Overloading the Memory Hole

George Orwell's classic totalitarian dystopia 1984 created many of the concepts we use to this day to think about and describe evil empires.  The brutal police state, the constant surveillance, the unending official lies - all these characteristics of dictatorships were described in memorably graphic detail.

Perhaps one of the must unique vignettes Orwell described is the "memory hole."  This was just a simple garbage chute in the desk of Winston Smith, the story's protagonist.  But, in his employment for the Ministry of Truth, Smith's job was to weed through old newspapers, identifying and cutting out any past articles that contradicted the current party line, and sending the paper evidence down the "memory hole" to the oblivion of the incinerator.

Thus, when Smith's nation's decades-long war with Eurasia suddenly became, instead, a war with Eastasia, every past article discussing the previous enemy had to be excised and replaced with a rewritten discourse referencing the new one.  "We've always been at war with Eastasia!"

Recent events have become a pretty violent stress-test of the memory hole down which the MSM tries to throw any news which might reflect unfavorably on themselves or on elected Democrats.  We've seen many stunning "facts" presented by supposedly objective journalists which have come unstuck a few days, weeks, or months later - even minutes, in some cases - without the slightest mention of the falsity of their earlier reports.

Like any human, journalists prefer not to draw attention to their own mistakes.  More than that, though, our media also try not to bring up any contradictions between what Democrats said a short time ago and what they're saying now.

Part of the job of a free media is to shine light into dark corners and to uncover things the powerful would prefer to stay under wraps.  Instead, our media sees their job as spreading darkness over anything unseemly any Democrat might have ever said or done.

The problem is, our media is not omniscient: now more than ever, they've loudly proclaimed the orations of Democrats that turned out to be spectacularly wrong.  So, all of a sudden, yesterday's reporting vanishes: it now exists only in the memories of those who watched it.

Do people simply listen and believe whatever they hear today, even if it's the opposite of what they heard and believed yesterday?

If Americans have become that forgetful, there's little hope that we'll be able to draw back from the "socialist paradise" Democrats are advocating.  We're looking forward to finding out whether all the awkward, Democrat-hostile facts the media are trying to bury can in fact be shoved down the memory hole, or whether Mr. Trump's people will be able to resurrect them in time for the upcoming election.

With any luck, the desperate efforts of the media to shove so much information and reportage down the memory hole will exceed its capacity and it will burst, blasting a geyser of suppressed truth far and wide across the fruited plain.

How Deep is the Hole?

Forests have been felled castigating Mr. Trump's response to the Wuhan flu as too little, too late, too incompetent, and too negligent.  Despite the presence of both transcripts and worldwide-broadcast video, we have yet to see anyone in the media who's seen fit to recollect that Mr. Trump mentioned the Wuhan virus in his State of the Union speech on February 4.

Yes, that's right - the very selfsame speech which Ms. Pelosi ripped to shreds, saying there was "absolutely no reality in his speech."  We disagreed with her at the time, obviously, and we never expected the coronavirus to represent such a cold hard reality - but although Nancy Pelosi could not possibly have been more spectacularly wrong, the news will never point this out as long as they think they can get away with blaming the President instead.

Nor does anybody journalism care to remind America that the first information about the virus came to the White House during the period of distraction brought about by the Democrat's bogus impeachment.  Those hearings ran Dec 18, 2019 through Feb 5, 2020 - one day past the SOTU when Mr. Trump mentioned the virus to the public, to a chorus of razzberries from the massed media.

When Mr. Trump banned airline flights between the US and China and then Europe, every senior Democrat, including Joe "Befuddled" Biden, their presumptive Presidential candidate, trashed him for being racist, xenophobic, and having orange hair on top of all his other sins.

To this very day, nobody in the MSM seems to want to admit that Mr. Trump was right about shutting down air travel, even though it's clear that most of the West Coast cases came from China and that New York, which has had most of the American covid fatalities, was infected by people coming from Europe.

