Latest news with #Newspeak
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dystopia Now! In ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,' Director Raoul Peck Shows How ‘1984' Author Foresaw Today's Authoritarian Drift — Cannes
'Special military operation.' 'Department of Government Efficiency.' 'Enhanced interrogation techniques.' 'Alternative facts.' We live in a time when governments use lexical distortions to manipulate public opinion – the very thing author George Orwell captured so cogently in his dystopian novel 1984, where the futuristic regime adopts 'Newspeak' and other authoritarian techniques to stamp out independent critical thinking. More from Deadline Raoul Peck's 'Ernest Cole' Shares Cannes' L'Oeil D'or Prize For Best Documentary With 'The Brink Of Dreams' Raoul Peck Directing Documentary 'The Hands That Held The Knives' On Assassination Of Haitian President Jovenel Moise Nu Boyana Exec Launches Next Gen Company Hollywood Influence Studios With Stratosphere-Shot Debut 'Above The End' The time is ripe then to reexamine a writer who, though he died 75 years ago, foresaw how leaders of today would gaslight their own people to impose their will and squash dissent. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck takes on that task in his new documentary Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, premiering on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. 'A man that died in January 1950, to be that accurate about what is happening today — you better take a second look and try to learn even more from him,' Peck tells Deadline. For his examination of Orwell and his thought, the director drew upon the writer's personal archives. 'The estate allowed me to have access to everything — to published, unpublished [work], private letters, unpublished manuscripts. And that's something, especially in today's world where buying a chapter of a book costs you a fortune,' Peck says. 'It was a gift to be able to have access to everything. It was the same gift I had with James Baldwin' (focus of Peck's acclaimed film I Am Not Your Negro). Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 traces the writer's effort to complete 1984 in the late 1940s as tuberculosis took the last vestiges of his health. He was hospitalized regularly as he worked on the manuscript on the Scottish island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. The film also dials back to experiences much earlier in Orwell's life that formed his humanistic worldview. In private writings – voiced by actor Damian Lewis – Orwell describes growing up with the ideology common to a Briton of his background (he described himself as 'lower upper-middle class'). He was educated at Eton but instead of following the common path of his classmates to Oxford or Cambridge, he joined the British Imperial Service, working as a colonial police officer in Burma (present-day Myanmar). 'The key to who he became was in Burma. He realized he was there as an imperialist,' Peck observes. 'He was there as a European and doing the worst things a human being can do to normal people — not to combatants, not to communists — to normal people, 'Coolies,' farmers. And he did not like himself. He did not like what he was doing, and he was doing it for the Empire. That was the big break. And he never was able to reconcile that. And he knew he had to keep his critical mind always, no matter who's the boss, no matter who is the king, no matter who's the president, he needs to keep his critical mind.' He threw his lot in with working people, chronicling life on the lower economic rungs in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). He fought fascism in Spain in the 1930s, documenting his experience in Homage to Catalonia (1938). 'The thing that made him interesting to me beside his books, besides his ideas, was the fact that he lived through those things. He wrote from his experience, his own personal experience, not from any intellectual awareness of anything. Not that I'm against that, but there is a sort of credibility that can only be gained from going through those things yourself,' the filmmaker says. 'And this is something he did very frontally, very decisively, and trying to live among the poor, among the disinherited, because that was important to him to feel before he writes, to understand before he can write and to verify what his instinct was. And by the way, he didn't do it from a superior point of view, but he criticized himself as well. He put himself under his own analysis, and he did that very early on.' Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist, but he abhorred the sort of mind control exerted by ostensibly socialist or communist regimes like the USSR and its satellites. Animal Farm, published in 1945 as the Soviet Union was clamping its pincers on Eastern Europe, and 1948 – published at a time when Stalin had drawn the Iron Curtain between East and West – illustrate the moral depravity of the powerful who exert dominance over the powerless. But, as Peck believes, Orwell has wrongly been interpreted as relevant only to an earlier time of Stalinist totalitarianism. Forcing people to accept that 2 + 2 + 5 (as happens in 1984) – how different is being forcefed the lies of Putin that he unleashed hell on Ukrainian civilians to 'denazify' the country? How different is it from Pres. Trump attempting to rewrite reality by describing the January 6 attack on the U.S. capital as 'a day of love'? Orwell saw, as shown in Peck's documentary, that totalitarian regimes engage in 'continuous alteration of the past.' 'Orwell has been put in a little box as an anti-Stalinist or an anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian regime,' Peck comments. 