Today we need to examine something that reveals the machinery of authoritarian propaganda with surgical precision: how a handful of violent incidents across a few city blocks in Los Angeles was transformed into a “crisis” justifying the deployment of federal troops against American citizens. And how easily that transformation succeeded.

I write this from Los Angeles, where I’ve lived long enough to witness actual citywide chaos. I was here during the widespread unrest following George Floyd’s murder. I was here during the rioting after the Dodgers won the World Series. I’ve seen what it looks like when a city of four million people truly erupts in violence.

What happened this past weekend wasn’t that. Not even close.

Yet somehow, a few isolated incidents of vandalism and confrontation—contained within a handful of city blocks—became the justification for deploying Marines against American protesters. More disturbing still, this manufactured crisis worked exactly as intended. Millions of Americans now believe that military force was not just justified but necessary to restore order in a city that was never actually in disorder.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And what we witnessed was not urban chaos but the deliberate manufacture of consent for military rule through carefully orchestrated propaganda.

The anatomy of this deception reveals the terrifying efficiency of post-truth manipulation. It begins with the amplification of isolated incidents into the appearance of widespread mayhem. A broken window here, a confrontation there, perhaps a small fire somewhere else—all genuine incidents, but scattered across a metropolitan area larger than many states. In the hands of propagandists, these become “Los Angeles in flames” or “chaos consuming the city.”

This isn’t to minimize the genuine violence that occurred. Videos of protesters hurling chunks of concrete torn from infrastructure at police officers are genuinely shocking. Such attacks represent serious criminal behavior that deserves prosecution. But here’s what the propaganda deliberately obscures: the number of people engaging in this violence could be counted on two hands. The geographic area where these incidents occurred spans perhaps a few city blocks in a metropolitan area of over 500 square miles.

Most importantly, the system worked exactly as it’s supposed to. Many of these individuals have already been apprehended. Social media footage is being used to identify and arrest those who haven’t been caught yet. Local law enforcement, supported by existing legal frameworks, is handling the situation through normal investigative and prosecutorial channels.

This is precisely what makes the propaganda so insidious—it takes genuine criminal behavior by a handful of individuals and transforms it into justification for military deployment against an entire city. The concrete-throwing incidents become “widespread violence.” The few blocks where confrontations occurred become “chaos consuming Los Angeles.” The handful of criminals become representative of all protesters.

The propagandists understand that dramatic images of real violence are far more effective than fabricated ones. A video of someone hurling concrete at police is genuinely disturbing and naturally generates strong emotional responses. But that same video, stripped of context about scale and containment, repeated endlessly across multiple platforms, creates the impression of systematic breakdown rather than isolated criminal behavior being addressed through normal legal processes.

The crucial element is decontextualization. Videos of specific incidents circulate without time stamps, location markers, or scale indicators. A thirty-second clip of one intersection becomes representative of an entire city. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement, naturally boost content that triggers fear and outrage while burying anything that might provide proportion or context.

Mainstream media, trapped in its own engagement-driven incentives, amplifies rather than clarifies. Headlines speak of “widespread unrest” and “violence erupting across Los Angeles” without mentioning that we’re talking about incidents covering perhaps twenty square blocks in a city spanning over 500 square miles. The scale of the actual disturbances gets lost in the imperative to make everything sound dramatic and urgent.

The result is a population that believes they’re witnessing something far more serious than reality warrants. Americans in other states, consuming this curated content, develop the impression that Los Angeles is in the grip of systematic breakdown requiring extraordinary intervention. The manufactured crisis becomes indistinguishable from a real one in the minds of people who have no baseline for comparison.

This sets the stage for the propaganda’s true purpose: convincing Americans that military force is necessary to restore order. Once the impression of chaos has been established, military deployment becomes not just reasonable but obviously required. “Local law enforcement can’t handle it” becomes the refrain, even though local law enforcement was never actually overwhelmed and never requested federal assistance.

The genius of this propaganda operation lies in how it reframes the debate entirely. The question is no longer whether military deployment against civilians is constitutional or appropriate. The question becomes whether you support “law and order” or you support “chaos and violence.” Anyone questioning the use of federal troops gets cast as someone who doesn’t care about public safety or who actively supports destruction.

