The age of Trump and climate denial are of course over-the-top Orwellian; since before the year 1984, editorialists have reached for the novel to describe corrosive politics, including Ronald Reagan’s bland euphemisms for class and race war and Tony Blair and George W. Bush’s campaign of deceit to launch wars against that abstraction “terror” that killed perhaps a million nonabstract human beings. That era produced responses such as the website the Memory Hole, named after the desktop pit into which Winston Smith dumped newspaper articles once their account of history had been replaced by a
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