'But you hear what he says in the film, authoritarians don't all only happen in faraway countries. It can happen as well in the U.K., in the United States and elsewhere. So, the scope [of the film] was from the get-go very wide. For me, it was not just an anti-Trump or anti-whatever agenda.' Peck was born in Haiti but as a child he and his family fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to escape the dictatorial regime of François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, an authoritarian who enjoyed the support of many successive American governments. That high level hypocrisy – America, the shining beacon of liberty, propping up a dictator – made Peck as acutely sensitive to the abuse of political language as Orwell. 'When Kennedy or Nixon or Johnson, were talking about Haiti, supporting a dictatorship, and the word democracy was in every speech, how could I reconcile that?' he questions. 'You are supporting a guy who has killed thousands and thousands of people, who is keeping his people poor, who is corrupt, where there is torture. So how do you reconcile that? Very early on, I was always suspect of certain words that people were using.' Ultimately, what Orwell was about is asserting the dignity of individuals, especially the downtrodden, against forces of exploitation, be they economic and/or political. He's as relevant to our times as he was to the mid-20th century. 'When you encounter a thinker like Orwell, and you feel, wow, he gets it. He gets what the 'other' is, he has empathy,' Peck says. 'He looks at everybody as a human being, whether you are poor, rich or Burmese or British or a worker in a kitchen in Paris, he sees you first as a human being. And that's very rare. That's very rare.' Best of Deadline 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery Where To Watch All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies: Streamers With Multiple Films In The Franchise Everything We Know About 'My Life With The Walter Boys' Season 2 So Far
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Free speech and freedom of the press under assault
Replica of the United States Bill of Rights, documenting the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution. (Leezsnow/Getty Images) On June 4, 2024, an op-ed I penned (Project 2025's threat to democracy) was published in The Fulcrum, a national bipartisan social media platform. It received over 74,000 views and landed as one of the top 10 most read op-eds – out of 1,460 – published in 2024. The op-ed identified how the right-wing extremist Heritage Foundation think tank had prepared a 900-page blueprint of actions Donald Trump should implement – if elected — in the first 180 days of being America's 47th president. Dozens of op-eds were spun off from the op-ed by a multitude of cross-partisan freelance writers and published in The Fulcrum, identifying – very specifically – what Trump and his appointees would do by following Heritage Foundation's dictum of changing America from a democracy to an authoritarian, fascist-like country. We're about 1/3rd of the way through Heritage Foundation's 180-day blueprint and have witnessed 129 executive orders resulting in – no surprise to people who completed a high school U.S. government class and understand America's distinct three levels of government — 113 legal challenges (Litigation Tracker). 2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL Five books were cited in the June 4 op-ed to assist readers better understand how an authoritarian-dictator acts and can – rather quickly — convert a democracy into a totalitarian and oppressive ruled country. Four of the books were written by the contemporary authors' Anne Applebaum, Barbara McQuade, Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder. The other book was George Orwell's dystopian novel '1984.' You might like to know the #1 most banned book by right-wing agents is Orwell's '1984,' which warned against autocracy's reign of terror. After Donald Trump made unprovable and 'alternative fact' statements in 2017, sales of '1984' soared 9,500 percent. After Trump's 2024 election victory, '1984' sales went 'soaring off the shelves' (Axios, Nov. 8). In Orwell's '1984,' Big Brother and his acolytes installed the practice of eliminating words, called `Newspeak.' `The Party' was the name of the totalitarian government that used Newspeak to delete words, discourage free thought, limit people's ability for critical thinking and control its citizens. Jump to 2025 and the term `Newspeak' is now being applied to a portion of our 47th president's administration. Despite Mr. Trump claiming to be the 'champion of free speech,' The New York Times found hundreds of words used in Trump 2.0 documents have disappeared on hundreds of federal document websites and on more than 5,000 pages. A partial list of words that have being eliminated by Mr. Trump from America's lexicon include: advocacy, biologically female, Black, clean energy, climate science, cultural heritage, disability, discrimination, diversity, equal opportunity, equity, female, females, feminism, gender, hate speech, Hispanic minority, inclusion, Latinx, LGBTQ, mental health, minority, multicultural, Native American, pregnant person, race, sex, social justice, transgender, tribal, under represented, victims and women. Notice what words are not on Trump's banned list: male, man, men and White. Another example of Orwellianism in Trumpism exists … In George Orwell's '1984,' several citizens in the authoritarian country Oceania work for the Ministry of Truth, whose job was to alter historical records to fit the needs of `The Party.' On the sixth day of Trump's 47th presidency, he ordered 'the U.S. Air Force will no longer teach its recruits about the Tuskegee Airmen, the more than 15,000 Blacks pilots (first Black aviators in the U.S. Army), mechanics and cooks in the segregated Army of World War II.' Trump's very own `Ministry of Truth' is attempting to erase history of active Black fighters from 1940 to 1952, who flew in over 15,000 sorties and destroyed more than 100 German aircraft. Recall one of the words Mr. Trump has eliminated from U.S. documents is … Black. Orwell's Big Brother also wanted to destroy the literature of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Bryon, etc. so