This false binary eliminates the possibility of reasonable middle ground. You cannot argue that the incidents were isolated without being accused of minimizing violence. You cannot question military deployment without being labeled an enemy of order itself. The propaganda creates a rhetorical trap where any opposition to extraordinary measures becomes evidence of extremism.

What makes this particularly insidious is how it exploits genuine human psychology. People naturally extrapolate from limited information, especially when that information triggers fear responses. A few dramatic images repeated endlessly create the impression of systematic breakdown even when the reality is far more contained. The mind fills in gaps with assumptions, and those assumptions become indistinguishable from observed fact.

The propagandists understand this perfectly. They know that context kills crisis, so they systematically strip away anything that might provide scale or proportion. They know that repetition creates reality, so they flood information channels with the same decontextualized clips. They know that fear overwhelms reason, so they frame everything in terms of immediate threat requiring immediate response.

Most Americans consuming this content have no direct experience of actual urban warfare or citywide riots. They have no baseline for distinguishing between genuine crisis and manufactured emergency. When they see curated clips of violence repeated endlessly across multiple platforms, their natural assumption is that this represents the broader reality rather than isolated incidents being amplified for political effect.

This psychological vulnerability becomes a political weapon. Once Americans believe they’re witnessing systematic breakdown, military deployment seems not just reasonable but obviously necessary. The idea that federal troops shouldn’t be deployed against civilians—a principle that was considered sacred just a few years ago—suddenly seems naive or even dangerous in the face of manufactured emergency.

The success of this operation should terrify anyone who understands how democracies die. We’re not just witnessing media manipulation or political spin—we’re watching the real-time manufacture of consent for military rule through carefully curated chaos. Each successful deployment makes the next one easier to justify. Each manufactured crisis normalizes extraordinary measures as ordinary responses.

This is exactly how authoritarian consolidation works in practice. You don’t announce that you’re ending civilian control over the military—you create conditions where military control seems like the only reasonable response to ongoing emergencies. You don’t eliminate constitutional protections in one dramatic gesture—you erode them gradually through crisis management that becomes permanent.

The precedent established in Los Angeles will not remain confined to Los Angeles. Once Americans accept that federal troops can be deployed against protesters whenever local incidents can be framed as widespread chaos, every future demonstration becomes a potential justification for military intervention. The threshold for extraordinary measures gets lower with each successful deployment.

Consider how this dynamic will operate in the future. Any protest that produces even isolated incidents of vandalism or confrontation can now be framed as requiring federal military response. The mere possibility of violence becomes sufficient justification for preemptive deployment. The distinction between peaceful demonstration and dangerous riot becomes whatever federal authorities claim it to be.

This represents a fundamental transformation in how power operates in American society. We’re moving from a system where military deployment against civilians requires extraordinary justification to one where such deployment becomes a routine response to political dissent. The change isn’t happening through constitutional amendment or legislative action—it’s happening through the gradual normalization of what was previously unthinkable.

The media’s role in this transformation cannot be understated. By treating manufactured crisis as genuine emergency, by amplifying decontextualized images without providing scale or proportion, by framing military deployment as reasonable response rather than constitutional violation, mainstream outlets become unwitting accomplices in their own irrelevance. When reporters present authoritarian power grabs as ordinary policy disagreements, they help normalize what should be shocking.

Perhaps most disturbing is how effectively this propaganda has convinced ordinary Americans to support what amounts to the militarization of domestic law enforcement. People who consider themselves patriots now applaud the deployment of Marines against American citizens. People who claim to defend constitutional principles now support the violation of fundamental restrictions on military power. The propaganda has made authoritarianism seem patriotic.

This cognitive dissonance reveals the true power of manufactured crisis. When people believe they’re facing genuine emergency, they willingly surrender protections they would normally defend. The Constitution becomes less important than immediate security. Constitutional principles become luxuries we can’t afford during times of crisis. The fact that the crisis is largely manufactured becomes irrelevant once the psychological impact takes hold.

We are witnessing the live construction of an authoritarian consensus through carefully orchestrated deception. A few broken windows and isolated acts of violence in Los Angeles became the justification for crossing a constitutional line that previous generations would have died to defend. And it worked precisely because most Americans have lost the ability to distinguish between genuine emergency and manufactured crisis.

