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Krugman: Cotton & Perdue are "acting like apparatchiks in a totalitarian regime"

I've been trying to put my finger on what's so disturbing about the spectacle of Cotton and Perdue lying so obviously and blatantly to protect Trump. And I think I have it: here you have U.S. senators -- US senators! -- acting like apparatchiks in a totalitarian regime 1/

George Orwell wrote about this at length; most famously in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but long before then, for example in Looking Back at the Spanish War https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-f...anish-war/ … where he described the rejection of the very notion of objective truth.

You can understand this kind of behavior among people actually living under a totalitarian regime, where failure to be sufficiently obsequious to the Leader can mean imprisonment or death. But here you have wealthy, powerful men in what is still a free society doing it

And doing it on behalf of an almost inconceivably undeserving leader utterly lacking in moral authority of any kind. The fact that they (and many other Republicans) are willing to behave like this now is terrifying in what it says about the future.

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