Brett Alan Williams's Blog, page 5
January 4, 2021
January 4, 2021: King Trump has no clothes. What a sight… Let the laughter begin!
Trump—the man who tried to convince us he has large hands—has been disrobed. [1] What we see is not a surprise, but it is funny. Likewise, that other stand-in for phallic prowess, the AR-15, is returned to its gun rack beside the jeans that don’t fit, the junior-varsity jacket, and MAGA hat dusted with coronavirus. During America’s four-year saga of reality TV drama, who knew it would end as a comedy? When Rudy Giuliani flashed his petite portion of voter fraud so small it couldn’t be found—in a filthy parking lot between a porn shop and a crematorium. [2] And if that weren’t farcical enough, after Giuliani screamed “Fraud!” in public but denied it in court, he reappeared for a 105-minute lie-a-thon. As black sweat ran down his face, America received the news: the ghost of Hugo Chavez molested our election. [3] One last prank from the jester who colored his hairs with Trump’s Sharpie. [4]
Mercifully, the Trump comedy was canceled thanks to a ratings drop for its game show host. But while Putin’s asset hastened America’s retreat, accelerated the rise of China, and made conspiracy theorists feel special, he also provided the gift of laughter for generations to come. As a sayonara to our populist temper tantrum—in the Oval Office for now—we gaze here at Trump’s tiny segment of spoofery, and his screwball supporters who performed their own striptease. It took them four whole years of undressing that not-so-scary camo to finally get naked, and a laugh. And while Trump scrapes his knees for a mouthful of counterfeit votes in Georgia, the GOPP sedition caucus, led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, plan to bare their anatomy in public chambers for one last guffaw; a coup against that Constitution they pretend to venerate. [5]
This all started with a joke: Trump's puerile populism raised to the level of a new religion, ditching the old one. As Billy Graham Center director Ed Stetzer wrote in Christian Times, “Christians seem to be disproportionately fooled [as] Putin’s troll factories focused on…evangelicals.” [6] On the BBC, Stetzer said some Christians had replaced Christ with QAnon—hence the new religion and magnet for populists—which 4 in 10 “Republicans” believe in. [7] This latest adoration of the New Right crawled under Trump’s bedsheets along with the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and the Klan, where Trump fondled their gullibility to let them feel special too. Though “Gullibility is not a spiritual gift,” says Stetzer.
But humor is. And there’s plenty of it, with QAnon a fresh display of sidesplitting credulity. Get this: Q claims that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his 1999 plane-crash death in order to replace Vice President Pence as the con man’s 2020 running mate. [8] Q divulged that Hillary Clinton drinks “adrenochrome” as a fountain of youth derived from the blood of children her pedophile syndicate holds captive at that D.C. pizza shop, which Trumper and gun-besotted Edgar Welch shot up to free all those children who were never there. [9] And Q-cult-leader Austin Steinbart’s prophetic insights into government are “because he receives messages from his future self through quantum computing.” [10] “Steinbart, recently jailed for violating terms of his pre-trial release on extortion charges, had in his possession a prosthetic penis called a ‘Whizzinator.’” [11] Now, that’s funny! We’re told the lesson of the Whizzinator is that it showed Trump what’s essential to grasp when holding the staff of Q-leadership, even with small hands. And who needs an AR-15 to thrust high in state capitols when a man can grab his lightweight Whizzinator instead? [12]
While Mad King Trump and his disciples embraced QAnon and any crank who would lick Trump’s… boot, he, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity revealed to the waiting world “doctor” Stella Immanuel’s support of hydroxychloroquine as Covid-19’s cure. [13] Recall, hydroxy was a lie Trump told as a diversion from his prescription to inject Lysol, and Trump’s a no-nonsense, straight-talking liar. When he tells a lie, he sticks to it. To polish her medical credentials, Immanuel added that, by-the-way, “people are having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.” [14] These phantasms turn themselves into women that have sex with men to collect their sperm. Upon which, they turn themselves into men who sleep with men, depositing that collected sperm… somewhere, and… somehow reproduce more of themselves. Forget vaccines, she said; scientists cooked those up “to prevent people from being religious.” [15] With backdrop-gravitas of the Supreme Court at our 1st Annual White Coat Summit—organized by “conservative” Tea Party Patriots—Immanuel dropped the bombshell: the U.S. government is run by reptiles and aliens! How often have I said Trump operates solely off that reptilian structure at the base of his brain, “Responsible for feelings of urgency: gag, vomit, defecation, sex, fight or flight…” [16] And when Immanuel says “aliens,” she’s not talking that border crossing version, but those who zip in from distant galaxies. See my post, U.S. government Deep State impregnates our daughters with illegal aliens from other planets! [17] I knew I was on to something.