The implications extend far beyond immigration enforcement or protest suppression. Once the principle is established that federal troops can be deployed whenever authorities claim local breakdown, there are no meaningful constraints on military power over civilian life. Every future crisis—economic, political, social—becomes a potential justification for extraordinary measures that gradually become ordinary.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And when a few isolated incidents can be transformed into justification for military deployment through propaganda alone, you’re no longer living in a constitutional republic—you’re living in a system where perception matters more than reality and manufactured crisis justifies unlimited power.

The center cannot hold when truth becomes whatever serves authority and crisis becomes whatever power claims it to be. We have crossed a line that will be very difficult to uncross, not because the precedent is legally binding but because the psychological transformation it represents may be irreversible.

The manufactured crisis succeeded. Americans now accept military deployment against civilians as normal and necessary. What comes next will be worse, because the machinery of deception has proven its effectiveness and the appetite for resistance has been systematically eroded through careful manipulation of fear.

The propaganda worked. And that should terrify every American who understands what we’ve just surrendered.

Mike Brock is a former tech exec who was on the leadership team at Block. Originally published at his Notes From the Circus.

Earlier this month authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras while looking for a woman who they said had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois, according to multiple datasets obtained by 404 Media.

The news shows in stark terms how police in one state are able to take the ALPR technology, made by a company called Flock and usually marketed to individual communities to stop carjackings or find missing people, and turn it into a tool for finding people who have had abortions. In this case, the sheriff told 404 Media the family was worried for the woman’s safety and so authorities used Flock in an attempt to locate her. But health surveillance experts said they still had issues with the nationwide search. 

“You have this extraterritorial reach into other states, and Flock has decided to create a technology that breaks through the barriers, where police in one state can investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another,” Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund, who researches both ALPR systems and abortion surveillance, told 404 Media. 

On May 9, an officer from the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched Flock cameras and gave the reason as “had an abortion, search for female,” according to the multiple sets of data. Whenever officers search Flock cameras they are required to provide a reason for doing so, but generally do not require a warrant or any sort of court order. Flock cameras continually scan the plates, color, and model of any vehicle driving by, building a detailed database of vehicles and by extension peoples' movements. 

Cops are able to search cameras acquired in their own district, those in their state, or those in a nationwide network of Flock cameras. That single search for the woman spread across 6,809 different Flock networks, with a total of 83,345 cameras, according to the data. The officer looked for hits over a month long period, it shows.

Flock users are able to run a “Network Audit” to see what other agencies have searched their cameras. The data reviewed by 404 Media shows this was a nationwide search because evidence of the search appeared in logs held by different police departments on the other side of the country from Texas. Muckrock user Rose Terse obtained two of the sets of data from Yakima and Prosser police departments in Washington via public records requests. The same search also appears on the audit report for the Mount Prospect, Illinois Police Department.

Sheriff Adam King of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told 404 Media in a phone call that the woman self-administered the abortion “and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.”

“We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever to get an abortion,” he said. “It was about her safety.” 

He said the search “got a couple hits on her on Flocks in Dallas,” but Flock was not responsible for ultimately finding her. Two days later the Sheriff’s Office was able to establish contact with the woman and verify she was okay, he added.

On the fact that the Sheriff’s Office performed a nationwide search and not just one in Texas, King said “that way we’re hitting everything, every possibility.”

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at digital rights organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media “The idea that the police are actively tracking the location of women they believe have had self administered abortions under the guise of ‘safety’ does not make me feel any better about this kind of surveillance.”

Elizabeth Ling, senior counsel for If/When/How, a reproductive rights group that runs a reproductive legal rights hotline, told 404 Media that many criminal cases they’ve seen originate after someone close to the person getting an abortion reports it to police. A research report published by the group found “about a quarter of adult cases (26%) were reported to law enforcement by acquaintances entrusted with information, such as friends, parents, or intimate partners.”

“Self-managed abortion is extremely safe. What we have found in our work and our research is that the greatest risk posed to people self-managing their abortion is state violence and criminalization. I understand wanting to keep your loved ones safe,” Ling told 404 Media. “When people have died from pregnancy or from being denied an abortion, it makes sense that people are scared that they could lose a loved one. But, when police and prosecutors have wrongly investigated and punished people for their abortion or pregnancy loss it is equally fair to fear criminalization if police are aware of your abortion. All of this shows why it is essential for people to have access to accurate information about their options and legal risk. Because no one should face criminalization for their abortion.”

