Politcal Whisperer
By Robert Hornak
In the classic dystopian novel 1984, about the threat of authoritarianism and what the future might look like under a socialist authoritarian regime, George Orwell’s antagonist Big Brother created the Ministry of Truth to serve as one of the main instruments to control the general population and what they thought.
In the novel, Newspeak was the approved language that people must adhere to using, the Thought Police enforced that adherence in both speech and belief, and the Ministry of Truth rewrote history to support the government’s narrative.
Democrats have been pushing a version of Newspeak for many years now. They have, with their allies in the legacy media, tried to enforce the use of certain language and beliefs by responding to their opponents with attacks designed to delegitimize the very being of the people disagreeing with them. Orwell called this making people into “unpersons” whose very memory would be erased.
For a few decades now, taking any number of mainstream republican positions, including cutting taxes, balancing the budget, fighting corruption, and now even trying to eliminate fraud in elections, has been enough to label someone as a racist, misogynist, anti-Semite who hates the elderly, children, women, immigrants or anyone with brown skin. This has been the foundation of the Left’s attack on any Republican standing up for these positions.
Additionally, if you didn’t accept the hyper-doomsday scenarios of global warming and the belief that basic human activity was destroying the planet, they attack those people as “deniers” of whatever their agenda was at that time. And as time went on and the doomsday scenarios didn’t materialize, they adopted a Ministry of Truth approach and simply wiped away those completely mistaken predictions, acting as if they were never made.
This mindset is now overtaking the Left, whether it be in misgendering someone, or trying to talk in any way about election fraud – which for decades was something both parties admitted existed and needed to be combatted – now gets someone labeled an election “denier,” which has become one of the Left’s favorite words to attack those who disagree with their agenda. Let’s not forget how anyone who wanted to decide for themselves whether to get the COVID vaccine or to wear a mask was call a science “denier.”
Now Zohran Mamdani is taking this approach to the next level and actually creating his own version of the Ministry of Truth, which he is calling the Office of Mass Engagement with a $5.2 million budget. Those in politics can easily recognize this as a campaign communication machine in waiting, but with dozens of staffers receiving very comfy six figure salaries and the mandate to push Mamdani’s political agenda to control the language used to describe it. All on the taxpayers dime.
This is in addition to his $51.7 million official communications department, which saw its budget increase by $7 million from last year. This is Mamdani’s official communications operation, while the Office of Mass Engagement will be the behind the scenes operation working in the shadows to pressure people in the legacy media to use their “approved” wording.
We’ve already seen how this works in Mamdani-land. When questioned during the campaign what he would do to fight antisemitism and the alarming rise in hate crimes against Jews, Mamdani responded vaguely that he would increase the budget for the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes without any acknowledgement of the rise in Jewish hate crimes. Then his first act as mayor was to take the universally accepted definition of anti-Semitism and created a new working definition to be used by NYC.
This is exactly what the Office of Mass Engagement will be tasked to do. Change the generally accepted definitions of what we know is true to something that fits the Mamdani narrative, all paid for by the very taxpayers he is looking to control. For years people have warned that 1984 is becoming reality, and it appears now it truly is.
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously worked for the NYC office of the Republican Assembly Leader and served as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @roberthornak on X.
