Tag Archives: Orwell

Missing Information

At a recent doctor’s appointment, the assistant began by asking  the routine questions with which we are all familiar, concluding with “have you been depressed lately?” When I responded “Ever since the election,” that opened the floodgates–she confided to being terrified, angry, and desperately worried about the world her small daughter will inherit.

Millions of Americans are having similar conversations.

Given the firehose of rash and destructive assaults on poorly-understood agencies and programs, most of us are worrying about personal effects of the chaos: will my Social Security payment arrive? Will Medicare/Medicaid benefits be cut? What will Trump’s love affair with tariffs do to the stock market and my retirement accounts? Will the confirmation of an anti-science kook with a brain worm invite another pandemic?

Others wonder why we are spitting on America’s allies.

Given the sheer number of things to find appalling, it’s understandable that relatively few of us are focusing on an even more ominous aspect of this effort to destroy the federal government: the erasure of data from government websites. A recent report from In the Public Interest spelled out some consequences of those erasures.

The collection and dissemination of accurate data and findings fuel research all over the nation, in academic programs, think tanks, hospitals, private labs, and in state and local governments. But this isn’t just a problem for researchers whose projects or even life’s work have been interrupted or derailed. It’s the human cost of this loss that should worry all of us.

More than 8,000 web pages across a dozen U.S. government websites were purged, and while it covers everything from a veterans’ entrepreneurship programs to a NASA site, the purge of webpages and datasets related to public health is particularly alarming. The purges, which include more than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have removed information and articles about vaccines, tuberculosis surveillance, veterans’ care, women’s health, HIV testing and prevention measures, Alzheimer’s warning signs, and overdose prevention training, among many other topics.

The datasets that have disappeared include large-scale national health surveys, indices, and data dashboards that are essential for policy makers and the public.

I spent 21 years teaching law and policy, and a bedrock principle of both was the importance of facts and evidence–the rather obvious connection between an accurate understanding of the reality of a situation and efforts to adjudicate it fairly or remedy its deficits via policy change.

The political disputes that have gotten us to this point have been significantly affected by the vast amounts of misinformation, disinformation and lack of information that have bolstered various bigotries while ignoring reality. (If you accept Musk’s description of programs with which he disagrees as “fraud and waste,” discussion of the merits of those programs–or the consequences of their sudden termination– becomes irrelevant.)

The erasure of data accumulated in rigorous studies–studies we taxpayers have funded and to which we are entitled–is an attack on knowledge and reality. The erasures are in service of MAGA bigotries– efforts to eliminate any mention of gay or trans people, avoid recognition of racial and gender realities, distort medical science and ignore climate change.

A  Guardian essay (link unavailable) noted the ridiculous extent of the purges.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s sweeping executive orders attacking “gender ideology” and DEI programs, the word “women” – along with a number of other terms – is quite literally being erased. The likes of NASA have been busy scrubbing mentions of terms related to women in leadership from public websites in an attempt to comply with Trump’s executive orders, for example. Agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have taken down numerous webpages related to gender in the wake of Trump’s orders – although a federal judged ordered on Tuesday that they should be reinstated.

Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has an internal list of hot-button words (which include “women”, “gender”, “minority”, “biases”) that they are cross-referencing against active research projects and grant applications. The Washington Post reports that once one of these very dangerous words is identified, staff then have to go through a flowchart to see whether a research project should be flagged for further review.

The National Institutes of Health and multiple university research departments are going through a similar dystopian exercise. Researchers at the University of California at San Diego, for example, have said their work is now at risk if it contains language deemed potentially problematic, including the word “women”.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak was the language created by Oceana to meet the Party’s ideological requirements. It limited people’s ability to think critically–after all, if you lack the word for something, does it exist?

Welcome to Oceana.

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What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate

In so many ways, America has entered into a time that can only be described as Orwellian. For those of you who’ve forgotten the world described in 1984, or who missed Orwell’s essay on Politics and the English Language, allow me to suggest their renewed relevance.

As a recent essay in the Atlantic pointed out, “Newspeak” language is violence by another means, an adjunct of totalitarian strategies.

Clear language, Orwell suggests, is a semantic necessity as well as a moral one. Newspeak, in 1984, destroys with the same ferocious efficiency that tanks and bombs do. It is born of the essay’s most elemental insight: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Orwell’s essay is often referenced by political scientists who emphasize the importance of clarity and shared meaning to the political process. As the Atlantic essay notes, however, American discourse increasingly lacks both.

But the essay, today, can read less as a rousing defense of the English language than as a prescient concession of defeat. “Use clear language” cannot be our guide when clarity itself can be so elusive. Our words have not been honed into oblivion—on the contrary, new ones spring to life with giddy regularity—but they fail, all too often, in the same ways Newspeak does: They limit political possibilities, rather than expand them. They cede to cynicism. They saturate us in uncertainty. The words might mean what they say. They might not. They might describe shared truths; they might manipulate them. Language, the connective tissue of the body politic—that space where the collective “we” matters so much—is losing its ability to fulfill its most basic duty: to communicate. To correlate. To connect us to the world, and to one another.

And semantic problems, as Orwell knew, have a way of turning into real ones. Violence descends; threats take shape; emergencies come; we may try to warn one another—we may scream the warnings—but we have trouble conveying the danger. We have so much to say. In another way, though, we have no words.

In yesterday’s post, I considered the real-world implications of the vast right-wing propaganda apparatus and its coordinated messaging. That messaging employs a language akin to Newspeak, a vocabulary intended to mask, rather than communicate, reality.

