The bullet missed his artery by millimeters. He fell to the ground choking, certain he was about to die, not for fame or country, but for truth.
15 October 2025 – That moment changed him forever. He had gone to Spain to fight fascism, but what he found was betrayal, censorship, and propaganda on both sides. He watched men lie in the name of justice, and he saw newspapers twist facts until the truth disappeared.
When he recovered, he carried the scar for the rest of his life, a thin reminder of how fragile both the human body and honesty could be. That wound bled into every word he ever wrote:
• In Animal Farm, he exposed how revolutions rot into tyranny.
• In 1984, he gave the world its greatest warning: that truth itself could be destroyed, rewritten, and replaced by the voices of power.
But Orwell’s brilliance wasn’t born in theory or politics. It was born in poverty and pain. He scrubbed floors in Paris kitchens. He lived among coal miners in northern England to understand the working class. He wandered through the alleys of London, invisible, hungry, watching how society treated the forgotten.
He believed that writing was not a career; it was a moral act. “In a time of deceit,” he said, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
When he wrote 1984, he was dying of tuberculosis, coughing blood as he typed through sleepless nights on a cold island in Scotland. Friends begged him to rest, but he wouldn’t. He said he had one more truth to tell before his voice gave out.
And when it finally did, he left behind more than novels. He left a mirror, one that still reflects our world too clearly.
George Orwell didn’t just write about oppression. He lived through it. He survived it. And with the scar on his neck and fire in his words, he made sure we could never say we weren’t warned.
The conservative writer, anti-Trumpist David Brooks says America needs a mass movement – now. Without one, America may sink into autocracy for decades.
But we did this to ourselves. We . . . me and the people reading this … the very educated elite.
We did some good things. We created the internet brunch and mocktails.
But we did some bad things.
We designed a meritocracy, designed around the skills we ourselves possess and rigged the game. So we succeeded and everybody else failed by the age of 12.
American children of affluent kids are four grade levels above everybody else by university age. Rich kids are 77 times more likely to go to university or to Ivy League University than kids from poor schools. In adulthood, 54% of the people at elite workplaces went to the same 34 elite colleges.
So we ended up creating a caste system.
People with high school degrees die nine years sooner than people with college degrees. People with high school degrees are five times more likely to have kids out of wedlock. People with high school degrees are 2.4 times more likely to say they have no friends.
So we created a caste system even though we pretend to be egalitarian.
But the worst things we did were not material. America is a very strong economy. The worst things we did were spiritual. We privatized morality and destroyed the moral order. George Marsden, a great historian, said what gave Martin Luther King’s rhetoric its power was the sense there’s a moral order built into the universe. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If segregation is not wrong, nothing is wrong.
We took that essential moral order that holds people together and we decided “it’s up to you to find your own truth. Find your own values”. Back in 1955, a great American journalist named Walter Lipman understood this was going to be a big problem saw what would happen. He said, “if what is right and wrong depends on what each individual feels, then we are outside the bounds of civilization”.
And so without a strong moral order, it’s hard to have trust. It’s hard to find your meaning in life. And so America has become a sadder society. Rise in mental health, rise in suicide. 45% of high school students say they are persistently hopeless and despondent. Since 2000, the number of Americans without close personal friends is up by fourfold. Since 2000, the number of people who say they’re in the lowest happiness category is up by 50%.
We’ve just become sadder.
But the very horrible thing the educated elite has done is we produced Donald Trump.
Some people think Donald Trump is a populist. Donald Trump and Elon Musk went to the University of Pennsylvania and Ivy League schools, and became billionaires.
JD Vance went to Yale.
Steven Miller went to Duke.
Fox News types like Laura Ingraham went to Dartmouth.
They represent the educated elite.
But the key factor of these educated elite is that they’re not pro-conservative. They don’t have a positive conservative vision for society. They just want to destroy the institutions that the left now dominates. And this means in the first place they’re astoundingly incompetent.
Elon Musk had 25 year olds firing people who were controlling our nuclear codes.
And now elite narcissism causes them to eviscerate every belief system they touch.
Real conservatives believe healthy societies are built on healthy institutions. They are anti-institutional conservatives who believe in steady and gradual change. They “Edmund Burke” their disruption.
Real conservatives believe in constitutional government.
Donald Trump says, “I alone can fix this”.
Conservatives believe in moral norms.
This bunch is destroying moral norms. The other belief system that they’re destroying is Judeo-Christian faith. Judeo-Christian faith is based on service to the poor, service to the immigrants, service to the stranger.
We educated elites destroyed the social fabric through inequality, we destroyed the moral fabric through privatizing morality, and we destroyed the institutional fabric.
We’ve been through periods of national crisis before across the world, but this one feels very different.
And that’s because, I think, we have suffered from a hyper individualistic culture over the last 30+ years that has destroyed our communal culture.
No, I am not optimistic. Because all I see are monsters controlling the world, my world.
Trumpism is ascendant now. Yes, I know. History shows that in the past America cycles through a process of rupture and repair, suffering and reinvention. This process has a familiar sequence. Cultural and intellectual change comes first – a new vision. Social movements come second. But political change always comes last.
Sorry. I cannot end on a higher note. Autocracy will be ascendant for a long while.