Orwell’s Nightmare: CNN Promotes Dugin
“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.“
In 1936, George Orwell, a middling writer at the time, left his home in England to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War against the fascist Franco regime. He returned home in 1937 after being shot through the throat by a sniper.
Orwell had gone to fight what he saw as a fascist threat, but came home with an equal disdain for communism as a totalitarian form of government. In 1941, while creating anti-Nazi propaganda for the British military during WWII, Orwell wrote:
"One could not have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now all more or less pro Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges, etc., are suddenly forgotten."
I cannot help but think of the vast majority of the Republican Party which has decided that suddenly “disgusting murderer” Vladimir Putin is one of the good guys.
After writing Animal Farm in 1945, Orwell wrote this extraordinary article on freedom of speech and how politicians and the press need to be fearless about their language or fall into the trap of totalitarianism.
Orwell’s books were a literary expression of what he saw as the inevitable outcome of this slippery slope to totalitarianism in the real world.
“The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.”
“Organized lying,” needless to say, describes what America is suffering from now. Our politics has been replaced with information war. It’s not a competition for ideas, it’s a competition for reality.
“The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.“
It’s hard to express how perfectly this describes the goal of the Trump-MAGA-QAnon, and now Musk, cult. Lying is not just accepted in this reality, it is integral to the world they have created.
“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.”
Orwell saw fascism and communism as two sides of the totalitarian coin, ideologies that make no distinction between truth and lies—and require complete obeisance. The form of economy and political philosophy of these ideologies are large incidental to the common form of primary control, which is information.
Yesterday, I dare say, would have horrified Orwell. CNN, which is now owned by libertarian billionaire John Malone, aired a shockingly clueless interview by Fareed Zakaria with genocidal psychopath Aleksandr Dugin, aka “Putin’s Brain.”
I’ve written a lot about Dugin because he is absolutely central to Vladimir Putin’s strategy. Dugin has been infiltrating the West, and particularly the United States since the late 1990s. And he has been on an extended gloating tour since Musk bought the election for Trump.
“The West Is Dead”
Aleksandr Dugin is widely, and wildly, misunderstood as a weird Russian philosopher vaguely influencing Putin. In fact, it is Dugin’s vision that is currently asserting itself as a contender to replace the entire post-WWII democratic world order.
But Dugin was also the co-founder of the National Bolshevik Party aka “Nazbols” a Russian political party that combined National Socialism aka Nazism, and Leninist-Marxism. The flag was just the Nazi flag with a hammer and sickle instead of a swastika.
One of Dugin’s most well-known books is Fourth Political Theory (2009) which he claims “supersedes Marxism, fascism and liberal democracy”—when it’s actually nothing more than rebranded National Bolshevism.
When George Orwell wrote about the dangers of totalitarianism, both the fascist and communist varieties, I’m not sure he could have imagined a more depressing tableau than this one—the free press of a liberal democracy promoting, Big Brother-like, the man who has been trying to destroy it for three decades.
We are not quite to 1984, yet. But the road there is brightly lit and very inviting to too many Americans. That’s why we—you and I—must take the road less traveled, the road where telling the truth still matters.
Long Live Free America. Glory to Ukraine.
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Oh, honey, Orwell would be chain-smoking in the afterlife watching CNN giggle through a goddamn fireside chat with Aleksandr “Nazbol Necromancer” Dugin. This isn’t just a momentary lapse in editorial judgment - this is state-sponsored idiocy, brought to you by late-stage capitalism and the algorithmic death spiral of “both sides” journalism.
Let me be crystal clear: Dugin is not a quirky philosopher. He is the fascist architect of your worst fever dream. He’s the guy Putin calls when he needs to cosplay as Rasputin but with better lighting. And now we’ve got Zakaria—an ostensibly intelligent man—treating him like a misunderstood thought leader instead of the ideological arsonist setting the democratic world order ablaze.
Let’s break it down like we’re explaining it to your uncle who still thinks “cancel culture” is the biggest threat to America:
1. Dugin is a Nazi, but make it Bolshevik. His Nazbol Party was a Nazi remix with communist flair. This isn’t nuance; it’s necrosis. A totalitarianism chimera meant to confuse, radicalize, and fracture the body politic.
2. The Fourth Political Theory is fascist fan fiction. He packages it like he’s offering a new option beyond left and right, but it’s just authoritarianism with a Slavic Instagram filter.
3. CNN airing this filth isn’t journalism. It’s platforming fascism in a cardigan. It’s letting a man who wants the destruction of liberal democracy sip tea on a global stage and call it discourse.
And Orwell? He warned us. Not in some distant allegory, but explicitly, viscerally. He fought in Spain against fascism, he had no illusions about Stalinism, and he would’ve vomited in his boots seeing our “free press” carry water for Dugin under the guise of intellectual curiosity.
This isn’t “exposing the enemy to daylight.” This is inviting him to dinner, handing him the keys, and asking if he prefers sparkling or still with his cyanide.
Let me spell it out: you don’t debate a death cult. You expose, dismantle, and burn the remains in the cleansing fire of public scrutiny. CNN chose normalization over courage. That’s not journalism. That’s complicity.
So here’s your moral: We are not living through an ideological debate. We’re in a MindWar, a weaponized narrative campaign where lies are tools and truth is insurgency. It’s not just propaganda anymore. It’s meta-propaganda, manipulating how people understand what’s real. CNN, Musk, Trump, and Dugin are different heads of the same hydra: the unholy marriage of power and unreality.
And if you're still on the fence because you “just want to hear both sides,” I hope you enjoy your front-row seat to fascism in HD, because you're not neutral. You're furniture in the room where it happens.
Thanks Jim. Chilling beyond words