Pravda.

Choose your own truth.

Pravda was the newspaper of the Communist Republic of the Soviet Union. Pravda was primary to the U.S.S.R.’s political propaganda machine.

“Pravda” means “truth.”

If the Internet were around during the Soviet era, it likely would have been called Pravda Sotsialnaya. That means “Truth Social.”

At its heart, George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four is about the immutable nature of truth and the wholly corruptible nature of truth existing simultaneously. This paradox of perception is virtually impossible and also wholly real. We in the United States are not at risk of ending up here, as you’ve heard many say; we are here now and we have been for some time.

To remain sane and grounded in some semblance of reality, we need to reflect upon self-evident truth as reality and observe dictated truth as reality constructed to corrupt minds, hearts, actions, and souls.

What is our Ministry of Truth?

In Orwell’s novel, the official propaganda arm of the government is called the Ministry of Truth, and it exists to create such cognitive dissonance among the populace that what they believe to be reality is entirely subjective and entirely dictated by all avenues of cognitive understanding.

The Ministry of Truth “…concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and fine arts.”

I wrote a couple of days ago about the persisting myth that The New York Times is a “left” or “left-leaning” news organization. It isn’t, but if you search online for “The New York Times media bias,” all search results will tell you that the Times is solidly left-wing or left leaning. Someone who responded told me that no one has viewed the Times that way for at least a decade, and that person is wrong. I don’t, perhaps you don’t, and perhaps people who chat with online do not. But ask people in your offline life—ask your family, ask your coworkers, ask strangers you meet randomly. Whether you live in Oklahoma or New York City, Miami or Butte Montana, most people will be certain that the Times is left leaning despite abundant evidence that it is not.

Few people would argue today that the Washington Post is legitimate, I would think, and yet most everyday people I know offline here in the Washington, D.C. area still regard it as a trustworthy and reliable news source solely because of its longstanding brand reputation. It doesn’t that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos personally overrode his editorial board’s decision to endorse Kamala Harris in his own interests, and then immediately followed this action with an Orwellian op-ed telling his readers that “I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.” It doesn’t matter that he then fired his longtime editorial board members, bought out most of the Post’s longtime, legitimate political columnists, and replaced them with a stable of new overtly pro-Trump columnists, and it doesn’t matter that longtime Washington Posts journalists, opinion writers, and cartoonists have resigned in protest of Bezos’s corruption of the newspaper they were once proud to work for.

The public broadly still views the Post as legitimate. You may not. But ask around—offline, not among your social media network—and let me know if your family members and coworkers regard the Times and the Post as reliable and where they fall on the political spectrum.

Journalists, including those who have broken away from traditional news networks such as Katie Couric, who built her career at NBC and CBS News, CNN’s Jim Acosta, the Post’s Margaret Sullivan, et al. now present strangely contradictory messages as independent online voices in support of democracy. On one hand, such journalists sound an alarm and raise awareness about criminal governmental corruption, and on the other hand, they continue to cite entirely untrustworthy traditional media sources as their evidence. Then, despite their extensive media experience, they ask the people they are interviewing how this can be happening.

A friend of mine recently sent me a Substack article essay with a note that the argument the writer makes is a lot like what I’ve been writing and discussing with my friend for years. I was surprised to see that the essay was written by Margaret Sullivan, who writes for The Guardian and who previously worked for both The New York Times and the Washington Post. I was surprised that Sullivan has become a critical of the media’s failure because Sullivan worked for the Washington Post during Trump’s first term as U.S. president, and she occasionally participated in live-streaming Q&As on Facebook. I tuned into one, and I asked if she believes that journalists are honest enough about Trump’s lies and his corruption. I was frustrated that journalists softened the impact of Trump’s lies by calling them “mistruths” and “falsehoods,” and always gave him the benefit of the doubt. Sullivan chose to respond to my question, and her response was thoughtful but it boiled down to “journalists should never be activists, and we need to present both sides.” And so it goes. Both sides—reality-based truth and lies that have created an alternative, fictional reality that people now believe in—were reported by traditional news outlets until we got to where we are today: Only one side is reported by most media corporations as credible, and that side is based on lies.

