In the aughts, there were a lot of signs that the US was moving towards a fascist police state, and when I called it out conservatives would point to Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies, and so I started doing what I called applied Godwinism which was to compare specific events and behaviors of the modern day to specific events that closely matched in the German Reich.

A more recent example came during the Trump administration, even though ICE was ordered only to investigate and detain immigrants who were also violent felons (the illegal in illegal alien is only a misdemeanor) but ICE disobeyed and detained anyone they could find, which overran the detention centers which in turn had supply crises and were overrun with infectious disease. Compare the Sicherheitsdienst under Reinhard Heydrich who was ordered to only go after Jews who were violent felons.

The good news is that enough of the Nineteen-Eighty-Four tropes have entered common parlance, so when the TOS of a smart TV tells us Refrain from having private conversations in front of the television and someone juxtaposes it with text about Telescreens, most people get it.