You Won't Believe What Wikipedia Just Did to an Orwell Classic…
“They inverted Animal Farm."
This article originally appeared on m o d e r n i t y and was republished with permission.
Guest post by @ModernityNews
During an X discussion concerning the leftist bias of Wikipedia, one commenter pointed out that the website has completely inverted the intended theme of George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm.
Author Walter Kirn shared a story about Wikipedia being edited by leftists with an axe to grind.
He noted, “I’ll use Grokipedia now. I try not to rely on these tools much but I do like to know the populations of towns and cities.”
Then this respondent brought up the entry on an upcoming film version of Animal Farm:
It’s the complete opposite of what Animal Farm is.
It’s akin to claiming 1984 warns against excessive freedom.
Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1945 as a blistering satire of Soviet communism under Stalin, using the animals’ rebellion to mirror the Russian Revolution and its betrayal into totalitarianism.
The pigs, led by Napoleon (a stand-in for Stalin), seize power from the farmer (the Tsar/capitalists) only to replicate and exceed the old oppression under the banner of “equality.”
By the famous closing line—“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”—Orwell underscores that collectivist tyranny, not capitalism, is the true villain.
To label this work as anti-capitalist requires ignoring Orwell’s own words. In his 1946 preface to the Ukrainian edition, he explained the book arose from his horror at how “the Russian mythos” had corrupted British socialists, blinding them to Stalin’s atrocities.
He had seen the same pattern in Spain during the Civil War, where communist purges crushed genuine left-wing dissent.
Far from decrying markets or private property, Orwell’s target was the lie that state ownership and centralized planning liberate anyone; the pigs’ commandments devolve from “All animals are equal” to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” a perfect caricature of socialist rhetoric masking oligarchy.
To recast Animal Farm as an attack on capitalism is to erase its warning that power concentrated in any system—especially one claiming moral superiority—breeds corruption.
Even the new 2025 Andy Serkis movie adaptation, which reportedly soft-pedals the anti-communist bite for “broad appeal,” doesn’t pretend the book critiques capitalism; it simply dilutes the satire.
Wikipedia’s description doesn’t reflect a good-faith misreading—it reflects an ideological rewrite so brazen it would make the Ministry of Truth blush.
Wikipedia basically belongs in 1984.
Wikipedia’s claim to neutrality completely collapses under the weight of its own edit wars, where a small cadre of hyper-ideological administrators—many openly aligned with far-left causes—function as gatekeepers who lock pages, revert sourced additions, and ban dissenters with the zeal of commissars.
The site’s entry on the Second Amendment, for instance, buries the individual-right interpretation affirmed by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller beneath layers of gun-control advocacy, while articles on conservative figures like Ronald Reagan or Clarence Thomas read like opposition research dossiers.
On a recent episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger delivered a scathing critique of the platform he helped create, accusing it of devolving into a “mixture of oligarchy and anarchy” dominated by left-wing activists and infiltrated by intelligence agencies like the CIA, which he claimed edit entries directly from Langley to propagate propaganda.
Sanger detailed how Wikipedia’s “perennial sources” blacklist systematically deems conservative outlets—such as Breitbart, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Daily Caller—unreliable while greenlighting left-leaning ones like The New York Times, CNN, and Mother Jones, making it “very difficult for conservatives to get into Wikipedia” without facing bans or sanctions.
He lamented the site’s abandonment of its neutral point of view, attributing this to anonymous admins (80% of whom he said are untraceable) who enforce ideological conformity, and proposed “nine theses” for reform to restore balance, leaving Carlson visibly stunned as they navigated the site’s biased machinery live on air.
Wikipedia isn’t crowd-sourced knowledge; it’s curated propaganda, where “verifiability” means “verifiable to outlets we already agree with,” and the result is a digital palimpsest that scrapes away inconvenient truths faster than the pigs in Animal Farm whitewash the barn wall.
Meanwhile…
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