he could control the way people could think, how much they could think and what they could think about. In a similar literature vein, Donald Trump has controlled what news agencies can work at the Pentagon; CNN, The Washington Post, The Hill, War Zone, NBC News, NPR, New York Times and Politico have been kicked out (AP, Feb. 7). Four news agencies (i.e., Associated Press, Reuters, HuffPost and Der Tagesspiegel) have been barred from attending Trump cabinet meetings. Americans are being controlled over what media can report to us and therefore how much to think and what to think about. Evidence is replete Mr. Trump is not only following Heritage Foundation's authoritarian-oriented playbook with his multitude of executive orders but many of the actions employed by the fascist rulers and tenants of George Orwell's '1984.' Call your two Senators and U.S. House Rep. (202-224-3121) to remind them that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press and demand it is their job to put a stop to Trump's 2.0 anti-free speech and anti-freedom of the press dystopian movement.
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What Trump's Gulf of America obsession is really all about
Out with the oldspeak. In with President Trump's newspeak — or else. On Tuesday afternoon the White House blocked an Associated Press reporter from attending an Oval Office Q&A with Trump and Elon Musk because the newswire hasn't changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to 'Gulf of America.' The restriction 'plainly violates the First Amendment,' AP executive editor Julie Pace said, signaling a likely legal challenge. Several press freedom groups agreed with her assessment. 'Punishing journalists for not adopting state-mandated terminology is an alarming attack on press freedom. That's viewpoint discrimination, and it's unconstitutional,' the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in a statement. Later in the day another AP reporter was 'barred from a late-evening event in the White House Diplomatic Room,' the wire service said. So this was not just a one-off. It is a standoff. And it's part of a much larger weaponization of language to advance the Trump administration's agenda. The AP supplies information to newsrooms across the country, and its stylebook is an industry standard, so the White House action was also a warning to the wider world of media and technology. The president evidently wants journalists to obey his guidance; repeat his words; follow his rules. Outlets that don't fall in line might lose access. Editors and reporters are wondering aloud if the administration will next penalize news outlets that acknowledge the existence of transgender people or cite data from purged government databases. Trump's 'first order of business was to dispense with the oldspeak,' New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh wrote Tuesday, referencing George Orwell's '1984.' In its place 'is a new vocabulary,' McCreesh wrote, 'containing many curious uses of doublespeak.' Trump, for instance, said he 'stopped government censorship' and simultaneously policed language around gender, diversity and immigration. In the past few weeks his administration has deleted the White House's Spanish-language website; stated that the government recognizes 'only two genders;' and directed agencies to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts. As a result of Trump's edicts, employees have been fired; websites have been removed; and scientific papers have been withdrawn. Language is at the heart of this overhaul. At agencies like the National Science Foundation, workers reviewed active projects with a list of keywords 'to determine if they include activities that violate executive orders' issued by Trump, the Washington Post reported last week.'The words triggering NSF reviews provide a picture of the sievelike net being cast over the typically politically independent scientific enterprise, including words like 'trauma,' 'barriers,' 'equity' and 'excluded.'' In '1984,' Syme tells Winston that 'the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.' Trump loyalists would argue that they're doing the opposite, and making it easier to think freely, by reversing progressives' language-policing. I'll leave that debate to others. But I want to recognize that language — from the meaning of the word 'censorship' to the name of the Gulf — is at the very heart of Trump's scorched-earth approach to governance, and right now, he's winning the war of words. Yesterday Trump triumphantly posted a Google Maps screenshot showing that Google has adopted his name change (for users in the U.S.). He evidently wants The AP to do the same. The AP, because it represents so many news outlets, is typically always part of the White House press pool. But the wire service said it was told earlier in the day on Tuesday that — in Pace's words — 'if AP did not align its editorial standards' with Trump's Gulf of America order, it would be blocked from attending Trump's Q&A in the Oval Office. And that's exactly what happened. 'The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors' decisions,' the White House Correspondents' Association said, calling the action against the AP 'unacceptable.' But it happened a second time late in the evening when Trump welcomed Marc Fogel home from Russia in front of the press pool. Notably, on both occasions, the AP's photographer was allowed in. Only the reporter was barred. The AP's stylebook guidance about the Gulf is transparent and nuanced. The news outlet isn't ignoring Trump's renaming, it is simply recognizing that 'Trump's order only carries authority within the United States;' thus its stories still say Gulf of Mexico but do acknowledge 'the new name Trump has chosen.' Maybe this will turn out to be an isolated incident. But it doesn't feel that way to AP editors. As Jonah Goldberg wrote back in 2021, 'if you control the language, you control the argument, which means you control how reality is perceived.'
