George Packer: "Doublethink Is Stronger Than Orwell Imagined"

Perhaps worth reading, but he makes the standard mistake of his tribe: thinking that Trump is the most Orwellian danger loose in the world, and treating the progressive O'Briens as more-or-less an afterthought. Trump's bullshittery is not to be underestimated--but it's of a pretty ordinary type, just turned up to 11. Though, of course, he has nukes...
But the most Orwellian threat in our cultural environment is represented by the PC left. The right, for example doesn't believe that truth is unreal, nor that it's malleable on the basis of politics. The left--or at least much of its vanguard--does believe that. The right lies--the left does, too. But at least the right doesn't accept a philosophy that rejects the very distinction between truth and lies. Trump doesn't seem to care about the distinction--as I've said, he's a Frankfurtian bullshitter. But he doesn't question the difference between facts and fictions--and doesn't demand that we do so. Much as I abhor his loathsome, non-stop bullshitting, I see him as a familiar kind of problem writ large--not an exponent of a whole new kind of theory that denies the very possibility of making sense of the world.