I had to look that up too – “denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.” With the overpowering wisdom of a 16-year-old, I was quite skeptical. I probably chuckled.

Not anymore.

“War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength.”  (“1984”)

I noticed evidence of doublespeak during college in the 1960s. Lyndon Johnson declared the United States was winning the war in South Vietnam, so he needed to send thousands more young draftees to the beautifully awful battlefield of South Vietnam. I imagine Vladimir Putin is saying the same thing about Russia’s unprovoked and disastrous invasion of Ukraine these days.

But it wasn’t really until 2020, when enough voters in just the right places ignored the obvious signs of Joe Biden’s addled mind, that I became an enlisted believer.

In a campaign town hall designed to woo voters, he called one impertinent questioner a “dog-faced pony soldier.” That’s a nonsense phrase. But most of us could discern it wasn’t a compliment.

Another time, Biden asked an Iowa audience what they thought of Ohio’s infrastructure. You know how all those four-letter, flyover states tend to confuse Easterners.

Warren Harding, in 1920, was the last candidate to run a front-porch presidential campaign where voters, sometimes 6,000 in an afternoon, came to his home at 320 Mount Vernon Ave in Marion, Ohio to hear him call for a “return to normalcy” after the 1918 flu pandemic and World War I.

Radio and television, then chartered jets, changed all that, enabling candidates like Donald Trump to speak at three or four mass rallies in as many states on the same day.

Not Joe Biden. For unexplained reasons likely tied to health, he conducted much of the campaign from his Delaware basement with fake bookshelves as a Zoom backdrop. Then, in the White House, he built a fake Oval Office across the street from the real one, again absent explanation.

When he did come upstairs in Delaware, Biden’s campaign days usually wrapped by 10:30 or 11:00 in the morning.

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

Biden, who hasn’t grocery-shopped since he had real hair, declared that inflation of “one-tenth of one percent” didn’t worry him. What does worry Joe Biden, beyond cutting out early on Fridays for his beach house? Well, it sure worries a lot more of us who do not live with 24-hour servants in luxurious government housing. The actual latest year-over-year inflation was 8.3 percent. “Today’s data,” Biden boasted, “show more progress in bringing global inflation down in the U.S. economy.”

Tell Big Brother it’s not.

He spoke at a “celebration” of his falsely-named Inflation Reduction Act that will pump another $485 billion into the economy already overheated by some $5 trillion of new spending in just the 20 months since he began shaking hands with invisible friends publicly. Plus, likely another trillion to come in college-debt payouts financed by all taxpayers, regardless of education level.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi added the act is already “driving down costs for kitchen-table items for America’s working families” who’ve seen for themselves that on the contrary, prices for food items have jumped 11.4 percent, the most in 43 years.

Biden, the ignorant autocrat, also was pleased to point out that gas prices are down $1.30 over the summer. Apparently, he didn’t have time to admit that’s not quite half the increase since he took office and began his campaign to cripple the fossil fuel industry.

Kamala Harris, his vice-presidential salad chef, told a national TV audience “We have a secure border.” This, as government figures showed apprehensions of illegal crossers nearing two million this fiscal year, a new record with two months left.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

The Biden crowd continues to maintain its great economic progress. Its members simply deny that the two recent consecutive quarters of economic decline are a recession and its complicit media go along. In a classic example of 1984 doublespeak, Treasury Secy. Janet Yellen told NBC recently, “Even if that (GDP) number is negative, we are not in a recession.”

Here is some contradictory evidence:

From steady, consistent growth of 2.5% a year, stock market gains of nearly 35%, and low inflation averaging around 2% during the Trump years, we have descended to this economic hell, created by an incompetent president and his team that brags about his terrible performance.

Faced with that inflation and an incompetent president, the stock market has cratered in recent days, erasing trillions in family savings, investments, and dreams.

Biden falsely claims to be getting inflation under control. But that invisible tax has produced a 16 percent hike in electricity costs and 33 percent in natural gas prices and erased wage gains. Indeed, Bidenflation has actually cut wages by 3.4 percent in the last year.

Last week the American Institute for Economic Research warned:

The United States appears to be entering the same economic malaise of bloated bureaucracy, excessive taxation, and spiraling inflation that typified the Carter years….. Perhaps the most telling fact of all is that our elected officials and policymakers haven’t a clue how to reverse these trends. Indeed, they are still feeding them.

New Bureau of Labor Statistic figures reveal that on average last year, U.S. citizens paid $16,729 in taxes. That is $1,234 more than they spent on health care, food, and clothing combined.

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness. And for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

We’d like to think that such information will drive enough voters to face the dismal facts, rather than the Biden lies, distortions, and giveaways.

And that they will 1) turn out to vote on or before Nov.8, and 2) remove control of Congress from Democrats to paralyze their wanton spending. Republicans have at times been less than stalwart in opposition. But almost anything is better than the Pelosi/Schumer tag team bank-busters.

We’d like to think that. But here’s another actual stat, an ominous one that suggests that 1984 happiness with gimmes might just win out over the nation’s historical quest for freedoms. And perhaps the obviously addled Joe Biden is a sharper schemer than he appears.

Few people realize that last year, a majority of Americans – 57 percent – paid no federal income taxes. None. Zip. Nada. This generosity, enhanced by succeeding administrations and Congresses, means that 43 percent of Americans are paying the taxes for 100 percent.

Which also means the immense ongoing costs of servicing five or six trillion dollars in new debt alone – and Lord knows what other super spending sums Democrats could insert into future falsely-labeled legislation — has absolutely no effect on their wallets.

So, ominously, happiness could indeed seem better to a decisive many than freedom.