Big Brother and The Ministry of Truth: Why (Dishonest) Donald Wants to Delegitimize the Press

If you run across Eric Arthur Blair anytime soon, be sure to let him know that, though the dystopian society he described in his classic novel, 1984, has not been fully realized, we can finally say that Big Brother actually exists, has established an almost constant presence via television and social media, has used the demagoguery of fear and anger to establish a body of uncritical congregants who worship him with an almost messianic fervor---"Only I can fix it!"---and is doing all he can to establish himself as the Only/Ultimate Purveyor of Truth.

While you've got his ear, tell George Orwell---Eric Arthur Blair's pen name---that Big Brother's name is Donald Trump and that the address of his Ministry of Truth is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

WHY DISHONEST DONALD WANTS TO DELEGITIMIZE THE MEDIA

The success or failure of Dishonest Donald's effort to delegitimize the credible press depends on how well he plays the demagogue to those elements of the visceral, low-information, right-wing voter base who have long disdained what they call "media elites."

In service of his effort, Trump has turned up the heat and the volume of his followers by characterizing the press as "the opposition," "the opposition party," and even "the enemy of the American people"---the latter in particular being a characterization so foreign to the philosophy of our Founders as to be, for lack of a better phrase, un-American. As John McCain noted during a recent interview on Meet the Press, Trump's attack on the foundational institutions of free democracy is "how dictators get started."

When Trump rants against "the dishonest media" for being accurate in its reporting, the poor souls who bow and scrape before his every action or word, bless their hearts, are "all in" with him. They don't much care about what is true and what is false. If they did, they wouldn't defend to the death his well-documented, multitudinous lies or his well-documented misrepresentations and or his outrageous policies/actions. And they would run screaming into the night when their orange-skinned, orange-haired hero---the president of the United States---actually encouraged them to set reality aside and delude themselves into believing that what the media calls "false" is actually "true" and vice versa.

There was a time when a majority of Americans prided themselves on being independent thinkers who knew the difference between chicken salad and chicken---well, you know. For a lot of them, that time is over. Their idolatry of Donald Trump has cost them their sense of smell and, thus, the distinction between the two.

Facts are virtually irrelevant to Trump and his minions, as was seen this past weekend when he awakened early and, in an infantile rant, lashed out on Twitter, with absolutely zero corroborating evidence or substantiation, that President Obama had "wire tapped" (we'll have to help him with his spelling since Wharton apparently didn't have an English 101 class) Trump Tower in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Despite the almost universal disdain among thinking people for his out-of-nowhere assertion, his staffers---did Mike Huckabee not teach his daughter anything about the difference between spinning and lying?---and his minions defended him and even tried to devise narrative absurdities to make a case for his impulsive lie.

[Just to be clear, a president does not have the power to order a wiretap on any American citizen.]

The takeaway was clear: For Trump and his base, facts be damned if they don't make the Donald look good or don't fit in with whatever nutty narrative he's pushing; cf., The Birther Movement. As he tells his sycophants, "If the poll is negative, it's 'Fake News.' If the reporting is negative, it's 'Fake News.'"

Were the legitimate media to question Big Brother's announcement that "black is white and white is black," Trump fans would break out the pitchforks and characterize the media's assertion of fact-based reality as "Fake News." Because, as we all know, "black is white", "white is black" and "two plus two equals five" are not false statements but "alternative facts." And the idea that the moon-landing was a contrived event staged in an old warehouse deep in the Arizona wilds is not objectively false but an "alternative fact." The idea that the earth orbits the sun and not vice versa was nothing but Fake News pushed by a deceptive media in the time of Copernicus? That's not objectively false. It's an "alternative fact."

Worse, there is no debating Trump disciples about what is real and what is not because we are not talking about debating facts with critical thinkers. They are visceral and reflexive, not thoughtful and reflective. They are perfect representations of what is called "tribal epistemology," which "evaluates facts, information, and narratives primarily on whether they are advantageous to the tribe in their war against the opposing tribe [in this case, anyone who doesn't agree with Trump]."

As I said, facts be damned.

Ominously, Trump's war to delegitimize the media by demeaning the importance of facts and defining truth on his own terms is, at least with his base, working. He is, with amazing ease, consolidating that base around hostility toward the legitimate media so that he will have a built-in measure of set-in-concrete support for anything/everything he does/says, no matter how crazy, destructive, cruel, false, unconstitutional or unlawful it might be.

