“Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And I’m not sure about the former.” — Albert Einstein
I am sure you recall the “tremendous” job that Frederick Douglass was praised for by Donald Trump, who was unaware that the man had been dead for any number of decades. He thought Douglass had a cubicle next to the water cooler outside Mike Pompeo’s office, or God knows what.
Tonight, we have another kind of moment like that, this time from Don Junior. He’s raving here about a new office at Homeland Security, staffed by an official dedicated to combatting misinformation. At 1:07 you will hear the words, “Orwell called and wants her to stop plagiarizing her material.” George is now Georgia and somebody is plagiarizing “her” material? And Orwell called how, through the Twilight Zone? You can’t make this stuff up.
Saying, “We are living George Orwell’s 1984,” Junior is ranting tonight about the new position at DHS created to counter Russian disinformation. pic.twitter.com/ReqIthbL1t
— Ron Filipkowski ?? (@RonFilipkowski) April 29, 2022
Okay, class, anybody who thinks Junior HAS read “1984” raise your hands…. I thought so. Twitter agrees with you, FYI.
Now, if you doubt for a nano second, after all you have seen and heard that this isn’t exactly how Trump world operates, where Trump is allowed to just make up reality out of whole cloth, the first blog I ever posted that went viral was called “There Are No Such Things As Facts” says Trump surrogate on NPR.
Here’s the full text. This was written December 1, 2016 and at that time the connection between Trump world and George Orwell was an original thought. It didn’t stay that way for long. By February, 2017, “1984” had hit the number one spot on Amazon’s best seller list.
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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.”
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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There you have it. And now, comically, Don Junior is an expert on Orwell, and he’s the one seeing a fascist takeover by Democrats. Righto.
I can’t wait for his next public service announcement where Junior discourses on Aldous Huxley. This could become a weekly feature, The Illiterate Numb Nut Hour.
It’s amazing that someone dumber than his father (who suggested ingesting or injecting bleach, or shoving a UV light down the throat or up the ass would cure Covid) has people that pay attention to these little videos. But they do. Worse, MAGAts have proven over and over they will do whatever Trump says no matter how stupid. You know what? I’m convinced that if Trump were to try and joke around, or perhaps was feeling particularly mean and wanted to see just how stupidly and blindly devoted his followers were and he suggested to guys if they were horny but didn’t have a wife or girlfriend that sticking their junk in an old-fashioned meat grinder (that kind that clamps to a table or counter top) and cranking the handle was as good as sex with a woman some of them would try it! One doesn’t have to die to get a Darwin Award – only remove themselves from being able to contaminate the gene pool and MAGAts are plenty stupid, excuse me STOOPID to realize advice from Trump is dangerous.
When the MAGAs started showing up at ERs because they drank fish tank cleaner, that sealed it in my mind that they would at some point actually drink kool-aide if he told them to.
That’s already been proven many times over. The human experience needs control. They need a leader. My whole life though has been living outside that box. Other people do it as well. Yourself for example. The fact that you get up everyday to publish this newsletter puts you in the “other” column. But magas would happily lay down their very lives for that clown. It’s really sad to see!
You may be right. It may be as simple as that. I have known people who can only function in groups. They’re not comfortable being alone, they’ve got to be part of a pack.
Good food for thought. Thank you for making the comment. (And I guess your technical issues have been solved if you could physically post it.) :))
I think George had it right in Animal Farm…the swine took over.
Before anyone rushes to buy a copy of ‘1984’, read this warning notice (maybe that’s the version Donnie Baby read)
https://www.businessinsider.com/1984-sold-amazon-text-replaced-gibberish-2019-8
For some odd reason Orwell’s books are copyright in the USofA and nowhere else, so for the rest of the world, pay a visit to Gutenberg and read 1984 and Animal Farm free of charge
That is scary. To write a classic and then have later generations trash it. I’m almost ready to cry thinking about it.
The RWQNJs and MAGAts just don’t get it…Orwell’s 1984 was meant to be a warning, not a plan or a blueprint!
Both the book and the movie scared the hell out of me as a kid. If you had told me I’d be an old woman and it would be coming true, that might have blown all my mental circuits.
I probably got scared a lot earlier than you Ursula. I remember watching the BBC broadcast back in 1954 (with a very young Peter Cushing in one of his first major roles). It was transmitted live (videotape hadn’t been invented) but there’s a cleaned up version on Youtube:
This is wonderful. Thank you for sharing this. I LOVED the old Playhouse 90, and Alcoa Theater, Kraft Theater and I think there were others. They were legitimate attempts at culture beyond sitcoms. I guess Masterpiece Theater and all that became the replacement to the original playhouse shows. I hadn’t thought of them in years, but this brings it all back.
I hater be the one to tell you. But video tape has been around since probably 1900. The way it was handled has changed quite a bit. The BBC just liked to do live shows. A classic example is the lady that played Emma Peel on that English crime show that the name escapes me. She did live shows completely nude. Most of their soaps were performed live. I believe there’s others,also.
You’re thinking of Diana Rigg in The Avengers. She did plays in the nude? Seriously? Can you find a reference to this? I was a big fan of hers starting back in the 60’s and I never heard this about her.
I don’t know where you get your information, but magnetic tape itself (for audio recording) wasn’t invented until 1928 by AEG and BSF. It was top secret and wasn’t known outside Germany until after 1945.
Video tape recording didn’t come along until 1963 when Ampex developed the helical scan system using 2 inch tape.
This info comes courtesy of a retired TV service manager who started way beck before video recording was even thought of.
Diana Rigg’s only known nude scene was in ‘Abelard and Heloise’.
Oh and for further information, the first RADIO broadcasting station didn’t operate until 1919 (in Rotterdam) and the first (mechanical) TV broadcasts were in 1928 (in Schenectady). The first electronic TV broadcasts were in 1936 (BBC).
There were earlier experiments, granted, but they were either by wire or demonstrations (which never took off)
So, there is absolutely NO chance that any video recording would take place before that
The piece on this site with the brain deprived woman claiming Biden is being played by Jim Carrey perfectly exemplifies this post and the terrible reality that a large portion of our citizens are flat out undereducated idiots who can be led to believe anything as long as it’s completely absurd.
These people are scary. I know a gal in Texas who told me her father talked to his pals at work about going to D.C. on January 6 and how people in Texas were “going to take their orders from Trump” and the “military was with Trump.” We are in some deep shit in this country if we’re even having conversations like this.