Excerpt:

Orwell’s work illustrates a point made by Josef Goebbels and swallowed whole by the proponents of identity politics in our day: “The essence of propaganda is not in variety, but rather the forcefulness and persistence with which one selects ideas from the larger pool and hammers them into the masses using the most varied methods.” Hammering in a few selected ideas is at the farthest remove from genuine liberal education, whose aim is to free both mind and spirit and to engage the whole person with reality, including what actually happens. It is still possible, even now, to hide one’s face in a great book. And rumors of real conversations persist.