Almost all abortions are illegal in Texas, where the officer who performed the search was based. But in Washington and Illinois, where at least some searched Flock cameras were located, abortion is legal before viability of the fetus and is seen as a fundamental right. Courts have repeatedly protected people’s right to travel to get an abortion, but the specter of this type of surveillance has led to widespread fear among people who have sought legal advice from abortion helplines like If/When/How.

“We hear this every day on the helpline, there is an overwhelming fear that they’re being watched and tracked by the state, whether that’s through their internet history or through traveling,” Ling told 404 Media. “There have been multiple court decisions within the abortion context reaffirming the right to travel, but you have law enforcement agencies utilizing tools to extend their reach outside of their jurisdiction to surveil and try to find people. Even if that doesn’t ultimately result in an actual criminal prosecution, that is still a complete invasion of someone’s privacy and it increases people’s fear.”

The surveillance of women seeking abortions has long been a problem, and with the 2022 Dobbs Supreme Court decision allowing states to criminalize abortion, experts have warned that patients, the people who help them, and their doctors are at a much higher risk of surveillance and criminal prosecution. 

“One of the biggest issues that has emerged in the post-Dobbs era is there’s all these things that are possible in terms of how people might use the tools available to go after abortion seekers or surveil abortion seekers but then you’re not sure which ones are actually going to be used,” Bertash said. “Knowing this helps us hone in what tools in the field law enforcement is actually using.” 

“We saw the groundwork for this laid pretty early. You had anti-abortion activists doing surveillance of abortion clinics, license plates, the people driving in and out, but they would stand in the parking lot with pen and paper writing down license plates,” she added. “When you have this legacy of manual surveillance and then a large tech company offers this type of surveillance as a service, those same tactics, techniques, and customers coming from an antiabortion legacy are handed these automated tools handed on a silver platter, it’s shocking to see it but also it felt inevitable.”

Ashley Emery, senior policy analyst in reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told 404 Media “The risks of this intrusive government monitoring cannot be overstated: law enforcement could deploy this surveillance technology to target and try to build cases against pregnant people who travel for abortion care and those who help them. This incident is undeniably a harbinger of more AI-enabled reproductive surveillance and investigations to come. Especially for women of color who are already over-surveilled and over-policed, the stakes couldn’t be higher.”

“Police in one state can investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another.”

Neither the Yakima or Prosser police departments responded to a request for comment asking if they were aware an officer in Texas had searched their cameras for an abortion-related reason.

Flock told 404 Media in a statement: “Flock is committed to ensuring every customer, including law enforcement, can leverage technology in a way that reflects their values, and we support democratically-authorized governing bodies to determine what that means for their community. Flock does not decide which criminal codes to enforce in Texas or Washington. We rely on the democratic process. And in this case, it appears Flock was used to try to locate a vulnerable person who may have been a danger to herself.”

Earlier this week, 404 Media reported about the use of Flock cameras and its lookup tools to help the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Ling of If/When/How said the use of Flock in that context cannot be separated from the use of it in an abortion context.

“This use of license plate recognition in an immigration context is not separate and apart from the criminalization of abortion. In both cases we’re talking about the state wanting to control what people do with their bodies,” Ling said. “There is a firmly established constitutional right to travel, but unfortunately that does not mean that the state will not do everything in its power to infringe on people’s bodily autonomy. It’s really important to understand that this is happening at the county level, because regardless of what is happening at a national level, there are decision makers at the state and county levels who feel emboldened to use these tools of punishment and surveillance.”

In October, 404 Media reported on a tool bought by the U.S. government which tracked cellphones and could be used to monitor visits to abortion clinics.

Update: this piece has been updated with additional comment from Ashley Emery.

Marketers promote AI-assisted developer tools as workhorses that are essential for today’s software engineer. Developer platform GitLab, for instance, claims its Duo chatbot can “instantly generate a to-do list” that eliminates the burden of “wading through weeks of commits.” What these companies don’t say is that these tools are, by temperament if not default, easily tricked by malicious actors into performing hostile actions against their users.

Researchers from security firm Legit on Thursday demonstrated an attack that induced Duo into inserting malicious code into a script it had been instructed to write. The attack could also leak private code and confidential issue data, such as zero-day vulnerability details. All that’s required is for the user to instruct the chatbot to interact with a merge request or similar content from an outside source.

