I'm Audie Cornish, and this is the Assignment. And here is a fact. Democrats and Republicans in Congress can't agree on whether the government should continue to spend money on financial help for people who need it, for their health insurance.

Hello America, this is White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Here's what you;d get if you called the White House comment line right now.

Democrats in Congress have shut down the federal government because they care more about funding health care for illegal immigrants than they care about serving you, the American people.

'Covering a story like this is a nightmarish haze of talking points, double-speak, and rhetorical gamesmanship. But honestly, the last couple of years have felt that way, which is probably why sales of George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, surged a few years ago, and why the author's words still have resonance today.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of this world. I'm going to set down what I dare not say aloud.

'And why Raoul Peck, the documentarian behind the Oscar-nominated "I Am Not Your Negro" about James Baldwin, has come to focus on Orwell for a new film. It's called "Orwell: 2+2=5."

Because we have a number of people who want you to believe that two plus two equals five, and who can get you confused. Because when it's a voice of authority, who comes on TV and tells you, you know what? As of today, two plus two equals five. And by the time you start to understand, wait, wait a minute, that's not what I remember. The time is gone, and you're already submerged.

Stay with us. Raoul Peck had access to Orwell's manuscripts and letters and journals, and among the many jarring things about the documentary, hearing the actor Damian Lewis bring the man who would become Orwell to life. Eric Arthur Blair was born in British India in 1903, and on his way to being a writer, he was an Imperial police officer in what was then known as Burma. By the time he was an adult writing under the pen name George Orwell in the 1940s, there had been two world wars and he had witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe. Orwell wrote from experience. In that way, he and director Raoul Peck are the same.

As somebody who's born in Haiti, who has known what dictatorship means, who have seen his parents whispering in the living room because they didn't want me to hear certain things. My father lost his job as a scholar in the faculty of agronomy in Haiti the next day of the election. We were witness of that kind of abuse and from the state itself. From the political leadership. And nobody would have thought that something like this would happen in the United States, where this is a country that always felt like above all the other countries of the world, who wanted to be like the sheriff of democracy around the world. Even though we know that it's not the reality, because that very same dictatorship I'm talking about in Haiti, like the Duvalier regime, who stayed father and son, who stayed more than 35 years in power, but they were able to stay that long because they were supported by every single US administration.

'First of all, and I don't want to be presumptuous, but like, you very much understand the power of words, language, images. And how do you think about a term like propaganda? And how has that changed kind of before and after this project, "2+2=5."

So yes, the importance of word, the important of, you know, we are all humans, you know, we are, we are impressionable, and especially if the words come from the state itself, from leaders themselves. So if we don't know anymore what is the truth or what is a fake, and we are in the middle of that, it's impossible to see through. Orwell discover something very early on the the the significance of language, and being in a democracy, being even in a society, is that that particular group agrees that certain words mean certain things.

And it's funny, in my line of work, I feel sometimes right at the little catalyst point of those kinds of things where I'll watch a talking point, a political talking point which is even the term we use just for the propaganda that is brought to the various parties for the purpose of spreading it, okay, just to try and use it in a neutral term. And now all of a sudden, you're trying to have a conversation with someone who is using those terms and you're in this battle of interjecting the facts, but now you're arguing and now it looks like it's something that is an argument instead of something that's a case of a fact and not a fact.

Exactly.

'And it feels very much- what I appreciate about a doc is in a documentary you can have that conversation with a kind of clarity that sometimes it feels like I'm in an informational fog of war.

'But there is something that we can call the truth, even a mathematical truth. That's why we call the film "2+2=5," because we have a number of people who wants you to believe that two plus two equals five, and who can get you confused. Because when it's a voice of authority, who comes on TV and tells you, you know what, as of today, two plus two equals five. And by the time you start to understand, wait, wait a minute that's not what I remember. And the time is gone and you already submerged by, by what you call the propaganda, basically.

Submerge is a good word.

Yeah.

It does feel like the water is rising sometimes.

That was the plan. Let's flood the zone. So Orwell has a phrase for that. And it's really a good phrase to think about when he said the degradation of language is the condition for the degradation of democracy.

Wait, so let me say that again. The degradation of language is the condition for the degradation of democracy.

