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One of the most effective aspects of the Trump campaign’s critique of the Biden regime was that it was authoritarian, bent on framing its principal opponent on various bogus crimes and destroying the freedom of speech by forcing Americans to accept a wide array of falsehoods, chief among them being that men can become women and legitimately star in women’s sports. Numerous patriots termed this leftist authoritarianism “Orwellian” and have continued to do so, and the New York Times is clearly feeling the sting.

Leftists, after all, thought they owned Orwell, and that any totalitarian regime that resembled the one in 1984 would come from the right. Just recently, the Times feebly and petulantly tried to make the case that it is Trump and his supporters, not leftists, who are really Orwellian.

If it sounds like a fool’s errand, that’s only because it is. The leftist flagship that insisted on referring to guys such as Rachel Levine and Caitlyn Jenner as if they were really the women they wish they were now expects you to believe that the real manipulation of language is to be found in “Trump’s airbrushing of the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as a ‘beautiful day’ and the pardoning of violent rioters who, he said, had ‘love in their hearts,’” which, the Times insists, “recalls one of Orwell’s quotes: ‘The past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.’”

See, the Times can call Trump’s words about Jan. 6 “Orwellian” because it is familiar with the old leftist tactic of accusing the enemy of doing what the accuser is actually doing himself. The left, with the Grey Lady leading the way, fabricated the entire Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative out of a guy with Viking horns walking around and some elderly ladies snapping selfies in the Capitol rotunda after the police opened the doors and ushered them in. Now this is “the deadly Jan. 6 attack,” even though the only person who was actually killed on that day was a Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt.

Now, if you don’t accept the left’s “insurrection” narrative, you’re engaged in an Orwellian rewriting of the past, according to the Times, when the actual rewriting of the events of that fateful day was entirely the handiwork of the left. And yet despite the fact that the entire leftist intelligentsia was on board with this deception, no one was ever actually charged with “insurrection,” least of all Trump, and the left’s efforts to bar him from seeking office again came to naught.

The Times’ Orwellian Matthew Purdy adds that Pete Hegseth’s efforts to rid the Pentagon of the divisive and racist effects of Critical Race Theory are reminiscent of the bureaucrat in “1984” who “gleefully bragged that ‘we’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.’” Remember, this is coming from the group that has destroyed a generation of schoolchildren’s understanding of what pronouns are and how they work by forcing us all to pretend that they were a matter of each individual’s own choosing. This is coming from the group that professes to revere the man who said he dreamed of the day when people would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; now, Hegseth’s efforts to do just that are “Orwellian.”

Purdy also rails against the “abrupt switch of Russia from enemy to ally,” likening it to the switch in “1984” of the enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia. And yet where has Russia become a U.S. ally except in the febrile imagination of the likes of Purdy and his fellow leftists?

The biggest howler of all in this childish Orwell-Is-Ours-Not-Yours screed is this: “In ‘1984,’ hate binds members of the Party, reinforced with Two Minute Hate sessions aimed at the televised mythical figure ‘Emanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People.’ In the lexicon of Trump, his many enemies — law enforcement, judges, immigrants, the press — are ‘scum’ and ‘vermin’ and, yes, ‘enemies of the people.’” It’s hard to imagine that even the New York Times could be this myopic, but there it is. Matthew Purdy clearly has the self-awareness of special-needs slime mold.

Did the Times miss the fact that the entire justice system was weaponized against Trump for at least the last four years, and that before that, there was the Russian Collusion hoax, the impeachment over an insignificant phone call, and, oh yes, another impeachment and efforts to bar him from the ballot over that phony “insurrection”? The man is now a “convicted felon” because a rabidly partisan prosecutor decided to elevate misdemeanors into felonies and ram a conviction of Trump through an equally rabidly partisan and corrupt court system. No, the Times didn’t miss all that; it was leading the charge against Trump. If anyone is the Emanuel Goldstein of our age, it is Trump himself, and it is a testimony to the strength and resilience of our political system that he wasn’t completely railroaded and isn’t sitting in a prison cell today.

Yes, the left owns Orwellian, because leftists today are so exquisitely Orwellian. It is they, with their felonious Trump, their fake insurrection, and their equally fake women, who are demanding that we affirm that two plus two equals five, just because the party says so. The New York Times, in trying to shore up the left’s sagging narrative, only reminds us yet again who are the real enemies of freedom, and, indeed, enemies of the people.