At War with Eastasia

Kamala Harris is Indian. Kamala Harris is black. Kamala Harris wants to open the border. Kamala Harris was never the border czar. Kamala Harris was the best border czar ever, and she’s going to keep us all safe. Vote Kamala. Here are some gushingly favorable faux-headlines about her that nobody wrote, ever.

If you can’t keep up with the endless rewrites to the mainstream version of the 2024 election storyline, join the club. My head is spinning and I don’t even watch the news anymore.

Unsubtle Gaslighting

In what is now old news soon to be forgotten entirely, masking and distancing were necessary precautions, just in case you still happen to Google either. The vaccine they managed to produce in a heartbeat, basically untested, and dispense all over the world with the magic wand of Tinker Bell was always safe and effective. The VAERS statistics showing it wasn’t have been “debunked” as unreliable, even though VAERS is a government database previously considered the gold standard of reliability. So then, nobody who was vaccinated against COVID was coerced into it. Theirs was a personal decision and any negative consequences (not that there were any) are the responsibility of those who elected to participate.

In vaguely-Christian news, Mark Galli didn’t blow the whistle on Christianity Today’s feverish desire for mainstream respectability, an addiction that led them to take on millions in leftist investments to become the foremost mouthpiece for Democrat talking points in the evangelical community. If that seems out of place, just know that Galli’s confessional essay has evaporated along with tens of thousands of other blogs posts, articles and news pieces that broke with the conventional wisdom or revealed the Emperor is wandering around without his underwear.

The gaslighting used to be a lot subtler.

Down the Memory Hole

Today, the gloves are off. Search engines show us the prevailing narrative plus a few purpose-written correctives to “disinformation” being circulated by those “deplorables” who have no place among us and need to go somewhere else. The article by the former head of the WHO knowledgeably dissenting from the so-called medical science that you read with excitement six months ago has been memory-holed, never to be seen again. The archive sites in which online dissidents put their trust have been coopted by government agencies, put out of business or so comprehensively wrecked by bot attacks that they are worse than useless. The articles you saved there and bookmarked for later on all show nothing but dangling links.

Oh yeah, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. It has never been any other way.

Playing with Search Engines

As you can tell, I’ve been playing with search engines this week. The re-writing of history currently going on is unprecedented. The Soviet propagandists of the sixties were nowhere near this efficient. Dissenting articles still pop up occasionally, but their shelf life is maybe a week, and only the Lord knows what has happened to their writers. Some of David Thompson’s links to the more amusing leftist missteps of any given seven-day period are virtual vapor by the time his Friday Ephemera is posted.

Basically, if you want to preserve anything interesting you come across on the internet, better take a screenshot and store it on a device that is not connected to the Web, otherwise you can pretty much guarantee it’ll be history the next time you go to attach it to an email to send to a friend. If it’s on YouTube, download it and do the same. A recent YouTube expose of lefty darling Neil Gaiman’s legal problems was not just demonetized but effectively rendered invisible on YouTube, despite saying nothing that wasn’t readily available elsewhere.

Christians and Censorship

I’m not sure if Christians have an orthodox position on censorship to which we can appeal in the midst of all this rewriting of reality. For me, it depends what’s being censored. Scripture teaches there are some things that ought never to be communicated, and I’m entirely fine with that. No hippie-dippie lecturing about “free speech”, please. At the same time, the lies of liars need godly contradiction. A world in which only the most powerful control what may be said and heard is in the express lane to the abyss.

If you’re noticing the same thing and despairing of ever grasping the truth about anything that is going on right now, I take comfort in the promise that “A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape.” That includes the designers of algorithms that shape public perception with false impressions of reality, and it certainly includes the powerful men and women who commission them. It may happen in this life or the next, but the final chapters of Revelation are unambiguous about where the chronic liars of this world are destined to spend eternity.

In Lieu of Perfect Discernment

In lieu of perfect discernment, which is all but impossible under the current circumstances, I offer the following biblical principles useful in separating light from darkness in your own online and media experience:

• Liars lie. A Christian who gives known liars the benefit of the doubt in the interest of charity will find herself regularly deceived. Once you know you are dealing with a con artist, walk away and never give the source of lies another second of your time or money, even when he bears the name of Christian.
• The spirit of the age always opposes God. If it’s popular, it’s probably deadly in some yet-to-be-determined way. The fact that it may disguise itself as an angel of light is no excuse for being a sucker. Unpopular people are sometimes righteous, sometimes just out of step with the zeitgeist, but universal popularity is invariably a strong indication something is morally off. If saying it will get you loved by everybody, stop saying it. If it makes the flesh happy, it’s almost surely wrong. If an ideology puts you in the majority, it’s false.
• Context, context, context. When the world reproaches you with scripture, go read the whole thing, not just the convenient part they are quoting at you. Satan loves his proof texts.
• The most effective lies contain maximum truth and tell you exactly what you want to hear. So look closely at the word of God on the subject and the facts of the case, not the rhetoric around it.