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This artifact is from the liberal political magazine, The New Yorker. It was published in the later months of 2016 and it pinpoints the issue of fake news that people are consuming in the United states.

The article addresses both the issue of social media proliferating false information and also the issue of our own president spreading fake facts. The influence of Facebook has become very great as most people use the website for consumption of news. Facebook also happens to be a large proponent of fake news.

This false information that is habitually consumed by the people is comparable to the modified past of 1984 and the choice of facts by the government. If we think about how influential the media is on the people's outlook, it makes sense that George Orwell would warn us about this.

As for the totalitarian implications, it is largely just controlling what the people do and think. Giving the people specially-tailored information influences the way that they think, and when a population is only informed to a certain degree, the media/government is given more control. Knowledge is power.

This should be concerning, because we believe in a nation of honesty and truth. Fake news and harsh censorship undermines the people's ability to contribute to democracy with misinformation. Truth is very important in a time of strong political tension.

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What we are now calling fake news-misinformation that people fall for-is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, in the Republic, Plato offered up a hellish vision of people who mistake shadows cast on a wall for reality. In the Iliad, the Trojans fell for a fake horse. Shakespeare loved misinformation: in "Twelfth Night," Viola disguises herself as a man and wins the love of another woman; in "The Tempest," Caliban mistakes Stephano for a god. And, in recent years, the Nobel committee has awarded several economics prizes to work on "information asymmetry," "cognitive bias," and other ways in which the human propensity toward misperception distorts the workings of the world.

What is new is the premise of the conversation about fake news that has blossomed since Election Day: that it's realistic to expect our country to be a genuine mass democracy, in which people vote on the basis of facts and truth, as provided to them by the press. Plato believed in truth but didn't believe in democracy. The framers of the American Constitution devised a democratic system shot through with restrictions: only a limited portion of the citizenry could vote, and even that subset was permitted to elect only state and local politicians and members of the House of Representatives, not senators or Presidents. In guaranteeing freedom of the press, the framers gave a pass to fake news, since back then the press was mainly devoted to hot-blooded opinion. They felt protected against a government that came to power through misinformation, because the country wasn't very democratic, and because they assumed most people would simply vote their economic interests.

Only in the twentieth century, as the United States became a complex modern society with mass media and professional journalism, did people begin to worry about the fake-news problem, and when they did they usually came down either on the side of restricting democracy or restricting the media. (As American democracy came to include a greater number of people-former slaves, immigrants, and women-élites, including liberal élites, began to find it more worrisome.) Walter Lippmann began "Public Opinion," published in 1922, with a long quotation from Plato's cave parable, and wound up abandoning the idea that the press or the public could discern and then pay attention to the truth. Instead, he wanted to create "political observatories"-what we'd now call think tanks-that would feed expert advice to grateful, overwhelmed politicians, relegating both the press and the public to secondary roles in government policymaking.

In the nineteen-twenties, when radio was as new and vastly influential as the Internet is today, the United States decided not to create a government-funded news network like the British Broadcasting Corporation, but instead to turn broadcasting over to private industry and to regulate it heavily. The American news world that many people are nostalgic for had only three networks, which were required to speak in a nonpartisan voice and to do money-losing public-service journalism in return for the renewal of their valuable government licenses. That world disappeared when Ronald Reagan deregulated broadcasting, in the nineteen-eighties. When cable television and the Internet came along, they were structured on the more libertarian idea that everybody should have a voice and everybody should have free access to all forms of information, including misinformation. It shouldn't be surprising that a lot of people, both creators and consumers of journalism, prefer fake news to real news.

So what should we do about journalism's role in non-reality-based politics? The easy part-which won't be all that easy, because of the current economic troubles of journalism-is to expand the real-news ecosystem as much as possible, by training people in how to do that work and by strengthening the institutions that will publish and broadcast it. (Along with this goes enhancing the smaller ecosystem for correcting fake news: snopes.com, PolitiFact, factcheck.org, and so on.) The hard part is figuring out what to do about the proliferation and influence of fake news. It's a sign of our anti-government times that the solution proposed most often is that Facebook should regulate it. Think about what that means: one relatively new private company, which isn't in journalism, has become the dominant provider of journalism to the public, and the only way people can think of to address what they see as a terrifying crisis in politics and public life is to ask the company's billionaire C.E.O. to fix it.

