{"id":41424,"date":"2026-01-01T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T15:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=41424"},"modified":"2026-01-09T19:02:03","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T03:02:03","slug":"karoline-leavitts-white-house-briefing-doublethink-is-straight-out-of-orwells-1984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/karoline-leavitts-white-house-briefing-doublethink-is-straight-out-of-orwells-1984\/","title":{"rendered":"Karoline Leavitt\u2019s White House briefing doublethink is straight out of Orwell\u2019s \u20181984\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Laura Beers<\/a>, American University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During a press conference on Dec. 11, 2025, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced there was good news on the state of the economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cInflation as measured by the overall CPI has slowed to an average 2.5% pace<\/a>,\u201d she said, referring to the consumer price index. \u201cReal wages are increasing roughly $1,200 dollars for the average worker.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When CNN political correspondent Kaitlan Collins attempted to ask a follow-up question, Leavitt pivoted to an attack. Not on Collins, a frequent target of White House ire<\/a>, but on Leavitt\u2019s predecessor in the Biden White House, Democrat Jen Psaki.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psaki, claimed Leavitt, stood at the same lectern a year before and told \u201cutter lies<\/a>.\u201d In contrast, Leavitt insisted, \u201cEverything I\u2019m telling you is the truth backed by real, factual data, and you just don\u2019t want to report on it \u2019cause you want to push untrue narratives about the president.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201creal, factual data\u201d that underpinned Leavitt\u2019s statement was specious at best. The actual inflation rate for September was 3%<\/a>, not the 2.5% figure cherry-picked from economic data<\/a>. The rise in real wages? CNN business editor David Goldman writes that in the past year<\/a>, U.S. workers have experienced \u201cthe lowest annual paycheck growth that Americans have had since May 2021<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m a historian who has written about the enduring legacy of George Orwell\u2019s ideas<\/a> about truth and freedom. Listening to Leavitt assert a \u201ctruth\u201d so obviously discordant with people\u2019s lives, I was reminded of the repeated pronouncements from the Ministry of Plenty in Orwell\u2019s \u201c1984<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen,\u201d Orwell wrote. \u201cAs 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 \u2014 more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel\u2019s doomed hero, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department that produces these fraudulent statistics \u2013 figures that are so far divorced from reality that they \u201chad no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the world of \u201c1984,\u201d not only are statistics invented, they are continually reinvented to serve the needs of Big Brother\u2019s regime at any given moment: \u201cAll history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Transparency as doublespeak<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The lack of transparency depicted in \u201c1984\u201d has an uncanny echo in our current political moment, despite Leavitt\u2019s repeated assertions that President Donald Trump is the \u201cmost transparent president in history<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leavitt has made that claim countless times, including in her public defense of Trump\u2019s \u201cQuiet, Piggy!\u201d dismissal<\/a> of Bloomberg News journalist Catherine Lucey last month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Leavitt\u2019s usage, \u201ctransparency\u201d has become a form of Orwellian \u201cdoublespeak,\u201d a word or phrase which through the process of \u201cdoublethink\u201d had come to encompass its exact opposite meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDoublethink,\u201d in Orwell\u2019s writing<\/a>, was the mechanism of thought manipulation that allowed someone \u201cto 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doublethink was the mechanism that enabled the citizens of Oceania, the Anglo-American superstate governed by Big Brother\u2019s authoritarian regime, to accept that \u201cWAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it is the mechanism that allowed Leavitt to proclaim, in defending Trump\u2019s unwillingness to release the Epstein files, \u201cThis administration has done more with respect to transparency<\/a> when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein than any administration ever.\u201d That claim was pronounced \u201cfabulously audacious<\/a>\u201d by The Guardian\u2019s Washington bureau chief, David Smith, in a story headlined \u201cNothing to see here: Trump press chief in full denial mode over Epstein.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making \u2018lies sound truthful and murder respectable\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In his famous essay \u201cPolitics and the English Language<\/a>,\u201d Orwell wrote that \u201cpolitical language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the past 10 months, Leavitt has, among other things, claimed that the now dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development \u2013 USAID \u2013 provided a grant of $32,000 for a \u201ctransgender comic book<\/a>\u201d in Peru. Not true<\/a>. She has misrepresented the \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill\u201d as fully eliminating taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security<\/a>. In reality, deductions for these are capped<\/a>. She claimed that Trump coined the motto \u201cpeace through strength<\/a>.\u201d He didn\u2019t. The phrase has been in circulation for decades, used most prominently by Ronald Reagan during his presidency<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And she recently sought to delegitimize U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly and colleagues\u2019 plea to servicemen and women not to obey illegal orders by suggesting tautologically that \u201call lawful orders are presumed to be legal by our servicemembers<\/a>,\u201d and hence Kelly\u2019s plea could only serve to provoke \u201cdisorder and chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All governments lie<\/a>. But Leavitt has become a master of the art of political language, wielded to aggrandize her boss, belittle his opponents and deflect attention from administration scandals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laura Beers<\/a>, Professor of History, American University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Beers, American University During a press conference on Dec. 11, 2025, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced there was good news on the state of the economy. \u201cInflation as measured by the overall CPI has slowed to an average 2.5% pace,\u201d she said, referring to the consumer price index. \u201cReal wages are increasing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":41425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8025,46,295,10,296,36,4,15533,38],"tags":[479,3738,17318,885,891,886,860,16783,17317,987],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41426,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41424\/revisions\/41426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}