CNN
12-02-2025
- Politics
- CNN
What Trump's Gulf of America obsession is really all about
Out with the oldspeak. In with President Trump's newspeak — or else. On Tuesday afternoon the White House blocked an Associated Press reporter from attending an Oval Office Q&A with Trump and Elon Musk because the newswire hasn't changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to 'Gulf of America.' The restriction 'plainly violates the First Amendment,' AP executive editor Julie Pace said, signaling a likely legal challenge. Several press freedom groups agreed with her assessment. 'Punishing journalists for not adopting state-mandated terminology is an alarming attack on press freedom. That's viewpoint discrimination, and it's unconstitutional,' the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in a statement. Later in the day another AP reporter was 'barred from a late-evening event in the White House Diplomatic Room,' the wire service said. So this was not just a one-off. It is a standoff. And it's part of a much larger weaponization of language to advance the Trump administration's agenda. The AP supplies information to newsrooms across the country, and its stylebook is an industry standard, so the White House action was also a warning to the wider world of media and technology. The president evidently wants journalists to obey his guidance; repeat his words; follow his rules. Outlets that don't fall in line might lose access. Editors and reporters are wondering aloud if the administration will next penalize news outlets that acknowledge the existence of transgender people or cite data from purged government databases. Trump's 'first order of business was to dispense with the oldspeak,' New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh wrote Tuesday, referencing George Orwell's '1984.' In its place 'is a new vocabulary,' McCreesh wrote, 'containing many curious uses of doublespeak.' Trump, for instance, said he 'stopped government censorship' and simultaneously policed language around gender, diversity and immigration. In the past few weeks his administration has deleted the White House's Spanish-language website; stated that the government recognizes 'only two genders;' and directed agencies to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts. As a result of Trump's edicts, employees have been fired; websites have been removed; and scientific papers have been withdrawn. Language is at the heart of this overhaul. At agencies like the National Science Foundation, workers reviewed active projects with a list of keywords 'to determine if they include activities that violate executive orders' issued by Trump, the Washington Post reported last week.'The words triggering NSF reviews provide a picture of the sievelike net being cast over the typically politically independent scientific enterprise, including words like 'trauma,' 'barriers,' 'equity' and 'excluded.'' In '1984,' Syme tells Winston that 'the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.' Trump loyalists would argue that they're doing the opposite, and making it easier to think freely, by reversing progressives' language-policing. I'll leave that debate to others. But I want to recognize that language — from the meaning of the word 'censorship' to the name of the Gulf — is at the very heart of Trump's scorched-earth approach to governance, and right now, he's winning the war of words. Yesterday Trump triumphantly posted a Google Maps screenshot showing that Google has adopted his name change (for users in the U.S.). He evidently wants The AP to do the same. The AP, because it represents so many news outlets, is typically always part of the White House press pool. But the wire service said it was told earlier in the day on Tuesday that — in Pace's words — 'if AP did not align its editorial standards' with Trump's Gulf of America order, it would be blocked from attending Trump's Q&A in the Oval Office. And that's exactly what happened. 'The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors' decisions,' the White House Correspondents' Association said, calling the action against the AP 'unacceptable.' But it happened a second time late in the evening when Trump welcomed Marc Fogel home from Russia in front of the press pool. Notably, on both occasions, the AP's photographer was allowed in. Only the reporter was barred. The AP's stylebook guidance about the Gulf is transparent and nuanced. The news outlet isn't ignoring Trump's renaming, it is simply recognizing that 'Trump's order only carries authority within the United States;' thus its stories still say Gulf of Mexico but do acknowledge 'the new name Trump has chosen.' Maybe this will turn out to be an isolated incident. But it doesn't feel that way to AP editors. As Jonah Goldberg wrote back in 2021, 'if you control the language, you control the argument, which means you control how reality is perceived.'
