Welcome to the Era of the Mega-Lie —(The Descent Into Meaningless Words)
The tsunami of new words has not so far relieved us of the encroaching corruptions of political vocabulary skewered by Orwell seventy years ago. “Emptying words of meaning is an essential step on the road to autocratic rule.” It sounds like an ungood Newspeak principle, but it is fresh from Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist, commenting in 2017 on the weird events of the Trump presidency. Having scored a surprise Electoral College victory, but not the “landslide” he claimed, the new president obsessed about the size of his inauguration crowds and the conspiracy whereby Hillary Clinton sneaked nearly three million noncitizens into the nation’s voting booths. No doubt the infiltrators of his imagination did all the dirty work in the dead of night, carrying their clichés with them. The president’s acolytes threatened to avenge the media for failing to find the mythical armies of fraudsters, and then promulgated even more mendacities about the media’s determination to suppress news of acts of terrorism. In the president’s mind, that made them “among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”