Dick Durbin Has Walked The Earth For 80 Years And Never Heard The Word ‘Wrongthink’
Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin claimed in a Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that in 80 years he has not once heard the term ‘wrongthink,’ a concept familiar to readers of George Orwell and a phrase increasingly common among conservatives who oppose the government’s censorship of free speech.
Durbin’s comments were obviously in reference to an article written by Benjamin Weingarten in The Federalist earlier this year. Weingarten, a Federalist senior contributor, testified before the committee regarding government censorship on Tuesday.
“Anyone who wants to characterize that event of Jan. 6 as ‘the riot used to launch the war on wrongthink.’ What in the hell is ‘wrongthink?’” Durbin said. “I can’t keep up with all these words that are coming at us as brand new terms.”
While discussing President Donald Trump’s pardons for Jan. 6, 2021 protesters in The Federalist, Weingarten noted earlier this year that the unrest at the U.S. Capitol was “used to launch the war on wrongthink.” During the hearing, Durbin directly quoted Weingarten and said he did not know the meaning of “wrongthink.”
“Let me ask you what the word ‘wrongthink’ means. Did you make that up?” Durbin asked Weingarten.
“If I did make it up, I’d be happy to take credit for it, and my definition of it would be speech that flouts the orthodoxy of our political establishment and cultural elites,” Weingarten replied.
Durbin was born in 1944, and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “wrongthink” was first used in the 1950s. In his highly acclaimed novel 1984 (published in 1949), George Orwell penned the term “thoughtcrime” to denote thoughts and ideas that contradicted speech approved by the novel’s socialist state. The term “wrongthink” now carries a similar meaning.
According to Google, the use of the term “wrongthink” in writing spiked in the 1980s and has been on the rise again since 2013. The New York Times even employed the term in 1988 in a piece announcing the publication of Orwell’s 1984 in Russia. The term has also been used various times on the Senate floor and by legislators in recent years.
Durbin also asked Weingarten to define the phrase “whole-of-society war on wrongthink,” also referencing Weingarten’s article in The Federalist.
“‘Whole-of-society’ means government working hand-in-hand with civil society to achieve some sort of outcome,” Weingarten said. “[It’s] potentially chilling when you have government and civil society working hand-in-glove because that blurring of the line between civil society and the state can cross into potentially draconian methods and outcomes.”
The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway also testified before the committee, outlining the ways the censorship-industrial complex has been targeting conservatives and free speech.
“[T]he right to free speech has been under worse attack in the last decade than at any other point in our nation’s history,” Hemingway said in her opening statement.“Attacking free speech and debate has become a massive industry, much of it government-funded, and all of it threatening a free society.”
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He is a spring 2025 fellow of The College Fix. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
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