It’s thirteen o’clock in America

The first sentence of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” is foreboding. It reads, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 

Millions of Americans have been undergoing an ideological lobotomy over the last decade. Free thinking has been severed. They have been indoctrinated into Trumpism and their minds incessantly embedded with frequent repetitions of lies and propaganda devised to regulate ideas and images.

And regardless of time zones, many across the United States believe it’s 13 o’clock, which represents the unsoundness and far-reaching irrational influence wielded by Donald Trump.

Trump is controlling our thoughts. His face and voice dominate our screens 24/7. It seems like he is watching us as much as we are forced to watch him. His endless television and social media ubiquity equates to huge portraits, skyscraper size statues and rants of self-aggrandizing soliloquies that engulf America. 

He consumes all the oxygen aiming to limit our thoughts by overwhelming our mind with distraction and constant fearmongering keeping us bedeviled and dismayed. He creates a narrative that satisfies his delusions, regardless of the surrounding reality and then his party loyalists confirm his chimera.

This crippling effect keeps Trump in control and many Americans in a psychological prison where although their eyes are wide open, their minds are shut. They don’t look to escape because most are unaware of their Pavlovian captivity so they remain exploited and figuratively shackled together on an ideological daisy-chain that prevents the mind from roaming freely.

Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, much like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, exerts power and control as it spreads lies disguised as candor and gospel. His machinations and hypnotic grasp persuade us to believe him even when our own eyes and ears tell us differently.

In 2018, Trump told us, “And just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.” Similarly, in “1984,” “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” 

In the novel, Newspeak is a language that limits vocabulary and thought by removing words used for dissent or critical thinking which the government considered “thoughtcrime.” And according to a recent Free Speech Project report, “Federal agencies flagged hundreds of words to remove ‘woke’ initiatives”; namely, accessible, climate crisis, equal opportunity, inequality, pollution, prejudice, privilege, racism, social justice and transgender, among others. 

Many Americans move day to day in thoughtless existence oblivious to the puppet strings attached to our mind that manipulate our thoughts like conceptual marionettes. Free thought is diminishing throughout the land of the free. No matter how contrary the paradox, how unbelievable the lie or how diametric the contradiction, millions accept and embrace Trump’s “doublethink.”

In Trumpworld, party members suffer from cognitive dissonance, which allows them to remain in perfect harmony with a leader who is the personification of incongruity.

Trump has convinced many that he is an America-loving patriot after dodging the military draft four times. He convinced you he is a successful businessman after six of his businesses went bankrupt. He convinced you he upholds the Constitution after inciting an insurrection against America. He convinced you he supports the police after commuting the life sentence of a man who orchestrated the murder of a police officer and pardoning everyone who assaulted cops at the nation’s capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Moreover, Trump convinced you that at age 78 he is very healthy, when at the tender age of 22 he was granted a medical exemption from military service. Further, in 2018, although the average life expectancy for men in America was 78 years, then-White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson tried to convince us that Trump was so healthy he “might live to be 200 years old.” 

Recently, the Trump administration attempted to erase the historical legacy of baseball legend Jackie Robinson and remove Black and Latino veteran content from military records to manipulate history to serve its agenda. In “1984,” a goal of the Party was to “thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened.” Ultimately, “Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.”

On Feb. 19, after posting on Truth Social that he saved New York from congestion pricing, Trump signed off with “LONG LIVE THE KING” in his ongoing use of mental stimuli to influence thoughts. This is a form of unconscious learning. 

Trump conditions his party members like the classical conditioning of Pavlov’s dog who began to salivate at the sound of a bell before each feeding. Similarly, some adherents salivate at the distant sound of the monarchical trumpet rising to a crescendo./

And on Feb. 27, the latest form of thought manipulation was unveiled, another red cap with the slogan, “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”

The next cap may read ‘2+2=5’.

This mind control is nothing new. All demagogues throughout history usurped power by similar tactics resulting in the oppression of hundreds of millions including the very people that zealously supported their totalitarian ambitions.

But this is only the tip of the dystopian iceberg. As America sinks deeper into an ocean of mind control, daily life will continue to seem normal until the cerebral coup de grace is administered. Remember April 14, 1912, on the unsinkable RMS Titanic, the band continued to play as normal while the ship capsized and sank resulting in more than 1,500 deaths.

The clocks are striking 13 and the alarms have been blaring for 10 years. You can keep hitting the cognitive snooze button and continue to sleep while awake or you can get up from the spellbound slumber, acknowledge that the clock has malfunctioned, take control of your mind and thoughts and realize what time it is.