Our government has many ways of dealing with the natural tension between public opinion and reliable information: think of the Federal Reserve Board, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the federal judiciary. People grouse about these institutions-one can caricature them, and people do, as élitist or as inexcusably political-but, on the whole, they work. Most countries, including the United States in the past, have found their way to some parallel structure for real news. Many countries are stricter about enforcing diversity of private media ownership than we are, and they find ways to give an economic advantage to the better news organizations while still maintaining public-service requirements to shape the behavior of private companies that use public airwaves.

It's facile and unhelpful to assume that government's role in journalism can be either nothing or absolute control for propaganda purposes. There is a big difference between state media (like the odious Russia Today) and public media (like the BBC). Most developed countries with press freedom have far more public media, including multiple government-funded broadcast-news channels, than we do. National Public Radio is one of the very best American news organizations, but it has minimal government funding; the Public Broadcasting System is also mainly privately funded, and it doesn't maintain a large network of national and international correspondents the way NPR does.

It's sad that, in the wake of the election of a President who doesn't hesitate to tell his followers things that simply aren't true, we are not even talking about any of this. If people really think that something should be done about the fake-news problem, they should be thinking about government as the institution to do it.

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What we are now calling fake news-misinformation that people fall for-is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, in the Republic, Plato offered up a hellish vision of people who mistake shadows cast on a wall for reality. In the Iliad, the Trojans fell for a fake horse.

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This is another artifact collected from the Washington Post which was posted in January of 2015. The article is about the same topic of totalitarianism, however, it delves into the aspect of education. This article just clarifies the complete isolation and vast difference between western cultures and north Korea.

North Korea's dictatorship is so vastly different from the democracy that we are all so accustomed to. They have a supreme leader who is treated divinely. His word is all that matters in the country and he controls and greatly limits the information that the citizens have access to.

In this article, we are introduced to the indoctrinations that are part of the education system. The supreme leader's beliefs (most prominently hating america) have a cascading effect in different areas of society to ensure that the people's minds are thinking properly.

This blind acceptance of a certain doctrine and perhaps the use of doublethink is strikingly similar to that of Big Brother in 1984. Winston is one example of someone who is so used to the force-feeding of a set of beliefs but questions them at the same time.

This is something to be concerned about because we have a country involved in nuclear testing and its people are being completely controlled by a totalitarian regime. This means that all the power is in the hands of an anti-american leader and this si not the way to have global harmony.

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When Jeon Geum-ju was a girl in Hoeryong, a depressing mining town at the very northern reaches of North Korea, she used to sing at school about the country's supreme leader.

"Kim Jong Il, how hard he works, he works so hard that he sleeps in the car and just eats rice balls," sang Jeon, now 29, sitting in a restaurant here trying to recall the words that were once ingrained into her. "On his desk there are piles and piles of reports that he has to read and approve. He works so hard for us, the people."

And when Lee Hyun-ji, 19 and also from the country's north, was in elementary school, learning to throw wasn't a simple matter of pitching a ball.

In gym class, there was a wooden target of a human figure with pale skin and a huge nose, with "cunning American wolf" written on it. Lee and her young schoolmates would practice their throwing with a wooden "grenade."

For North Korea's dynastic Kim regime, citizens are never too young to be indoctrinated. Indeed, an all-encompassing personality cult has kept the country intact even as the Soviet Union collapsed and as China and Cuba have opened up.

With its pudgy leaders and their comical haircuts, its goose-stepping soldiers and its inventive turns of phrase, this bastion of totalitarianism has provided endless opportunity for mockery, most recently with the controversial U.S. film "The Interview."

Although critics have questioned its artistic merits and defectors have lamented the way it makes fun of North Koreans, the movie targets a central tenet of Kimist mythology: the idea that the North's leaders are divine beings. The crucial moment in the film is not the death of Kim Jong Un but earlier, when a talk show host interviews Kim and taps into his daddy issues, leading the young dictator to start blubbering, "I am strong," revealing him to be not only human but also insecure.

The personality cult that permeates every aspect of North Korean life has become an ideology in itself. It revolves around Kim Il Sung, portrayed as
an anti-Japanese revolutionary hero and founding father who remains North Korea's "eternal president" more than two decades after his death.

His son, Kim Jong Il, was, according to North Korean myth, born on a sacred mountain, under a bright star at night. (In reality, he was born in Siberia.) Since Kim Jong Il's death in 2011, Kim Jong Un has taken over the family business.

