Chris Hayes had the Atlantic's Adam Serwer and the New York Times' Michelle Goldberg on last night to talk about Bob Barr's attack on reality.
"There is a kind of crazy making quality to watching someone in Barr's position take up the kind of Trump TV, Donald Trump 'no puppet, you're the puppet' line of like, up is down, the reverse of what is true is true," Hayes said.
"Right. And he's every bit as much of a liar and a propagandist as Donald Trump, he just does it in this kind of soporific, bureaucratic voice instead of Donald Trump's ranting showman voice," Goldberg said. "But it doesn't change the utter insanity of what he's saying.
"The other thing like Donald Trump is, in that in that clip you just played, he was actually describing something very much akin to what Donald Trump has tried to do in Ukraine. Right? And he's done this before. It's always kind of 'accuse your enemies of whatever you're doing' so that people out there say, 'Oh, both sides are saying the same thing, who can tell?'
"And as to the crazy-making point: I mean, so much of our dystopian fiction is not really about gulags, it's not really about torture, it's about the deranging denial of truth, right? It's not just Orwell, right? It's also Farenheit 451 and all the sort of, you know, Russian literature, communism, it's all about kind of what happens to a person's psyche under the bombardment of lies and it's this kind of psychic tax that's being exacted on the American people who have to wade through the myths, truths and propaganda of their purported leaders to figure out what's going on."
Psychic tax. We're all paying it, every single hour of every single day. At what point do Americans get off their devices and take to the streets?
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