Opinion: Trump’s troubling use of language is straight out of ‘1984’

To the editor: The Times’ Dec. 19 editorial, “Talking about climate change in Orwellian doublespeak doesn’t make it go away,” began with this sentence: “If President Trump were a reader of books, we’d recommend a nearly 70-year-old novel to him because it illustrates nicely both the absurdity and the danger of perverting language for political ends.”

I think he has read George Orwell’s “1984” and is using it as his playbook.

Here is one example: Apparently Trump does not favor words in our language that disagree with his beliefs. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the use of seven words — “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based” — were reportedly banned from budget documents.

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Those words are from “1984,” and they explain how Trump is creating the past that governments before him have been failures and that he alone can make our country “great again.”

John Lynn, Carlsbad

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To the editor: “It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” So wrote mathematician and philosopher William K. Clifford in a famous essay on “The Ethics of Belief.”

He illustrated his point with the example of a ship owner who allowed his ship to sail despite insufficient evidence of its seaworthiness, resulting in the perishing of everyone aboard.

Trump and Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, now believe it is safe to go full speed ahead with the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, not only in the absence of sufficient evidence, but in the face of abundance evidence to the contrary.

They are purging all reference to climate change as a threat to national security. The ship their actions imperil is the entire planet.

James Van Cleve, Claremont

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To the editor: I plead our 1st Amendment rights to use these forbidden words in a sentence. Here’s my first effort:

Since my vulnerable fetus days, I have realized our entitlement to emerge as transgender in the name of diversity; not only is this entitlement evidence-based, but also science-based.

Mel Kernahan, Laguna Woods

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