Interestingly, Sullivan published three predictions in her Washington Post column in September of 2019. They were:

First, Trump’s tactic will work — but almost exclusively with the people who are already convinced that the national news media shouldn’t be trusted, namely Republicans…

…Second, there is a significant loser in the trust battle over that long time period: CNN. Trust in the network decreased sharply — from 64 percent to 48 percent who consider it trustworthy. (Despite this, CNN remains, overall, more trustworthy than Fox News among all groups.) …

And so, my third takeaway: Trump’s attacks on news outlets won’t make much difference to the media industry itself or individual journalists.

The trends are already firmly in place…. The choir has already been thoroughly preached to, and is ready to sing.

But the president’s ramped-up rhetoric will do damage nonetheless by further dividing a torn-apart nation.

“It’s going to be a long 14 months,” she wrote over six years ago. Let’s see how that is going.

“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”

In 2023, Variety named CBS News’s 60 Minutes the 20th-greatest television series of all time, calling it “the crown jewel of the CBS News division” and “some of the most consequential TV journalism ever.”

Ad Fontes Media, a website that rates news outlets’ trustworthiness and political bias, states that 60 Minutes has a “left” bias, as it claims The New York Times and the Washington Post do. Ad Fontes is one of several sites that Google returns when a person searches online to find out the media bias of news sources.

Recently, the Post has become an overt public-relations agent for the Trump administration, going so far as to claim “You don’t want lower prices as much as you think you do” and to celebrate Trump’s executive order that makes being homeless and mentally ill arrestable offenses—the basis on which a forced-labor camp for homeless people is now being built in Utah.

After the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk in September, the Washington Post editorial board and CNN, among other media outlets, used the shooting as an opportunity to blame Democrats for political violence, and none of these supposedly “left-wing” media outlets examined the extreme violence of Donald Trump’s political speech, in which he has bragged that he could get away with literal murder, urged people in his audience to commit acts of violence (“I’ll pay your legal bills! I’m not kidding!”) and far too much to mention here, including most recently proposing that his political adversaries be put to death.

That’s just talk. The actual violence of the Trump administration has been staggering, from the deploying of armed military into U.S. cities, violent ICE arrests that are so commonplace today journalists don’t report on them, and political assassinations of Democrats that Trump and his cronies mocked and journalists largely chose to downplay.

When Trump was shot at, The New York Times became his personal in-kind publicist, effectively branding his campaign with one of its photographers images of “triumph” and stating that the violent act awarded Trump “mythical status.” In effect, the Times celebrated this act of political violence by publicly awarding Trump credibility he did nothing to earn and immediately changing the tone of its coverage from critical to reverential. Likewise, after Charlie Kirk was killed, The New York Times’s Ezra Klein now-infamously began his campaign of elevating Charlie Kirk to the level of political martyr, proclaiming that “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” In that essay and subsequent fawning over Kirk, Klein chose to overlook all of Kirk’s hate speech, including telling his following that the killing of gay people “is God’s perfect law” and that mass shootings of children in schools “is worth it,” not to mention his career’s foundation of extraordinary racism.

Like Kirk, Ezra Klein told Ta-Nehisi Coates that certain sacrifices are ‘worth it,’ including sacrificing certain minority populations and women’s rights for a party’s political win—that’s what Klein means by “practicing politics the right way.” Coates replied, simply, “Not at the expense of my neighbor’s humanity.” Klein is a primary face and voice of The New York Times, as is Michael Barbaro, who about a year ago called Ayn Rand “one of the great public intellectuals of all time,” and both of them regularly call themselves “liberal,” which really means libertarian, but which websites that rate news outlets place far to the left on the political scale. Over the past couple of years, The New York Times’s executive editor and publisher have explicitly and implicitly rejected democracy altogether and praised Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the economy.

I asked a couple of days ago in reference to The New York Times: If this is “left of center,” what the hell constitutes centrist politics today?

Well, this question has been answered and it is, to be blunt, a horror.

Bari Weiss, according to The Hill and other supposed journalism corporations, represents centrist politics today.

She has lovingly profiled Erika Kirk:

She has lovingly profiled Amy Coney Barrett:

She has no bias, only Truth. Only Pravda.

The foundation of Bari Weiss’s public persona is “anti-woke.” According to Google’s AI summary, “For Weiss, anti-woke isn't just about being conservative; it's about preserving intellectual freedom, critical thinking, and a balanced perspective against what she perceives as an overly ideological and censorious progressive movement.”

