In their upside down, Alice-in-Wonderland version of reality, the left has a point when they cast George Orwell as a prophet of our times.
Our world increasingly resembles the soul-crushing landscape of manipulation the English writer limned in the pages of “1984” and “Animal Farm.” Powerful forces in government, media, academia and business have transformed much of the news into propaganda. During the Biden years, for example, the left cast their push for censorship as a commitment to truth and the coercive control of everyday life as the flowering of freedom.
Talk about Orwellian.
Now that Donald Trump is back in office, they are once again insisting the president and his populist supports on the right are an existential threat to liberty.
Blessedly, however, we still live in a relatively open society. Many of us can see through and expose their deceit. That’s why Hans Christian Anderson rivals Orwell as our most useful modern prophet. His tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” captures the daily experience of watching very serious people holding very serious conversations about total nonsense.
It’s why watching the news makes us channel our inner Elvis — give me a gun so I can shoot that TV.
The most recent front-page example is the wall-to-wall coverage of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” They report that hundreds of people knew that Biden was not up to running the country, and yet this scheming horde hid this secret from the legacy media. It was only after they lost the election that these conspirators decided to spill the beans.
In fact, polls show millions of people knew the score on Biden well before the election. One didn’t need special access, just two eyes to see the truth. Yes, it is nice to have the book’s detail on the consternation about Biden’s infirmities, but that just confirms rather than expands our knowledge.
Even as it pretends to reveal the truth, “Original Sin” is another exercise in gaslighting, because it tries to make the starting point of the story — the effort to hide Biden’s incapacity — its endpoint.
The pressing issue, however, is not the cover-up, but the cover-up of the cover-up. Which unelected officials were running the government in Biden’s name? How did they do it? How did they justify it? Turning the old Watergate question around: What did the president not know and when did he not know it? And, why did so many of the nation’s most influential news outlets participate in this charade? How was Biden’s health discussed in top newsrooms? Who made the decision to dismiss these consequential concerns?
Answering those questions and naming names is the urgent task for media outlets who have already lost the trust of much of the country because of their partisan coverage. Instead of experiencing a come-to-Jesus moment, however, the legacy media is likely to use its coverage of the book to bury the Biden years under the claim that the key questions have now been asked and answered. It will use the “lessons” it learned as a reason to pound Trump even harder, including questioning his mental fitness.
If Democrats and their media stenographers have learned anything, it is that they will almost certainly get away with it. The Biden cover-up is part of a decades-long pattern in which they have stridently misled the American people – against all evidence – about the biggest issues of the day.
The short list includes advancing the clearly bogus claims that Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election; attacking those who made the obvious connection between the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology; delegitimizing reports about the material on Hunter Biden’s laptop detailing the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes; and the truly Orwellian effort to disparage honest challenges of official narratives as “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
Going back nearly two decades, there was the 2006 Duke lacrosse case, in which local and national media outlets echoed a local Democrat district attorney’s assertion that a bunch of rich preppies had raped a poor black stripper. There was never any real evidence for this heinous crime, apart from the troubled woman’s claims. Yet the young men were convicted in the press simply because of their alleged privilege. A few years after this shameful episode, the media were back at it, advancing false narratives about the deaths of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown in 2014 to allege a war on blacks — setting the stage for the racist convulsions of the Black Lives Matters movement and DEI programs.
None of these missteps resulted in soul-searching — though a few did result in Pulitzer Prizes. The next few years promise more of the same: the Orwellian twisting of facts that will bombard us with dangerous lies. As the aptly named group “Talking Heads” once sang: Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
It’s enough to make you go full Elvis.
(J. Peder Zane is a RealClearInvestigations editor and columnist.)
