O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?”

In the days since Charlie Kirk was murdered, I’ve found myself repeatedly musing on this passage from George Orwell’s 1984. The novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, had once written in his diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” In Orwell’s totalitarian state, this assertion was a thought crime, and following Winston’s disappearance into Big Brother’s torture chambers, the party sought to break him—or, more specifically, to break his commitment to the existence of an objective reality.

“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” Winston blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

The moment that news of Kirk’s shooting hit the internet, MAGA—its influencers, podcasters, media figures, Republican elected officials, Cabinet directors, Vice President JD Vance, and President Donald Trump—immediately began insisting that two and two make five. Their gaslighting around Kirk’s death has been so extensive—and so speedily promulgated—that it’s hard to fully grasp the sheer magnitude of their mendacity. Here’s a very brief summary of some of the self-evidently false assertions the right has been feverishly proclaiming in recent days:

Though all of these lies are shocking and dangerous, the narrative that has been most troubling to me—or at least has most caused me to feel like I may actually be losing my mind—has been the right’s insistence on the universal public canonization of Kirk. They have endeavored to make his mourning mandatory, enforcing it through threats—backed by the full power of the state—against anyone who dares to share truthful observations of who this man really was. Participate in the hagiographic whitewashing of a dedicated provocateur’s career, or suffer the consequences. (Unless, of course, you’re Donald Trump, who had already gone back to obsessing over the White House ballroom within hours of Kirk’s death, and skipped his Kennedy Center vigil to go golfing.) 

Kirk was an extremely talented communicator and activist whose efficacy in building up the organizing infrastructure of the far right has materially affected American politics. He was also, by most reasonable standards, a demagogue whose espousal of 

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