George Orwell has never been more on point than right this minute.
Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes made an appearance on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show on Wednesday. She made the incredible statement that, “There are no such things as facts.”
“Well, I think it’s also an idea of an opinion. And that’s — on one hand I hear half the media saying that these are lies, but on the other half there are many people that go, no, it’s true,” Hughes said. “And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts, they’re not really facts.”
She went on, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts. And so Mr. Trump’s tweet amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.”
Politico's Glenn Thrush was present at NPR and this was his response:
Thrush responded, “First I’ve got to pick my jaw up off the floor here. There are no objective facts? I mean, that is — that is an absolutely outrageous assertion. Of course there are facts. There is no widespread proof that three million people voted illegally. It’s been checked over and over again. We had a Pew study that took place over 15 years that showed people had more likelihood of being struck by lightning than voting illegally in an election.”
I don't mean to be chicken little, but seriously, the dumbing down of America has led to precisely this moment in history. This statement of Hughes' is positively Orwellian. The bottom line is that most of the people in this country cannot distinguish between a fact and an opinion. If somebody that the low information trogolodytes have imbued with authority, such as our Orange Prophet president-elect says something, that becomes concrete, indelible fact in these peoples' "minds," no matter how preposterous the assertion might be.
They are incapable of critical reasoning. "Trump's tweet is truth," Hughes tells us. Facts or no facts, Trump's tweet is truth. The people who are listening to Trump and to Hughes don't even know the definition of the word propaganda.
If Trump’s tweet is truth then why not add, “Freedom is Slavery.” “War is Peace.” And this will put chills down your spine, “Ignorance is Strength.”
And here’s more George Orwell. Sound like any political party that we know?
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.”
“The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
“It was a bright cold day in April November and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — “1984”
This was not a normal election, Trump is not a normal president-elect, and what we can expect in the very near future is not normal governance by an opposing party as you and I understand the meaning of that term. The "D" word describing our way of life in this country is no longer democracy as of November 9th. Rather it is dystopian. George Orwell put the handwriting on the wall sixty years ago. Now it is blinking in neon. I pray that I am wrong.
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