Time to heed George Orwell's warning

(JNS) — The British essayist, novelist and critic Eric Arthur Blair, best known to the world as George Orwell, died in 1950. A year before his death from tuberculosis, he used his unique insight to write his classic dystopian novel “1984.” That book, published in 1949, eerily predicted the totalitarian threats that the United States is facing today.

It dealt with the consequences of a totalitarian government, mass surveillance, unending propaganda to distort the truth, and the suppression of freedom, including even the freedom of thought. The totalitarian state, which is at the heart of the st...