AI assistants’ double-edged blade

The mechanism for triggering the attacks is, of course, prompt injections. Among the most common forms of chatbot exploits, prompt injections are embedded into content a chatbot is asked to work with, such as an email to be answered, a calendar to consult, or a webpage to summarize. Large language model-based assistants are so eager to follow instructions that they’ll take orders from just about anywhere, including sources that can be controlled by malicious actors.

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Some of the Atlanta-based federal government workers who were recently laid off due to cost-saving efforts by the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had questions for their union leader on Thursday that she couldn’t answer.

IT specialist Ryan Melton was one of nearly 600 laid off Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees who participated in a Thursday night Microsoft Teams Q&A session with local leaders of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).

Melton is a self-described U.S. Army veteran who was still in the one-year probationary period of employment at the CDC when he was informed of his termination last week. He said he hasn’t taken a day off since starting at the CDC roughly eight months ago. He wanted to know if he will receive payment for the PTO days he accrued. 

Melton said he needs it to help pay for the new house he can no longer afford.

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” he said during the virtual call. “My back is against the wall right now. I’m a disabled vet, yeah. But that money don’t go that long when interest rates and housing prices are as high as they are.”

Yolanda Jacobs, president of AFGE Local 2883, did her best to console and reassure those on the call that their union is doing everything it can to help them.

Jacobs estimates that African Americans like her and Melton make up a larger, disproportionate share of local and national AFGE members — as well as those who were laid off this week — and she expects the wave of terminations will have an economic ripple effect in metro Atlanta, where the gap between the haves and have-nots is still the widest in the nation, according to a 2024 Bankrate study.

“There probably will be people who lose their homes,” Jacobs said. “And then when it comes to being able to rent when they lose their home, that’s going to be pretty difficult, because rents are sky-high in Atlanta.”

Jacobs said some federal employees fighting to keep their jobs have been scrubbing their LinkedIn profiles of any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative participation. Trump administration officials have been working to rid the federal government of all DEI workers, but Jacobs said many Black employees who participated in DEI programs were ordered to do so by their superiors.

“The majority of them at the CDC, they didn’t volunteer to do that work,” Jacobs said. “The ones who were leading the DEI initiatives at CDC were majority white.”

A former CDC executive coordinator who asked to not be named wondered what the “end game” will be for the estimated 700 local CDC workers who’ve received layoff notices since Valentine’s Day. 

A related federal worker class-action lawsuit has already been filed. The executive coordinator said one of her former male co-workers — who recently received a termination letter — died shortly thereafter. She worries the stress of a sudden job loss played a role in his demise.

“We just want our jobs back,” she said on the call. “It’s frustrating. It’s depressing.”

Jacobs said securing a federal union job can be a socioeconomic game changer for Black Georgians, whose estimated $57,000 median household income is far less than the roughly $82,000 typical income white families earn. Typical Black households in Atlanta earn closer to about $28,000 annually, according to Kindred Futures, a local nonprofit formerly known as the Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative.

In contrast, salaries for federal government employees in metro Atlanta usually range from $70,000 to $150,000, Jacobs said.

“That can change the course for a Black family living in Atlanta,” she added. “For a lot of Black people, federal employment is a dream come true.”

Jessica Ingram hopes her dream doesn’t soon turn into a nightmare. The 37-year-old disability examiner for the Social Security Administration was one of the local federal workers and supporters who participated in one of the recent layoff protests in metro Atlanta this week. She said she and her co-workers have been on edge since DOGE’s first round of layoffs was announced.

“It’s been nerve-wracking,” Ingram said Wednesday. “We are not getting much information. It’s just kind of in flux.”

Ingram found it ironic that Musk’s DOGE department, which launched in January, is responsible for eliminating other federal jobs. She noted that similar efficiency departments already exist in most federal agencies, calling DOGE a “made-up agency” that is “redundant.”

Jacobs told laid-off union members on Thursday that AFGE would do its best to minimize their suffering.

“A lot of you are in a really bad position, and what we’re trying to do is the best we can to help you navigate that,” she told the workers. “It seems like no one cares about what happens — whether you keep your home, you lose it, whether your children eat, whether you can even feed yourself.”

The post “My Back Is Against the Wall”: Atlanta’s Black Federal Workers Reeling From Layoffs appeared first on Capital B News - Atlanta.

