COVID-1984

Leftists believe they have a monopoly on 1984. Draw any comparison between the nightmare world of Winston Smith and the nightmare world leftists are currently working their fingers to the bone in order to create, and a horde of pink-haired baristas will assemble itself to remind you that Orwell was in fact an enthusiastic democratic socialist.

And there’s the magic word. If Orwell was a socialist, then surely he would have approved of all of the tyranny which modern socialists are obligated to support – right?

Well, not exactly. For starters that would conveniently overlook the “democratic” component of Orwell’s political convictions. But more than anything else, Orwell was anti-authoritarian. He wrote 1984 to provide a glimpse of what the world would become once governments control the entirety of their subjects’ private lives.

So the gender studies majors have to ask themselves: Would Orwell have approved of a government which boards up small businesses, prohibits people from leaving their homes, mandates injections, forces children to swaddle their faces in cheap cotton, and accuses dissidents of siding with the evil foreign government du jour? Hardly. In fact, if Orwell could have witnessed the unfettered efforts of today’s left-leaning political actors, he might just assume they’d mistaken his novel for an instruction manual.

If you go on social media to scream-cry about people who are no longer tolerating COVID restrictions, then you are a fair weather authoritarian – happy to condone free speech when it’s dribbling out of your own gob; happy to endorse civil unrest, even when it scorches vast swaths of urban landscape into oblivion; but mortified when someone whose politics fall anywhere to the right of Mao Zedong’s does the same.

In short: If your ideology cannot become the norm without copious amounts of coercion, then you are one of the ones Orwell spent his final days on Earth trying to warn the rest of us about.

And COVID really does fit into Big Brother’s playbook quite neatly. It’s a vague, omnipresent threat that can only be mitigated so long as everyone does exactly as the talking heads behind the daises and flickering across the telescreens say. Never mind where COVID came from. Never mind that the vaccine for COVID doesn’t prevent its symptoms or transmission. Never mind that the official solution to the pandemic makes regular Joes poorer and less free.

If you’re onboard with the plan, then you’re a paragon of virtue deserving of two blue checkmarks. If you’re against it, then you necessarily belong to any one of the categories of people that the media has spent the last decade demonizing – or worse, working for whichever foreign government your country’s leftist politicians currently like the least. That’s Russia at the moment, but there’s no telling which nation we’ll always have been at war with next.

Here’s our extreme stance on the matter. If a disease ever does arrive from a country of unknown origin, and it immediately starts destroying everyone it infects with pustules and buboes and wens, then we’ll gladly stay in our homes sans official compulsion. But you can take your Orwellian COVID restrictions and stick them right up your memory hole.