[Below: Soviet Poster, 1931 Public Domain.  In fact, “2+2 = 5.” is also a slogan from “1984”]

THE REPUBLICANS and their messaging partners seem to want to sabotage Biden’s Covid-19 success and don’t much mind that it shortens the life expectancy of their own voters, weakens the economy, kills innocent bystanders, and incubates new, deadlier strains of the virus.

As with their Clueless Leader, they don’t seem to think or plan, but rather derive their actions from a collective Oppositional Defiant Disorder–opposing and defying order itself and most of the tenets of a functioning democratic society.

But it’s gone too far with the deliberate and deadly lies. This country needs to enact some anti-propaganda legislation. Just as the right to bear arms does not confer on anyone with a gun the right to deliberately shoot others, freedom of speech should never be extended to the point where the deliberate spread of falsehoods about a very deadly and highly communicable disease results in negligent homicide and diminished national security.

It’s already been established that our enemies have sown the seeds of discontent among us for years. Disinformation and misinformation campaigns are usually promulgated by propaganda experts. Of course, for example, Russia. But today, G.O.P. could stand for Goebbels Own Propaganda: you have to revisit fascist regimes of the 1930s to find parallels on a scale with the deranged and deliberate nightmares they stage daily and in broad daylight. The narratives from Russia itself often emphasize the same themes…

But with no prevailing factual basis for  their pronouncements, no terra firma on which to build purpose and found a future, we sink into a mire of lies, aimless in a miasma of incoherent ideas. The condo collapse in Florida becomes a harbinger of impending decline and fall if nothing is done.

With the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the advent of cable television (as a private resource—no longer a public one), and the absolute diaspora of common culture or understanding, our loyalties were invited to sail toward whatever sirens sing our song.

And they did.

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press for one group cannot operate as dark engines of propaganda that disembowel life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for another. If each person’s freedom comes at the expense of another’s, no one is free.

In Orwell’s 1984, an artful treatise on tyranny and in response to the regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR, the “Ministry of Truth” would feverishly revise and reconcile the records of the past to catch-up with Big Brother’s shifting narrative of the present. [See https://www.moviesmarketsandmore.com/orwells-1984-is-…e-for-eric-blair/]

It was all purely for the power.

It was all One Big Lie.

It is time to insist that, where national security and public health are concerned, mass communication be based on facts, evidence, and science.

WRH