In the old days of the USSR, while very difficult, it was at least conceivable that you could just fly to moscow and see if they were eating their children there or burning priests or god knows whatever else.
There was a natural limit to the deception that could occur and further a normal person could make conclusions about the things they saw with their own eyes.
Now, the enemy that "we have always been at war with" is a completely isolated (and economically trivial) state that virtually nobody travels to and who is attacking us with secret cyber weapons that only a domain expert with highly specialized experience could even recognize, much less qualify.
And the people that are telling us are those same people that are, or are not, secretly recording all of our conversations.
There's not one little thing there you could take at face value.