Do not read Doctor uncritically.

> An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.

What he's leaving out is that in the novels Farson explicitly was a rabble-rouser pushing for democracy, egalitarian rule, and the downfall of the aristocratic class--and he used that to cloak anti-social behavior and butchery.

Sound familiar?

(Not that Cory is a butcher--hah!--but that he's deliberately eliding the "type" of demagogue Farson is. Consider why that might be.)

At this point, that mostly seems like extraneous details that would most just lend themselves to rationalizations for people who still don't want to accept the current reality.

That narrative certainly had appeal in decades past when we appeared to be headed towards totalitarianism from the other direction. I was there for it, then. But then the corpo gloves gleefully came off, and the main thing that remains of the prior dynamic is referencing it as a soothing strawman.