The lines are drawn.

We have fought in these swamps before, regrouped after being surprised, took the high ground, and mounted an offensive that moved us forward.

We can do it again.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg laid down the gauntlet: There will be no more veracity checks.

X’s proprietor, Elon Musk, recently responded, “True,” to Alex Jones’s accusation that the L.A. fires were part of a globalist plot to cause the collapse of the United States.

This is the same Alex Jones who said the slaughter of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax.

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos pulled a cartoon from his newspaper that portrayed him as a supplicant, and billionaire Rupert Murdock’s national television network has paid hundreds of millions in defamation damages.

Recently, Musk snapped off an apparent Nazi salute.

These billionaires were prominently seated at Donald Trump’s inauguration.

For what purpose are these people intruding on our consciousness?

In President Joe Biden’s farewell address, he warned:

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence …”

“Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation.”

Disinformation — misinformation intended to mislead — lies — has traditionally been the currency of illegitimate power.

It was disinformation, propagated by Southern plantation owners — men dependent on the enslavement of human beings to perpetuate their wealth, power, and illusion of superiority — that promoted the South’s secession.

A result that evoked this comment from Mark Twain:

“… (disinformation) set their world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government, with silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless society.”

Twain could turn a phrase when he had a mind to.

Ulysses S. “Sam” Grant — clerk in his father’s leather goods store — a graduate of West Point who hadn’t a penny to spare — was not misled. He knew the value of sham chivalries and grandeurs, rejected their imagery, and embraced the truth: “Slavery was the cause. One of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

Hannah Arendt, historian, philosopher, and one of our time’s most respected thinkers, crystalized disinformation’s perverse effect:

“A people who can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong — with such people, you can do anything.”

Such was the effect of lies that led to the Civil War. This, too, their impact on the populations that preceded the wars our fathers, mothers, and grandparents fought in Europe and the Pacific, where their disabling manifestations led whole populations to evil — then into hell.

My father didn’t fight the effects of disinformation serving in the Pacific, and my cousin Bill Prieur wasn’t wounded three times as his armored regiment moved with Gen. George Patton through France, across the Rhine into Germany so that billionaire oligarchs could keep feeding people lies.

The danger then is the danger now — the use of power and disinformation to subjugate human beings — us.

From 1947 through 1974, incomes at the bottom and middle of the income distribution grew at the same rate as those at the top. But, in 1975, this era came to an end. Since then, the top 1% has captured almost all of the nation’s economic growth.

TIME (September 2020, citing a Rand Corp. study): “The Top 1% Have Taken 50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%.”

During his confirmation hearing, a senator asked billionaire Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent whether the $7.25 federal minimum wage — in effect since 2009 — should be increased. His response was direct: “No, sir.”

There is more concentration of ownership in the financial sector, health care, energy, housing, food, and agriculture than ever before.

What do we do?

What Grant did.

At a time when maps were primitive, GPS did not exist, rumor and disinformation were rampant and calculated — as they are now — Grant knew where he was, where the enemy was, the nature and effect of his earlier miscalculations, and how best to proceed from Shiloh.

He was a good listener. Grant knew what information to believe and whose counsel to consider.

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s goal was the perpetuation of an oppressive society. Sam Grant was guided by the proposition that all men are created equal and that a nation so dedicated should long endure.

Grant’s powers of observation and perception translated into a holistic comprehension of his circumstances and what was needed to protect the truth.

Then he started his advance, kept advancing, and drove back an army conceived in lies.

Just as our fathers and grandfathers did.

Just as we must do.

Doug Pugh’s “Vignettes” runs monthly. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.