Yes. So that means it start there with language. And it's incredible, but it's simple. And we have seen, and that's the other thing, sometimes I have discussion with colleagues and friends, it didn't start with Donald J. Trump. We have seen that degradation and unfortunately, the press have been somehow complicit with it, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not knowingly.

Yeah. Can I challenge this for a second? Because one of the things I've wrestled with is particularly for American press, even Western press, as you're talking about things like propaganda, yellow journalism, they're from way earlier in the century.

Yes, of course.

'And that wasn't truly a fact-based time in a lot of ways.

'Yeah, but there were resistance and-

There was, exactly.

And there were regulations.

'But there's something about Watergate also that sort of taught American journalists and taught a generation that here's what's gonna happen. There's gonna be a revelation in which you will reveal a truth. And when that truth is heard, all across the land, there will be politicians and average people who will say, aha, the truth, and they will act. That feels broken to me. That feels like now we're in a scenario where something might be revealed and someone else will say, well, that's not true. Or is it? And it's just, you're in cycle now and it's really broken and it feels like we are not prepared to deal with it. And I don't mean for you to be my therapist, Raoul Peck as a journalist, but-

But it's true. It's true.

Do you know what I'm saying? Like it's something that we were raised to know. Reveal, action will follow. And that being broken, I feel like has left a lot of journalists struggling with, well, what are you for?

Well, but you have to go at the bottom of that. When did it start and why? It start first, you know, Bourdieu says in the film, basically journalists have become puppets, not that they don't think, but they are in a system that they do not control. I'm old enough to have gone through those phases. And I remember after the 70s, the 80s, where there was what they called newspeak, rationalization. In fact, they were cutting the budgets and within also newspapers, television, et cetera. And there was the talk about how do we get more viewers?

Right.

'And one of the idea was let's make everything shorter. Let's make everything sample. Let's have debate, but opinion debates, not debates based on argumentation, on numbers, on analysis, on reports. And I remember that that show on CNN, what was the-

Crossfire.

'Come on. I remember this thing and I remember I was a young man. I say, oh, my God, we are, you know, we that's the end. And from there-

'But I do think there's something to be said for creating some sort of entertainment. I mean, I'm watching your documentary, right? And your documentary feels like a social media feed. It has the cut- the cutting and the energy and the moving from here's an image from Gaza, here's him an image from Burma. Here's an image- it is- you are also using the native tongue of our modern technology.

Yes, but differently, because I'm making a film for a theatrical audience. I'm not making a phone for the internet. I'm a making a film that allows you thinking time. I'm not bombarding you with images. There is a very strong text, played by an incredible actor, in that case, Damian Lewis. And I make sure in the way I edit this film to leave space for you to think. There are moments where it's calm.

You had access to manuscripts, letters, photos. So we are hearing the narrator of this film in a way is Orwell himself. His ideas are what guide us, even though they are performed by an actor. How did you decide then what clips to use? Because it really goes all over the place. I mean, modern things in the 80s, things in 40s. And as you were listening to his words, I don't know which came first, but how did you start to think about the images that would do what he said, expose a lie?

Well, I would say the method to work like this with an incredible body of work, I learned the hard way with my film, "I Am Not Your Negro." So in this case, I learned much quicker how to do it. And what I did is basically I had to find my libretto, the text first, that's where I start. I don't start with images, I start with the text because I am Orwell in that sense. For me, it was clear that Orwell had to tell the story himself. You can't have more impactful and stronger connection when it's the author himself who is telling the story. And that was also my learning process with Baldwin. You can't top Baldwin telling the stories himself, whatever how good you are. So I knew I could risk that with Orwell as well, and that's when I went throughout his work and start putting a story together, because I don't do, contrary to what some people think, I don't just put clips one after the other. No, there is a very clear story I'm telling. In that case, that was the story of a man in his 40s who knows he's going to die and he's struggling to finish his novel. That's the simple bottom line story. And that story, of course, enabled me to digress and go everywhere in his work to use everything else he said, he wrote and all lived through. You know, it's an indirect biography. I don't do biography, because a biography you can watch it once and that's it. But a film like this one, you can't watch it multiple time because you will discover different thing each time. I leave different layers of storylines. You know, some are easy to see and others need more time for you to sometimes to understand. So the text is always the key. And the story, I'm telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end so that I don't lose my viewer and everything else participate in that's what I would call orchestration with many different instrument, the music, the graphics. The sounds, every different sound that we work through. Nothing in this film is just random. I didn't have those images and say, I'm gonna find Orwell, what Orwell said about that. No, I'm trying to put myself in Orwell's shoes. So he's the guiding line.

