I opened my laptop and alerted my neighbor Swamp Rabbit to a recent news story:

The Department of Justice scrubbed all information about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot from its website over the weekend, online archives show, continuing the Trump administration’s apparent campaign to reshape government web content in the new president’s image. The removal of the content comes just days after President Donald Trump pardoned anyone for “offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

“It didn’t take long for Donald Trump and his dirt bags to ditch the rule of law and erase history, did it? ” I said. “They remind me of a quote from 1984. Do you have a copy? I used to have an old Signet paperback, but it fell apart.”

Swamp Rabbit stroked his wiry goatee. “I have a copy of David Bowie’s ‘1984’ and Spirit’s ‘1984,’ and that album by Van Halen. I have ‘1999’ by Prince.”

“I’m not talking about music, you goofball. I mean the George Orwell novel that inspired the songs. But never mind — I just remembered the entire novel is on the Internet now.”

I went to Google and found the quotation in Part 1, Chapter 7: The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

“Ain’t it ironic?” Swamp Rabbit said, noting that we can go online and read a cautionary tale that describes a fictional dictator (Big Brother) destroying the historical record as a means of wiping out information that might threaten his control, but we can’t do anything about a degenerate president who’s doing the same thing in the real world.

“It’s worse than that,” I said. “The people who voted for Trump continue to think he can do no wrong. The media has more or less normalized his tyranny. Opponents of the felon-in-chief are too discouraged to mount serious opposition to the coup that’s being orchestrated for him by Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire shadow president.”

“The peeps might hit back if Trump goes through with them tariffs,” my deadbeat buddy said. “Tyranny they can put up with, but not another major jump in the price of eggs, not to mention cars.”

“I doubt it,” I replied. “Trump will just order his minions to rewrite the history of his recent failures. He’ll blame transexual immigrants and woke bias at PBS. The MAGA crowd will love it.”