George Orwell, no doubt, would have approved of President Obama’s farewell speech. Underneath the hopeful rhetoric of “Yes We (Still) Can” and list of the accomplishments over the past eight years lay a bracing, overarching message: when lies can become truth, democracy is in peril.

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Orwell penned his dystopian political novel, 1984, from the same fear. “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” he wrote. “Lies will pass into history.” In 1984, the Ministry of Truth spews propaganda and the language of Newspeak obfuscates lies. On Tuesday night in Chicago, Obama reinforced that this could happen now unless we can agree that there is accepted truth and that “reason and science matter.”

“Without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point,” President Obama warned, democracy can’t function.

With only 10 days left in office, the president focused on the dangers of the new information age that has taken hold during his tenure. First he cited the “splintering” of the news media so that there is no longer a trusted voice of authority or arbiter of the facts. Then he talked about the so-called filter bubble, the sorting of facts according to social media feeds where “increasingly we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.”

This was straight talk, perhaps the last we will get from an American president in a very long while.

Soon we will have Donald Trump’s version of a Ministry of Truth operating out of the White House. His own tweets are already written in Orwellian Newspeak.

Messaging and communicating are really the only areas of governing that Trump has mastered, experience he mostly gained as the celebrity host of The Apprentice. In fact, his presidential campaign was itself little more than a messaging machine. The candidate’s persona was just a calibrated version of his role on the show, recreated in rightwing coloring.

His most senior aides have almost no policy or governing credentials. Rather, they all have the skills to run an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. There is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a newspaper owner who used his power to tilt the coverage of his publication favorable to Trump over objections from his reporters. Steve Bannon, the head of Breitbart “News,” has created what is now a global machine of rightwing propaganda. Kellyanne Conway madly richochets from talk show to talk show pronouncing and trying to explain Trump’s positions only to see the man himself reverse what she says. Reince Priebus, a staple guest of the Sunday news shows, is the practiced mouthpiece of the Republican party.

Trump himself learned the dark arts of bending the truth from the bare-knuckled New York lawyer, Roy Cohn. Cohn, who died in 1986, had disgraced himself as an attack dog for Senator Joe McCarthy during the Red-hunting of the 1950s. He started mentoring Trump in 1971, when he defended the Trump real estate company in a lawsuit, which ultimately settled, over its allegedly racist practices. Cohn believed all press was good press and leaked stories about himself to friendly columnists. He used his brass knuckles to plant negative stories about his enemies. Most crucially, he tried, unsuccessfully, to rewrite history. In 1968, Esquire Magazine put a story he wrote on its cover. It was entitled: Believe Me, This is the Truth About the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Honest.

Back then, before the internet could be used as an echo-chamber for Cohn’s false history, his defense of McCarthyism was ridiculed. People remembered the lives that McCarthy and Cohn ruined with false accusations of communism. They knew the facts.

We have watched Trump already try to rewrite the history of the 2016 election. In his version of political reality, he won a mandate so big that he “embarrassed” the Democrats. Millions voted illegally. Charges of Russian meddling are a witch hunt. These lies circulate unchallenged inside the filter bubbles of his supporters.

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It was surreal on Tuesday night when Obama’s elegant farewell addressed was overshadowed by the news of a scurrilous dossier about Trump’s activities in Russia. The story, though no news organization had independently substantiated the material, spread like wildfire. Whether it’s all so-called fake news or real news we still don’t know.

As we face the reality of Donald Trump’s inauguration, we should all remember a line from Obama’s farewell address that did not come from Orwell but from the president’s mother: “Reality has a way of catching up with you.”