And his prescience is eerie. Even saying that as someone who has read the book a bunch of times, it is eerie to listen to his words and have them feel so, uh, current. So just to give you an example, obviously this film has been in the works for some time, but as a news reporter, I have been covering, for instance, the way the Trump administration has been approaching the defense secretary's job. Okay. It's the department of defense. Now it's called the Department of War.

It's directly out of 1984.

War is peace. And in the version we hear, peace is strength. Hearing these very sort of blunt rewrites to reorient Americans towards a different idea has been kind of frankly jarring for a lot of people. And I was wondering if you've had any moments like that yourself just in the last week or two where you heard and thought feels familiar.

I can tell you the big part of my life, but also the last four years where we have been working on this film. And at one point we had to stop following the actuality because it's unending. We had every day more example, but I knew that more efficient was to make a film that would stay whatever the time. And in fact in my mind, I thought the film would be finished when Kamala Harris would be president. And even if Kamala was president, this film would have been as important as it is today.

Say more.

Because that's the thing. We cannot just see the big bully and ignore where it came from. It's the same that Orwell analyzed. Orwell went through that. He was working at the BBC during the war. So he knew, he said in a very humorous way, because I like that, his humor at time, where he said, well, I think while working at the BBC, the propaganda was less idiotic than it could have been, than it was, you know? He's very conscious.

'He is, he's very self-aware, very self aware.

So the toolbox that he basically analyzed, it's the exact same toolbox. When he say that, well, we are always in a hurry to see what the others are doing to us, but we refuse to see what we are doing the others. And he add, and without bothering to see the arguments, and we are in the middle of that.

We'll be right back with more from director Raul Peck. You talked about the idea of if those in power push one door, they're gonna push another. What do you see in the response or lack of response in the communities that are dealing with this or even our culture at large?

One of the impact of all those movements is that it did create fear, create personal fear because you feel very lonely you feel alone. Because they detach you from your group from your reference, you know, that that's a human behavior to say oh my god, they came to take my neighbor, but I'm fine so far. And and not going to the neighbor and say neighbor, what can we do together? Unite your neighbors and say I don't want them to come next week and do that to all of us. The civil rights movement, what was it? It was people coming together, churches, not only Black, Jewish communities, white communities, students, intelligence, academia, simple people, garbage union. It was part of the society deciding we're not going to accept more and we have to find a way to do it. And I was reminding students, I was at Yale, I was in Columbia talking to students. I said, that generation, they, you know, your age, they were willing to go to the South knowing they were risking their lives. And some of them did die. Some of them were arrested, tortured and killed. And we don't remember our own history where citizens started to sit down together and talk. Because we don't have, there is no response that will just come up like this. We need to make sure that we understand each other and that we are taking that risk together and to say it's stopped. Rewind the status quo. Let's go further and make sure that this will never happen again.

You are raising the question of where is, for instance, Black leadership, or when you maybe also women's groups, when you're talking about the idea that there has there has been a kind of erasure of gains and civil rights for these communities, what do you mean? And who do you think could be speaking of that isn't?

As an example, even the words are eliminated. One of the first thing they did, you cannot use, I don't know the number, maybe 300 or 400 words, you cannot use them. They took them down from official website.

Like diversity, equity, or inclusion are probably some good examples.