Late in Trump’s zany programming came a televised interview where NBC host Savannah Guthrie asked Trump about tweeting “a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden orchestrated to have Navy SEAL Team Six killed to cover up the fake death of bin Laden.” (Newsflash! Osama’s not dead!) And Trump’s reply? “That was a retweet. I’ll put it out there. People can decide for themselves.” To which Guthrie responded, “I don’t get that. You’re the president. You’re not someone’s crazy uncle!” [18]
Trump’s someone’s crazy uncle. Ask Mary Trump.
While Donald, and Rudy-beside-the-porn-shop—with his witness to voter fraud, who turned out to be a liar and registered sex offender—pushed the China-paid-Biden story, the Wall Street Journal and—wait for it—FAUX NEWS, reported nothing to it. [19] By this point, Trump’s belt was undone, his zipper was down, his pants were about to come off, and…
Don’t look, cult fans! You’ll be forced to lie (again) about what your eyes see clearly!
And their latest giggle? Authoritarian-fascists-who-loath-socialism scream, “STOP the STEAL!” Dead people voted; Trump ballots were burned; Biden ballots were stuffed! It says so on the Internet. Even mail-in ballots were counted. And kept counting, until all votes cast before the election were counted after. (As always.) [20]
These assertions from sTupid himself, Rudy, and Goebbels Media were then fed to 57,151,930.99 guileless Americans who—released from evidence, facts, and planet earth—believe. [21] And opened their wallets for Trump’s last con: his “legal fund.” [22] Vindication of that funny Chinese saying: “One dog barks at a shadow, and one hundred dogs respond to make it a fact.” This shadow was laughed out of a record 63 courts, with two 9 to 0 swan songs sung by The Supremes. [23]
Wow. What a looser.
But Trump got Putin’s help in 2016. He extorted Ukraine in 2019. What are these “losers” and “suckers” complaining about? [24] (Not a reference to Trump’s description of fallen U.S. troops. [25]) Don’t the ends justify any immoral means? Isn’t that the governance our Founders gave us?
Secretary of State Impersonator Mike Pompeo said, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump term.” [26] So what’s the problem? Democrats tried The Steal but failed, lost seats in the House, and could lose the Senate in a runoff.
Or… was that part of the plan? Plausible deniability… Finish impeachment the Senate bungled, set the bootlickers free?
Brilliant! Way to go, Dems!
Recall this trifling bit of reality: pimps and addicts of this type of stupidity are not toddlers, fearful of goblins under their beds. These are “adults,” many with university degrees. So psychedelic-high on their lies, they display fealty to their buck-naked pharaoh by refusing protective masks at his rallies, strutting their adolescent defiance of… a virus.
Hmm…
Deny there’s a lethal killer in the air today, cheer Trump for saying so, who admits it’s a killer on a February recording, who then says it’s not, whereupon we as deniers sign an agreement absolving Trump from responsibility for our death from the virus-that-doesn’t-exist acquired at his rally. [27]
Hilarious!
