Messalina, the third wife of Roman Emperor Claudius, was put to death after publicly marrying a Roman Senator while Claudius was away performing a sacrifice in the neighboring city of Ostia.
Immediately afterwards, the Senate agreed that, in order to ensure the absolute oblivio (obliteration) of her memory, they were to erase any trace of her existence.
The Senate ordered that her name be chiseled out of all official inscriptions. Coins minted in the Greek provinces that bore her name and image were defaced. And many of her portraits were chiseled away until her likeness became unrecognizable.
This practice was later named damnatio memoriae, a more modern Latin term that means “condemnation of memory”… or, memory holing.
The liberal/progressive mind has extensive experience with this practice as it is steeped in hypocrisy and double standard. To them, history began yesterday. Truth is the fleeting outrage of the moment. Nothing else matters.
The liberal/progressive advocates for an end to all things offensive, except for those things offensive to those who are Christian, Libertarian, conservative, and above all, Trumpian.
They call for “unity” in 2020, despite the fact that they explicitly called for the opposite in 2016 when someone offensive to them took over the Oval Office. But these facts must be memory-holed. All traces of their calls for violence and disunity must be scrubbed by Big Media, Big Tech, and Big Money Politics.
In support of this, The New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose called for President Biden to appoint a “reality czar” to combat disinformation in an opinion article headlined “How the Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis.”
Of course, there is no “reality crisis,” unless you’re the NYT and you can’t stomach any other media outlet or publication contradicting the official elite party line.
Roose wrote: “Several experts I spoke with recommended that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency taskforce to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.'” Roose admitted that the plan sounds “dystopian” but argued that readers should “hear them out.”
Sounds Dystopian? It is drawn directly from dystopia.
In the book 1984, the Ministry of Truth — Minitru — was responsible for rewriting articles that contradicted current party dogma. Articles that exposed the truth were flushed down the memory hole.
Biden’s Minitru will make sure no news gets out that contradicts the regime’s accepted dogma. The rest of the lamestream media’s silence on the concept speaks loudly.
Such an American Minitru would simply be the fulfillment of what then-FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, the Republican Establishment Party appointee to the commission, proposed in an op-ed printed in The Wall Street Journal in 2014.
He wanted the FCC to grill reporters, editors and station owners over what stories they run or ignore. It was sort of a reprisal of the grossly misnamed “Fairness Doctrine” that thankfully died in the late 1980s. The program is called the “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs.” In newspeak, it’s called CIN. Pai wrote:…The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about “the process by which stories are selected” and how often stations cover “critical …
… with critical information for your customers that was rejected by management?” Follow-up questions ask for specifics about how editorial discretion is exercised, as well as the reasoning behind the decisions.
Having a “Minitru” observer in each newsroom, broadcasting studio, and watching each desktop publisher will stifle any hope of ever seeing a news article or hearing a story that has a shred of truth in it, or that is critical of the elites and their practices. While the major media organizations are already largely controlled by them — after all, six corporations control 90 percent of what Americans see and hear — nuggets of truth do occasionally slip out.
But the elites obviously feel they may be losing control of the message. This might be because they see more people than ever before turning to talk radio and the Internet for news and information and turning away from the networks, cable news and newspapers.
The New Minitru observer can have an immediate and deleterious effect on talk radio because the FCC controls who owns the licenses. A noncompliant radio station can easily be booted.
The fix will be in from the beginning, and anything that doesn’t conform will be memory-holed. It’s simply more evidence (soon to be memory-holed as well, no doubt) that there are rules for the “Big People,” there are different rules for the “Little People,” and no rules at all apply to those who control what you see and hear.
That means there is no rule of law in America.
Bob Livingston
