George Orwell’s classic dystopia of 1984 describes a future (as of 1949, the year of its publication) in which a totalitarian state attempts to control both the present and future by rewriting the past.

The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth, “rectifying” past news accounts:

The Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984.

Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from 30 grams to 20 at the end of the week.

All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.

DISTURBING? YES.

Orwell saw it coming – just more than 30 years later than he predicted for our country. But it was already happening in communist countries such as the Soviet Union, China and North Korea.

The political class’s openly stated desire for a Ministry of Truth to suppress “misinformation” on social media notwithstanding, there’s little evidence it needs a brute government agency to let it have its way with the true facts.

The media does it for them.

In 2021, mainstream media spend most of their ink and bandwidth uncritically regurgitating – and affirming their faith in – the political establishment’s preferred narrative of the moment.

The collapse and stranding of Americans in Afghanistan is a perfect example.

HOW MANY liberal cable news talking heads have discussed, like chickens pecking corn, how of course the US had to invade Afghanistan after the 2001 attacks on us because the Taliban wouldn’t turn over Osama bin Laden? Quite a few.

How many of those same talking heads even mention that the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden upon presentation of evidence that he was behind the 9/11 attacks? Or that then-President George W. Bush declined and chose to invade?

It’s not just Afghanistan or foreign policy.

From the delta variant panic-pandering of “public health authorities” and mainstream media, one wouldn’t know that covid-19 deaths in the US are at a quarter of their pandemic high. Or, given the constant emphasis on “the chillllllldren,” that covid-19 has killed fewer than 400 Americans (out of a total of nearly 625,000) in the under-18 age bracket since the pandemic began.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and other “public health authorities,” with the aid of a compliant mass media, have given themselves whiplash over the last 18 months from constantly reversing themselves on policy and science, entreating us all to trust them and hide under our beds.

No Ministry of Truth had to “rectify” the public record to put these whoppers over on us. The information is freely available and easily accessible.

But the mainstream media either don’t want us to know it,or can’t be bothered to investigate themselves. And for the most part the same is true of the rest of us.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center