This might be a tad on the long side, for which apologies.

The Great Smearing War of 2015 - present is one of the most successful political campaigns of recent times.

Built out of almost nothing, it grew into a vast conspiracy against the truth, in which there was a race to the bottom as to who could make the most outrageous accusation.

This race was won, handily I’d say, by the Telegraph’s Simon Heffer, who infamously commented on an LBC show that Corbyn ‘wants to open the gates of Auschwitz’.

The list of calumnies is long. Each has been dissected and found to be tissue thin. Most have been ‘interpretations’ of words or deeds which it takes some considerable skill to transform from the pitiful scraps of nothing they are into literal harbingers of annihilation.

The wreath, the irony, the preface, the friends: this is all they could find, over the course of a long political life. These few, disputable fragments, repeated and repeated until the repetition became numbing, were the building blocks for their Great Palace of Bullshit.

There have been many effects of the smearing war. One obvious one is the annihilation of the Labour party as a political force in UK politics. Polling shows Starmer gaining no new ground.

Ordinary voters are, perhaps, reluctant to support a party that its own MPs have described as rotten to the core with antisemitism, and intending a second Holocaust.

Another obvious effect is the installation of Johnson’s murderous kleptocracy, with all that follows. Hungry children given grotesquely inadequate food. Covid epidemic out of control. Mass poverty, mass misery, mass hunger, all predictable, all predicted, all now taking place.

But there may be something more corrosive and more dangerous even that that. I just watched a clip from 2018 in which a Guardian columnist, @queenchristina_, linked Corbyn to the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue massacre.

This raised no eyebrows - the presenter simply moves on to the next item - but it’s worth taking a moment to consider just how utterly astounding this is.

11 Jews were murdered in cold blood and 6 more injured as they celebrated their Shabbat morning service. One might expect a response of empathy, sorrow, anger. It was a horrifying attack, motivated by the darkest and most dangerous hobgoblins of the human mind.

But that isn’t @queenchristina_’s response at all. Her response to this sickening human tragedy is to spin out some rather garbled conspiracy theory that ends up with ‘Jeremy Corbyn’.

Nor is this an isolated incident. Commentators and ‘journalists’ of all kinds vied with each other to mount the most outlandish and irrational attack. Facts were long gone, rationality smothered with a pillow, even basic human decency kicked out the door.

Heffer took the prize of course - who could beat ‘open the gates of Auschwitz’? - but the entirety of the Fourth Estate (with a very few honourable exceptions) all participated, gleefully.

When truth is pushed aside, what takes its place is fear and hate. Pitchfork mobs, roused to fury by the ridiculous lies of these professional liars. Hate mobs. Lynch mobs. Violence and blood-lust and persecution.

They didn’t just assassinate Jeremy Corbyn, they assassinated truth. They replaced truth with falsehood, and they propagated their falsehood to a credulous nation who seemed disinclined to actually *check* anything, or even consider it proper to do so.

If they could successfully convince some significant percentage that a man whose entire political life has been the fight against prejudice and discrimination is the same as some Jew-murdering terrorist, then they could, presumably persuade anyone of anything.

The danger of this ought to be obvious. Our media can create reality, can manufacture realities to order, and can successfully ‘sell’ them to large numbers of people. They did it with Corbyn and they’ll do it again as it suits.

Brexit, Covid-denialism, austerity, ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’: these are all con-jobs that a sophisticated and well-funded media machine have sold to people who simply do not have the intellectual resources to withstand the assault.

Like infantry sent out against heavy artillery, with no guns and no boots and no helmets, they are simply targets to be hit. Pitting any individual person against the most sophisticated persuasion machine humankind has ever seen, is plainly unreasonable.

But the effect is what we see: unreason, hate and bigotry are all around us, and our media create and fuel it. They lie, monstrously, and their monstrous lies become the reality we see, of ferocious attacks on the wrong target, misplaced anger, misdirected savagery.

We, as a nation, are now just an angry mob, a weapon that our media can prime and direct at any target they decide.

I think this ought to concern all of us, no matter our political persuasion. I think we ought to aspire to be better than this. And I fear that we don’t.