by Ed West, All News Pipeline:

Authors note: Orwell was a paradoxical man, contradictory, sometimes hypocritical.  As his Vogue profile stated, fairly much a leftist, George Orwell was a defender of freedom, even though most of the time he violently disagreed with the people besides whom he fought.

Although a writer of the political left, Orwell has gained many fans on the political right ever since ‘Animal Farm’ was published. And over the decades, both the Left and the Right have claimed Orwell as their own.

Today the issue of freedom is far more used by the Right.

“For conservatives like myself,” Ed West writes, “when we see dictionaries changing the definition of a word literary overnight, or the total distortion of history to suggest it has always been so, when it is ‘normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children’ because they are the greatest fanatics, we can’t help but see the echoes of 20th century totalitarianism in the modern progressive movement, even if it is a soft totalitarianism and doesn’t come from the state, but from the media, the academy and tech companies.”