I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof.
They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.
I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives are his notebooks.
Can you describe the basis for the claim?
Like if you take Zamyatin's "We", and make the main character a propagandist working for the government, you get 1984.
Having witnessed the horrors of Nazi Germany, the rise of Stalinist Russia, and the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wanted to expose the mechanisms of oppression and propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Sources_f...
A very interesting read, but it did not verify any of your claims.
Its like animal farm a staunch criticism of the communist experiment and the societies it would form. The history rewritting was actually a typical socialist society pehnomena, going so far that china basically erased its whole past permanently. Its a incredible young country (barely 70 years old) and had to reimport a ton of its culture from taiwan!
Orwell lived through the hyper akward year, where hitler and stalin where allies and best friends - and thus saw the moscow controlled part of the international defending facists as best friends for a year, right after they stabbed the anarchists in the back in spain.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)
Apple's 1984 commercial didn't age well: https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc
Everyone ran towards this Brave New World based on media fueled populism.
To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
Provenance such as "this is what I want to do with my life" are poor justification for enabling it.
I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good contrast that pushes us in the right direction.
It could be as simple as budget changes.
I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc.
Upvote from me :)
I disagree with this. I think the comment was perfect quality. As we are slowly sinking into totalitarianism in the US, you will understand that this "noise" was in fact the signal you should have been listening to.
It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil.
It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
That feels a little horrifying to me.
They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) building anything. I don't think this period of brutal oppression they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in the US react very poorly to roving bands of State goons.
which is why the big tech bros and the openAI execs donated money to Trump; "kiss the ring".
it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.
recent posts show that 1/3 of the US electorate will still, in all likelihood, vote Republican, again, even after everything that has happened.
I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS, it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility.
Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)
The fact that he's President. Twice. He maneouvred himself into the most powerful seat in the world. Twice. I'm tremendously sceptical that someone stupid can wind up there like that. (Again, not necessarily intelligent. You don't need to be intelligent to clear the Republican field in 2016. You do need to be crafty.)
It's entirely possible that you can be on the stupid side of Chesterton's fence (to abuse the metaphor) and take it down, causing all the expected havok, and then claim you're excelling at your goals because you just have a sociopathic approach to the world.
Sure, picking up Maduro was well executed... and then he has been replaced with (checks notes... ) "the Maduro Regime".
Yeah, that -screams- competence.
I'll grant that he has achieved success via some amount of cunning (often via threats), but "smart" is decidedly not a term I would ever apply to him, and I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably think this given the myriad facts otherwise.
wut. this is a joke, right?
Stephen Miller... maybe. He's mostly evil and shiftless, and willing to utilize any and all tools.
No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists.
I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent. And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope he's sometimes characterised as.
Bush 1 was a dope. Dan Quayle was a dope. Bush 2 was a dope (until they decided they liked him). Sarah Palin was a dope. Trump is a dope. Vance is a dope.
The left views intelligence as a top tier prize, so they start by first trying to dismantle someone's standing on that.
How likely is it that all of those people are actually stupid compared to the typical voter? Zero chance. They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the typical voter, above average intelligence across the board. Are Bill Clinton and Obama smarter than Trump? Yes imo. But you can't play at nuance in the propaganda game though, so the left always settles on: my opponent is stupid; and they push hard in that direction.
Dan Quayle hitching his wagon to the moral majority and inadvertently setting the stage for the neocon right? Maybe not a completely bumbling dope, but absolutely a dope.
The right had 20-30 years of ineffectual dopes that completely lost touch with the American people.
Trump is not a dope. You don’t win a first and second presidency, with the entire media and political apparatus aligned against you to a degree unprecedented in modern politics, by being a dope.
The thing those people have in common is that they have unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of performative bombast, specific tropes referencing cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as buffoonish.
The point is that intelligence is orthogonal to, say, lust or many other trappings of power.
I think you're both correct to note that attacking the intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty normal liberal tactic.