CNN
12-02-2025
- Politics
- CNN
What Trump's Gulf of America obsession is really all about
Out with the oldspeak. In with President Trump's newspeak — or else. On Tuesday afternoon the White House blocked an Associated Press reporter from attending an Oval Office Q&A with Trump and Elon Musk because the newswire hasn't changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to 'Gulf of America.' The restriction 'plainly violates the First Amendment,' AP executive editor Julie Pace said, signaling a likely legal challenge. Several press freedom groups agreed with her assessment. 'Punishing journalists for not adopting state-mandated terminology is an alarming attack on press freedom. That's viewpoint discrimination, and it's unconstitutional,' the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in a statement. Later in the day another AP reporter was 'barred from a late-evening event in the White House Diplomatic Room,' the wire service said. So this was not just a one-off. It is a standoff. And it's part of a much larger weaponization of language to advance the Trump administration's agenda. The AP supplies information to newsrooms across the country, and its stylebook is an industry standard, so the White House action was also a warning to the wider world of media and technology. The president evidently wants journalists to obey his guidance; repeat his words; follow his rules. Outlets that don't fall in line might lose access. Editors and reporters are wondering aloud if the administration will next penalize news outlets that acknowledge the existence of transgender people or cite data from purged government databases. Trump's 'first order of business was to dispense with the oldspeak,' New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh wrote Tuesday, referencing George Orwell's '1984.' In its place 'is a new vocabulary,' McCreesh wrote, 'containing many curious uses of doublespeak.' Trump, for instance, said he 'stopped government censorship' and simultaneously policed language around gender, diversity and immigration. In the past few weeks his administration has deleted the White House's Spanish-language website; stated that the government recognizes 'only two genders;' and directed agencies to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts. As a result of Trump's edicts, employees have been fired; websites have been removed; and scientific papers have been withdrawn. Language is at the heart of this overhaul. At agencies like the National Science Foundation, workers reviewed active projects with a list of keywords 'to determine if they include activities that violate executive orders' issued by Trump, the Washington Post reported last week.'The words triggering NSF reviews provide a picture of the sievelike net being cast over the typically politically independent scientific enterprise, including words like 'trauma,' 'barriers,' 'equity' and 'excluded.'' In '1984,' Syme tells Winston that 'the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.' Trump loyalists would argue that they're doing the opposite, and making it easier to think freely, by reversing progressives' language-policing. I'll leave that debate to others. But I want to recognize that language — from the meaning of the word 'censorship' to the name of the Gulf — is at the very heart of Trump's scorched-earth approach to governance, and right now, he's winning the war of words. Yesterday Trump triumphantly posted a Google Maps screenshot showing that Google has adopted his name change (for users in the U.S.). He evidently wants The AP to do the same. The AP, because it represents so many news outlets, is typically always part of the White House press pool. But the wire service said it was told earlier in the day on Tuesday that — in Pace's words — 'if AP did not align its editorial standards' with Trump's Gulf of America order, it would be blocked from attending Trump's Q&A in the Oval Office. And that's exactly what happened. 'The White House cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors' decisions,' the White House Correspondents' Association said, calling the action against the AP 'unacceptable.' But it happened a second time late in the evening when Trump welcomed Marc Fogel home from Russia in front of the press pool. Notably, on both occasions, the AP's photographer was allowed in. Only the reporter was barred. The AP's stylebook guidance about the Gulf is transparent and nuanced. The news outlet isn't ignoring Trump's renaming, it is simply recognizing that 'Trump's order only carries authority within the United States;' thus its stories still say Gulf of Mexico but do acknowledge 'the new name Trump has chosen.' Maybe this will turn out to be an isolated incident. But it doesn't feel that way to AP editors. As Jonah Goldberg wrote back in 2021, 'if you control the language, you control the argument, which means you control how reality is perceived.'
