Cognitive Dissonance Chronicles

     The use of deliberate contradiction and confusion to paralyze the populace is a classic tactic of totalitarian regimes. It’s also used by aspiring tyrants:

     The recent controversy over gas stoves is a classic example of how the left works.
     They put the idea out there that they wanted to get rid of gas stoves. The liberal media ran with it immediately. We suddenly had articles in major newspapers claiming that gas stoves cause asthma and are bad for your health and the environment.
     When the public pushed back on this idea, suddenly the idea of banning gas stoves was a conspiracy theory. Suddenly, you were crazy for even thinking that anyone was going after gas stoves.
     Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer of New York is now mocking Republicans for this, and the liberal media is playing right along. Look at this:

Schumer mocks GOP: “Nobody is taking away your gas stove” https://t.co/Mj24BdsmYm pic.twitter.com/c7kC2bJGQp

— The Hill (@thehill) February 3, 2023

     There’s just this one little problem:

     In the memo dated Oct. 25, 2022, Richard Trumka Jr. — whom President Biden appointed to serve on the five-person Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) — wrote to a fellow commissioner that there was sufficient evidence for the agency to move forward with a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPR) to ban gas stoves in the near future. Trumka’s memo was titled, “NPR Proposing Ban on Gas Stoves (Indoor Air Quality).”
     “The need for gas stove regulation has reached a boiling point,” the CPSC commissioner wrote in the October memo. “CPSC has the responsibility to ban consumer products that emit hazardous substances, particularly, when those emissions harm children, under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act.”

     The repeated use of this tactic is often sufficient to induce a policy of distrust by everyone in everything. Not that we aren’t pretty close to that already, mind you. But the Democrats may have made an error in using the Dishonorable Charles Schumer for this mission. New Yorkers, at least, know better than to believe what comes out of his mouth. The rest of the country should take notice.

     Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. 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. [1984]

     Our telescreen is not on your wall, Comrade. It’s in your hand. Now thank us for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams.