Just a few generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written as a warning about how freedom is lost to the tyranny and intolerance of totalitarianism.

Animal Farm and 1984 were particularly apt for teaching young people at a time when the shocking revelations about Nazism and Soviet communism that were coming out in the 1950s and 1960s were hard to digest. Most important, what these works revealed was that a defining feature of totalitarianism is mind control. First, propaganda warps and destroys people’s grasp on reality. Second, propaganda is designed to foster groupthink, conformity, and collectivism, which  marginalizes critical and independent thinking.

Orwell described the scope of the totalitarian enterprise, noting in one section of 1984 that, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

In 1984, Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future.” Orwell’s introduction of concepts and terms such as “newspeak, doublethink and thought police” are what we now experience as political correctness, misinformation, and cancellation. The analogs of “thought police” in 1984 are now the enforcers of political correctness and closed political narratives.

As Orwell notes, “the whole aim of newspeak and doublethink is to narrow the range of thought.” Political correctness has the same goal and that’s why its adherents are so intolerant -- seeking to silence, cancel, and delegitimize people with whom they disagree.

As it turns out, social media and information technology have great power to narrow the range of acceptable thought. Google, which controls 90% of Internet searches, utilizes an AI-driven search ranking that can manipulate not only consumer preferences but also election outcomes. According to Robert Epstein, a Harvard Ph.D. who has studied Google for more than decade,  Google’s ability to manipulate its search ranking algorithms has  the power to change the choices of 15% of undecided voters, more than enough to change many recent close election outcomes.

The COVID-19 lockdowns and the death of George Floyd in May 2020 created an environment of fear. And fear of going to the polls gave Democrat activists and lawyers the opportunity to change election laws and protocols in key swing states to expand the utilization of mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, and lengthening vote counting deadlines. These initiatives enabled paid activists to manipulate voter registration and the vote count through fraudulent ballots -- undertaken to deny Donald Trump a second term.

Simultaneously, a full-blown cultural revolution came to America. What had been going on at many college campuses for decades came to cities across the country. With activism that created division, fear, and people turning on each other, it was as if Mao’s Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution 1960s and 70s had come to America.

First came hordes instigated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter smashing windows, looting, and burning down neighborhoods resulting in the destruction of $2 billion of urban property across America. Then, as if on cue or following a plan, marauding mobs appeared with ropes seeking to topple historic statues and monuments. Columbus and Confederate Civil War heroes were the first to go, but no one should doubt that the Founding Fathers -- the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution -- will be next. No history, no borders, no country.

Future historians may well look back and mark 2020 as the year America’s greatest threat began, for what happened that year and continued over the two and half years radically changed the country, effectively depriving American citizens of their First Amendment rights more completely than ever before, resulting in a questionable presidential election and the subsequent foreign invasion across the southern border.

In 2020 the main issues for Deep State influence and control of the American people were the COVID-19 pandemic and the November national election. The CIA, FBI, and DHS, which all had personnel who were hired by such social media companies as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, also had information-and-influence portals to these social media companies. However, directly influencing the election through censorship was perceived to be constitutionally problematic.

In June of 2020, the Election Integrity Partnership was formed by Alex Stamos, who was then a “research professor” at Stanford University, after resigning his role at Facebook as chief security officer in 2018. Stamos’ first endeavor at EIP was to meet with the Chris Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security to identify what EIP needed to do to influence the upcoming election, particularly regarding censorship, which CISA was reluctant to do.

Although Stamos had a staff of some 120 at EIP, keeping up with flagging and censoring the tens of millions of social media posts deemed to have “misinformation” would be impossible. His solution was for Stanford’s EIP to undertake persuading all the major social media companies to change their customer terms of service policies to incorporate language about “delegitimization,” which would enable mass censorship and cancellation.

Within six weeks of getting its operation up and running, EIP succeeded in getting Facebook to change its terms of service to adopt delegitimization. On September 10^th, Twitter also incorporated delegitimization into its terms of service. Other social media platforms followed suit.

Once the new terms of service that included delegitimization were in place, EIP had a two-fold approach to bring all social media companies into compliance to deplatform and cancel discussion/coverage of delegitimized topics: 1) Remind social media firms that there could be consequences from government regulatory agencies if they were noncompliant with their terms of service; and 2) Noncompliance with their written terms of service would also likely result in negative PR for the company.

There were slight changes to the words and subjects identified for delegitimization before and after the November national election. Mike Benz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, has itemized a partial summary of prohibited subjects for discussion on social media that would trigger cancellation or deplatforming:  new election protocols and processes; issues and outcomes; mail-in ballots; early voting; drop boxes; “Stop the Steal”; “Sharpiegate”; Poll Watcher; Postal Service; dead voter rolls; and Antifa. And when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in mid-October, it was immediately delegitimized.

By EIP’s own admission, Twitter was forced to cancel 22 million tweets that contained “misinformation” that violated the company’s terms of service prior to the November 2020 election.  After the election, when many Americans felt disenfranchised and had many questions about perceived irregularities, they found that social media effectively checked discussion about election fraud, just as social media had done with COVID-19 policy abnormalities.

In many ways social media has taken the place of the town hall, the marketplace, and traditional media. Whatever the cause, whether government agencies who have direct portals to convey one-sided information to social media, or NGOs like the Election Integrity Partnership, when they block, cancel, or deplatform voices and information, the result is a narrowing of the range of acceptable thought. This censorship is of course a violation of First Amendment free speech. Worse, it is an assault on the Constitution and a betrayal of government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute, and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His recent book, Rediscovering America, was #1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org

Image: Mike Licht