Forty years ago, an attempted "lone-actor" assassination of a politicoreligious leader — blamed upon an out-of-power political disorganized viewpoint with trappings of religious dissent — was less successful than the recent attack on Mr Kirk. The 1985 attack was followed by months of vicious, and yet at times almost randomized, suppression of all opposition, usually asserting that all opponents were ungodly and dangerous to the very fabric of society, invoking religious orthodoxy as the foundation for determining a viewpoint's (or individual's) merit. This included cancelling-although-they-didn't-call-it-that of a prominent comedian.
If you searched your memory, or even the 'net, for attempted assassinations in the US in 1985, you're probably wondering if I was riffing on New York City mafiosi or a cult in Oregon. I'm afraid you were looking in the wrong place entirely, at events not nearly as parallel. It was that "in the US" that let you down; my source material was a few thousand kilometers distant (N.B. despite the URL, this item is not paywalled).
Why yes, I am comparing the MAGA movement as epitomized by Turning Point to extremist theocrats whose justifications for particular doctrines rooted in bigotry shifted unpredictably between the archly political and sanctimoniously religious, depending upon rhetorical convenience of the moment more than anything else. This inherent tension between two clauses of the First Amendment — free exercise and sectarian nonestablishment — is one that the Founders were themselves too close to to recognize, and their rhetoric failed them. And us.†
The true "Orwellian nightmare" alluded to in the quotation-title of this post is founded upon an intentional rhetorical device in the service of totalitarianism — the depersonalization built into Newspeak. Most of the time, people who quote 1984 actually misquote it by inserting personal pronouns: "He who controls…" This necessarily misses the point of Newspeak, which more than just reinforcing whatever present views the Party wished to present was about removing the ability to dissent by removing the individual: No individuals, therefore no individual thought, therefore no dissent. The irony that the only path toward understanding of the magnetism of the distressingly parallel religious nationalism of 1980s Iran and 2020s MAGA/Turning Point/hopefully-not-all-of-America requires rejecting Newspeak and embracing consideration of the individual at a fundamentalist (!) rhetorical level is definitely too far from mainstream discourse in the respective communities. They don't want anyone to even have the ability to express such dissent. And that's rather my point.
† Perhaps the greatest irony — and one in distinct contrast to the "beliefs" of some prominent Founders — is that neither the language of the First Amendment nor the language of acceptable political discourse since acknowledges even the existence, let alone validity, of choosing the ultimate disentangling of politics and religion: Rejection of religion. With very rare exceptions, atheism and agnosticism are just as much a part of the American conversation as (in America's cramped perception, anyway) sex was to upper-middle-class Victorians — that is, let's not talk about the icky thing and maybe it'll go away.