Amid all the noise, an eerie hush is spreading across America. Companies, scientific researchers and Trump critics are clamming up as the MAGA movement ushers in a new era of government censorship.

On Day 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” This might have sounded like banal lip service, reaffirming commitment to the First Amendment. In reality, it was the start of an Orwellian effort to root out wrongthink from government ranks and the private sector.

CBS says it will turn over an unedited transcript of its October interview with Kamala Harris to the Federal Communications Commission, part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing fight with the network over how it handled a story about his opponent.

President Donald Trump’s newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS over their alleged “airing of commercials,” and suggested that the public broadcasters could be at risk of losing their federal funding.

Last week, the administration ordered a blackout on public communications from government health agencies — in the middle of flu season.

For the first time since 1952, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withheld its weekly report on morbidity and mortality data updates.

Other federal departments, such as the Energy Department, were also ordered to cease public communications unless they had explicit approval of the acting secretary.

The president and his allies have also leaned on private firms to disavow politically incorrect values. For example, a group of 19 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to Costco demanding the retailer drop its diversity commitments, citing a Trump executive order. 

Other Trump allies have engaged in speech- and thought-policing, the kinds of actions for which they once condemned progressives (sometimes rightfully!). Last week, for instance, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) obliquely threatened Apple’s CEO for not yet renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Trump-blessed “Gulf of America” in Apple Maps. (Google Maps has caved, however.)

Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” is heading for the trash can.

George Orwell ‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell’s ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a staunch believer in democratic socialism and member of the anti-Stalinist Left, modelled the Britain under authoritarian socialism in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism and on the very similar practices of both censorship and propaganda in Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.