1984 ends not with a bang, but with a grammar lesson. Readers of George Orwell’s novel—still reeling, likely, from the brutal dystopia they’ve spent the previous 300-odd pages living in—are subjected to a lengthy explanation of Newspeak, the novel’s uncanny form of English. The appendix explains the language that has been created to curtail independent thought: the culled vocabulary; the sterilized syntax; the regime’s hope that, before long, all the vestiges of Oldspeak—English in its familiar form, the English of Shakespeare and Milton and many of Orwell’s readers—will be translated into the new vernacular. The old language, and all it carried with it, will die away.

With its dizzying details and technical prose, “The Principles of Newspeak” makes for a supremely strange ending. It is, in today’s parlance, a choice. But it is a fitting one. Language, in 1984, is violence by another means, an adjunct of the totalitarian strategies inflicted by the regime. Orwell’s most famous novel, in that sense, is the fictionalized version of his most famous essay. “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, is a writing manual, primarily—a guide to making language that says what it means, and means what it says. It is also an argument. 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.”

The essay, over the years, has enjoyed the same backhanded success that Orwell himself has. Its barbs have softened into conventional wisdom. Its enduring relevance has consigned it, in some degree, to cliché. Who would argue against clarity?

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.

Earlier this month, Donald Trump mused aloud about the violence Americans might anticipate on November 5. If Election Day brings havoc, he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, the crisis would come not from outside actors but instead from “the enemy from within”: “some very bad people,” he clarified, “some sick people”—the “radical-left lunatics.”

The former president further mused about a solution to the problem. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard,” he said, “or, if really necessary, by the military.”

A presidential candidate who may well retake the White House is threatening to use the military against American citizens: The news here is straightforward. The language that makes the news, though, is not. The words twist and tease, issuing their threats in the conditional tense: It should be. If necessary. Trump’s words often do this; they imply very much while saying very little. They are schooled, like the man himself, in the dark art of plausible deniability. In them, Orwell’s doublespeak—that jargon of purposeful obscurity—gets one more layer of insulating irony: The former president says whatever he wants, and reserves the right not to mean it.

Do we take him at his word? The answer to this question, on which so much else depends, can only ever be “maybe.” 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.

But the fact that you need to translate him at all is already a concession. The constant uncertainty—about the gravest of matters—is one of the ways that Trump keeps people in his thrall. Clear language is a basic form of kindness: It considers the other person. It wants to be understood. Trump’s argot, though, is self-centered. It treats shared reality as an endless negotiation.

The words cannot bear the weight of all this irony. 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.

[Read: Do you speak Fox?]

Orwell published “Politics” at the end of a conflict that had, in its widespread use of propaganda, also been a war of words. In the essay, he wrestles with the fact that language—as a bomb with a near-limitless blast radius—could double as a weapon of mass destruction. This is why clarity matters. This is why words are ethical tools as well as semantic ones. The defense of language that Orwell offered in “Politics” was derived from his love of hard facts. “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information,” he confessed in his 1946 essay “Why I Write.” His was an elegant dogma. Words matter because facts matter—because truth matters. Freedom, in 1984, is many things, but they all spring from the same source: the ability to say that 2 + 2 = 4.

One October surprise of 2024 took an aptly Orwellian turn: The scandal, this time around, was a matter of language. Earlier this month, John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, escalated his warnings that his former boss is unfit for office. Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump had expressed a desire for generals like the ones “that Hitler had.” Then, in an interview published by The New York Times, Kelly described Trump’s dictatorial approach to leadership, his drive to suppress opposition, his insatiable appetite for power. He concluded that Trump fits the definition of fascist.

Kelly’s claim was echoed, more mildly, by Trump’s former secretary of defense—he “certainly has those inclinations,” Mark Esper said—and, less mildly, by Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump is “the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley warned in Bob Woodward’s latest book, its publication timed to coincide with the election. He is also, Milley added, “fascist to the core.” (Trump denied the men’s claims: “I am the opposite of a Nazi,” he said.) Late last week, 13 others who had served in high-level positions in the Trump administration signed an open letter: “Everyone,” they wrote, “should heed General Kelly’s warning.”

