Sebastian Gorka, a controversial White House adviser, appeared on Newsmax a couple of weeks ago when he was asked about the administration’s approach to the international race on artificial intelligence technology. But before the host could finish asking the question, Gorka interrupted.

“No, no, no, no,” he told Newsmax’s Ed Henry. “Sorry, it’s ‘SI.’ As of this week, it’s ‘Super Intelligence.’”

It was a sign of things to come. A few days later, Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on CNN, where host Jake Tapper asked about talks with China regarding AI. “Well, we’re going with ‘super intelligence’ now, Jake,” Waltz replied.

Earlier this week, Justice Department and State Department officials were told that they, too, had to adopt Donald Trump’s preferred branding in all of their official work.

But if this wasn’t quite enough, the president wasn’t done. Politico reported:

President Donald Trump said Thursday that the White House will consider anyone who does not adopt his preferred term of “super intelligence” as “the enemy,” escalating his campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence amid calls to erect more guardrails.

“The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” Trump said on Truth Social.

If recent history is any guide, Trump is likely to adopt a similar approach to those who continue to reference the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario and Denali, too.

In George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984,” the authoritarian regime embraces politically motivated words and phrases and imposes them on the public. This new language, designed to crush independent thought, is called “newspeak,” while the English language was relegated to “oldspeak.”

While social media didn’t exist in the world Orwell described, it’s easy to imagine Big Brother publishing a missive that declares those who resist “newspeak” as “the enemy.”

This has been a staple of Team Trump politics for too long. The administration has held up science grant proposals, for example, if they include the word “gender,” which is apparently a red flag for Republican officials. Similarly, the president has said people are not “allowed” to reference coal unless it’s proceeded by the words “clean and beautiful” — to the point that he felt the need to correct a child during a Christmas Eve call late last year.

According to a court filing, the Trump administration even created a six-page list of banned words that Head Start locations are forbidden to use when describing their programs. Among the banned words were “disability” and “race.”

In the recent past, much of the right was hysterical about concerns about “speech codes” and “language rules” as evidence of “woke” politics spinning wildly out of control and threatening free speech.

As a new brand of conservative political correctness takes root, I can’t help but notice how quiet that crowd has suddenly become.

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