But, Trump's motives per delegitimizing the press are much darker than just manipulating the minions.

His attempt to destroy the credibility of the credible press---as well as to cast doubt on the credibility of the intelligence community---was no doubt designed by his principal advisor, noted white nationalist sympathizer, anti-Semite and social/economic isolationist Steve Bannon. And what Bannon desperately wants to do, as Trump's real brain, is make Trump the Ultimate/Final Arbiter of Truth.

By delegitimizing the press, which the Founders believed to be the most effective firewall between the people and autocratic/dictatorial rule by an oppressive government, Trump/Bannon believe that we will be forced to look to such a government---or the person supposedly in charge---to tell us what is true and what is not, what is real and what is not, what is good for us and what is not.

Dana Milbank describes the Trump administration as "the ultimate faith-based initiative---and The Donald is the deity. Things aren't true because they can be proven via the scientific method or any other. They are true because Trump believes them to be true."

Milbank further notes that "among those attempting to bestow the divine power on Trump to declare absolute truths" is none other than the Queen of Right-Wing Lying, Ann Coulter. She did, after all, publish the book "In Trump We Trust" just last year. And, after another inept media performance by Trump, she tweeted, "Trump is already head of state. After that press conference, in my eyes, he's now head of church."

The new joke making the rounds is that you know Trump is lying when he says, as he often says, "Believe me." He asked us to "believe me" seven times in one January speech. The not-so-funny part of the joke is that millions of people have anointed him as "head prelate" and actually take him at his word when he says, "Believe me." Even when what he says is beyond belief.

My guess is that Eric Arthur Blair would have no trouble finding analogies to Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth in the strategic efforts of this bizarre and frightening administration.

Indeed...

Late in January, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, who, incredibly, chairs the House Science Committee and has actually succeeded in weaponizing it for use against "unfettered scientific inquiry" that arrives at conclusions such as "climate change is real," praised the new president on the House floor for "a laundry list of accomplishments," an example of which was, uh, including his children in various decision-making processes. That kind of boot-licking is common in the House, but what he said next is not: "The national media won't print [Trump's many accomplishments in his first five days in office, whatever Mr. Smith thought they were] that, or air it, or post it. Better to get your news directly from the president. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth."

Did I mention that this media-debunking nut is also a member of the House "Freedom of the Press" Committee?

Crazy on top of crazy spun as sane and reasonable.

It's like naming a woman who wants to get rid of public schools---and who thinks guns should be in schools in case of "an attack by grizzlies"---to head up the Department of Education.

It's like naming a vicious little critter with a racist history---and was once denied a seat on a federal bench because of it---as Attorney General.

It's like naming a man, Scott Pruitt, who, as Oklahoma Attorney General, sued the EPA 14 times---and has an ongoing suit against it that has not been settled---to fight regulatory and clean-up efforts to become the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. It says something, doesn't it, that one of Trump's first acts as president was to begin dismantling what was known as the "Clean Water Rule," which prohibited coal mining interests from releasing untreated petrochemical waste material into freshwater streams.

I don't know about you, but I'm looking to buy stock in whatever company sells the most bottled water in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. And, if I owned woodlands in either of those areas, I'd go ahead and sell the timber before the groundwater starts killing the trees.

It's like naming a famed neurosurgeon with zero administrative experience and who thinks that slaves brought to America chained to the bottom decks of slave ships were "immigrants" to head up the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It's like naming an ethically-compromised Georgia congressman whose fondest dream is to return American healthcare to virtually the same "free-market" system that, before the ACA, left millions of people without coverage or healthcare to head up the Department of Health and Human Services.

It's like all of that and more. And having people believe that such ineptness and incompetence is quite fine---just because The Donald said so.

Trump believes that if he can delegitimize or marginalize the mainstream media, he can posit himself as Big Brother and establish himself as The One to whom Americans must look for the "Unvarnished Truth."

Because, no matter how crazy, how delusional, how false it might be, if Trump says it's the right move to make, it's the right move to make---he is, after all, Truth Incarnate and there would be, in Trump/Bannon World, no firewall of an unfettered press to protect us from whatever "alternative facts" he considered to be The Truth.

Real facts---and the free press to provide them for us---be damned.