Down the memory hole we merrily go

Vital information is being erased and disappeared, censored and swathed in secrecy

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984

We are already deeply steeped in that, in 2025 Brave New America.

The MAGA cult, religiously — and Republicans generally—see and hear only what they are instructed to through the appropriate propaganda channels like FOX, Newsmax and ONN, rightwing “influencers” like Joe Rogan and Alex Jones, Twitter, Facebook and other social media who have weaponized their algorithms to magnify far right voices. And increasingly, through so-called ‘mainstream media’, many of whom have abdicated their responsibility to report objective realty, and sunk to parroting the lies of the rich and powerful, to be the handmaidens and house pets of the plutocrats.

And now the rest of us, stubbornly refusing to be hoodwinked by our oligarch overlords, are simply going to be denied access to “evidence” — to vast swaths of information of great importance to our health, well-being and sanity.

Before the corpse of democracy was even cold, Preznint Felonius Fascist threw wide the portals of the Ministry of Truth and started stuffing inconvenient truths down the Memory Hole.

President Donald Trump has ordered a “blackout” for federal health agencies, banning them from publishing external communication.

Agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute for Health and the Department of Health and Human Services will not be allowed to publish scientific reports, issue health advisories or update their websites.

The blackout, first reported by the Washington Post, comes at a time when experts are raising the alarm about public health concerns.

Among the suppressed information is a new report on Avian Influenza, which has already claimed at least one human victim in the US that has been acknowledged —and new forms and variations are appearing rapidly. If irony were not dead, I would point out that the deluded cultists who said they voted for Felonious because he would lower the price of eggs, are going to discover that not only is the price skyrocketing but soon there won’t be any eggs at all, and his get-rid-of government policies will be the reason. But they don’t have the neural circuitry to put two and two together, so they will remain blissfully stupid.

As egg prices continue to soar across the country, there are new concerns about bird flu as a new strain was discovered at a duck farm.

The different, rarer sub-type of the common avian influenza H5N1 virus has been found on a farm in Merced County, California, according to the World Organization for Animal Health.

Experts including the World Health Organization, are calling for better surveillance on farms. Tens of millions of farm birds have been killed since the bird flu outbreak began.

But the Trump Administration has ordered the CDC and other federal health organizations to pause most external communications, limiting them to communications only deemed "related to emergencies or critical to preserving health."

Infectious disease experts are comparing that directive to disabling a smoke alarm.

The CDC's weekly report, which they have put out for more than 60 years, was not published in Trump's first week in office, resulting in a new study on the bird flu not being reported by the CDC last week.

As I write this, the first hearing for the RFK Jr nomination for Health and Human Services Secretary is in progress. Rick Wilson, from The Secretary of Plague: RFK, Jr. Must Be Rejected, writes:

Over and over, Democratic Senators have hit him with verbatim quotes of his outrageous, unscientific, conspiratorial, and racist theories¹ about vaccines, and he’s denied saying them. Over and over, they’ve responded with transcripts proving that he did.

This is not just gaslighting—it’s gaslighting at scale, with the intensity of a man whose entire existence depends on a lie that has cost lives already, and will cost us more if he’s elevated to the Cabinet.

When anti-vaccine conspiracy profiteer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he’s “pro-safety” or “pro-health,” what he really means is he’s pro-polio, pro-measles, pro-typhus. He stated that we should “give infectious diseases a break.” Hard pass, Bobby. His testimony is so profoundly disingenuous that even Republicans on the committee must be feeling like they’ve finally found a bridge too far.

It didn’t help that Kennedy affirmed he’d review mifepristone — it was approved and has been in wide use for 25 years — at Trump’s behest as part of their war on women’s rights.

He’d be leading protests against the vaccine if smallpox were still ravaging humanity. He’d recommend supplements against the bubonic plague. He’s lying at scale, fueled by a mix of malice, arrogance, and an unshakable belief that the rubes will never catch on. His misinformation campaign isn’t about science or freedom—it’s about lining his pockets.

Caroline Kennedy says he is “addicted to money and power,” and talks about exactly how he preys on parents of sick kids while vaccinating his own:

“Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children — vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs. Even before he fills this job, his constant denigration of our health care system and the conspiratorial half-truths he has told about vaccines, including in connection with Samoa's deadly 2019 measles outbreak, have cost lives.”

Also, by the way, if you haven’t read it yet, that Samoa thing was so much more fucked up than we even knew.

At least it looks like Kennedy, who would undoubtedly kill thousands or millions of Americans, is probably not quite as deadly overall to the nation’s ultimate survival as Hegseth, Patel or Gabbard, although admittedly that bar is too low to measure—may not get the nod. But not because he is an unstable, ignorant, soulless grifter, but because he once expressed the heretical opinion that women have a right to opinions about their own bodies. The Holy Mikes [Pence and Johnson] take umbrage at that.

But you can rest assured that they have an unlimited number of barrels to scrape the bottom of and come up with someone just as dangerously incompetent, but more sadistically Puritanical.

In his ongoing brutal assault on America’s most vulnerable, Felonious lit another match to the Constitution, by attempting to hijack the ‘power of the purse’ from Congress and to force a shutdown of as much government activity as possible.

President Donald Trump threw the nation into chaos once again on Monday night with his order declaring a “pause” of indefinite length on $3 trillion in federal grants and loans. Among the government programs facing an immediate cutoff: Meals on Wheels, Head Start, school lunches, child-care help, student loans, disaster relief, crime-fighting assistance and Medicaid, which provides health care to 82 million Americans.

But the good news is that the first effort at fighting back against the fascist fucks has succeeded because of their own hubris and clubfooted blundering. In what may hopefully be seen as the first sproutings of spine in Democrats—and perhaps even a few Republicans who, already rendered eunuchs, want to avoid being completely ground into dust under the dictator’s jackboots — enough resistance was applied to force them to rescind the order.

The Trump administration’s biggest swing at radically reshaping federal spending lasted just under 45 hours.

A sweeping freeze on trillions in federal spending for grants and loans, issued Monday night by the White House budget office to federal agencies without fanfare, sparked outrage and confusion – even among fellow Republicans. The impact touched all corners of the country, with state Medicaid funding portals briefly shuttered and programs like Meals on Wheels and Head Start scrambling to figure out if they were about to lose their funding.

The White House insisted that the confusion was a media-led creation. But on Wednesday the Office of Management and Budget issued a terse two-sentence memo rescinding the directive it had issued just two days prior, and just over 20 hours after a federal judge ordered a halt to the freeze.

The withdrawal of the federal freeze was a stunning about-face for President Donald Trump’s White House, which has so far pushed the envelope to reshape the federal government, sowing chaos and confusion in firing career civil servants, pausing foreign aid programs and offering federal workers a buyout.

While Medicare and Social Security were allegedly exempt, state agencies reported that financial systems and funding portals for Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, and emergency aid had gone offline within hours. The resulting panic was immediate.

The irony was almost funny. Trump cultists, many of whom despise “socialism” with the intensity of a thousand suns, were suddenly in full meltdown when their own government bennies were cut off. They thought bad stuff was only going to happen to drag queens and black/brown people, never THEM. They screamed to high heaven — and Fascist Felonious backed down.

Their is no doubt that the Big Bag of Fascist Fuckery is just beginning to be unpacked and that we have lots of hell to live through, but I am beginning to have some hope. If we stick together, if we learn to become the squeaky, screeching wheels republicans know how to be —if we see something, we say something, if we flood the switchboard of our government reps, Congress, governors, local politicians — we might well get some attention and action.

NEVER GIVE UP. We can’t win if we don’t fight.