How many articles have we seen about Sen. Feinstein saying it was OK to visit Chinatown in Scat Fransisco, Democrats holding Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or Mayor DeBlasio saying that everything was fine and New York life should go on just as before?

The stated goal of the lockdown was to "flatten the curve" to avoid overfilling our hospitals.  Why doesn't the mainstream media comment on the fact that banning "elective" surgery has meant that hospitals are going broke and that people are dying of routine matters that could be cured if the hospitals were operating?  Or that the Virginia health commissioner is talking about keeping schools in that state shut down for 2 years?

When Sen. Feinstein revealed Ms. Blasey-Ford's letter accusing Justice Kavanaugh of sexual assault, every senior Democrat decreed that we must "believe all women" regardless of any inconsistencies in her story and the utter lack of anyone to whom she'd told the story earlier.  Anyone who was so off-message as to point out inconsistencies in her story was hounded for being in favor of rape.

When Tara Reade made much more serious and much better attested accusations against Joe Biden, Democrats and the MSM ignored the story as long as they could, and have since pivoted to strenuous efforts to airbrush it away.

When Justice Kavanaugh denied the allegations against him, Democrats stated that his denial was proof of his guilt.  When Mr. Biden's campaign issued a boilerplate denial, Democrats who had poured vitriol on the Justice said they were satisfied with Mr. Biden's statements.  Townhall also tells us:

New Hampshire State Rep. Richard Komi (D) took to Twitter to explain why he doesn't believe Tara Reade's sexual assault allegation made against former Vice President Joe Biden. According to Komi, "the position of the female vagina" makes it highly unlikely the act took place "unless their [sic] is some cooperation" from Reade.

Having savaged Mr. Trump for overreacting in shutting down air travel between the US and various virus hotspots, the media abruptly switched to criticizing him for not doing enough.  The Atlantic pointed out that  "On January 26, Dr. Fauci himself said the virus posed a very, very low risk to the United States and was a concern for public-health officials, but not the public."  Given what was being said publicly by government experts, would it have been politically possible for Mr. Trump to do any more than he did?

Sen. Ted "Chappaquiddick" Kennedy's sordid sexual escapades were well known for decades, but nobody said anything negative about the "liberal lion" who was said to be the "conscience of the Senate."  One of the late Sen. Kennedy's colleagues, Sen. Chris Dodd, joined him in an incident of sexual harassment known to Washington insiders as the "waitress sandwich" - and today, in the midst of MeToo and accusations against Joe Biden, Sen. Dodd is on Sleepy Joe's vice presidential search committee, searching for a woman candidate with a strong stomach and no principles whatsoever.

Mr. Trump was vilified for having our military target the Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani who had been responsible for thousands of American deaths and casualties.  He was accused of stirring up a war with Iran, as if we haven't been technically at war with them since they invaded our Tehran embassy in 1979.  The Iranians have been somewhat less aggressive since then - but that fact favors Mr. Trump's position, so it doesn't get much coverage.

When Mr.Trump spoke about a little-known ultraviolet catheter technology which has been researched since 2016, which shines UV light inside the lungs (if this video hasn't been taken down) he was ridiculed.  When he spoke of other cutting-edge means of disinfecting virus patients such as controlled ethanol vapor inhalation, the MSM falsely reported that Mr. Trump had recommended that people either drink or inject bleach when he'd done nothing of the sort.

Nancy Pelosi lied even more spectacularly, saying that the President said people should kill the virus by injecting Lysol - sure enough, some idiots attempted to do so and Trump was wrongly blamed.  Twitter closed the account of the researchers who'd posted a video showing how their experimental UV technology worked and explained that they were seeking FDA approval for further testing.

How could politicians and journalists get away with such transparent and outrageous lies about someone as prominent and well-documented as the president?  CSPAN has been posting inaccurate transcripts of Mr. Trump's virus briefings.  Lazy journalists who don't bother to listen to the entire video often pick up these misquotes and spread them - and, being fellow journalists, their peers don't bother to correct them with the truth since that would make Trump look good and journalists bad.