"I believed in this system for more than 20 years, but I was so thirsty to find out about the outside world," said Jeon, who now lives in South Korea and works in an office. Her curiosity led her to decide to sneak across the border to China. "Then, when I realized it was all lies, it was like I was just born at 23 years old. Twenty-three years had been stolen from my life."

365 days' worth of Kims

In North Korea, there is no escaping the Kims. Every home, office, classroom and even train car features portraits of the first two leaders, and the pictures must be cleaned with a special cloth every day.

North Koreans wear pins, usually of Kim Il Sung but sometimes of both Kim One and Kim Two, on their chests, on the left to be close to their hearts.

Television sets and radios are fixed to state-run channels - being caught with an unfixed device, or worse, foreign DVDs, is a severe offense that often leads to time at a labor camp - and for all but a handful of the elite, there is no Internet. Although an increasing amount of information seeps across the border from China, the state continues to have almost total control over the flow information.

After years of futile efforts to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, the international community is now focused on human rights violations there. Unprecedented attention is being given to political imprisonment and executions.

More pervasive, but less obviously gruesome, is the way the regime brainwashes children from an early age to believe in the Kims as godlike leaders.

This indoctrination program has two basic goals, according to a groundbreaking 372-page report published last year by a U.N. commission of inquiry: to instill utmost loyalty and commitment toward the supreme leader, and to instill hostility and deep hatred toward the United States, Japan and South Korea.

The brainwashing starts in kindergarten.

"The milk would arrive and we would go up one by one to fill our cups," recalled Lee, who came to South Korea only in March and asked to use a pseudonym to protect her family in the North.

"The teachers would say: 'Do you know where the milk came from? It came from the Dear Leader. Because of his love and consideration, we are drinking milk today,' " said Lee, looking every bit a South Korean with her dyed hair and trendy sweater.

"I didn't really ask questions," she shrugged. "Somehow I just knew not to."

Children's books convey the ideology, too. "The Butterfly and the Cockerel," for example, tells the story of an irascible, bullying rooster (the United States) outwitted by a small, virtuous butterfly (North Korea).

Teachers don't just teach history, they teach "revolutionary history." And all music, storybooks, novels and artwork relate to the Kims.

"When I taught math problems, they would go like this," said Chae Kyung-hee, who used to teach middle school in North Korea and now runs a school for defectors in Seoul. "If you have this many of Kim Il Sung's anti-Japanese fighters and this many Japanese soldiers, and X-many Japanese soldiers are killed . . ."

There are 365 days' worth of education materials, so every day teachers could say to their students, "On this day, Kim Il Sung went there, did that." At age 7, all children must join the Children's Union. The next year, they start Saturday "self-criticism" sessions in which they must confess how they fell short of the "Ten Principles" that are the foundation of North Korea's ideology. The principles include requirements such as studying the "revolutionary ideas of Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung" daily.

At 14, they move up to the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League, which focuses on worshiping the Kim family.

High school students in North Korea must complete a three-year, 81-hour course on the history of Kim Jong Un, according to a recent report from South Korea's KBS World Radio, which cited a copy of the North Korean Education Committee's "compulsory education outline." The course is in addition to a 160-hour course on Kim Il Sung and 148 hours of study about Kim Jong Il.

Social molding

Tatiana Gabroussenko, an expert on North Korean literature who teaches at Korea University in Seoul, said that by not allowing people to form their own opinions, North Korea infantilizes its citizens.

"North Korea molds children socially," Gabroussenko said. Books for different generations have different styles but the same message and characters, sometimes involving South Korean "stooges" or American "beasts."

"In the children's version, a child will be fighting Americans by throwing pepper in their eyes and making them sneeze and cough," Gabroussenko said. In the adult version, weapons, rather than condiments, are used.

"The message 'We are one nation' implies that you can't rebel against your father, you can't rebel about your government, that it's important to stick together," she said.

Indeed, the system of surveillance and informing on people is so pervasive that husbands dare not voice doubts about the regime to their wives, and parents, if they are skeptical, dare not try to protect their children's minds.

"My parents were very loyal," said Ji Sung-ho, a 31-year-old who lost a foot and an arm as a teenager when he fell from a moving train while trying to steal coal for his family. "I think my parents really believed it, even when people were dying of hunger."

The U.N. report concluded that the system of indoctrination and surveillance constitutes numerous human rights abuses, including violations of the freedoms of thought, expression and religion. To some, those violations are just as inexcusable as the executions, torture, infanticide and other abuses documented in the report.

