Kyle Rittenhouse is a domestic terrorist. Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist. Donald Trump won in 2016 only because he colluded with the Kremlin. Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington Catholic High School on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was an entitled white bigot. Mr. Trump said the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville were “good people.” Last year’s riots were mostly peaceful. Unarmed black men are routinely shot in huge numbers by police officers. The discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plot.

Which of these have you heard in the last five years? I doubt there’s an American with even the faintest interest in public events who wasn’t made aware of every one of these stories, didn’t have them repeatedly drummed into his head in the amplifying loop that connects agenda-driving traditional news organizations, culture-shaping digital sites, knowledge-delimiting search engines, and information-controlling social media platforms.

I didn’t pick deliberately obscure fabulations, “nutpicked” items of agitprop peddled by extremists. I didn’t have to scour the nether regions of the Marxist-anarchist web to find them. These were all, for a while, the received versions of major news events promoted by the people who loudly proclaim their credentials as guardians of the truth. They were all conspicuously consensus accounts of the biggest stories “reported” in the past five years by the usual newspapers and TV networks, relayed by the entire news food chain that seeks to emulate them and retailed eagerly by the half-wit entertainers of Hollywood, publicity-hungry professional athletes and the crowd of gender- and media-studies graduates who churn out press releases for S&P 500 companies.

And these are only some of the more obvious ones. I could have added: Inflation isn’t a problem. Andrew Cuomo was America’s greatest governor. Republican-run states are killing people with their anti-science Covid policies. A white man killed a succession of Asian-Americans in Georgia in a fit of racist rage. Russians offered cash bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers. Anyone who suggested the pandemic started in a Chinese laboratory was a racist. Oh, and Mr. Trump’s postmaster general was stealing mailboxes.