When it was published in 1949, George Orwell’s 1984 was about a future dystopian world in which the government changes history, represses free thought and individualism,  subjects its citizens to constant surveillance, and punishes all dissent.  Unfortunately, we have seen the future, and we are living the dystopian nightmare envisioned by Orwell, thanks to the so-called progressive Democrats.  I’m not exaggerating.  In 1984,  the government motto was “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail.  It takes a village.  Sound familiar?  By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want.  Medicare for all.  Sound familiar?  “Ignorance Is Strength” because the inability of the people to recognize these contradictions cements the power of the authoritarian regime.  Did you think the Left’s take over of the educational system was a coincidence?  One of the early progressives, John Dewey, supported kindergarten for American kids, not to begin their education at an earlier age, but as a convenient means of removing kids from their families early to prevent their picking up any non-progressive values at home.  In Orwell’s world, the government’s Ministry of Truth was in charge of lying to the public.  The Ministry changed history, by rewriting what actually happened, in favor of the convenient narrative of the moment.  You think the schools stopped teaching history because the subject wasn’t interesting?  And when they do pretend to teach history, many schools rely on Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States, which pretends to teach history from the Marxist viewpoint.  No, I’m not making that up.  Zinn rejects the notion that the telling of history should be an objective exposition of the facts, but instead, sees is as a means of serving progress.  Thus, in Zinn’s “history,” Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, becomes “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.”  I’m sure that, had they lived, the 30 to 50 million Chinese who were killed by Mao’s policies, would be so proud.  Zinn also dispels that misconception that the Castro regime in Cuba has a bloody record of suppression.  I’m sure that the thousands of Cubans languishing in the filthy prison on the Isle of Pines, the ones the Castros didn’t simply shoot, will be glad to know that they’re not being suppressed.  But changing history?  Is that possible?  In Orwell’s world, the keeping of written records was criminalized, and government records were falsified, to show that the government was responsible only for improving human life and not for oppression.  But that couldn’t happen here, right?  Wrong!  If NBC doesn’t report it, it didn’t happen.  And what do you think the monopolistic search engines and social media sites are up to.  They push any progressive ideas to the front of the list, and either bury or delete conservative thought.  You think it’s a coincidence that Google directed online inquiries about the California Republican Party to a site that equated Republicans with Nazis?  When you don’t teach history, and when young people don’t read books, and when “the truth” is whatever Google and Facebook say it is, then Big Brother is alive and well, and he’s a Democrat.  The Dems like to call Republicans fascists and dictators, but progressives have cornered the market for tyranny.  Progressives are entitled to run our lives from the cradle to the grave, you see.  Because they are afflicted with delusions of rectitude, the unshakable belief that they are always right, they know best what’s good for us.  The individual voter is too ignorant to make his or her own decisions, don’t you know.  And while it’s true that Democrats are having trouble connecting with the voters (which will remain important only until the progressives abolish elections), it’s not their fault.  It’s your fault.  You’re simply too dumb to understand how smart the Democrats/Progressives really are.  Don’t take my word for it.  Just listen to that noted legal scholar, Senator Maisie Hirono, who you will recall was willing to convict Brett Kavanaugh without evidence explaining, “Look, we are not in a court of law, we are in a court of credibility at this point.”  Maisie’s advice to men of, “Shut up and step up” neatly sums up progressive orthodoxy.  Last week, at the Bend Towards Justice conference (as in “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again”), Maisie explained, “We, Democrats, have a really hard time in connecting to people’s hearts instead of [their heads].  We’re really good at shoving out all the information that touch people here [pointing to her head] but not here [pointing to her heart].”Democrats cannot connect with people because we Democrats know so much.  That is true.  We have to … tell everybody how smart we are.”  Wow!  Without realizing it, Maisie Hirono just proved that Ronald Reagan was right again, when he said “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant.  It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”  And, of course, Maisie’s right, after all, she’s a liberal.  The proof that Democrats are so smart is all around us.  Joe Biden is a leading contender for the 2020 presidential nomination.  Who’s smarter than good old Joe?  Joe famously taught us that “the No. 1 job facing the middle class is a three-letter word: jobs.  J-O-B-S, jobs.”  Man, that’s deep, no wonder we can’t understand it.  And talk about changing history?  Joe Biden was ahead of his time.  “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about … the princes of greed.  He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’” Uh, two things.  First, the stock market crashed in 1929, and F.D.R. wasn’t president until 1933, and then again, he never appeared on television until the 1939 World’s Fair, but no matter.  And who could be smarter that the new darling of the Left, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who taught us that, “Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.”  Alexandria, how would we pay the additional $34 trillion for the programs you want?  Answer, “We just pay it, because it’s more affordable.”  Brilliant.  So good is bad, bad is good, more is less, and freedom is slavery.  Yes, Big Brother is alive and well, and we’re in big F—-ing trouble.