"Of course, you can talk about torture and labor camps," said Jeon, the defector, "but I think a more serious infringement of human rights is not giving people any choice to think for themselves or giving them access to outside information."

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In North Korea, it's never too soon to start the brainwashing

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When Jeon Geum-ju was a girl in Hoeryong, a depressing mining town at the very northern reaches of North Korea, she used to sing at school about the country's supreme leader.

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The artifact collected here is an article by the Washington Post which was posted a few months earlier this year. The article aims to inform people who aren't living in Britain (Americans) of the political upheaval in the UK.

The Brexit deal is basically an action plan for England to leave the European Union in order to benefit themselves in  the long term. However, the reason that it has become controversial is because of the people voting for it.

Those who vote for reasons like less immigration and access to their country have been equated to the conservative voters for Trump. These people envision a future for England that involves more isolation and nationalism to a certain degree. They want England to be the all-powerful country and do not want to be cheated by the EU in any way.
This political ideology can be compared to that of 1984. In the novel, the government (the party), is an inner circle group of people who control the government but ignore the proles who are able to retain many of their human qualities but do not have an impact on the direction of the country.

Britain can be seen as a similar entity within the european union. They want to be in control of everything and not be involves with the rest of the partners in the European Union. Furthermore, they (the voters) want to revert back to an imperialistic and slightly nationalistic superpower, and in this sense this is very similar to Airstrip One in 1984.

We should be concerned about this because the voters and the direction of Brexit is not what it should be. If Britain is to leave the EU it should not be because of factors like xenophobia from the citizens, it should be a clear cut political and economic plan.

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Brexit has begun, and British Prime Minister Theresa May now faces the unenviable task of settling her nation's divorce from the European Union while also figuring out how to make up for the potentially ruinous costs of the break.
A first step of sorts took place Thursday when May's government published plans to convert thousands of E.U. laws into British ones - what my colleague Karla Adam describes as "a gigantic 'cut and paste' job, repatriating 40 years of powers from Brussels to London." Dubbed the "Great Repeal Bill," the move is a bid by British leaders to calm the justifiable fears of millions of Britons - and European nationals living in the country - who are worried about Brexit's effect on their daily lives.

But it's Brexit supporters who may be in line for a real shock. Even beyond the coming " traumatic" loss of access to the E.U.'s market - as the Economist put it - the promise of a politically resurgent Britain is likely to fall flat.

Much of the rhetoric of the pro-Brexit crowd centers around the reclamation of British "sovereignty" from technocrats in Brussels. But Brexit proponents have also projected a nostalgic vision of Britain once more asserting itself as a dominant player on the world stage. May trumpeted the dawn of a new "Global Britain" earlier this year: a nation shorn of its continental commitments and capable of finding a new accommodation with other parts of the world - especially those it once colonized.

The ironically named 'Commonwealth' helps rehabilitate the image of the British Empire and deny its numerous genocides.

- Crimes of Britain (@crimesofbrits) March 14, 2017

"Outside the E.U., the world is our oyster, and the Commonwealth the pearl within," the far-right, pro-Brexit United Kingdom Independence Party declared ahead of last year's referendum. Earlier this month, it emerged that May's government is seeking to boost trade links to many of the nations of the Commonwealth - particularly in Africa - in a move labeled by some anonymous government officials as "Empire 2.0."

And Liam Fox, charged with rebuilding these links as Britain's international trade secretary, suggested that his country had little to atone for in its imperial past.

"The United Kingdom, is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its 20th century history" #scc16

- Dr Liam Fox MP (@LiamFoxMP) March 4, 2016

Brits are hardly alone in harboring delusions of empire - consider, for example, the colonial nostalgia of France's far-right nationalists or the Ottomania of Turkey's ruling party. But the fantasy of Britain's past collides almost farcically against Britain's present.

Never mind that Britain's empire was a precursor to the forces of globalization and migration that the Brexiteers so profoundly resent.

Never mind that Brexit will "be a considerable blow to Commonwealth nations that export to Britain," as the Financial Times reported: "Thirty-two Commonwealth countries, mainly in Africa and the Caribbean, are covered by free-trade agreements with the E.U. These states therefore enjoy duty-free and quota-free access to the E.U. for nearly all their goods. . . . Once the UK is out of the E.U., these countries will end up paying $800m a year in additional duties to access the UK market, according to an analysis by the Commonwealth Secretariat."

