Friday, January 24, 2025

Trump's War on the Truth Has Officially Gone Full Orwell

 https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22547037/donald-trump-orwellian-truth-reality-eyes-ears/

“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

This is almost a little too on-the-nose Orwellian. In 1984, George Orwell described the totalitarian government's ultimate demand of its subjects:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

It has long been clear that the president is attempting to build a genuine authoritarian movement over which only his word has any power, and which he can use to ride roughshod over the institutions of democracy. So far, this attempt has been an unmitigated success, as his supporters inhabit the same infotainment vortex he does and other members of the Republican Party—which controls both Houses of Congress and has a constitutional duty to provide a check on the Executive Branch—bow to him out of craven fealty.

But none of that is actually the point. As Gessen explained beautifully, the point is to command power over reality itself. All this can be true at various times, or at the same time, if Trump says it is. Which is to say, we can't be sure that anything is true at all. In that environment, the only thing that matters is what powerful people say. Trump's war on the truth is an admittedly fascinating amalgam of vanity and crippling confirmation bias combined with a ferocious instinct for manipulation and deception. He is plummeting through the infotainment vortex, but he isn't gasping for air or grabbing at something to hang onto. He seems to thrive in the void.

1 comment :

  1. Say the folks who say that gender isn't real, a man can be a woman, race is social construct (except when it isn't) and that the Arabs are the real indigenous people in Israel

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