“I want you to quote this,” chief strategist Steve Bannon told the New YorkTimes in January. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
Also in January, Kellyanne Conway, a top aide to Trump, defended Sean Spicer’s blatant lie about the size of the inauguration crowd, “That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period,” a remark which the fact-checking website PolitiFact deemed to be “pants on fire” false. Conway, however, defended this blatant falsehood, saying the White House’s false claims were “alternative facts,” which drew comparisons to “newspeak”, the language of a dictatorial regime featured in George Orwell’s dystopian classic “1984,” causing sales of the book to spike. On February 1 “1984” was the bestselling book on Amazon.
The significance of these two events, and many others like them, is that we are now living in a society where people in the top ranks of our government are openly committed to mind control of the masses through redefining language and re-framing facts into this new language construct. Once language, by which we communicate our basic experiences has been altered, truth itself is altered. Language and truth are a hand in glove concept.
Steve Bannon knows what both Hitler and Orwell had to say about language and truth, which is that, “a lie told a thousand times becomes truth.” The “big lie” is what that is called. Bannon has paraphrased George Orwell on numerous occasions and stated in essence that he who controls the information flow controls the people. Very basic concept, very chilling. Journalism is the only place where we can hold the ground on truth as a society, and truth is the most basic weapon, perhaps indeed the only weapon that we have to defeat evil. This is where the line is drawn and Donald Trump just stomped over it in the last 72 hours with his daughter in law, Lara Trump, and former CNN newsreader Kayleigh McEnany vlogging on Facebook two episodes of what they call, “The Real News,” which is anything but that.
Listen to Tapper delineate it. His grasp of what’s happening is down to earth and comprehensible. Apparently “1984” is our new playbook for governance in Washington, D.C.