The Two Minutes Hate

From Ilhan Omar to the Chicago Teacher’s Union.

Again and again these days, my thoughts keep turning to George Orwell’s writings. I wish, fervently, that this wasn’t the case. I’m at that juncture in life where I’d like to find comfort in the world around me, and instead each morning’s news brings fresh reasons for horror, fresh reminders that we’re living in an Orwellian dystopia. Forty years ago, when the calendar turned to 1984, a virtual cottage industry emerged among commentators eager to explain how Orwell’s 1984 had not, in fact, been predictive, that the world had not become the totalitarian monstrosity depicted in Orwell’s novel. Only a few years later, Harvard scholar Frances Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history,” the arrival of a grand geopolitical and cultural conclusion to the politics of division and hatred.

But two recent news items once again put the lie to the notion that Orwell had it wrong. I refer to the coverage of Ilhan Omar’s recent celebration of her Somali and Muslim identity, and the vote by the Chicago City Council calling for a Gaza cease-fire. Each exemplifies what has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon, both here in the U.S. and across the Western world, a phenomenon captured in Orwell’s concept of the “Two Minutes Hate.”

In the totalitarian world of 1984, the “Two Minutes Hate” served alongside “I Love Big Brother” as a tool for promoting support for the governing regime. The “hate” ritual played out every day, with every citizen obliged to watch as televised images fired their anger against the enemies of the regime, enemies symbolized by the hated figure of Emmanuel Goldstein. In the end, however, each hate session dissolves into the reassuring image of “Big Brother,” the regime’s benevolent father figure. Each day, then, became an exercise in catharsis, an irresistible unification of performative hatred and love, above all of loyalty to Big Brother.

On January 27, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar made a speech which apparently ordered her loyalties as, first, her Somalian homeland and second, her Muslim religious identity, with the clear implication that the U.S. stood, at best, a poor third in her loyalties. I say “apparently” only because, after reports of the speech ignited a firestorm of Republican criticism, Omar and her backers retreated, insisting that her words had been mistranslated (the speech had been made in the Somali language) or misinterpreted.

This, of course, is scarcely the first time that Omar or her allies in “The Squad” have said something outrageously anti-American and then invoked “misunderstanding” and the ever-present support of an indulgent mainstream media to assure that they suffered no penalty. Omar and company have trafficked for years in hatred for the country they serve as representatives for, and, in Omar’s case, the country that gave her sanctuary from a hellish existence in Somalia. Nothing new or surprising there. But what struck me this morning was a point made by Scott McKay when he observed that most of Omar’s Minneapolis constituents aren’t downtrodden Somali refugees but instead were “60 percent white, 17 percent black, and 10 percent Hispanic.” McKay broke down the demographics further, drawing the inescapable conclusion that “it isn’t some great mass of Somali immigrants who make Ilhan Omar the congresswoman from Minnesota’s 5th District. It’s left-leaning, childless, mostly single white people.” 

Something similar seems to animate a majority of the members of the Chicago City Council, who recently passed a resolution calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. This is nonsensical on so many levels that one scarcely knows where to start. The Chicago City Council has precisely zero authority to legislate in such matters, as proponents of the resolution frankly acknowledge. This is instead purely a feel-good resolution for the Hamas-supporting progressive radicals of the Chicago teacher’s union, who strongly advocated for its passage, and for personages like Jesse Jackson, who should know better. As my friend Luther Abel observed in covering the story, “Hyde Park, Wacker, and Evanston write the legislation that satisfies progressive appetites while Chicagoans die in unpoliced, unprotected streets.”

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Which brings me back to 1984 and the “Two Minutes Hate.” Orwell articulated  something fundamental about the intersection of politics, culture, and passion. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, and having been deeply disillusioned by the left’s embrace of Stalinism, Orwell tried to portray how totalitarian regimes trafficked in hatred as a means of drumming up support. It’s surely no accident that the personification of the enemy in the “Two Minutes Hate” was named Goldstein, since both Hitler and Stalin had been notorious anti-semites. 

Orwell also understood the contempt that English-speaking intellectuals felt for their own countries and culture. Writing in England, Your England, he noted that “in left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.” While his focus was England, his words apply equally well to American intellectuals, who share this reflexive contempt, so much so that it has become a kind of fashion statement among the progressive left, journalists, college professors, graduate students, teachers—looking at you, Chicago teachers unions—and, in general, the denizens of upscale urban neighborhoods. 

I recently wrote about the explosion of anti-Semitism that followed the October 7 Hamas atrocities, locating it in something I called “Holocaust envy.” But as I write again this morning, I think something more is in play, namely, the need for progressives to indulge in a culturally approved orgy of hatred, to pat themselves and each other on the back as they act out a hostility that starts with our own “deplorables,” meaning those ordinary Americans who love their country, and then continues to “Goldstein,” that is, to Jews who, once again, they are allowed to openly hate. Ilhan Omar personifies this hatred, but it’s the progressive voters of her district who likely enjoy a frisson of hate-filled joy when they support her. The same might be said of the members of the Chicago City Council, who voted in support of the destruction of Israel and its people, no matter how much they might pretend otherwise. 

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this whole episode is that the Chicago teachers encouraged a student walkout in support of this resolution. Making the expression of hatred a fun event, an excuse to skip school and march around shouting hateful slogans, all with the approval, in fact, the active encouragement of the supposed adults in the room. All of this speaks to something deeply troubling about the state of our country. Making unreasoned hatred popular and fun is the very definition of the “Two Minutes Hate.” 

What has become of us? This morning, I despair.

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region.