The All-Purpose Enemy

 Mark Steyn has a new audio recording out of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The  book recounts the "two minutes of hate."

The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure... Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even--so it was occasionally rumoured--in some hiding-place in Oceania itself...

Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it...

The sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically... But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were--in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police.

It is not necessary, though, for the All-Purpose Enemy to be that real. The Deep State decided five years ago that "Russia" was behind anything that advantaged Trump: The Kremlin had bought a hundred grand's worth of Facebook ads and a bunch of "Macedonian content farmers" and loosed them on the presidential election to devastating effect. An entire election cycle later, the Democrats and the media declared as one that they would not be addressing the matter of Hunter Biden's laptop because it was "Russian disinformation". Which is, in Orwell's very well-chosen words:

...an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.

And so tens of millions of apparently sane Americans believe Trump is a Russian agent and that Putin somehow dropped off a fake laptop at a Delaware computer shop.