Among these draft-dodgers from our war against a foreign invader, “no-masker,” and Idaho pastor Paul Van Noy refused to halt in-person church services. He landed in an ICU with the Trump virus. [28] The Constitutional scholar and Arizona Sheriff, Mark Lamb, “proclaimed the state’s attempt to curb coronavirus was unconstitutional,” winning Lamb a White House invitation. [29] Sadly, Lamb tested positive for Covid, contracted at a campaign event, invitation canceled. That’s not just funny; that’s the kind of scrumptious irony the British love and another reason they, the Canadians, French, Pakistanis, Sudanese, Bangladeshis… laugh at us. Everybody’s laughing. In San Antonio, TX, a man in his 30s succeeded in contracting the disease at a “Covid Party.” Later, in hospital, he looked to his nurse and said, “I think I made a mistake. I thought it was a hoax, but it’s not.” [30] As his last words, he then died.
Maybe that’s not funny.
With America First! in Covid deaths, it’s fall to 25th place in democracies, a world record $29 trillion in debt, ranked 16th in infant mortality, 38th in mathematics education, 24th in science, utter ignorance of founding governance, and alone in the world with a decreasing life expectancy, maybe these aren’t funny either. [31] “Make America Great Again”? Let’s not.
We once thought Nazi Germany suffered a national madness. Psychologically, morally, half of America is little different.
And we have nukes.
That’s not funny.
[1] Recall the “large hands” remarks are in reference to an old tavern myth, equating the size of one’s hands to other parts of the male anatomy, thus “proving legitimacy as a leader.” Given its origin, it’s no surprise such comparisons play well in the tavern.
[2] LAUREN EDMONDS and FRANCES MULRANEY, Trump campaign is mocked for holding press conference in a parking lot between a sex shop and a crematorium, Daily Mail, 8 November 2020. Let’s see if sTupid, Rudy and the Goebbels Networks can get those AR-15s back out on the street for some real life 20th century-like fascist action on January 6 or thereafter. Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert is calling for it.
[3] Lisa Lerer, Giuliani in Public: ‘It’s a Fraud.’ Giuliani in Court: ‘This Is Not a Fraud Case.’, New York Times, Nov. 18, 2020.
Jonah Engel Bromwich, Whatever It Is, It’s Probably Not Hair Dye, New York Times, Nov. 19, 2020.
[4] TINA NGUYEN and MARK SCOTT, How 'SharpieGate' went from online chatter to Trumpworld strategy in Arizona, POLITICO, 11/05/2020.
Umair Irfan, Trump’s “Sharpiegate” grudge may have cost NOAA’s acting chief scientist his job, VOX, Oct 31, 2020.
[5] GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party.
Amy Gardner, ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor, Washington Post, Jan. 3, 2021.
Dan Balz, Trump knows no limits as he tries to overturn the election, Washington Post, Jan. 3, 2021.
Dean Obeidallah, Trump loves Rep. Mo Brooks' election objection. But Congress can't overturn Biden's win., NBC News, Dec. 4, 2020.
Dareh Gregorian, GOP senator to object to Electoral College results, forcing Congress to vote on overturning Biden's win, NBC News, Dec. 30, 2020.
[6] ED STETZER, On Christians Spreading Corona Conspiracies: Gullibility is not a Spiritual Gift, Christianity Today, April 15, 2020
[7] BBC, Why is QAnon going global?, The Real Story, September 4, 2020. The quote was abbreviated here from, “troll factories focused on…evangelical Christians.”
Ed Stetzer, Evangelicals need to address the QAnoners in our midst, USAToday, September 4, 2020.
Max Boot, Republicans are becoming the QAnon Party, Washington Post, August 12, 2020.
Boot on Twitter.
[8] Dana Milbank, Thanks to the Trump administration, one QAnon theory is panning out, Washington Post, September 15, 2020.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] According to BBC, this quintessentially American creation of QAnon has infiltrated 71 countries. (Who says America’s not an exporter?) These offshore adherents claim 5G radio waves can carry matter, in this case, the coronavirus. Naturally, those metal 5G towers had to be burned like a witch at the stake in 1692 Salem, Massachusetts. Pity, metal doesn’t burn. Is that not hilarious? However, while metal does not burn, unfortunately for customers of 5G and other effected normal people, the organic insulations and circuit boards which ride those metal towers do burn. Corinne Reichert, 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory leads to 77 mobile towers burned in UK, report says, CNET, May 7, 2020.
