“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out… even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”
George Orwell’s bestselling novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” describes a world in which the ruling political party had taught the population to exercise doublethink — to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time with no internal dissonance. Through manipulation of language and the public consciousness, “Big Brother” manages to build a citizenry that will gladly swallow any falsehood.
Lies, half-truths, and opportunistic hypocrisy are leveraged by politicians on both sides of the aisle. However, the Biden administration is particularly adept at framing certain policy positions in an exceptionally Orwellian fashion.
Here are some examples.
Unemployment is job creation
The United States economy drastically missed employment projections for the month of April. Nevertheless, the Biden administration somehow managed to take a victory lap.
Despite the presence of 7.4 million job openings, only 266,000 jobs were added in April. Instead of decreasing, the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.1%.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) diagnosed the flaw in President Biden’s economic agenda that led to the disconnect: “While Dems trap people in a cycle of fear & pay them NOT to work, it’s clear the best thing to do is end the crisis-era policies & get Americans back to work.”
President Biden attempted to frame the dismal economic report in a positive light.
“Today, there’s more evidence our economy is moving in the right direction,” Biden remarked on May 7. “This month’s job numbers show we’re on the right track.”
Top Biden officials scraped together a thirty-second promotional video to push the same narrative. As upbeat music played, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg declared triumphantly that “in April, we created 266,000 new jobs in the American economy.”
The Commander-in-Chief adopted similar rhetoric after he scrapped the Keystone pipeline, killing 11,000 jobs with the stroke of a pen. Biden’s executive order insisted that “the significance of the proposed pipeline for our energy security and economy is limited” and that “the United States must prioritize the development of a clean energy economy, which will in turn create good jobs.”
The Keystone pipeline employees aren’t holding their breath.
Abortion saves lives
Though the Biden administration supports abortion with virtually no restrictions, its leaders consistently frame this position as “healthcare.”
Democratic politicians frequently use the “abortion is healthcare” lie, but Vice President Harris recently took the untruth a step further, insisting that abortion indeed saves lives.
“There are states that have passed laws that will virtually prevent women from having access to reproductive health care,” Harris remarked during a Democratic primary debate. “And it is not an exaggeration to say women will die — poor women, women of color will die — because these Republican legislatures in these various states who are out of touch with America are telling women what to do with our bodies.”
In declaring that “women will die,” Harris failed to mention the unborn women of color whose lives are snuffed out daily by abortion. Indeed, black and Hispanic mothers carry out over 55% of abortions in the United States — a rate that drastically overrepresents their 29% share of the population. Half of their victims, of course, are women.
Likewise, President Biden — who bills himself as a “practicing Catholic” — is deeply supportive of abortion. In complete contradiction to historic biblical ethics on the matter, the President’s campaign platform declares abortion a “constitutional right.”
In other words, with the slight exception of nearly everything he stands for, the President is indeed deeply Catholic.
Court packing is restoring balance
President Trump managed to clinch a third Supreme Court nomination days before the 2020 election, decisively shifting the balance of power within the nation’s highest judicial body. President Biden is attempting to “pack” the Supreme Court, a move that would undo the conservative majority; yet, Biden’s moves have been intentionally reframed to appear more benign.
Throughout modern history — as Princeton University political science professor Keith Whittington recently discussed in Newsweek — court packing has been “understood to be beyond the pale” as “an announcement that politicians are above the law.”
Therefore, Democrats have adopted a new definition of the term “court packing.” The definition — as altered by Dictionary.com in December — can now more broadly refer to an imbalanced ideological makeup on the Court. Under the new parlance, President Trump engaged in “court packing” by filling three Supreme Court seats with constitutional originalists.
In this context, President Biden unveiled a “Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States” to analyze the “Court reform debate” — namely, by examining “the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court” and “the membership and size of the Court.”
A brief examination of the commission members’ work proves that many are constitutional revisionists who are open to reimagining the Supreme Court as Americans currently know it.
Handouts are infrastructure
The Biden administration unveiled a $2.7 trillion omnibus bill entitled the American Jobs Act. The catch is that very little of the bill has anything to do with infrastructure.
During a speech in Pittsburgh, President Biden declared that his bill “builds a fair economy that gives everybody a chance to succeed, and it’s going to create the strongest, most resilient, innovative economy in the world.”
“In fact, it’s the largest American jobs investment since World War Two,” he continued. “It will create millions of jobs, good-paying jobs. It will grow the economy, make us more competitive around the world, [and] promote our national security interests.”
Under the first version of the bill, however, roughly $621 billion — less than 25% of the overall bill — would be utilized for roads and bridges. The rest would finance healthcare, education, and a vast array of new government handouts.
Despite President Biden branding the bill as a twenty-first-century rerun of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, nonpartisan economists at the University of Pennsylvania agreed that the legislation would be economically counterproductive. The bill would in fact decrease economic growth as taxes and government spending rise.
Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson slammed the Biden administration accordingly: “I mean look, if you want a reparations bill, if you want a Green New Deal, just say so and let’s have the debate, but don’t call it an infrastructure bill, because it’s not.”
In promoting Biden’s legislation, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) perfectly encapsulated the redefinition of terms upon which the Democrats are increasingly reliant. In a viral tweet, she declared that “paid leave,” “child care,” and “caregiving” are “infrastructure.”
In Biden’s America, infrastructure is evidently as fluid as gender.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.