one of America’s statistically safer cities, federalizes the local cops, sends in the National Guard, and then… has them pick up litter and spread mulch around the Tidal Basin.
This isn’t governance. It’s authoritarian dinner theater, and we’re all stuck with the check.
Klein and Balko don’t explicitly invoke Orwell, but they’re basically describing the same playbook: democracy death by a thousand theatrical cuts.
When Big Brother Gets Into Landscaping
Remember how Big Brother’s face plastered everywhere in 1984 wasn’t about surveillance so much as psychological dominance? Well, slap a Trump banner on federal…
