>Things have been trending that way for a long while, but it really feels like the Orwellian knob has been jacked up an order of magnitude in the last 24 months

>Things have been trending that way for a long while, but it really feels like the Orwellian knob has been jacked up an order of magnitude in the last 24 months. Governments having much of a relationship with objective reality at all is a fairly new phenomenon and very much a product of the Enlightenment. It wasn't too long ago that court astrologers and politicised clergy were intimately involved in decisions that effected the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. What we're seeing is the erosion of Enlightenment rationalism into what we had before, the state saying 2 + 2 = 5 when it's convenient and browbeating anyone who points out how ridiculous they're being. >If we can't agree on some basic rules about what is or is not true about fundamental reality, why even bother having courts or trials to determine higher level truths? I'm sure this exact question went through the mind of Galileo Galilei when he was forced to recant his heliocentric views. Objective reality doesn't care about society's power structures, so society's power structures return the favour.