Stalinism might had a top down approach to ideology, but what would get you in a gulag is the people around you reporting you to the kgb. This made oppression including linguistic also bottom-up

Newspeak is actually a very similar approach to what’s going on currently because it removes words that allows communicating ideologically problematic concepts. What’s going on with the entire blacklist/whitelist issues is based on the assumption that removing a word that describes a perceived injustice will remove that injustice from the world. It is an approach that is completely blind to the real meaning a word has taken, and tries to folk etymologically hack a different interpretation. This is why the real insulting words are never these that debated.

Both Newspeak and "rightspeak" think that language creates reality rather than the other way around