Too Orwellian To Check: ‘1984’ Gets a Trigger Warning

I’d say “too ironic to check,” but this goes well beyond irony and into prophecy fulfillment. George Orwell wrote his masterpiece 1984 as a warning about how authoritarians would manipulate language and amend texts to obfuscate truths and oppress the masses. Orwell set his protagonist Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth to highlight how important language control and its obfuscation was to the totalitarian aims of regimes. Orwell includes other aspects of authoritarianism in 1984 too, but as a writer, Orwell understood the critical element of language manipulation in misleading and misdirecting the masses.

So how will Signet Books celebrate the 75th anniversary of Orwell’s masterpiece? By framing its language and approach as “problematic,” of course. Orwell apparently missed the memo on female empowerment, according to Signet (via Twitchy):

In which you will learn that the current leading paperback version of 1984, its official Orwell-estate-approved 75th anniversary edition, includes a 1984-ish trigger-warning introduction calling the novel’s hero “problematic” because of his “misogyny.”

I am not making this up. https://t.co/U9UAR3dsdQ

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) June 2, 2025

If you want to hear the discussion between Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi in yesterday’s America This Week podcast, it picks up at about the 1:36:00 mark in the 2-hour episode:

America This Week, Live on Monday 6-2-25 https://t.co/Lc1K4WEGC1

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) June 2, 2025

Christian Toto brought this up at the beginning of our own Off the Beaten Path episode that will go up later this evening. At first, I found this (sorta) hard to believe, but Christian has since posted some of Kirn’s read-through from the foreword written by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, who claims to have enjoyed the novel as a “good story,” up until the moment that Winston Smith reveals that he dislikes women, “especially the young and pretty ones.” Apparently, a flawed character is enough to put Perkins-Valdez off her intellectual feed, so to speak, having had to resist the urge to “put [the] book down”:

“When I was younger that’s exactly what I would have done, but I’m a more seasoned reader now and I know the difference between a flawed character and a flawed story. I remind myself that this is a dystopian novel and Orwell is suggesting misogyny is likely in a totalitarian society and Winston is a product of that environment.”

“Thank you for your trigger warning for ‘1984,’” Kirn said. “It is the most 1984ish thing I’ve ever f***ing read.”

Believe it or not, the actual essay is considerably more offensive than Kirn suggests. Mark Blair wrote a thread on X/Twitter while engaging with Kirn, providing screenshots and highlighting some of the absurd declarations within it:

I’ll have to wait till I finish my read to see exactly what you are referring to, but I took a look at the introductory essay by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and am in dismay at aspects of it:

“That sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does… pic.twitter.com/NPMPaSmi51

— Mark Blair (@mblair) June 2, 2025

“That sliver of connection can be difficult for someone like me to find in a novel that does not speak much to race and ethnicity at all.”

She goes on to find herself “self-pausing” that “there are no Black characters at all.”

When Orwell wrote the book, black people made up less than 1% of the English population — 8 to 10k in total (See below from Imperial War Museums).

This is as absurd as expecting to find white characters regularly occurring in Nigerian literature.

Yet somehow I doubt that would give her pause.

Be sure to read that whole thread, including where Perkins-Valdez studied, as well as a side commentary with another reader about the narcissism of demanding protagonists that mirrors one’s self. 

To get back to Kirm and Taibbi: It’s not quite the “most 1984ish thing” I’ve ever read, but as I told Christian in our podcast, it’s certainly on the Orwell spectrum. The most 1984ish thing I’ve experienced is the Big Brother Censorship Complex that erupted over the last few years, which Taibbi had a significant hand in exposing, in the guise of “misinformation.” That first emerged to suppress dissent to pandemic policies, which treated opinions as espionage while insisting that the government had a duty to dictate content on the Internet and even in real-life spaces. The worst aspect of that was its use to suppress debate and dissent regarding Joe Biden’s cognitive incapacity, in which the Protection Racket Media tried to demand that we ignore the evidence of our own eyes and demand we accept Biden’s senility as a “childhood stutter” and the public episodes as “cheap fakes.”

However, this still comes pretty close to that level of Orwellianism, for a couple of different reasons. In the first place, it demonstrates exactly how much contempt the media elite have for its audiences. Kirn speaks at the 1:46 mark to ridicule the “permission structure” supplied by Signet and Perkins-Valdez by demanding we frame it in the context desired by the elites. That in itself borders on Ministry of Truthism, as are almost all “trigger warnings,” especially on classic content in literature and cinema. These are infantilizing devices used by the media and cultural elites who believe that the hoi polloi are too stupid to understand the context of, say, Blazing Saddles as well as 1984, and therefore must be instructed on how to think about the material in an acceptable manner — meaning acceptable to the sneering elites. 

This leads directly to the greater issue in this particular “trigger warning.” Orwell wrote two of the most trenchant and important discourses in opposition to authoritarianism with 1984 and Animal Farm, essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand its methods and purposes. (In the non-fiction realm, only The Road to Serfdom and The Gulag Archipelago are equal in importance.) The addition of “trigger warnings” to Orwell’s works is an attempt to rob it of meaning by denigrating it as “problematic,” and by distracting readers at the start from its purpose with red herrings over issues of taste. And the motive that media and academic elites have to do this is because these works give real insight into how the elites in authoritarian systems work — and as we have experienced the last few years, those same elites want to impose an onstensinly benevolent despotism that would in practice be no different from the outcomes Orwell foresaw in both books, but especially 1984. 

Orwell’s works are too significant to bury or outright destroy. But by sneering at supposedly “problematic” aspects of his work, the elites are setting the stage for isolating and denaturing the works in ways that make them valueless artifacts rather than allow the truth within them to speak for itself. That itself is a kind of memory holing of wisdom that authoritarians must achieve to take and hold power — just as Orwell wrote in this very novel. That is the purpose of the entire “trigger warning” project, and in just the paternalistic tenor that Orwell’s term “Big Brother” signified, too. 

Is that the “most 1984ish thing” we’ve ever seen? Maybe not … but it’s too close for comfort.