She made a big public to-do about quitting her job at The New York Times on the grounds that the newspaper—which has been condemned by LGBT organizations and progressive people for its consistently anti-transgender and anti-Palestinian biases—is “woke.” She got all the attention she wanted; she founded a “news organization” via Substack, and she called it the Free Press. This demonstrated great strategic intelligence, as “the free press” always has referred to constitutional protections of the First Amendment; but now, when you search online for the term, you will be directed to Bari Weiss’s viewpoint, not to the First Amendment. She co-opted the concept using SEO, and now “the free press,” which always was a foundational principle of the United States Constitution, is whatever Bari Weiss declares it to be.

She then launched an intellectually dishonest podcast and—Did you guess?—she called it “Honestly.” You can find an episode of that podcast at the end of this article. In it, Weiss joins Jake Tapper from CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios in attacking Joe Biden on the grounds of his old age and supposed dementia. If you want to waste some time, I challenge you to find any acknowledgement of Donald Trump’s old age or self-evident dementia from Weiss, Tapper, or Thompson.

Weiss has been handed the reins of CBS News as editor-in-chief. A network news editor-in-chief is charged with setting editorial direction, reinforcing core values, and driving innovation. Weiss was made editor-in-chief of CBS News on October 6 of this year. The CBS News publishing principles web page was last updated on July 24 of this year—it doesn’t list Weiss on the CBS News masthead—and it states that “Politics is a sizable aspect of our daily coverage. We will always seek to hold your elected officials accountable through fair, unbiased and fact-based reporting.”

Yesterday, CBS News abruptly announced that it had killed a highly anticipated report on the CECOT prison where human rights abuses allegedly have taken place. Shortly thereafter, 60 Minutes Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi disclosed that Bari Weiss had unilaterally killed the story, which Bari Weiss has stated is due to a lack of participation from the Trump administration.

No legitimate journalist or journalism outlet requires participation or approval of any governmental authority to publish evidence-based, well-documented, and legally vetted stories, which the CECOT report is.

This does not matter to Weiss. She told The New York Times that “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason—that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices—happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”

One can safely assume that Weiss is reworking the story in consultation with the Trump administration. This is a violation of journalistic ethics, of course, but she is following the example set by Jeff Bezos of overriding journalism in his own interest and then blatantly denying that he ever did that, while only ramping up the ethical violations in proceeding months. This is truth—in the sense of Truth Social, in the sense of Pravda.

It is true, unquestionably, that Bari Weiss is innovative in her role as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Unless you are a broadcast media professional, chances are slim that you could name Weiss’s predecessor at CBS News, or that you could name the editors-in-chief of ABC News, NBC News, CNN, or any other television news network. That’s because editors-in-chief are not generally controversial figures, and they are practically never spotlight seeking—that is, until Weiss came along.

Immediately after being named EIC of CBS News, Weiss put herself in the spotlight quite literally by declaring that she and she alone would interview Erika Kirk, who has innovated her own role of Celebratory-Grieving-Widow of Charlie Kirk. As soon as Kirk was shot—arguably before he was shot—Kirk was lionized as a Republican martyr who, in the most Orwellian way possible, promoted the concept of Christ’s Love Through Hatred of The Other. As he died, journalists such as Ezra Klein and CNN’s Brian Stelter and celebrities like Kristen Chenoweth extolled his virtues. This prompted others to quote Kirk’s racist and sometimes aggressively violent rhetoric, and those people were roundly condemned because this was not the time for truth; it was the time to make a martyr.

Weiss saw the opportunity to make Erika Kirk into a martyr through the news network she had been handed, and to make herself shine, if not as a star in the heavens then at least under a spotlight onstage, awarding herself a primetime slot on her own broadcast network to interview Kirk. She called it a townhall; others called it public relations for the MAGA movement.

Some might be tempted to call it a carefully orchestrated reinvention of history. That history is the history of Josef Goebbels identifying a charismatic young man named Horst Wessel as an up-and-coming party leader. Goebbels tried to sell Hitler on the idea of deploying Wessel much in the way that Steve Bannon deployed Milo Yiannopoulos in 2015-16 to recruit young voters into MAGA ideology, but Hitler passed. Wessel was subsequently assassinated with a bullet that went through a neck artery and he died. Goebbels saw an opportunity to make a martyr of the young man by making a public spectacle of his memorial service and calling his political opponents "degenerate subhumans” at the event. Wessel’s mother was elevated to a martyr, too, mourning publicly in the name of arousing Nazism in the name of patriotism. Some noticed striking similarities between Stephen Miller’s remarks at Charlie Kirk’s memorial extravaganza and Josef Goebbels’s remarks at Horst Wessel’s.

