Nine Dogs, A Horse, and a Government of Pigs

State Terrorism Has Come to America

There is something instantly accessible about animal stories. They simplify without flattening, dramatize without condescension, and allow readers to see patterns of power and loyalty as vividly as a child might watch a fox trap a chicken in his or her back garden. Unlike a political essay, the allegorical animals make abstract behavior concrete—dogs bite, a horse pulls, pigs scheme. Yet the stakes are unmistakably human. Orwell understood this instinctively: to depict tyranny, he gave it ferocious teeth, obedient muscle, and cunning intelligence. Exactly eighty years after its publication, Animal Farm illuminates the affairs of state terror that have taken root in America.

Old Major dreamed of a rebellion that would overcome the deep state of human oppression and allow the disenfranchised to establish a new social order. His vision captures the imagination of the animals, and that force is soon mobilized to drive Farmer Jones and his wife off the farm. But even in the halcyon days immediately following the Rebellion, there is foreshadowing:

It happened that Jessie and Bluebell [the two farm dogs] had both whelped soon after the hay harvest, giving birth between them to nine sturdy puppies. As soon as they were weaned, Napoleon took them away from their mothers, saying he would make himself responsible for their education. He brought them to a loft reachable only by a ladder from the harness-room and kept them in such seclusion that the rest of the farm soon forgot their existence.

The “forgetting” is an essential element of what is to follow. In this gap of time, the pigs were already dreaming of their future power. Under the guise of “their education,” the puppies were quietly indoctrinated, maturing into a paramilitary force waiting in the wings, then unleashed the very moment Napoleon seemed destined to lose a debate with his political rival, Snowball:

At this there was a terrible baying sound outside, and nine enormous dogs wearing brass-studded collars came bounding into the barn. They dashed straight for Snowball, who only sprang from his place just in time to escape their snapping jaws. Silent and terrified, the animals crept back into the barn… [The dogs] were the puppies whom Napoleon had taken away from their mothers and reared privately. Though not yet full-grown, they were huge dogs, and as fierce looking as wolves. They kept close to Napoleon. It was noticed that they wagged their tails to him in the same way as the other dogs had been used to do to Mr. Jones.

When the snarling dogs appeared, they chased Snowball down the lane and past the five-barred gate. He was deported. The lesson was immediate and visceral: dissent, even in the form of a political debate, was no longer to be tolerated. At a subsequent meeting soon after, several hens who refused to give up their eggs were summarily executed, and the aura fear was totalized. Napoleon now ruled absolutely, affirmed by performative, obsequious loyalty. Said the workhorse Boxer at every opportunity: “Comrade Napoleon is always right.” The farm governed by animals had become a one-party state.

________________________

Between 2020 and 2024, when most of us thought the MAGA spell had been broken and the foundations of democracy reaffirmed, a few pigs were scheming in the hidden loft of the Heritage Foundation. The public saw a reset; but the MAGA powerful saw an opportunity to choreograph a system of state terror. They drafted a 900-page blueprint, ready for the moment they could seize power again. So, following the inauguration in January 2025, those pigs commanded a ready army of fierce, disciplined dogs. Some had been in training since 2015; others joined the pack on January 6, 2021.

Over the summer of 2025, under the guise of “emergency powers,” the dogs were let loose into the boulevards of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and other corners of the country. The so-called emergencies varied—lies about street crime, staged spectacles of violent protest, false profiles of predatory immigrants, and the political fiction of “the enemy within.” Through ICE raids and National Guard deployments, federal agents in tactical gear menaced day laborers and delivery workers. The vulnerable were pulled into vans or cuffed in parking lots, spirited away to gulags whose locations remain unknown. Many undocumented immigrants fled across the border in fear. Others retreated indoors, leaving streets quieter than before. Demonstrated capacity—mass arrests and shows of militarized unity—intended to silence debates about legitimacy before they could even begin.

The new regime’s messengers are like the sycophantic Squealer, who skips from side to side in happy allegiance to Napoleon. They are interpreters, explainers, and liars, turning every cruelty into policy and every doubt into treason. Today there is no shortage of Squealers: polished press secretaries, network anchors, think-tank operatives—each translating the hard edges of authoritarian ambition into digestible slogans. Their work is not persuasion in the old sense; it is emotional management, a steady drip of justification that makes the unbelievable seem inevitable. Their Orwellian motive: resistance must be made unimaginable.

In this shift from episodic terror to structural terror, fear no longer needs to be overtly enforced; it exists ubiquitously, anticipatory and latent. It regulates behavior not through law or direct coercion, but simply in the knowledge that the dogs are out there prowling. Meanwhile, state-sponsored voices file away at the rough edges of unease. Speech turns to whispers. Terror lingers like a shadow over every decision, an unspoken veto of collective courage. The lesson of Orwell’s farm is not merely that force can clear a room; it is that, once introduced, an initial show of force can rewire the imagination of the governed. When enforcement becomes the grammar of politics, even silence sounds like consent. The danger now is not just what might be done in the name of authority, but that we might no longer dare even to dream in its presence.

Boxer, who “had an almost unbelievable capacity for labor,” continued throughout the months and years to profess the desire to do even more. “I will work harder,” he said again and again, dreaming of his promised retirement in a sunny meadow. He sacrificed everything, only to be hauled off to the glue factory. In our present state, too, there is a muscular strength behind the regime, a willingness to pull harder against all common sense in the belief that loyalty guarantees protection. But the cart these loyalists pull is hitched to their own undoing. This is each MAGA faithful’s own tragic story.