Darkness Falls: Digital Orwell

You can see where this is going.  When the Homegrown Hitler regime denied the most obvious sort of fact--numbers that can be pretty much counted by evidence before your eyes--it tells us what to expect.  The key was not so much overestimating the crowd on inauguration day, versus media estimates based on visual evidence plus comparative statistics.  It was the claim that it was the largest inaugural crowd ever.  This is so obviously false as to be absurd.  It is as claimed "alternative facts."  Millions of fraudulent votes--another one.

So we can expect many more alternative facts. Supposing Homegrown Hitler gets his way, when the medical insurance market wobbles and many people lose coverage, resulting in untreated illnesses and death, any statistics to bear this out, any stories to bear this out, will be denied.  The claim will be everyone is covered, it's working great, everybody is happy.

When inflation goes up as a result of restricted trade, that will be denied.  The inflation statistics will be faulty.  When tax cuts for the rich are passed and the deficit and debt increase as a result, those numbers will be denied.  The deficit and debt will be said to be going down.  Unemployment numbers will not be valid unless they go down.  And so on.

Muzzling federal agencies from presenting real facts is also being attempted, so there is less competition with the alternative facts.  Bush's efforts were timid compared to Homegrown Hitler.

It should not be surprising.  Republicans have adhered to alternative facts for at least eight years, which is how they could claim that Obamacare wasn't working, the planet isn't heating, the federal deficit was out of control, the Iran nuclear treaty was a failure etc.  It's hard to avoid seeing a causal relationship between their alternative facts and the political fact that they were voted fully into power.  So far they're working.

This is the most blatant situation since Orwell defined it, especially since he predicted the use of technology to enforce the control of facts.  This control so far has been a product of the digital age in ways that need not be repeated here.

But now it is the federal government that is the purveyor of alternative facts.  This is the essence of totalitarianism.

It's not exactly new that rulers of one kind or another wield power by means of alternative facts in crucial areas.  For decades US officials lied about the effects of atomic bomb tests and nuclear weapons radiation.  According to major corporations, smoking was not unhealthy, they weren't really polluting, they weren't using slave labor.  And so on.

Lying is endemic to war.  Often it is lying about what isn't seen--i.e. what you don't know. When lying about Vietnam became obvious, public support wavered and toppled.  But it took some time, and much suffering.

This time what is being lied about is right out there for everyone to see.  And the program to lie about everything is openly stated.  Only they aren't lies because no they don't accept that facts exist in any meaningful way, just assertions as a basis for action, as if they were facts. It couldn't be clearer what the program is.

 This is the kind of war we're now in.  The dogs of this war were loosed by the election, and it's going to be a long war.  A lot of people are going to suffer, and there will be casualties.  Whether anyone knows about them will depend on the American media being as vigilant on vital matters as they were over the weekend on the size (as opposed to the madness) of crowds.