I am writing this very close to March 20, the 15th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, and I’m wondering: Have we learned anything from that experience?

One has only to look at the headlines to understand that no, we haven’t learned anything from the experience of being lied into war by a bunch of neocons.  The same neocons are all over the media, telling us that Russia got Trump elected, and that Putin personally ordered the poisoning of a former Russian spy on British soil.  We aren’t given any evidence for these claims; they are simply assertions that we are supposed to take on faith.  After all, the governments of the U.S. and Great Britain wouldn’t lie—would they?

It’s as if the Iraq war, and the events leading up to it, never happened, and this is especially true for the media.  In their relentless war against Trump, they have become a megaphone in the hands of elements in the “intelligence community” who hate the President and all he stands for.  And they’re all lined up for the new cold war against Russia.  Only a few marginal characters (e.g., Craig Murray, former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan) are challenging the “Novichok” narrative, which blames Russia for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, despite the fact that no evidence for this very serious accusation has been presented by the British government.

According to the Times of London, over 40 people were injured—poisoned—by the substance that felled Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, and yet a tweet by the local hospital informs us that only three people were treated there.  There’s a lot of fake news surrounding this incident, but the one thing that stands out is the absence of any real motive.  After all, Skripal may have betrayed his country—he was traded in 2010 for Russian spies imprisoned in the West—but why would the Russians kill him now?  They had him in prison in 2004, when he was charged.  Why not kill him then?

And why kill with such an exotic weapon, one that could easily be traced back to the Kremlin?  Novichok is a nerve gas developed by the Soviets, the existence of which has long been a subject of speculation, and a sample of which neither the Americans nor the British possess.  So how can the U.K. verify that the poison used against Skripal is indeed Novichok?  Well, they can’t.

We’ve seen the government paralyzed for over a year because our “intelligence community” is telling us that the Russians—under direct orders from Putin—“meddled” in the 2016 presidential election in order to elect Trump.  Where’s the evidence for this assertion?  It’s classified—you and I aren’t entitled to see it, because it’s Top Secret.  Our role is simply to believe.

And the media fall for it: With apparently no memory of the run-up to the Iraq war, or the run-up to any war, the Fourth Estate is even more credulous than they were in 2003, when the neocons ran the White House and Judy Miller was using the front page of the New York Times to falsify evidence of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.”

I asked myself, How is this possible?  And the answer popped up like an Internet ad: I’d forgotten about the effect of the simple passage of time.  Like most old people, I’m inured to it: In my mind, I’m still in my 20’s.  But of course time has marched on, regardless.  The reporters working today were teenagers (at most) when the Iraq war started.  Many hadn’t yet reached puberty.  And besides that, they don’t know anything, nor do they want to know anything.  Worse, they don’t know that they don’t know.  So we have the worst possible combination in this generation of journalists: They’re credulous, they’re stupid, and they’re committed ideologues who hate Trump, conservatism, and Western society’s fundamental values.

Journalism has been corrupted to the point where the public is turning away from the “mainstream” media and getting its news from “alternative” outlets—like the one I work for, Antiwar.com.  The Powers That Be don’t like this one bit, and they are prepared to do something about it: They’re edging toward some limitation on the First Amendment.  They won’t come out and say it, but they aim to regulate content on the Internet so that we “deplorables” won’t have any choice but to tune in to the “mainstream” for our news.

The corruption of journalism and of our entire society is illustrated by the fact that the neocons who lied us into the Iraq war are, if anything, more prominently placed than they were before the war.  David Frum—who wrote a screed published by National Review excommunicating the former editor of this magazine, as well as this writer, Bob Novak, Pat Buchanan, and a host of others, all for the “sin” of opposing that war—is now with The Atlantic.  He’s also all over the two anti-Trump channels, CNN and MSNBC, giving his opinion just as if he hadn’t been associated with a campaign to fabricate “evidence” that took us into a deadly and disastrous conflict.

Max Boot, another neocon janissary who assured us that the Iraqis would greet us not with IEDs, but with flowers, when we marched into their country to “liberate” them, is prominent among the Never Trumpers.  Instead of being shunned for bemoaning the lack of American casualties in the first days of the Afghan war, he’s been rewarded with a regular column in the Washington Post.  Because if you hate Trump, that’s good enough for Jeff Bezos.

Bill Kristol is sitting pretty: Far from being discredited for being wrong about absolutely everything—if you turn a Kristol prediction on its head, you come close to the truth—the little Lenin of the neocons is happily ensconced as the chief theoretician of the Never Trump forces.  Retired as editor of The Weekly Standard, he uses his Twitter pulpit to preach the neocon gospel—and cozy up to his newfound liberal friends.

Evil is rewarded, while virtue is persecuted or ignored.  That’s the world we live in, folks: a Gnostic nightmare.