The reality is that many Commonwealth nations simply don't need Britain. Australian exports to its former colonial ruler amounted to just 1.4 percent of its total outgoing trade. Canada, which shares a huge land border with the United States, will always look south, not east. India, once the jewel in Britain's imperial crown, has an economy already roughly the same size as Britain's; Indian moguls now own some of Britain's most iconic companies.

"In anglophone Africa, the game is already up," British historian David Olusoga noted in the Guardian. "The motorbikes on the freeways of Accra and Lagos are Chinese, assembled by local mechanics from kits shipped direct from Shandong. West Africa's new convenience food is Chinese instant noodles, not fish and chips, and the supermarkets that sell them are South African-owned. Many anglophone Africans still have deep emotional, economic and often familial links to Britain, but those with money are now as keen to holiday in Dubai as London."

"Brexit is rooted in imperial nostalgia and myths of British exceptionalism, coming up as they have - especially since 2008 - against the reality that Britain is no longer a major world power," British academic Tom Whyman wrote in a withering column. "Those most under the spell of imperial nostalgia have now become the sorcerers themselves, having somehow managed to conjure up a mandate to transform Britain in their image."

When not articulating wistful aspirations of empire, Brexit's champions appeal to that other bulwark of British patriotism: the legacy of Winston Churchill and his generation's defeat of the Nazis. When questioned in January about whether Britain could manage the chaos of a divorce with Europe, Brexit secretary David Davis harrumphed: "Our civil service can cope with World War Two, they can easily cope with this."

Britain starved 4 million to death in India, perpetrated countless massacres, looted trillions in property/resources all in the 20th century https://t.co/kB5ijJosx9

- Crimes of Britain (@crimesofbrits) March 6, 2017

43% of Brits think the Empire was a good thing,as Brexit nostalgia suggests.These atrocities from last century ONLY. https://t.co/bRR5ia24rT

- John O'Brennan (@JohnOBrennan2) March 24, 2017

The coming months will test the bravado and bluster of figures like Davis. Britain's memories of past triumphs and world-spanning power may make for easy political rhetoric, but they don't stand up to the actual history. Many have now noted how little Britain's real imperial legacy - one of conquest and abuse, coercion and exploitation - is actually remembered.

"For a Martian historian, the most interesting thing about modern British history would surely be that the country built a massive global empire," wrote columnist Gideon Rachman. "But for the Brits themselves, shaping a national story that centers around the war against the Nazis - rather than the empire - makes psychological sense. It has allowed Britain to nurture a national self-image as champions of freedom and plucky underdogs . . . rather than imperialist oppressors."

Recognizing that history, Rachman suggested, would be a good start if "May truly wants to forge a future for a 'global Britain.' "
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Analysis | Brexit and Britain's delusions of empire

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This artifact is a political cartoon from the Los Angeles Times about Trump's stance on immigration. The cartoon was featured earlier this year in the newspaper. This picture portrays Trump as a petulant individual by a cartoonist names David Horsey who has done a multitude of Trump-based political cartoons.

Trump's immigration ban gave the already perturbed anti-trump americans more ammunition against him. The ban cut off Syrians seeking refuge and put a 90 day ban on immigration from 6 muslim-majority countries. This did not get passed by the justice department because they decided that permitting these people to enter the country does not seem to be detrimental.

Trump's ban was mostly a response to terror and fear in our country. Part of his administration involves a fight against terrorism and this is where a strong amount of support comes from. The measure to which Trump elevated this is where the totalitarian aspects of his actions become clear.

We should be concerned about knee-jerk reactions from the leadership of our country. If we do not have faith that the president of our country will act in a way that is not dictatorial and brash, our country will not run on the principles by which it was created.

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Artifact #1: Police Brutality, An American Epidemic

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Artifact #1: Police Brutality, An American Epidemic

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This is a New York Times opinion article written in September of 2016. The New York Times tends to lean to the liberal side, so the intended audience would be left of center.

Police brutality has been one of the most controversial issues of the past year, with movements arising like, "Black Lives Matter". In this article the writer begins by deeming these new police shootings as events of a new trend. It is as if these are just falling into the vortex of police violence. The writer claims that the justice system is corrupt and people need to stop consenting.

