Listening to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt assert “truths” so obviously discordant with people’s lives one is reminded of the repeated pronouncements from the Ministry of Plenty in Orwell’s “1984.” The novel’s doomed hero, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department that produces these fraudulent statistics – figures that are so far divorced from reality that they “had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.”
