It is tempting to ascribe President Biden’s incessant lies to cognitive decline and the ethos of his lifelong profession.

Politicians dissemble without shame – which, ironically, is why they constantly invoke their own honor and allegiance to the truth. Still, Biden’s latest string of whoppers – that gas prices were sky high and the economy was in the tank when he took office, that he convinced the Congress to pass student loan relief, that he’s a deficit hawk who has secured the border, that his son, Beau, died in Iraq – are so obviously false that it’s hard to believe even a politician in his right mind would make such claims.

That he is the president of the United States, leader of the free world, makes this behavior especially troubling. And yet, those relatively small deceptions, so easily fact-checked and debunked, are the least of our problems because they do not simply reveal the partisan instincts of one softening mind. They also reflect the freedom Democrats and their leftist allies now feel to redefine reality itself by advancing their own array of Big Lies which are dividing and inflaming our country.

The most recent example is their framing of the vicious attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. The best available evidence suggests that Paul Pelosi’s assailant, David DePape, is a mentally ill drug abuser who, his employer told the San Jose Mercury News, suffered delusions and held conversations with a magical fairy. Nevertheless, Biden and his political allies immediately blamed Republicans. These allies apparently include the mainstream media. Two days after the assault, the Associated Press reported that the fact DePape brought zip ties to Pelosi’s San Francisco home was “ the latest parallel to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.”

By this strained logic, so too was the fact he was wearing socks.

Instead of demanding that the authorities release security and body-cam footage that could illuminate the events of that night, almost all major news outlets cast DePape – an avowed nudist whose residence, Michael Shellenberger reports, sports “a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree” – as a dedicated soldier in the GOP’s war on democracy. The New York Times reports that DePape seems to have embraced some far-right conspiracy theories, but an honest account would suggest that his mind was so addled that it is impossible to ascribe any coherent political motivation to his actions.

The left’s rush to tie DePape around the neck of their political opponents is part of their larger effort to portray Republicans as an authoritarian group of white supremacists bent on taking the vote away from African Americans while taking up arms against their fellow citizens.

That there is zero evidence for such ugly smears makes no difference. The left believes this propaganda is useful to their pursuit of power and so they hammer it relentlessly. They did the same thing during Trump’s presidency, pushing the fact-free claim that Donald Trump had conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election.

That they are now trying to make Republican “election denial” the key issue of the 2022 midterms tells you how confident they feel in their ability to spew unfiltered partisan spin through the compliant media. Hillary Clinton, for one, feels so protected that she is engaging in preemptory election denial, releasing a video that declares Republicans “already have a plan” to steal the 2024 presidential election.

And why not? In recent years the left has received little pushback from the legacy media as it has worked to normalize sweeping ideas that seek to redefine reality itself. Through their embrace of transgender ideology, they claim that DNA and the X and Y chromones are meaningless abstractions and that human beings are merely “assigned” a gender at birth.

After pretending that Critical Race Theory was an arcane academic theory taught only in upper-level law school courses, they insisted that we should teach children that racism is embedded in the DNA of Americans and explains every disparity between African Americans and their fellow citizens.

Voices that have risen in opposition have been widely condemned as racist and homophobic while the federal government has suggested they could be subject to arrest. The message: Shut up and submit, or else.

These broad assaults on free speech can make Biden’s misinformation about gas prices and the deficit seem like small beer. But all are part of a perilous pattern in which the left is not simply spinning lies but insisting that it can define reality however it pleases.

George Orwell sounded the alarm about such efforts long ago, one we should urgently heed today as Democrats seek to turn 2022 into “1984.”