Toward the beginning of “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” George Orwell has his unhappy protagonist Winston Smith jot down what he describes as an “axiom.”
“Freedom,” he writes, “is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
That seemingly simple, in reality, deep, observation is akin to Bishop Butler’s bijou that “everything is what it is, and not another thing.”
How much mischief could have been avoided if people, especially people in power, were to take such commonsense wisdom to heart? 
Italy’s new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, seems to be a rare member of the genus homo politicus in embracing such commonsensical positions.
In a speech three years ago at the World Congress of Families, she listed Orwellian by quoting not him, but G.K. Chesterton.
“Fires will be kindled,” she quoted, “to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in the summer.”
Chesterton’s wise words come from the end of his book “Heretics” (1905).
“The great march of mental destruction will go on,” he writes. “Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed.”
Meloni, founder and head of Italy’s Brothers of Italy party, is a Euroskeptic.
This makes her a heretic.
She objects to the effort of the people in charge of Project Europe to turn her into a “perfect consumer,” a “consumer slave.”
This makes her a pariah.
Meloni refuses to be treated as a cipher, a number.
This makes her a threat.
She proudly defines herself as “Italian, Christian, woman, mother.”
This makes her a fascist.
That, anyway, is what the major news networks want you to believe.
On the eve of her stunning election victory—in 2018, the Brothers of Italy won only 4.5 percent of the vote—CBS indulged in a hysterical (I don’t mean “funny”) bit of rhetorical overkill.
“Voters in Italy appear poised to elect a far-right prime minister,” CBS informed viewers.
That’s not all. According to CBS, Meloni “leads a neo-fascist movement, reminiscent of Benito Mussolini’s own political party.”
Mussolini, eh?
Oh, yes!
This woman wants to reclaim her own identity as an individual, to champion the two-plus-two-make-four reality that she’s Italian, not a global citizen, a Christian, not a “consumer slave,” a mother, not “parent No. 1,” and a woman, not a “gender.”
All this makes her, if CBS is to be believed, the exponent of a political philosophy that has “roots in neo-fascism.”
“Many fear,” intoned a bobblehead called Chris Livesay, that a “particularly ugly” bit of history could soon repeat itself, as Meloni is “poised to lead the most hard-right government since World War II.”
“Many”?
It wasn’t only CBS, of course.
CNN was right there on the case, telling us that Meloni’s victory ushered in “Italy’s most far-right prime minister since Mussolini,” “underscoring Italy’s longstanding rejection of mainstream politics,” i.e., the politics CNN supports.
And then there was the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who, just before Meloni’s victory, warned that the EU had “tools” it could use to punish Italy should it vote the wrong way.
Such “tools,” she added, were already being deployed against Hungary and Poland.
What we’re seeing here is a European version of the tactic deployed by the Biden administration against Donald Trump and his supporters.
At his speech in Philadelphia earlier this month, President Joe Biden insisted that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
A week earlier, at a speech in Maryland, Biden explained that the problem was “not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the … semi-fascism” of the MAGA agenda.
But what is that “MAGA” (or, even scarier, “ultra-MAGA”) agenda we’re supposed to recoil from?
It’s a commonsense agenda that stresses policies that encourage American prosperity, American security, and American freedom.
It’s an agenda that recognizes that borders are borders, that cheap, abundant energy is a prerequisite of economic prosperity, and that the rule of law must be administered impartially if the coercive power of the state is not to descend into tyranny.
It also recognizes that the human race is divided into two sexes, and only two, that race is not determinative of character, and that national sovereignty and private property are necessary to the preservation of individual liberty.
In his great essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell noted that the term “fascist” had degenerated into a cognitively empty negative epithet that was little more than a term of abuse.
You don’t like something. Therefore it’s “fascist.”
It’s certainly odd that one has to work overtime to defend Meloni’s assertion of her identity as an Italian, a Christian, a woman, and a mother.
Everything is what it is and not another thing.
But then, we really do live in a time when the assertion that two plus two make four is disparaged as an example of “white supremacy.”
Who knows what tort will be invented to counter the claim that leaves in the summer are green.
** Roger Kimball is the editor and publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. His most recent book is “The Critical Temper: Interventions from The New Criterion at 40.”