The comments made headlines because of the people who expressed them: Each had worked directly with Trump. The former officials made history, though, because of the word they deployed in their warnings. Fascist is a claim of last resort. It is a term of emergency. Because of that, its validity, as a description for Trump’s seething strain of populism, has been the subject of a long-standing debate among scholars, journalists, and members of the public—one made even more complicated by the fact that, as the historian Ian Kershaw has observed, “Trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

But one need not be a scholar of fascism to see the plain reality. Trump lost an election. He refused to accept the result. In a second term, he has suggested, he will “terminate” the Constitution; use the American judicial system to take revenge on those who have angered him; and perform sweeping immigration raids, expelling millions of people from the country. Trump, in addition to praising Hitler’s generals, regularly uses language that echoes Hitler’s hatreds. He has described immigrants, whatever their legal status, as a formless “invasion,” and the press as “the enemy of the people.” He has dismissed those who are insufficiently loyal to him as “human scum” and “vermin.”

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

Fascism—that call to history, that careful description, that five-alarm piece of language—is the right word. But it may turn out, at the same time, to be the wrong one. It might, in our cynical moment, provoke exhaustion rather than alarm.

In “Politics,” Orwell reserves particular vitriol for political language that hides its intentions in euphemism and wan metaphor. Wording that resorts to ambiguity can disguise atrocities (as when, in one of the examples Orwell offers, the bombing of villages and their defenseless people is referred to merely as “pacification”). Orwell’s problem was language that gives writers permission not to think. Ours, however, is language that gives readers permission not to care. Even the clearest, most precise language can come to read, in our restless age, as cliché. “The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet,” the old line goes; “the second, an imbecile.” On the internet, anyone can become that imbecile. For language in general, this is not an issue: When on fleek goes off in an instant or cheugy plummets from coinage to cringe, more words will arrive in their place.

When the restlessness comes for political language, though—for the words we rely on to do the shared work of self-government—the impatience itself becomes Orwellian. Urgent words can feel tired. Crises can come, but no words suffice to rouse us. Americans face an election that our democracy—hard-fought, hard-won, ever fragile—may not survive; “defend democracy,” though, can read less as a call to arms than as a call to yawn. Trump himself is insulated by all the ennui. Nearly every word you might apply to him fits the picture that was already there. His depravity has become tautological: It’s just Trump being Trump. It’s shocking, not surprising.

The word fascism can fail that way, too. And it can be further defanged by the biggest cliché of all: thoughtlessly partisan politics. Some audiences, seeing the word deployed as a description, will dismiss it as simply more evidence of the media’s (or John Kelly’s) alleged bias against Trump. Others, assuming that fascism and Nazism are the same thing—assuming that fascism cannot be present until troops are goose-stepping in the streets—will see the term as evidence of hysteria.

But fascism can come whether the language acknowledges it or not. It marches toward us, restricted right by restricted right, book ban by book ban. It can happen here. The question is whether we’ll be able to talk about it—and whether people will care. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week asked registered voters across the country whether Trump was a “fascist” (defined as “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents”). Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, said he was—roughly the same percentage of people who, in recent national polls, say that they plan to vote for him.

The philosopher Emilio Uranga observed, in Mexican political life of the mid-20th century, a gnawing sense of uncertainty—a “mode of being,” he wrote, “that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on.” The unsteadiness, he suggested, amounts to pain. In it, “the soul suffers.” It “feels torn and wounded.” Uranga gave the condition a name: zozobra.

The wound he describes, that plague of doubleness, has settled into American political language. In her 2023 book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes the “mirror world” in right-wing politics—a place where every reality has a rhetorical double. She focuses on the rhetoric of Steve Bannon, the former Trump-administration strategist. As Democrats and journalists discussed the Big Lie—Donald Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election—Bannon began discussing the Big Steal: the idea that Joe Biden, against all evidence, stole the presidency.

The tactic is common. Trump regularly fantasizes before his cheering crowds about the violence that might befall his opponents. Journalists describe him as engaging in “extreme” and “inflammatory” rhetoric. Republicans in Trump’s camp, soon enough, began accusing Democrats of, as one of his surrogates put it, “irresponsible rhetoric” that “is causing people to get hurt.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s response to the former military leaders’ warnings about Trump took a similar tack: Their rhetoric is “dangerous,” he said this weekend. On Monday, Trump gave John Kelly’s comments about him a predictably zozobric twist. Kamala Harris, he said, is a fascist.

