One of the hallmarks of leftists is an unshakable belief in the power of propaganda to override obvious reality. I discussed this yesterday, in the story about Nancy Pelosi scolding reporters for not doing a good enough job of selling Biden’s massive spending and government expansion. They believe that the problem is never that their product stinks, it’s just that the “messaging” is off.

They also seem to believe that since they have so much of the media and social media acting as their unpaid propaganda arm, if they can keep anything negative off of those channels, then people will never know about it. If the media can suppress it, then it doesn’t exist. But it’s not just Hunter Biden’s laptop that disproves that.

Back in the old Soviet days, humorist P.J. O’Rourke wrote that whenever he traveled to nations behind the Iron Curtain, as soon as locals found out he was from America, they’d take him aside and privately tell him all the latest jokes about what incompetent nitwits their leaders were. The commies believed that just because they’d intimidated people into not criticizing them out loud and into voicing rabid support in public that they actually didn’t know they were living terrible lives of oppression and deprivation. Imagine Facebook bans backed up by gulags.

Fortunately, here in America, we still have some outlets for free speech (this newsletter for instance), but the leftist-supporting organs are trying to smother it, sometimes in hilarious ways. The biggest recent example was how an obscene chant against Joe Biden at a NASCAR race was turned into “Let’s go, Brandon” by an NBC reporter desperate not to admit what viewers were clearly hearing. But that didn’t make people stop cursing Biden, it just gave rise to a widely-merchandised “Let’s Go, Brandon” craze, which I like because it enables people to express their true feelings about Biden without cursing in front of the children.

The recent Disney-Plus “documentary” on Dr. Anthony Fauci also has a couple of websites scrambling for creative ways to cover up the public’s true reaction. The movie gives the fawning hero treatment to the government health bureaucrat that many people are well and truly sick of (in the latest Rasmussen survey, 54% of likely voters say he’s “lost all credibility”), and viewers made their feelings known.

At RottenTomatoes.com, the professional critics gave it a laughably high 91% positive rating while audiences gave it 2% (for comparison, they give the often-cited worst movie ever made, “Plan Nine from Outer Space,” 45%.) The disparity between the critics’ raves and the public’s disgust was so glaring that the website briefly disabled the public rankings, but now, they’re back. Silencing the public didn’t make the truth go away any better than it did for the USSR. The site did, however, put a disclaimer on the audience reviews, saying that “some viewers expressed their dissatisfaction with the subject matter by giving the documentary a Rotten rating.”

Funny, I read some of the reviews and they specifically cited how disappointed they were in the film itself for being a fawning fan letter rather than an honest, informative appraisal. Although they obviously don’t like Fauci, either, especially after seeing him in the movie, working at home under a giant painting of himself.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/478899/

The Internet Movie Database also showed its sympathies for Democrats by trying some blatant vote-rigging to hide the public’s hostility to the film. The average viewer rating was 1.6 out of 10, so they simply changed it to 5.8. I’ll assume they found a box of late ballots in a car trunk.

https://www.westernjournal.com/terrible-reviews-imdb-rigs-fauci-movie-scores-got-caught-forgetting-major-detail/

All these sites are accomplishing by falsifying their ratings systems is to destroy their own credibility, not restore Fauci’s. If they’ll do this, why should we ever trust their ratings of any film? Will they downgrade “Gone With The Wind” to one star for being politically incorrect, or tell us Al Gore’s global warming movie is better than “Citizen Kane?” I’d probably believe both of those claims before I’d believe that audiences gave “Fauci” a 5.8. Like P.J. O’Rourke, I’ve had too many people tell me privately what they really think of it.