George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, in the closing weeks of the Pacific War. Even then, most naïve supporters of the wartime Soviet-British-American alliance were no longer in denial about the contours of Moscow’s impending postwar communist aggression.

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The short, allegorical novel’s human-like farm animals replay the transition of supposedly 1917 revolutionary Bolsheviks into cynical 1930s Stalinists.  . . .

Orwell saw that the desire for power stamps out all ideological pretenses. It creates an untouchable ruling clique central to all totalitarian movements. Beware, he warns, of the powerful who claim to help the helpless.

Something so far less violent, but no less bizarre and disturbing, now characterizes the American New New Left. It is completing its final Animal Farm metamorphosis as it finishes its long march through our cultural, economic, and social institutions. Leftists may talk of revolutionary transformation, but their agenda is to help friends, punish enemies, and to keep and expand power.

First, remember the 1960s and 1970s agendas of the once impotent, young, and supposedly idealistic leftist revolutionaries. . . .

The First Amendment was said by them to be sacred, even as the “free speech movement” transitioned to the “filthy speech movement.” Leftists sued to mainstream nudity in film. They wanted easy access to pornography. They mainstreamed crude profanity. The supposed right-wingers were repressed.  . . .

“Censorship” was a dirty word. It purportedly involved the religious bigots and medieval minds that in vain had tried to cancel ideological and cultural mavericks and geniuses from Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo. “Banned in Boston” was a sign of cretinism. Only drunken “paranoids” like Joe McCarthy resorted to “blacklists.” . . .

Conservatives, the radicals lectured us, masked the poverty of their thinking by “red-baiting.” They talked as if “commies” and “insurrectionists” were around every corner—in hopes of militarizing the country, and using police and troops to intimidate the “people.”

Snooping, surveillance, wiretaps—all that and more was awful—the purported work of nutty J. Edgar Hoover. His flat-topped, wing-tipped “G-men” usually outnumbered Black Panthers, Weathermen, and SDS members at secret strategy sessions.

Hollywood went wild in the 1960s and 1970s by warning us about “them.” Endless movies detailed the solo efforts of heroes, who were watched and threatened by the “government,” working hand in glove, of course, with either corporations or the “rich.” . . .

Students in the 1960s high schools were spoon-fed Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and other dystopian novels. Orwell and Huxley warned them of the dangers of a super-spy apparat, a one-party state that reorders a docile subservient population, and the combination of “science” with thought control—the sort of stuff that Nixon or Goldwater was no doubt plotting. .  . .

Reporters were either iconoclastic Gonzos or shoe-leather investigators on the scent of deep state overreach. They were obsessed with wrongdoing at the CIA and FBI. Politicians, of course, weren’t to be trusted—given the corporations who pulled their puppet strings.

The enemy of America, we were told, was the “big guys,” especially the international conglomerates like ITT with global reach. The corporationists refined the arts of the cartel, trust, and monopoly.  . . .

The “revolving door” was a mortal sin, as the tentacles of the Pentagon octopus now squeezed out public money for bombs, rockets, and jets to fight needless wars. About every three weeks Ike’s farewell warning about the “military-industrial complex” was trotted out by liberal columnists to remind us of felonious corruption.

Civil and women’s rights were the twin pillars of the 1960s radicals. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Malcolm X, the themes were for “white America” to live up to the ideals of their Constitution, to finally realize the “promises of the Declaration of Independence” and to treat people on the basis of the “content of their character” and not on “the color of their skin.” . ..

The point of the 1960s, again we were taught, was to tear down the rules, the traditions and customs, the hierarchies of the old guys.  . . .

Our Nightmare, 2021

Fast forward a half-century. What did these now-late septuagenarians give America?  . . .

We are now finally witnessing the logical fruition of their radical utopia: Censorship, electronic surveillance, internal spying, monopolies, cartels, conspiracy theories, weaponization of the intelligence agencies, pouring billions of dollars into campaigns, changing voting laws by fiat, a woke revolutionary military, book banning, bleeding the First Amendment, canceling careers, blacklisting, separate-but-equal racial segregation and separatism.

Conspiracies? Now they brag of them in Time. . . .

The Left censors books in our schools, whether To Kill a Mockingbird or Tom Sawyer.  . . .

The Left demands not free-speech areas anymore, but no-speech “safe spaces” and “theme houses”—euphemisms for racially segregated, “separate-but-equal” zones. . . .

For “teach-ins,” we now have indoctrination sessions. But the handlers are no longer long-haired 1960’s dreamy, sloppy, and incoherent mentors. . . .

The Left spun conspiracy theories about computer pings in Trump Tower, and nefarious meetings of Trump’s campaign officials colluding with Russian agents. CNN and MSNBC tell us that the whole plot was laid out in a bought dossier—as the fantasies of Christopher Steele’s canonical hired hit piece became the Left’s version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  . . .

Assimilation and integration are not our goals. Instead, we are to ferret out “cultural appropriation” and the odious culture of “white supremacy” and “unearned privilege.” “All men are created equal. But some are more equal than others” is now posted on the electric barn wall.

Deprogramming 74 million “whites” and “Republicans” is the advice on the pages of the progressive Washington Post. Don’t like an idea? Then wash clean the polluted minds of those who embraced it. .. .

A new Orwellian phrase is “free speech is not free reach”—as leftists become the intellectual inheritors of the racists of the open-housing fights of the 1950s and 1960.  . ..

Surveillance and spying are now good. How else to ferret out “right-wingers,” “white supremacists,” and “insurrectionists”?

So the FBI and CIA have transmogrified into heroic agencies run by stalwart social activist fighters like John Brennan, the old Gus Hall supporter, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe.  . . .

What a wonderful world they have created: Eavesdropping on the national security advisor, forging FISA documents, spying on American citizens, aiding one presidential candidate by surveilling another.

Finally, they can use their skills and surveillance to investigate and hound the “right” enemies, for the “right” causes.” . . .

Army may become our People’s Revolutionary Army as generals sniff out counterrevolutionaries hidden deeply in their ranks. Maybe a cleansing purge or two is necessary, in the Soviet fashion.

Barb-wiring the capitol and stocking it with camouflaged troops send the message that the military is, at last, woke and in control of America’s central nervous system. Corporate profiteering for retired generals and admirals is a necessary amplifier of their critical work. . . .

Could we have ever stopped the hate without the help of billions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros? Why break up monopolies and cartels when their profits pour into progressive wokeness?  . . .

The media? It is a Ministry of Truth. Informers and readers beg the Great Leader to let drop his favorite flavor of ice cream or the details of the Oval Office makeover. There is no need for censorship: the media are the censors. Whatever sinister idea a paranoid politician has for muzzling journalists, reporters themselves have already trumped it. Pravda is their model. Who can be disinterested when there is a war to be fought for diversity and equity, against climate change and white supremacy?

The revolutionary animals are now running the farm in a way that would be nightmarish even to Farmer Jones.

They won. They are now one with—but also far, far worse than—what they rebelled against.

(Excerpt from American Greatness. Article by Victor Davis Hanson. Photo Credit: Unsplash.)

What parallels do you see between Animal Farm and the times we are facing now?