[13] Will Sommer, Trump’s New Favorite COVID Doctor Believes in Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine, Daily Beast, Jul. 28, 2020.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Brett Williams, America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world, on Goodreads, September 7, 2020.
[17] Brett Williams, U.S. government Deep State impregnates our daughters with illegal aliens from other planets!, on Goodreads, December 2, 2019.
[18] Eliza Relman, 'You're not, like, someone's crazy uncle': Savannah Guthrie slams Trump at the NBC town hall over his promotion of conspiracy theories, Business Insider, October 15, 2020.
[19] MATT FRIEDMAN, Man featured at Giuliani press conference is a convicted sex offender, POLITICO, 11/09/2020.
Ben Smith, Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It., New York Times, Oct. 25, 2020.
Maxwell Tani, Wall Street Journal’s News Side Debunks Opinion Side’s Hunter Biden Screed, Daily Beast, Oct. 23, 2020.
[20] BBC, US election security officials reject Trump's fraud claims, BBC, 13 November, 2020.
Gregory Krieg, Trump's attempt to steal the election unravels as coronavirus cases surge, CNN, November 22, 2020.
Jemima McEvoy, Here Are The (Debunked) Voter Fraud Claims Trump And His Supporters Are Spreading, Nov 5, 2020, FORBES.
Tom Perkins, The dead voter conspiracy theory peddled by Trump voters, debunked, The Guardian, Wed 18 Nov 2020.
Oscar Gonzalez , Voter fraud: Social media is playing whack-a-mole with a bunch of bogus claims, CNET, Nov. 25, 2020.
[21] That’s 74,223,287 votes from sTupid times 77% who believe the vote was rigged. The Guardian, US election results 2020: Joe Biden's defeat of Donald Trump, The Guardian, December, 4, 2020.
Told J. Gillman, 77% of Trump voters blame fraud for loss to Biden, despite lack of evidence, Dallas Morning News, November 18, 2020.
[22] MAGGIE SEVERNS, Where Trump’s recount fundraising dollars are really going, POLITICO, 11/12/2020.
[23] Wikipedia, Post-election lawsuits related to the 2020 United States presidential election.
Zoe Tillman, Trump And His Allies Have Lost Nearly 60 Election Fights In Court (And Counting), BuzzFeed, December 14, 2020.
[24] Notice that two sides of the conspiracy fence are employed here. The conspiracy theorists of voter fraud with zero evidence vs. the conspiracy of Trump’s Putin-connection proven as collusion and obstruction by the Mueller Report and validated by the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report. There are “conspiracies,” fake, and conspiracies, real. One requires enough brain activity to tell the difference.
[25] JEFFREY GOLDBERG, Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’, The Atlantic, September, 2020.
[26] Matthew Lee, Mike Pompeo says there will be ‘smooth’ transition to a ‘second Trump administration’, Associated Press, November 11, 2020.
[27] Jamie Gangel, Jeremy Herb and Elizabeth Stuart, 'Play it down': Trump admits to concealing the true threat of coronavirus in new Woodward book, CNN. Spetember 9, 2020.
JESSICA LEE, Do Tulsa Trump Rally Attendees Have To Sign COVID-19 Waiver? TRUE, Snopes, 16 JUNE 2020. Like the fine print on Trump’s “STOP the STEAL legal fund” that gives him the money, picking fool’s pockets like his fake university. One last scam on his way out the door. MAGGIE SEVERNS, Where Trump’s recount fundraising dollars are really going, POLITICO, 11/12/2020.
[28] Nakia McNabb and Scottie Andrew, An Idaho pastor skeptical of masks lands in the ICU for Covid-19, CNN, September 18, 2020.
[29] Timothy Bella, A GOP sheriff vowed not to enforce Arizona’s coronavirus restrictions. Now he’s tested positive., Washington Post, June 18, 2020.