Mr. Biden was quoted as saying that China was our friend and that we had no reason to quarrel with the Chinese government or fear them.  Nobody has said much about Mr. Biden's position as China's lies about the virus have come out and they have embargoed shipments of medical products to the US, even those which are made in American-owned factories.  We believe that Chinese facilitating the spread of the virus throughout the world amounts to an act of war, but you'd never hear anything like that from the MSM.

Mr. Trump was ridiculed when he said he had a feeling that the Wuhan flu had a fatality rate comparable to our standard flu.  Now, there's silence as the New York Post reports updated fatality rates which pretty much match Mr. Trump's prediction:

Multiple recent studies from Iceland, Germany, USC, Stanford and New York City all suggest that the fatality rate if infected is likely far lower than early estimates, perhaps under 0.1 to 0.4 percent, i.e., 10 to 40 times lower than estimates that motivated extreme isolation.  [emphasis added]

We were amazed that after telling us for years that bombshell revelations of Mr. Trump's collusion with Russia would be revealed any day now, the media pivoted seamlessly to other topics when the Mueller report showed no evidence of collusion at all.

Why is it OK for Democrats and liberal journalists to hope that the economy will crash because that will lessen Mr. Trump's chances of re-election?  Look here, here, here, here, here, and here, among countless examples.  Have they no idea how many people will be harmed and how many will die during a period of economic stagnation?  Or do they simply not care?

We could go on and on - Mr. Trump was savaged when he refused to send Mr. Cuomo as many ventilators as Mr. Cuomo said he wanted, but Mr. Trump turned out to be right.  New York had surplus ventilators, but that doesn't get nearly as much press.

Treatment of Minorities

Our media have provided Democrats cover for how they claim to be helping minorities while holding them in contempt.  Mainstream outlets said little about the implications of Rep. Ilhan Omar describing the 9-11 attack on our Twin Towers as "some people did something."

On the bright side, what Ms. Pelosi said about Omar not knowing what she was saying about Jews showed what liberals really think of minorities and people of color.  When "Dr." Martin Luther King was found to have plagiarized most of his thesis, Boston University decided not to pull his degree because it would "serve no purpose." They later graduated AOC with an honors degree in International Relations and Economics - we know how their boat floats.

Liberals have spent decades proclaiming victimhood for minorities, saying they are inherently so inferior and so ignorant that they can't succeed without liberal help and hurl accusations of racism and other sins at anyone who questions their desire to keep minorities on the government dole.  That's how they get votes.

"Soft Bigotry" explains what liberals are really all about.  They sincerely believe that their intersectional groups are so incapable that pretty much anything they do or say has to be accepted because, as Ms. Pelosi says, they just don't know what they're saying.

Liberals adore fake hate crimes - the Wall Street Journal cited a book that suggests that only 1 in 3 of such incidents is genuine and pointed out "the initial publicity for supposed hate crimes tends all but to disappear if the allegations are exposed as fake."  For example, the MSM spread Jussie Smollett's account of being assaulted by Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats in Chicago in spite of mounting inconsistencies in the police investigation, and soft-pedaled accounts of his well-attested lies.

It turned out that he had paid some buddies by check to fake the entire incident as a means of self-promotion and virtue signaling, wasting millions of dollars of police time and heightening interracial animosity across the entire country.  As the Journal put it,

And the media’s relative lack of interest in exposing hoaxes that don’t involve famous figures is a big part of the problem [of fake hate crimes].

We'd put it differently. The liberal media likes spreading fake news: fake hate crimes "raise awareness," and apparently that's all they expect of such (in their exalted opinion) inferior people.

Remember in November?

Do our media moguls think we have no memory at all?  Are the facts whatever the major papers say they are, regardless of what was said the day before?  Or will Americans remember in November to vote against the tyrants and liars and their enablers?