“In the mirror world,” Klein writes, “there is a copycat story, and an answer for everything, often with very similar key words.” The attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, has commonly been described as an insurrection; Republican power brokers have begun describing peaceful political protests as “insurrections.” We must save American democracy, the stark slogan that gained new currency in response to the Big Lie, is now a common refrain on the right. (Elon Musk, at a recent Trump rally, argued that the former president “must win to preserve democracy in America.”)

Mirroring, as propaganda, is extremely effective. It addles the mind. It applies a choose-your-own-adventure approach to meaning itself. Mirroring does, in that way, precisely what Orwell feared: It gives up on the very possibility of common language. It robs political terms of their ability to clarify, to unite, to warn. In a world that is endlessly doubling itself, 2 + 2 = 4 may be a liberating truth. Or it may be a narrative imposed on you by a smug and elitist regime. Freedom, soon enough, becomes the ability to say that the sum of 2 + 2 is whatever you want it to be.

[Read: Why are we humoring them?]

The words fly, flagrant and fast; the definitions that might ground them trail, meekly, in their wake. But when the words are mere slogans—shibboleths and signifiers, narrowcast to one’s tribe—dictionary definitions miss the point. Slogans are rhetoric. They are advertising. They are vibes. They can function, in that way, as what the author Robert Jay Lifton called “thought-terminating clichés”: words or phrases that effectively curtail debate—and, with it, critical thought itself. Last year, an author who wrote a book decrying the “woke indoctrination” of children struggled to define what woke actually means. In 2022, the New York Times editorial board effectively declared lexicographic defeat: “However you define cancel culture,” it wrote, “Americans know it exists and feel its burden.” On Tuesday, Musk—who has been spreading his Trump-friendly brand of groupthink on his social-media platform, X—shared an image: a man, his face obscured, wearing a green cap. Stitched onto the hat, in large, all-caps letters, was MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN.

In 1990, a conservative Republican group headed by Newt Gingrich sent a pamphlet to Republican candidates running in state elections across the country. The document amounted to a dictionary: 133 words that operatives might use to elevate themselves (family, freedom, pride) and vilify their competitors (decay, corruption, pathetic, traitors). The pamphlet was titled, unironically, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Many in the media, nodding to the Orwell of it all, came to know it as “Newtspeak.”

The 1990s were years when politicians were translating the insights of postmodern discourse (the power of “framing” and the like) into the everyday practice of politics. But Gingrich’s memo turned spin into a plot twist. Every word of its grim new language represented an argument: that Democrats were not merely opponents, but enemies; that the differences between the two sides were not merely political, but moral. It recast American politics not as an ongoing debate among equals, but as an epic battle between good and evil. The core aim of propaganda, Aldous Huxley observed, is to make one group of people forget that another group is human; the pamphlet, cheerfully promising aspiring politicians that they could learn to speak like Newt, wove that logic, word by word, into Americans’ political habits.

The language in the pamphlet is stark. It is evocative. It is so very, very clear. It also takes the advice Orwell gave to preserve the thing he most loved and puts it in service of the thing he most feared.

Orwell watched the rise of communism. He fought the rise of fascism. He observed, from a distance and, at times, from intimately close range, the blunt-force power of words. He saw how quickly a common language could be transformed into a divisive one—and how readily, in the tumult, new hatreds and fears could settle into the syntax of everyday life. And he knew that history, so rarely consigned to the past, would repeat—that the battles of the 20th century would very likely be refought, in some form, in the future.

He knew all that, but he could not know it all. And there are moments in “Politics and the English Language” that can read, today, as nearly naive, with its faith in facts and its hope that clarity could be our salvation. Orwell was a satirist, too—1984, he believed, was an example of the genre—but he did not account for the ways that irony could come for language itself. He did not imagine propaganda that does its work through winks and shrugs rather than shouts. He did not sense how possible it would become for people in the future, seeking his wisdom, to wonder whether use clear language offers any counsel at all.

This is not Orwell’s failing, necessarily. And it need not be our own. If we look to him for refuge and find none, that means simply that we will have to use the words we have to create new advice, new axioms, new ways forward. We can take the insight that drove him—that words can expand the world, or limit it; that they can connect us to one another, or cleave us—and seek new means of clarity. We can treat language not just as a tool, but as a duty. We can keep remembering, and reminding one another, that 2 + 2 = 4.

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