BOOK CLUB: America's Orwellian turn
As the federal government makes war on Minneapolis and Jack Smith testifies in Congress, journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis trace the roots of "Injustice"
Yesterday in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by federal agents, then denounced as a “would-be assassin,” much as Renee Good had been called a “domestic terrorist,” blamed for her own death, and investigated instead of her killer. And over the last week in the occupied city, a half-dressed American citizen was wrested from his home and thrust into a waiting ICE vehicle; a five-year-old boy was separated from his parents, arrested, and transported to a detention facility in Texas; and ICE conducted warrantless raids, acting — as we learned via a memo obtained by the office of Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal — after the Department of Homeland Security granted itself the authority to ignore the Fourth Amendment and enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant. And according to reporting for MS NOW by Carol Leonnig, FBI Director Kash Patel has conducted a purge of the agency’s ranks, focused on senior supervisors and line agents in the Miami bureau who’d worked on the case stemming from the documents Donald Trump had taken from the White House when he left office in January, 2021.
As federal agents break the law, purportedly to uphold it, and the agencies created to protect Americans are weaponized against us, Americans are being asked to ignore the video evidence — and the evidence of their own eyes. With the possible exception of George Orwell’s 1984, I can’t think of a book that is more relevant to what’s happening or better equipped to provide deeper context than Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department by Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis.
The book’s final section details Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe into Trump’s handling of classified documents and his involvement in interfering with the 2020 election. While Leonnig and Davis question many of Smith’s decisions in the conduct of those investigations, one thing has become clear from his testimony in a closed-door deposition before the House Judiciary Committee and in a public hearing last week: the evidence Smith and team uncovered would have been sufficient to convict Trump, had those cases not been dropped or dismissed.
Smith’s public testimony, delivered knowing it would no doubt enlarge the target on his back, was a profile in courage and clarity. And we have seen the collective courage of thousands of Minnesotans who are risking their lives to bear witness to ICE’s actions and counter the gaslighting campaign being perpetrated by Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others in the administration.
We are being told we’re not seeing what we’re seeing, which is nothing if not Orwellian. From 1984:
To 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, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.
We hope you’ll join us this coming Wednesday, January 28, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when The Ink Book Club will host a live conversation with Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department. Below, for our members, are some questions to consider in advance of the discussion.
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