The most absurd. You know, it sounds innocent. It even sounds ridiculous. But that's play with your minds. And so that's a regression. And some people think it's, well, I've heard that argument. Well, it's the return of the balance. You know like, yeah, we will catch up in the midterms or the next thing. No, that's unprecedented. You know it's not, you know, return to the status quo. It's already impossible. And by the way, I've been in government. I know what it means to destroy, because I know how long it takes to have a law vote, how much discussion, how many commission, et cetera. It takes you three, four, five years to change a law. And now in one decree, it's gone. And you're destroying everything that have taken decades to establish. So people should understand what's going on. It's not a game, it's not funny. Everyone, wherever they are, journalists, scholars, they have to understand they have their jobs, but they are also citizens. They are part of the civil society. And the civil society as such needs to give a response, because I don't think that the majority of Americans agree with what's going on.

One of the things I have heard, particularly from conservative voices, sounds a lot like this: democrats and progressives and liberal people have engaged in their own kind of thought policing and groupthink. And you hear this even most frequently around the conversation around trans rights, that the idea of saying that this is a man, not a woman, is saying two plus two equals five. And I'm not, this is not my belief. But I hear it very frequently, that there was a group of people out there who felt like they were responding to a kind of thought policing that was being imposed on them, particularly from civil rights advocates in various areas. How do you hear that criticism, given, you know, what you've studied the last year?

'Yeah. Well, that's usual, the same thing. By the way, the people who are saying that, it's the excuse. Because even though it might be true, because every movement have moments of exaggeration. That's how it goes. If the feminists did not make noise, there would have never been change. That's our change goes. There are always a group and usually smaller group or much more radical than the bigger group. But if you try now to choose that radical group as an excuse to erase everything, your agenda is a totally different agenda. And by the way, again, when you see how long it took to Black people to get changed, that same people have been saying, oh, you have to be patient. I would agree with you. Yes, they are, you know- the whole thing with putting in every email, he, hers, them. I didn't do that because I feel that's not how I am. I'm very progressive and I respect each individual, but I don't have to obey to any injunction. My work speaks for me.

And I ask because now you have groups like, I remember the, I think it was the think tank Third Way, I'm not sure, but came out with a list of words that they said, you know, Democrats, you should really stop using these words. These alienate the voters and that battle over language came back to me again as I was watching the film.

Well, indeed, it's a battle, but you have to ask yourself what is the result you are looking for. Are you looking for every person to accept the thinking behind it, or you just need the fake surface of it? It's like you're obliging people to do certain things without those people even understanding why. It doesn't make sense. In fact, you're going to create more enemy to your cause. That's not very intelligent. And there are people sometimes on the radical side who are really drunk of their power, drunk by the fact that, oh, they find that this is change, this is progress. Yes, but progress, you have to bring the whole society with you. It's not progress for your little tribe. It has to be wider and it's not about agressing people.

Yeah. And we're in this moment where we have ICE, customs enforcement, landing in cities with the support of the military. And so we're actually starting to see action on the ground. And it's, it is easy in a way to hear those justifications for that action. Well, there was a riot here, all of the ways that you can kind of rationalize something that maybe doesn't quite feel right.

'My colleague and co-producer, Alex Gibney, who was saying yesterday at the Q&A, he went to Russia to make a film on Navalny. And he said, you know, at one point he went through, you know on both sides, there were agent, police, their badge were covered with black tape and they had a mask. And he remember saying to himself, oh my god, this would not be possible in the United States. And this is what a lot of people are experiencing every day. People with their names erased, with mask, with no real identity, and just take you in a car and bring you to a prison. This is how quick things can change. I'm sure a lot of Americans never thought that you would see that in the streets of America. And I remember coming to DC recently and there were four armored cars at the train station. But for me, it meant something else because I remember when there is a coup d'etat, you start seeing tanks everywhere, militaries in the streets. A lot of people in the world understand that language. And to see it happening here, to turn soldiers to make partisans out of them and they turn their rifle toward your own population, this is scary. When it happened elsewhere, this was a clear sign that something is wrong here. And if you ask the military themselves, I don't think they feel at ease. Their whole training is against that. They are not trained to turn their rifles toward people that are maybe the parents or their colleagues. That's totally absurd. We shouldn't play with that. It's not a game. It's not a rehearsal. It's reality. Two plus two equals four.

Well, Raoul Peck, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, thank you, it was great to talk to you.

'Raoul Peck is the director of the documentary "Orwell: 2+2=5" about the life of George Orwell. That's out now. I want to thank you for listening to this conversation and we'll see you next week.