During a sleepless night, fretting about the destruction of our country, I had a series of recollections.
My memories include living images of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, as well as horrid flashbacks to their assassinations. The reaction of the Trump Administration to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie King, evoked an even more disturbing recollection, George Orwell’s novel “1984.”
More time has passed since the year 1984 than from the novel’s 1949 publication and that imagined “future” date. Do younger people who do not recall the 1960s even know about that book?
“1984“ describes a country under a totalitarian leader known as Big Brother, who everyone knows “is watching you” with threats of imprisonment or worse if you deviate from the party line. The main character, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, which alters history to align with current politics and eliminates documentary evidence of individuals who have been “disappeared.” This horrendous vision, which combines aspects of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, gave birth to the term “Orwellian.”
“Orwellian” frighteningly describes what is happening in America today. Trump’s Administration attacks DEI initiatives as “discrimination.” ICE rounds up immigrants without a warrant and deports them without due process.
Hitler created concentration camps for Nazism’s “others,” especially Jews, eventually resorting to the death camps of the Holocaust. Russia’s secret police enforced government control, a model Vladimir Putin learned in the KGB and now has reinforced.
Today, in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a champion of the First Amendment, President Trump and Attorney General Bondi, head of the Department of “Justice,” claim that they will eliminate the “hate speech” of the Left. The Administration seeks to intimidate universities, businesses, law firms, and the media. For example, in September, Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit, now dismissed, against The New York Times for its 2024 campaign reporting.
Threatened by the FCC Chairman, Disney-ABC suspended late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel over remarks about the assassination of Kirk. He was reinstated after First Amendment advocates on the Right objected. However, many other people have lost their jobs without such protective reactions.
Who needs censorship when intimidation doesn’t involve violating the Constitution?
The Administration has also attacked American science, perversely undermining future innovation. Scientific knowledge, accumulated patiently by experimentation and replication, leads to the establishment of validated information – such as the conclusion that human activities, especially burning of fossil fuels, cause climate change. Such “inconvenient truths” run counter to using Orwellian “alternative facts” to dominate public discourse.
Trump consistently accuses others of doing what he himself does to pursue power. Most famously, he denied the validity of the 2020 election results and now appeals to that falsehood as he seeks to undermine our electoral system by eliminating mail-in voting and automated ballot counting.
Validated mail-in ballots – as we have demonstrated in Colorado – expand the ability of people to vote, especially disadvantaged citizens who have mostly voted Democratic since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Automatic ballot counting, as I have seen firsthand as an election judge, is reliable and not subject to outside manipulation – as long as the process remains secure. Trump supporter Tina Peters, a former County Clerk in Mesa County, has been sent to prison for violating her sworn duty to protect that security.
Hand-counting of millions of ballots risks the potential for thousands of miscounted ballots simply by human error, and more gravely, gross fraud – ballot-box “stuffing” that Trump falsely decries.
Do we have a chance of having fair elections across the United States in 2026? How big is the risk that we will have no elections at all?
Such waking nightmares, previously unimaginable before 2025, trouble this Orwellian time.
Dick White is a retired scientist, certified Climate Change Professional, and former Durango City Councilor and Mayor.