Donald Trump is certainly not an intentional purveyor of Newspeak–indeed, calling anything this twisted and unselfaware man does “intentional,” is to give him credit he clearly doesn’t deserve. But like so many tools used by would-be autocrats, he has unconsciously adopted its essence, what the essay calls the “dark art of plausible deniability”–  Orwell’s doublespeak—a “jargon of purposeful obscurity.” He says whatever comes to mind, and reserves the right not to mean it.

When he describes “the enemy from within”—or when he muses about police forces fighting back against criminals for “one real rough, nasty day,” or when he announces his intention to spend the first day of a second term acting as “a dictator”—you could read each as a direct threat. You could assume that he’s lying, embellishing, teasing, trolling. You could say that the line, like Trump’s others, should be taken seriously, but not literally. You could try your best, knowing all that is at stake, to parse the grammar of his delusion.

It isn’t only Trump. That right-wing media ecosphere amplifies the practice. The Republican cult adopts it. And the results go far beyond a lack of clarity. Americans not only occupy different realities, we have lost the ability to explain our respective frames of reference to those who do not share them.

We can no longer communicate. And without communication, political negotiation and compromise–even basic human kindness–becomes impossible. (The essay makes the point that clear language is a basic form of kindness that considers the other person.)

Democracy is, at its core, a task of information management. To do its work, people need to be able to trust that the information they’re processing is, in the most fundamental way, accurate. Trump’s illegibility makes everything else less legible, too.

The quoted essay was published before the election of the Newspeak Administration. Had Trump lost, the threat posed by what we politely call “disinformation” would still be troublesome, but what we now face is a threat to our ability to understand political reality.

I don’t think most members of the “chattering classes”– the “mainstream” commentariat busily finding fault with those who still live in the reality-based community–even recognize the enormity of the problem posed by Americans’ increasing immersion in the language of delusion and our corresponding inability to communicate.

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Words, Words, Words….

Words matter.

In the absence of symbols–words–to express an idea, we cannot form that idea. There is a substantial psychological literature on “framing” (I have often said that all of law school was an explication of the axiom “He who frames the issue wins the debate.”) Control of language is often tantamount to control of the people who communicate in that language.

Inept as it is at actual governing, the Trump administration does understand the power of language. When the President of the United States defends his anti-immigrant policies by claiming he wants to prevent an “infestation,” the equation of immigrants with vermin deliberately dehumanizes those immigrants.

It doesn’t stop with Trump’s vermin and “shitholes.”

Federal websites have been “scrubbed” of references to climate change–and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Recently, a regular reader of this blog shared an article with me that detailed a much more thoroughgoing effort to make language a tool of the Trump administration.

Consider us officially in an Orwellian world, though we only half realize it. While we were barely looking, significant parts of an American language long familiar to us quite literally, and in a remarkably coherent way, went down the equivalent of George Orwell’s infamous Memory Hole.

The author detailed her experience putting together an academic program on immigration. She had invited participation from the administration, and immediately ran into a maze of requirements. No ICE representative’s presentation could be taped, and the word “refugee” had to be removed from the description of a panel discussion.

The reason given: the desire to get through the administration approval process in Washington without undue delay. It’s not hard to believe that the administration that wanted to slow to a standstill refugees coming to the U.S. didn’t have an allied urge to do away with the very word itself. In order to ensure that ICE representatives would be there, the organizer reluctantly conceded and so the word “refugee” was dutifully removed from the program.

As the author noted, it made her wonder how many others had been similarly strong-armed, how many other words had been removed from various programs, and how much official rhetoric has gone unrecorded.

The very idea that the government can control what words we use and don’t at a university-related event seems to violate everything we as a country hold dear about the independence of educational institutions from government control, not to mention the sanctity of free speech and the importance of public debate. But that, of course, was in the era before Donald Trump became president.

Most of us who are concerned about the environment are aware of Trump’s assault on science and climate data. The Department of Agriculture has excised the very word “climate change” from its website, substituting “weather extremes,” and changed the phrase “reduce greenhouse gases” to “increase nutrient use energy.”

We may be less aware of other areas where language has been manipulated. When the subject is government helping the less fortunate or combatting discrimination, the changes have been striking:  excluded vocabulary includes “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” and “fetus.”

Given the Administration’s preference for “alternative facts,” we shouldn’t be surprised  that the phrases “evidence-based” and “science-based” have also been discarded.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services dropped “nation of immigrants” from its mission statement.

Ben Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development ditched the terms “free from discrimination,” “quality homes,” and “inclusive communities” in favor of a mission that supports “self-sufficiency” and “opportunity.”

The State Department deleted the word “democratic” from its mission statement and downplayed the notion that the department and the country should promote democracy abroad. In its new mission statement, missing words also included “peaceful” and “just.”

The article gives many more examples, including the (particularly chilling) fact that the Department of Justice removed the portion of its website devoted to “the need for free press and public trial.”

The United States described by the substituted language is very different from the country most of us recognize. And that, as the author says, is the purpose. After all, language creates our realities.

It might be worth reflecting on the words of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister for Hitler’s Nazi Party. He had a clear-eyed vision of the importance of disguising the ultimate goal of his particular campaign against democracy and truth. “The secret of propaganda,” he said, is to “permeate the person it aims to grasp without his even noticing that he is being permeated.”

Or perhaps “infested.”

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