The pattern written clearly.
Notice how easy it is to see when it's them. A murderous regime that for months has put a paid minority on the streets and called it "the people", and which now, when it suits them better, admits those same people could be removed in ten minutes.
We see the distortion immediately - if we didn't already see it beforehand - because it's crude, and because it happens far away, in a country we've already understood as unfree. Buried in the Lie.
The harder question is whether we can see the same thing when it's not them, but us.
Because there's a milder version of the same disease closer to home. Not a regime that stages things, but a class that can't help itself.
A press that has decided everything revolves around a single man in advance - Trump - and which therefore hands us an image shaped less by what's actually happening than by what they feel about him.
It's not a lie in the simple sense. It's something more difficult to grasp. It's a persistent skewness in what's selected, what's weighted, what gets to fill space, and what quietly disappears.
And the price isn't that we think badly of one person. He's quite literally irrelevant. And anyone is allowed to disagree with him, challenge him, find him impossible or think what he says and does is wrong.
No. The price is that the tool we share for even knowing what's happening - the balanced, nuanced and truthful reporting - stops working.
Because it's the same pattern, just turned inward.
In Iran, people know that what they see in state media isn't their country. The question is whether we still know when what we see isn't ours. Because the fabrication and the disconnected angling happens more often than most of us like to admit.
So let me put it in words that can't be misunderstood.
A press that can no longer report truthfully about a man it doesn't like has long since stopped reporting truthfully about Reality.
And that should worry everyone.
Happy Thursday.
