George Orwell appears in The Bob Zadek Show as a reference point for the corruption of language, not as a biographical subject. Across three episodes spanning 2011 to 2022, guests and host invoke him to describe how words are made to mean their opposites in campus speech regulation, in the rhetoric of trade, and in the government’s handling of COVID-19 testing information. The excerpts supply no details of Orwell’s life, no titles beyond the two named, and no account of his political views; what they show is the uses to which his name is put.
The perversion of language on campus
In a 2011 episode on campus speech codes, Bob Zadek introduced Harvey Silverglate, described as founder and chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and asked him about the tools universities use to stifle free speech. Silverglate answered that the overall tool is to torture the English language, which he placed in the tradition of an essay by George Orwell on politics and the English language, about how to use the English language to say nothing or to say the opposite of what one means Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011).
Silverglate’s example was the campus “free speech area,” a designated zone to which all public discussion, speeches and rallies by students on political or philosophical issues are limited. He argued that this is not really a free speech area but a censorship area, because the zone frequently comprises less than 1% of the geographic area of the campus, and is almost invariably far from the center of activity. By calling it a free speech area, he said, administrators make it sound as though they are protecting speech while in fact censoring it.
He applied the same analysis to campus speech codes. When FIRE began, he said, well over 90% of American college and university campuses had restrictive speech codes, and FIRE had battled them back to somewhere below that figure—he put it at probably 75% or 80%. But the codes are no longer called speech codes; the universities call them harassment codes, saying they are not limiting free speech but only speech that reaches the level of harassment. Silverglate said that by calling them harassment codes, liberal arts universities that claim to protect academic freedom routinely prosecute students in campus disciplinary tribunals for saying politically incorrect things about issues such as gender, race and sexual identity. The perversion of the English language, in his account, allows this to go unnoticed by parents paying tuition, by boards of trustees, and by the media—which is why, he said, FIRE’s website is accessed thousands of times a day by journalists who cannot find the truth on college websites.
Zadek’s own framing in the exchange was that college administrations have many tricks to stifle speech, including charging security fees, restricting petitioning, and confining demonstrations to small portions of campus. He also supplied the aside that the free speech area is behind the incinerator. These are Bob’s characterizations, not the guest’s.
Inverted slogans and the language of trade
Orwell returned in a 2017 episode on free trade with Richard Epstein, identified by Zadek as a professor at NYU School of Law, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and professor of law emeritus and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, and the author of more than 15 books. In his opening monologue, Zadek said that Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 brought to us all the phrase “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength,” and added that black is white, dark is light, and everything is upside down Trump Vs. Free Trade with Richard Epstein (2017).
Zadek used this as the frame for the morning’s topic, which he called one of the most important and least understood policy issues confronting America, compounded by loose, inaccurate and misleading talk by President Donald Trump. The subject was trade: buying and selling goods to and from manufacturers located outside the US. The trouble with discussing trade, Zadek said, is that all the words, or the common phrases used in a discussion of trade, mean actually the opposite of what they sound—bad words sound good, good words sound bad. He said he had gone to one of the wisest men he knows, Epstein, to sort out concepts that would influence economic and social life in America for decades if they were profoundly changed.
Epstein’s reply in the excerpt is limited to thanking Zadek for the introduction. The episode’s treatment of Orwell is thus entirely the host’s: the novel supplies a slogan about inverted meaning, and Zadek applies it to the vocabulary of trade before handing the discussion to his guest. The excerpt does not record Epstein invoking Orwell himself, nor does it state which trade terms Zadek had in mind.
Information as power
In a 2022 episode, Zadek interviewed Mike Munger about an article Munger had written on what he called the most important failure of the US COVID response. Munger’s thesis, as Zadek summarized it, was that the federal government underutilized the private sector, specifically on testing. Munger said the simplest way to put it was that the United States had an effective vaccine before it had an effective legal test, that the vaccine was developed in January 2020, and that testing a test should not take very long Troubleshooting the Constitution (2022).
Munger attributed the delay to the government itself. Germany developed an effective test by the end of January 2020; South Korea and the United States both diagnosed their first case on January 20th of 2020; by February 15th South Korea had enlisted the private sector and drugstores to distribute tests people could actually get, while the United States dragged its feet. He cited a National Public Radio exposé comparing the US, South Korean and German governments, and said the difference was that South Korea and Germany enlisted the private sector while the CDC said it knew better, producing a two-month delay. He also described the summer of 2021 situation in which US manufacturers were selling rapid tests abroad that could not be bought at home because the Food and Drug Administration said the tests were not as accurate as the PCR genetic test—which, Munger said, is a different thing, since the question people want answered is whether they are contagious. He attributed the agency’s stance to a bureaucratic bias against speed, and offered the metaphor of a factory versus a garden: an economy is more like a garden, and the US government tried to run it like a factory while South Korea ran it like a garden.
It was in response to this that Zadek raised Orwell. He identified two subtexts: a built-in ethos of distrust toward the private sector, and the government’s need to control information and preserve it as a tool for itself rather than share it with the public. Testing, he argued, would have given individuals information about their own health so they could decide whether they needed treatment, ought to self-quarantine, or should visit relatives—removing the decision from government and placing it with citizens. Governments are not generous with sharing information, Zadek said, because, to paraphrase George Orwell, information is power. He connected this to Friedrich Hayek, whose name he said would be heard a lot during the hour, and to the idea that much information is individual and local and held by the public, with a collective wisdom evidenced by a marketplace. He asked Munger whether he was just a conspiracy theorist in fearing that the government was unenthusiastic about testing because it was unenthusiastic about sharing information.
Munger answered that he was skeptical of any monocausal explanation and did not think Zadek’s explanation was wrong, but that he did not think the primary goal of government workers is control. Rather, he said, government experts honestly think they are smarter than the rest of us and should make choices for us, and the system of expertise, separated from the public, makes that problem worse—as in law enforcement, where you think everybody is a criminal, or medicine, where you think everybody is sick. He said there is nothing invidious about experts wanting to control, but that a constitution has to prevent it, and a government has to be limited precisely because experts who want to do good want the power to do it. He closed the thought by agreeing that information is power and information is control, and that the expert does not want information to get out because people will use it wrong. The excerpt breaks off mid-sentence in Munger’s speech.
Across episodes
The three episodes touch Orwell in unrelated contexts—campus speech codes in 2011, trade rhetoric in 2017, and COVID testing information in 2022—and the excerpts show no development in how he is used: each time his name supplies a shorthand for language that inverts or withholds meaning, and no speaker in a later episode responds to an earlier one’s use of him.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no biography: no birth or death, no nationality, no career, no list of works beyond the essay on politics and the English language and the novel 1984. They do not describe Orwell’s politics, his views on socialism or totalitarianism, or the content of either work beyond the single phrase quoted from the novel. Nothing in the sources indicates that Orwell was ever a subject or guest on the show, and no speaker claims expertise on him.