The underlying cause of all this? The American epidemic that still thrives: Racism. The article discusses the injustice towards African Americans and how it extends beyond shootings perpetrated by police officers

This article ties into Orwell's warning about authoritarianism and a police state environment. The government in 1984 has a firm chokehold on the citizens of its state, and is quite authoritarian with forces like the Thought Police. People who commit very minor crimes typically involving a lack of loyalty to the party are subjected to violence and possible vaporization.
Police brutality is a phenomenon that fits into Orwell's warning. An American force that is supposed to protect the people acts on motives of hate and intolerance. The trajectory that our police force has followed is grim and gives credibility to Orwell's claims.

1984 is a warning, but it is also a dystopian novel. By definition, a dystopian society is a society in which everything is unpleasant or bad. As citizens, we should be concerned with authoritarian aspects of our country. In that, we need to advocate for less hatred and diversify our police force. Moreover, the hatred in out country needs to be uprooted in order to solve this systematic problem.

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We are in a new age in which the shroud has slipped and trauma has risen.

This is a video age, in which facts that were previously filtered though police accounts and media sources, that were previously whispered over shoulders at barbershops and across kitchen tables, have been buttressed by the immediacy and veracity of visual proof.

It is an age in which the language of resistance has been set and accepted, in which the mode of expression and resistance has been demonstrated and proved effective. It is an age of enlightenment and anger, of fear and frustration, of activism and alertness. Black America is beyond the breaking point, a point of no return.

And in this era, the discussion around these issues must be broad and deep because the actions required to address the problems must be broad and deep.

This moment in our nation's history is not about how individual fears are articulated - in an emergency call, in an officer's response, in weapons drawn and fired, in black people's desire to flee for their lives, in black parents' anxiety about the safety of their children. This moment is about the enormous, almost invisible structure that informs those fears - the way media and cultural presentations disproportionately display black people, and black men in particular, as dangerous and menacing and criminal. It's about the way historical policies created our modern American ghettos and their concentrated poverty; the ways in which such concentrated poverty and its blight and hopelessness can be a prime breeding ground for criminal behavior; the way these areas make poverty sticky and opportunity scarce; the way resources, from education to health care to nutrition, are limited in these areas.

We keep talking about choices, but we don't talk nearly enough about the fact that choices are always made within a cultural and historical context.

People didn't simply choose to live in neighborhoods with poor housing and poor schools and crumbling infrastructure and few grocery stores and fewer adequate health care facilities. There were many factors that created those neighborhoods: white flight, and the black flight of wealthier black people, community disinvestment, business lending practices and government policies assigning infrastructure and public transportation to certain parts of cities and not others.

And the people living in those communities - sometimes trapped in those communities - make choices, sometimes poor ones, within that context.

We may say that a poor choice is simply wrong and the offending party must deal with the consequences. But poor choices made in a poor environment don't have the same consequences as those made in wealthy environments. For poor people, the same poor choices are punished more often and more severely, compounding their deficit.

Then America takes it further, imputing the poor choices of a few onto a whole race, and in so doing sets the stage for disaster. This creates the suspicion and fear that can lead to the deaths we're seeing, in which the person killed may have made no poor choices, in which the only poor choice was the pulling of a trigger.

This is what people mean when they talk about the impact of systemic racism in these cases and in these areas. It is not that the police harbor more racism than the rest of America, but rather that racism across society, including within our police departments and system of justice, has been erected in ways that disproportionately impact poor, minority communities. That is acutely clear in these killings.

What took centuries to grow may take a long time to fully chop down. You can't fight racism by plucking leaves from the top of the poisonous tree, but by taking an ax to the root.

Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence said last week, "We ought to set aside this talk, this talk about institutional racism and institutional bias," calling it "rhetoric of division." That is exactly the opposite of what we should do.

The police are simply instruments of the state, and the state is the people who comprise it. The police are articulating a campaign of control and containment of populations and that campaign has the implicit approval of every citizen within their jurisdictions. This is not a rogue officer problem; this is a rogue society problem.

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police brutality  misconduct and shootings

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Opinion | Police Violence: American Epidemic, American Consent

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We are in a new age in which the shroud has slipped and trauma has risen. This is a video age, in which facts that were previously filtered though police accounts and media sources, that were previously whispered over shoulders at barbershops and across kitchen tables, have been buttressed by the immediacy and veracity of visual proof.

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In 1984, Orwell was warning readers about a future in which society adopts a totalitarian/authoritarian attitude.