At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps "intelligence":
he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't functionally matter how smart he is because he has so much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is probably way more effective than worrying about the long games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes that fact obvious.
In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power could also be stated as a worry that the folks running the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety or mask on their power because they are more comfortable using dumb, brute force.
And they might be correct in that assessment- they might not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough.
Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure.
This is the exact opposite of what has been said about Trump by his "friends" in the Epstein files.
I realize this is kind of a joke, but...
The US will continue to be the most powerful military in history for a very long time even with a highly incompetent top-layer. It will just have less people with the wisdom and power to push back on the president's worst impulses.
Unfortunately(?) there's not enough coke in the world to put much of a dent in our current military spending (which they hope to increase even further to 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027). And if the price of coke ever did become a problem, well the US now believes it reserves the right to the entire western hemisphere which includes Columbia...
On a more serious note there is also likely to be a rapid burst of nuclear proliferation across the globe as everyone else adjusts to this new reality sans the traditional post-WW II world order.
On the current Trump path the world is going to get far more dangerous and chaotic, not less.
But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing; I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown folks to kidnap.
Soft power is a hard power amplifier though. I don't think it's incompetence and ignorance about how to maintain and use power, I think it's intentional deconstruction of power so that others can fill the vacuum.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5724300-ron-wyden-cia-le...
Hypothesis: CIA is hacking reporters to determine their government sources.
If we start seeing more government sources exposed, we haven't proven it but it supports the hypothesis.
Hypothesis: State election systems are being compromised for federal monitoring and control.
If we start seeing more improbable results in one direction, that is support for the hypothesis.
https://apnews.com/article/congress-cia-ron-wyden-martin-hei...
I hope that we will eventually find out why it was shut down.
This will not/hardly save any money. And this was a source of US soft power (deciding which facts to list, how to report on them, etc, allowed to shape an opinion.)
It's not even a bad submission saying that he mirrored it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
Not because the information is false, but because the act of choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you accept that, you’re no longer talking about neutral data; you’re talking about the official position of the United States government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure it was, esp during the Cold War(tm)
That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation depends on what you don’t say as much as what you do. Publicly cataloging a country’s political structure, demographics, or internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential.
It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we’re willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like population or religious composition can become leverage or liabilities in the wrong context, and you can’t realistically scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic negotiation or whatever.
The core issue is simple: this isn’t a private research group or a tech company publishing an open dataset; it’s literally the largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the United States government publicly describing other nations. That isn’t neutral.
Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even subconsciously, objective facts become directional. Not by falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than obvious propaganda.
During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there were better avenues to get their message out there.
However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in agreement with the previous administration, which means it might have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed or (really, it seems) no longer wanted or at least valued by either administration.
Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 - 126 comments, Feb 2026
I would wager that they're still going to maintain their own version of the World Factbook, and just simply not share it. This would allow them to cut out the very costly review step that I talked about.
Now whether that's a good decision or not is a completely different question.
Wikimedia foundation's operating budget is 207 million a year - a drop in the ocean of federal budgets, if Factbook was similar.
I'm sorry, I think you have a math or data error here. The US government budget for 2025 was not $62.5 trillion dollars.
I think you touched on the real reason: objective facts are anti-trump, woke leftist propaganda
From the CIA Factbook History page it writes,
> It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook
Is it just being classified again? Who knows! That could be classified.
Now, I have yet to see any cases of the CIA doing this to the World Factbook, since that would tank its credibility, but I also don't browse the Factbook too often.
The world factbook was mostly things that the military or politicians might care about the truth of, and data they need anyway. Mostly what is there were things where there wouldn't be much value in spreading lies - and what value that might have is outweighed by you can fact check everything (with a lot of work) so lies are likely to be caught.
Not saying they are perfect, but this isn't a place where I would expect they would see distorting facts help them.
It's definitely not the worst that can happen. Happens fairly often - google: CIA lying to congress. Getting audited is the worst that thing that happens to the CIA. ie The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last actively audited the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1960s, specifically discontinuing such work around 1962.