[30] Ella Torres, 30-year-old dies after attending 'COVID party' thinking virus was a 'hoax', ABC News, July 11, 2020.
[31] Referencing, The Economist, Democracy Index, Wikipedia.
U.S. debt, U.S. Debt Clock,
Validated by DATALAB, USAspending.gov, By the end of 2020, the federal government had $26.95 trillion in federal debt, ABC News, July 11, 2020.
macrotrends, U.S. Infant Mortality Rate 1950-2020, 2020.
DREW DESILVER, U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries, PEW Research Center, February 15, 2017.
Until next time: March 1, 2021.
Mercifully, the Trump comedy was canceled thanks to a ratings drop for its game show host. But while Putin’s asset hastened America’s retreat, accelerated the rise of China, and made conspiracy theorists feel special, he also provided the gift of laughter for generations to come. As a sayonara to our populist temper tantrum—in the Oval Office for now—we gaze here at Trump’s tiny segment of spoofery, and his screwball supporters who performed their own striptease. It took them four whole years of undressing that not-so-scary camo to finally get naked, and a laugh. And while Trump scrapes his knees for a mouthful of counterfeit votes in Georgia, the GOPP sedition caucus, led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, plan to bare their anatomy in public chambers for one last guffaw; a coup against that Constitution they pretend to venerate. [5]
This all started with a joke: Trump's puerile populism raised to the level of a new religion, ditching the old one. As Billy Graham Center director Ed Stetzer wrote in Christian Times, “Christians seem to be disproportionately fooled [as] Putin’s troll factories focused on…evangelicals.” [6] On the BBC, Stetzer said some Christians had replaced Christ with QAnon—hence the new religion and magnet for populists—which 4 in 10 “Republicans” believe in. [7] This latest adoration of the New Right crawled under Trump’s bedsheets along with the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and the Klan, where Trump fondled their gullibility to let them feel special too. Though “Gullibility is not a spiritual gift,” says Stetzer.
But humor is. And there’s plenty of it, with QAnon a fresh display of sidesplitting credulity. Get this: Q claims that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his 1999 plane-crash death in order to replace Vice President Pence as the con man’s 2020 running mate. [8] Q divulged that Hillary Clinton drinks “adrenochrome” as a fountain of youth derived from the blood of children her pedophile syndicate holds captive at that D.C. pizza shop, which Trumper and gun-besotted Edgar Welch shot up to free all those children who were never there. [9] And Q-cult-leader Austin Steinbart’s prophetic insights into government are “because he receives messages from his future self through quantum computing.” [10] “Steinbart, recently jailed for violating terms of his pre-trial release on extortion charges, had in his possession a prosthetic penis called a ‘Whizzinator.’” [11] Now, that’s funny! We’re told the lesson of the Whizzinator is that it showed Trump what’s essential to grasp when holding the staff of Q-leadership, even with small hands. And who needs an AR-15 to thrust high in state capitols when a man can grab his lightweight Whizzinator instead? [12]
While Mad King Trump and his disciples embraced QAnon and any crank who would lick Trump’s… boot, he, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity revealed to the waiting world “doctor” Stella Immanuel’s support of hydroxychloroquine as Covid-19’s cure. [13] Recall, hydroxy was a lie Trump told as a diversion from his prescription to inject Lysol, and Trump’s a no-nonsense, straight-talking liar. When he tells a lie, he sticks to it. To polish her medical credentials, Immanuel added that, by-the-way, “people are having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.” [14] These phantasms turn themselves into women that have sex with men to collect their sperm. Upon which, they turn themselves into men who sleep with men, depositing that collected sperm… somewhere, and… somehow reproduce more of themselves. Forget vaccines, she said; scientists cooked those up “to prevent people from being religious.” [15] With backdrop-gravitas of the Supreme Court at our 1st Annual White Coat Summit—organized by “conservative” Tea Party Patriots—Immanuel dropped the bombshell: the U.S. government is run by reptiles and aliens! How often have I said Trump operates solely off that reptilian structure at the base of his brain, “Responsible for feelings of urgency: gag, vomit, defecation, sex, fight or flight…” [16] And when Immanuel says “aliens,” she’s not talking that border crossing version, but those who zip in from distant galaxies. See my post, U.S. government Deep State impregnates our daughters with illegal aliens from other planets! [17] I knew I was on to something.
