George Ayoub, Nebraska Examiner

Nebraska’s high school curriculum standards do not make George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four mandatory reading. The state, however, allows latitude to local districts so the novel might show up on an English class syllabus because reading the book would cover many of the bases spelled out in Nebraska’s standards for critical reading.

For those who get that chance and those who already have, one line from Orwell’s masterpiece has taken on a haunting patina as it intersects with headlines from today’s and yesterday’s news: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

We call Orwell’s “doublethink,” accepting two contradictory ideas as in “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength,” cognitive dissonance, a psychological malady. Even as artificial intelligence challenges us to ferret out “slop” generated by large language models and deepfake videos, we can, for the most part, still believe what we see.

That’s why when a number of videos reveal the same thing — that a Minneapolis woman, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, does not appear to be trying to run over a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent when, claiming self-defense, he shot and killed her — our vision does not square with what the feds are feeding us. That includes a view from the shooter’s perspective.

In a federal rush to judgment — calling Good, “that woman,” a “professional agitator,” part of a “sinister left-wing movement” and in the act of committing “domestic terrorism” — the president, vice president, Homeland Security secretary and White House spokeswoman painted a picture the actual pictures do not support, essentially asking us to reject what we saw and heard.

We’ve been here before. The videotaped beating of Rodney King after a traffic stop following a high-speed chase in Los Angeles in 1991 stunned us. The grainy video shot from the balcony of a nearby apartment showed LAPD officers relentlessly pounding King with nightsticks.

Four of the officers went on trial for use of excessive force. Their defense centered on King posing a threat — that his erratic behavior and aggressive demeanor before the video justified the savage beating. But the images we saw were of a man offering no resistance being pummeled 33 times with night sticks, tased twice and kicked repeatedly for over four minutes. As you know, the officers were acquitted, and the City of Angels burned for the next five days.

In May 2020 a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes to restrain him after his arrest for passing a counterfeit $20 bill. The “restraint” killed Floyd. At the officer’s trial, part of his defense was that the kneeling was necessary and “objectively reasonable,” even when Floyd became motionless. Our eyes and ears saw something else, thanks to an alert citizen, as did the jury that convicted the police officer, sentencing him to over 30 years in prison.

Having just passed the five-year anniversary of a violent mob storming the nation’s Capitol to undo the results of a free and fair election because of a lie, we again are asked to disbelieve what we saw and heard. The White House website, updated just last week, insists the 2020 presidential election was rigged and now places blame for the Jan. 6 insurrection on U.S. Capitol Police for escalating peaceful protests into “chaos” and on Democrats who “staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election.”

The site goes on to accuse then-Vice President Mike Pence of “cowardice and sabotage” as he oversaw the eventual certification of the election results, his constitutional duty.

On his first day in office, the president pardoned more than 1,500 people for their role in riots that severely damaged the Capitol and risked undoing the republic.

Meanwhile, as of this writing, the FBI is blocking local authorities in Minneapolis from access to evidence as it investigates the killing of Good. The city’s schools closed for the balance of the week according to Minnesota Public Radio News after ICE agents showed up on a high school’s property, handcuffed two staff members and tackled people at dismissal.

As you recall, Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four, works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical tracts and documents to align the past with the Party’s current vision. Incumbent on all of us in today’s world where political, industrial, cultural, religious and technological leaders, with and without AI, commonly mislead, misinform and lie to their advantage, we must all be our own ministers of truth, our own debunkers of doublethink.

To that end, perhaps Nebraska high school curriculum standards should make Nineteen Eighty-Four mandatory. Better yet, today’s headlines should make it required reading for us all.

• George Ayoub filed nearly 5,000 columns, editorials and features in 21 years as a journalist for the Grand Island Independent. His columns also appeared in the Omaha World-Herald and Kearney Hub. His work has been recognized by the Nebraska Press Association and the Associated Press. He was awarded a national prize by Gatehouse Media for a 34-part series focusing on the impact of cancer on families of victims and survivors. He is a member of the adjunct faculty and Academic Support Staff at Hastings College. Ayoub has published two short novels, “Warm, for Christmas” and “Dust in Grissom.” In 2019 he published “Confluence,” the biography of former Omaha World-Herald publisher and CEO John Gottschalk.