Just another word for nothing left to know MSNBC hosts often contrast the fact-based reality here on “Earth One” with the Bizarro World inhabited by the denizens of the Trump personality cult, a parallel universe of “alternative facts.” Dante Atkins this morning reminds Twitter that conservative reactionaries’ efforts to “control the narrative,” as it were, are about more than political spin. They are about more than creating a world where facts don’t matter. They are about imposing a reality where all knowledge is proscribed, by them, where freedom to know and do things is eliminated, where freedom means its opposite. When they rail against “grooming,” Atkins suggests, what they really object to “is existing in public, because merely existing in public imparts knowledge that they do not want you to have.” This is the impulse behind the religious right’s home-school movement. Should parents have the right to educate their own children? Should they have the freedom to raise their children in the “hermetically sealed” equivalent of “a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnall’s porch“? Sure. So long as it does not amount to child abuse. So long as they do not insist on abusing the rest of us in the polity, on restricting not just what everyone else’s kids can learn in public schools, but confining what the rest of us understand as shared reality, and calling that freedom.