“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable — what then?” —George Orwell, 1984

Oli London is a British a singer and Instagram influencer. Over the past several years, he spent more than $150,000 on surgery — including multiple nose jobs, eye altering “blepharoplasty,” chin bone contouring, and skin whitening — all to look like K-pop star Jimin from the Korean boyband BTS. Moreover, London says he has been “traveling all over the world to Korea, to Poland, to China to get it done.”

London has also come out as “non-binary” and has stated that his preferred pronouns are “they,” “them,” “Korean,” and “Jimin.” Yet in a video posted last Monday, London committed an act of “heresy” as defined by those who insist gender — and only gender — is a “fluid” construct wholly divorced from biological and chromosomal reality: He came out as Korean. “Hey guys! I’m finally Korean. I’ve transitioned,” he declared.

London further clarified his personal reality. “I don’t identify as British so please don’t refer to me in any media or anyone online as British because I identify as Korean,” he said. “That’s just my culture. That’s my home country. That’s exactly how I look now and I also identify as Jimin. That’s my Korean name.” (Note that even London can’t keep up with his own pronoun preferences, as he refers to himself as “I” and “me.”)

And lest anyone still be confused, London referred to his eight-year journey as one where “I finally had the courage of undergoing my racial transitional surgery.”

Unsurprisingly, the “wokesters” on social media, many of whom undoubtedly support gender “transition,” were appalled by London’s efforts to apply the exact same standards to race.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t just choose to be Korean. It’s a nationality and ethnicity,” tweeted one trans-identifying user. “You have to be born Korean! Just because you like the culture, doesn’t mean you can take it and become it. There is a way to appreciate a different culture, this is not it.”

Another poster heartily agreed. “As a Korean nonbinary person, I haven’t really talked about the Oli London thing,” the tweet stated. “But, the fact that they are acting like it’s genuine and that it’s part of a ‘journey’ due to ‘identity issues’ really irks me. It’s a mockery of trans people, it’s cultural appropriation.”

Mockery? Cultural appropriation? Rank hypocrisy is more like it. It wasn’t Oli London who decided that reality itself could not only be self-identifying but engender governmental coercion to enforce that construct to the point where the Biden administration considers “women’s” sports a legal anachronism.

What truly enrages the LGBTQ crowd is that London is guilty of intellectual consistency. If gender is self-identifying, why not race? Because one accrues to leftist sensibilities and the other does not? London sees through the double standard. “Being Transexual is the same as being TRANSRACIAL because you are born in the wrong body,” he argued.

Additional backlash elicited further clarification from London: “I am Korean whether people accept it or not. This is how I identify. This is what makes me happy. This is who I am. It’s in my DNA.”

“DNA” is an unfortunate choice of terms because it is precisely the opposite of what drives the entire “transgender” agenda. The molecule that provides genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth, and reproduction of all known organisms is wholly divorced from the politics that has turned a psychological infirmity known as “gender dysphoria” into a political weapon whereby anyone who comes down on the side of DNA over “my truth” is a bigot or transphobe.

Moreover, this contemptible dynamic has metastasized to the point where the Biden administration also officially refers to those who have babies as “birthing people.”

Why not race? After all, the same Democrats who champion the “transgender” agenda once embraced the “one drop rule” that defined one’s race as “Negro” during the Jim Crow era. The pro-slavery party was also instrumental in passing miscegenation laws in several states, prohibiting interracial marriage and sexual relations between blacks and whites, that begun as an effort to discredit the abolitionist movement prior to the freeing of slaves.

By contrast, today’s Democrats prefer exploiting racial division. They embrace “equity” in lieu of equality, making race rather than merit the “standard” for one’s societal advancement in arenas such as admissions to college or getting a job. Thus, these days it is perfectly acceptable for Harvard to have different SAT test score requirements for different races, or United Airlines to simply announce that it will make 50% of its 5,000 trained pilots in the next decade “women or people of color,” or to continue maintaining policies such as affirmative action, disparate impact, and government set-asides for minority businesses, all because America is a “systemically racist” nation.

Thus, if one could simply declare oneself a minority — much like “Cherokee” Elizabeth Warren, former NAACP branch leader Rachel Dolezal, and self-proclaimed “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora” Jessica Krug — then the highly lucrative racial grievance industry, and the spoils system it engenders, would come tumbling down.

Ironically, race is a far more fluid construct than gender, where genuine ambiguity is defined as “hermaphroditism,” whereby a small group of people are born with both male and female reproductive organs. Yet even that term has become political, as dictionary.com states it is “no longer in common use” and is “now considered offensive.”

Offensive to whom? Nothing speaks more forcefully to the bankruptcy of progressive ideology than selective standards — and the selective indignation that accompanies them — its adherents fully embrace. As mentioned above, when one can be a woman simply by saying so, but is guilty of “cultural appropriation” when one applies the same standard to race, intellectual consistency is the first casualty.

Unfortunately, it’s not the only casualty. Nothing is a surer route to totalitarianism than capriciousness, and nothing speaks to that capriciousness more forcefully than reducing reality itself to a series of pronouncements wholly untethered to anything other than the ability of government to enforce them. And nothing better speaks to the potential level of enforcement than the immortal slogans disseminated by 1984’s Big Brother:

War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.

A constitutional republic that abides self-declared reality — with all the attendant government enforcement of same — is no constitutional republic at all. It is one thing to declare oneself a unicorn. It is quite another for the government to insist that stalls full of hay must inhabit a public school bathroom — accompanied by the threat of losing federal funding if that school fails to comply.

Tolerance and abdication are not interchangeable terms. And two plus two never equals five — unless a surrenderist society allows it to happen.