George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four coined the word “doublethink,” defined as thinking two contradictory things at once and accepting them both.

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the world ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

This is precisely how MAGA apes operate. Some of the contradictory beliefs they hold are:

• that America promotes free speech, but that Trump and his administration have the right to silence “radical Leftists”
• that American citizens have a right to health and safety, but that they must all submit to the will of their leader, even if he is recklessly putting their health at risk
• that MAGA are fighting to defend freedom, yet deploying the troops on American soil is “patriotic” and necessary
• that Trump’s America is a bustling success, but the “radical Left” is corrupting the country at the highest levels and bringing America to the brink of anarchy and tyranny
• that Trump is humble yet powerful, modest yet successful, kind and caring yet ruthless
• that MAGA is a movement for justice, yet its followers are always celebrating cruelties done to others – not celebrating justice, but celebrating actual acts of cruelty
• that America is “the best country in the world” but it also needs to be made great again (because it’s not great right now)
• that Trump cares about the poor yet obsesses over gold, marble floors, renovations, luxury jets and gold toilets
• that MAGA has a sense of humor, but to laugh at Trump is the highest sin and something that only “retarded” liberals do
• that MAGA wants the truth but you should never listen to anyone else but Trump and his sycophants

And many of these are unquestionable beliefs. Orwell wrote about “crimestop”:

The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. … He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions—’the Party says the Earth is flat’, ‘the Party says that ice is heavier than water’—and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.

MAGA loons are essentially training themselves all the time. They are so delusional that it must become second nature to them. Anything that doesn’t fit in with the MAGA worldview is instantly and automatically dismissed as fake news, without ever being understood.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the three slogans of the Party are:

War is peace

Freedom is slavery

Ignorance is strength

All of these might as well be MAGA’s key phrases.

The self-satisfied sheeplike face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically.

MAGA reacts instinctively with fear and anger toward anyone who’s a Democrat. They have been conditioned to do so. As soon as they learn someone is a leftist, the worst cruelty suddenly becomes permissible. All decency vanishes amid a torrent of screams and deranged nonsense. Lefties are maximally condemned, while conservatives are maximally praised – as long as they support Trump. This is conditioning and automatic adherence. It does not constitute rational, critical thought.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania’s citizens are conditioned to support the regime through the use of doublethink and constant reinforcement, using constant news of victory, war, and terrorism to keep people in fear and convince them to remain loyal to the regime. But in such regimes there is an inherent contradiction, hence the need for doublethink. If the regime is so glorious, why is it under constant attack? Why does it need to police its citizens’ thinking? Why does it need to subject everyone to surveillance? Why has it not yet put down its worst enemy?

But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day, and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were – in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State.

This is also a perfect description of what is going on with the MAGA crowd. The cult has become an insular echo chamber. MAGA could not exist without reference to its enemy, the Democrats, the “radical” Left. It must always keep the “fight” going. MAGA stands for “Make America Great Again” – will they ever reach the point where America is now great again, and there is no further need for the MAGA Cult? To accomplish its supposed mission would be to destroy itself. The cult’s sole reason for being is to perpetuate the struggle, to always need a Trump, and to always need enemies to defeat and mock.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.

The perfect description of MAGA today. They can’t help joining in. The hate campaign belongs to all of them. They lose themselves and adopt the MAGA crowd’s frenzy and mania. The only difference is that they will it.

The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

MAGA apes are always attacking people who agree with Democrats, or who have agreed with them in the past. That’s enough, in their minds, to completely discredit someone. Once you are associated with the enemy, none will listen to you.

Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think.

Again, what we see in MAGA. They don’t need to think. Everything is automatic and conditioned. No complex reasoning takes place. The crowd reacts, and the individual reacts, too. They might as well not be separate individuals at all since all they do is partake in the flow of the crowd.

As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

That’s exactly the impression you get when you read the scribblings of MAGA loons – this comes not from a thinking person with agency; it’s simply noise, to be agreed with fervently by other MAGA robots in the vicinity. They have been emptied out and now carry out only what is automatic and instinctive. They are totally incapable of critical thinking, of original thought. They have no opinions, no ideas. Everything comes to them ready-made. They merely regurgitate it and move on. Their “opinions” are not even half-baked – they are not baked at all. They are taken in and immediately passed out again, without undergoing any intermediate process of change. MAGA apes are simple vessels for MAGA opinion, which invariably comes from Trump.

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. … The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies – more of everything except disease, crime and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.

We see this in MAGA too – the constant narrative that things are getting better. Look at the stats! America is constantly improving, and yet, nothing in YOUR life seems to ever change. But the MAGA apes don’t question it. Though they can’t remember any such improvements to public life, they nevertheless swallow the narrative, because the only other option is to be a doubter, and that would mean abandoning Trump, abandoning all the “wins”, abandoning the precious future they have been promised.

When Trump says grocery prices are going down, but you are manifestly able to buy less than you could a year ago, how do the MAGA loons get out of that one? Doublethink! The cost of groceries in your life is going up AND the cost of groceries in America is going down. Two simultaneously held beliefs that contradict one another.

He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal – tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree – existed and even predominated.

It’s amazing what you can overlook if you don’t look around with open eyes. That includes in the conceptual space as well. MAGA apes hold all these misconceptions about America, and how stupid they are, we think, for believing them! It’s because they don’t actually LOOK with eyes that aren’t expecting anything. They’re always spinning it, putting a narrative on it, characterizing it in terms of the political alignment they have ALREADY DECIDED IS TRUE.

This is a real problem. As people become more isolated and less outgoing (thanks to the internet), their beliefs about the world are easier to warp because they notice less. They have less experience with what lies “out there”, so it’s easier for them to accept highly exaggerated or incorrect characterizations of it. Even when they do go out, they don’t LOOK. They just assume.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Believing clearly illogical things, despite the evidence of your experience, is a sure sign of irrationality. MAGA doesn’t understand government; they only understand it in terms of what they WANT it to be, which it can never be, of course. They are unable to explain things that happen contrary to what they want – their cognitive dissonance simply does not allow it. So, they blame everything on some conspiracy, perpetrated of course by the Left, who are all apparently devious holders of some secret master plan.

This was not illegal (nothing was illegal since there were no longer laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party acts arbitrarily. There are many, many things you can do against which there are no laws, but which could very easily lead to your arrest, or suspicion being put on you. You aren’t subjected to a set of well-known rules; you’re subjected instead to the ever-watchful eyes of Big Brother and the constant fear that you might be targeted next.

What Donald Trump really wants is to be America’s Big Brother, the dictator who can arbitrarily choose to punish whomever he likes for whatever reason he contrives. The Trumpists have not only come to believe this is good, they have come to believe it’s an inevitable good. Anyone who would stop Donald Trump from doing what he was supposedly elected to do (even if it’s not legal and has no precedent) is clearly obstructing the progress of America. The rule of Trump replaces the rule of law.

MAGA wasters are the most un-American people imaginable. They believe they are loyal, patriotic, law-abiding citizens, and yet they fully support Trump doing blatantly illegal and unconstitutional things. What a joke. Trump clearly does not care about the Constitution and has clearly never read it.

The only rule that matters to MAGA apes is what will get their president exactly what he wants.

MAGA SCUM.

Alternate Titles

“How Not To Be American”

“George Orwell Foretold Trumpism”