A former writing instructor of mine used to say that there are two kinds of great artists: the innovators and the masters. Josef Goebbels was the master of Nazi propaganda.

Bari Weiss’s town hall with Erika Kirk was innovative, perhaps, in the sense a news network EIC positioning herself as the star dictator of a broadcast TV network being unprecedented, but so far she’s more innovative than masterful. The event has been called “a massive ratings flop,” even as she has re-broadcast it multiple times to et more eyes onto it. She plans to continue the event as a series, with planned future interviews featuring the likes of J.D. Vance, Open AI Founder Sam Altman, and New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat, whose recent work includes the memorable exploration of a question only people like J.D. Vance and Ross Douthat might be asking, “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”

To the point of her bookings, it is worth noting one elephant in the room: Bari Weiss is a woman who has not only been placed into a top position at a major national news network—and arguably has ruined its journalism with a sledgehammer in mere months—but also a queer woman.

J.D. Vance is a proud sexist. Douthat probably would deny that he is sexist but his work speaks for itself. Sam Altman is a gay man, and that might seem to be a complicating factor, but it’s really not.

If Charlie Kirk has a clear predecessor in Horst Wessel, Bari Weiss has at least an echo in Germany, too, but hers is contemporary.

Alice Weidel, like Bari Weiss, is a woman of immense political influence as the head of the German AfD party—notably backed by the Trump administration and especially Elon Musk, . She promotes a German-first and German-supremacist political ideology and her supporters call out a chant in her name, “Alice für Deutschland” (“Alice for Germany”), that just happens to sound exactly like the German Nazi rallying cry “Alles für Deutschland” (“Everything for Germany”). Meanwhile, Alice Weidel herself, like Bari Weiss, is married to a woman. Weidel wants to shut down immigration into Germany and deport immigrants; and meanwhile, she and her non-German, Sri-Lankan wife actually live in Switzerland with their two children. Does any of this make sense? Not logically, but then again Hitler was a German-first German-supremacist who was not born in Germany, and he claimed tall, blond-haired, fair-skinned German people were racially superior and others should be exterminated lest they pollute the gene pool—even as he stood at a modest 5’9” and had greasy brown hair.

It all boils down to storytelling. To narrative. To fiction.

Donald Trump has authored, through a kind of nonsensical stream-of-consciousness rambling that would make James Joyce scratch his head, a fictional story of the United States, and people have devoured and digested and repeated his fictions until they became reality. His story of the United States began with his insane “American carnage” inauguration speech in 2017, which became a reality under his leadership. As everything fell apart, he told the public that everything was getting better, and half the country believed our eyes and the other half believed the lies. This has continued. Trump’s regime has wrested control over reality by mandating that the Smithsonian and federal websites must tell only positive versions of U.S. history as Trump speaks of our nation almost entirely as a wasteland, except when he tells us the things he is ruining are “perfect,” and he literally bulldozes the White House and builds concentration camps.

“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and that’s what the news media has chosen to do. If one can no longer discern the free press from The Free Press, then the difference is arbitrary, isn’t it? If one reads Trump’s lies, reported as “Truths” by trusted journalists, then the difference between a truth and a lie is no difference, isn’t it? What is truth, after all, but a story we tell ourselves? If 2 + 2 can equal 4, then surely 2 + 2 can equal 5. In fact, it does—just look:

“2 + 2 = 5”

And so it does.

It didn’t happen overnight. I’ve discussed our collective amnesia as a nation, our inability to remember what happened just weeks ago much less over the past year or longer, but it has now been a full decade. A decade of unchecked lies and a decade of unaccountability have created a world of lies and no accountability. There’s no mystery in this.

At the beginning of Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith refuses to accept that 2 + 2 = 5, a reality that the totalitarian government under which he lives has prescribed. Most people understand that 2 + 2 = 5. Smith works for the government, erasing records of people who have been disappeared, and he knows better. 2 + 2 = 4. He remembers and he always will.

In the end, 2 + 2 = 5 for everyone, including Winston Smith.

Honestly.