President Biden seems to be grasping the threat to his re-election posed by the inflation that he once called “temporary.” Yet rather than steer America toward honest money that would automatically curb price increases, he’s turning to what a federal judge calls his “Ministry of Truth,” an online censorship regime, to stifle gripes about inflation as a form of “misinformation.” As Orwell might have put it in “1984,” inflation is going down the memory hole.

The alarm in the White House, in the Washington Post’s telling, stems in part from one American’s outrage over the unexpectedly high price of a McDonald’s meal — $16.10 for a “novelty”* burger “with fries and a Sprite.” The complaint, originating as a TikTok video, strikes a nerve when the average price of a Big Mac is up 10 percent since 2020, the Post says. Millions have seen the video or others like it, igniting debate about Mr. Biden and “out of control” inflation.

This online outrage comes under the basilisk eye of the White House Office of Digital Strategy, which determined that such criticism of Mr. Biden was “one of many exaggerated examples of the nation’s economic woes,” the Post reports. So White House officials began “working with TikTok creators to tell positive stories of Biden’s economic stewardship,” the Post euphemizes, “while also working with social media platforms to counter misinformation.”

This kind of talk is akin to how the Biden administration describes the price controls it imposed on prescription drugs — turning the federal leviathan against private companies — as a “negotiation.” Mr. Biden’s effort to censor online speech about the pain of inflation, under the guise of countering “misinformation,” raises alarm bells for anyone concerned about the freedom of expression — as well as the fairness of the upcoming presidential election.

Federal judges are scathing in their criticism of Mr. Biden’s drive to combat so-called “misinformation” online. The riders of the Fifth Circuit call it “federally coerced censorship.” A district judge, Terry Doughty, notes the White House “seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” an agency “responsible for altering historical records and disseminating propaganda to manipulate and control public perception.”

Riders of the Fifth Circuit, in a ruling putting the brakes on the censorship, noted the alacrity with which social media firms jumped after White House officials balked that there was too much online debate over the efficacy of Covid vaccines. The firms “responded with total compliance,” the riders observe in their ruling: “Facebook asked what it could do to ‘get back to a good place’ with the White House,” while YouTube and Google promised “to do better.”

Debates over election fraud and Hunter Biden’s laptop incurred the wrath of the White House, too. As in today’s inflation outrage, the White House sought to conceal its attempts to stifle speech in the guise of correcting errors. The riders are having none of it, noting how evidence in the pending case of Missouri v. Biden shows how “unrelenting pressure” from the world’s “most powerful” leader led social-media firms to “bend to the government’s will.” 

Which brings us back to Mr. Biden’s efforts to stifle talk of pricey hamburgers, along with fears of, the Post reports, a “silent depression” and a “sense of dread” over the economy. Economists call “these kinds of comments,” the Post says, “not just wrong but dangerous.” Mr. Biden et al see them as “vexing,” the Post empathizes, since inflation is running at a “manageable 3 percent.” That, though, is more than 50 percent higher than the Fed’s inflation target.

“Voters still don’t like the economy, and they blame the president,” says the Post. Mr. Biden overlooks Americans’ fury at the damage that his inflation has wrought. Inflation might be off its peak of 9.1 percent, but the costs of things we buy “regularly” are “so much higher” than “three years ago,” the AP says. No wonder but 14 percent of Yanks report being better off than they were four years ago — and Mr. Biden is scrambling to censor their complaints.

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* A “limited edition ‘smoky’ double quarter pounder BLT,” the Post reports.