Late in Trump’s zany programming came a televised interview where NBC host Savannah Guthrie asked Trump about tweeting “a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden orchestrated to have Navy SEAL Team Six killed to cover up the fake death of bin Laden.” (Newsflash! Osama’s not dead!) And Trump’s reply? “That was a retweet. I’ll put it out there. People can decide for themselves.” To which Guthrie responded, “I don’t get that. You’re the president. You’re not someone’s crazy uncle!” [18]
Trump’s someone’s crazy uncle. Ask Mary Trump.
While Donald, and Rudy-beside-the-porn-shop—with his witness to voter fraud, who turned out to be a liar and registered sex offender—pushed the China-paid-Biden story, the Wall Street Journal and—wait for it—FAUX NEWS, reported nothing to it. [19] By this point, Trump’s belt was undone, his zipper was down, his pants were about to come off, and…
Don’t look, cult fans! You’ll be forced to lie (again) about what your eyes see clearly!
And their latest giggle? Authoritarian-fascists-who-loath-socialism scream, “STOP the STEAL!” Dead people voted; Trump ballots were burned; Biden ballots were stuffed! It says so on the Internet. Even mail-in ballots were counted. And kept counting, until all votes cast before the election were counted after. (As always.) [20]
These assertions from sTupid himself, Rudy, and Goebbels Media were then fed to 57,151,930.99 guileless Americans who—released from evidence, facts, and planet earth—believe. [21] And opened their wallets for Trump’s last con: his “legal fund.” [22] Vindication of that funny Chinese saying: “One dog barks at a shadow, and one hundred dogs respond to make it a fact.” This shadow was laughed out of a record 63 courts, with two 9 to 0 swan songs sung by The Supremes. [23]
Wow. What a looser.
But Trump got Putin’s help in 2016. He extorted Ukraine in 2019. What are these “losers” and “suckers” complaining about? [24] (Not a reference to Trump’s description of fallen U.S. troops. [25]) Don’t the ends justify any immoral means? Isn’t that the governance our Founders gave us?
Secretary of State Impersonator Mike Pompeo said, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump term.” [26] So what’s the problem? Democrats tried The Steal but failed, lost seats in the House, and could lose the Senate in a runoff.
Or… was that part of the plan? Plausible deniability… Finish impeachment the Senate bungled, set the bootlickers free?
Brilliant! Way to go, Dems!
Recall this trifling bit of reality: pimps and addicts of this type of stupidity are not toddlers, fearful of goblins under their beds. These are “adults,” many with university degrees. So psychedelic-high on their lies, they display fealty to their buck-naked pharaoh by refusing protective masks at his rallies, strutting their adolescent defiance of… a virus.
Hmm…
Deny there’s a lethal killer in the air today, cheer Trump for saying so, who admits it’s a killer on a February recording, who then says it’s not, whereupon we as deniers sign an agreement absolving Trump from responsibility for our death from the virus-that-doesn’t-exist acquired at his rally. [27]
Hilarious!
Among these draft-dodgers from our war against a foreign invader, “no-masker,” and Idaho pastor Paul Van Noy refused to halt in-person church services. He landed in an ICU with the Trump virus. [28] The Constitutional scholar and Arizona Sheriff, Mark Lamb, “proclaimed the state’s attempt to curb coronavirus was unconstitutional,” winning Lamb a White House invitation. [29] Sadly, Lamb tested positive for Covid, contracted at a campaign event, invitation canceled. That’s not just funny; that’s the kind of scrumptious irony the British love and another reason they, the Canadians, French, Pakistanis, Sudanese, Bangladeshis… laugh at us. Everybody’s laughing. In San Antonio, TX, a man in his 30s succeeded in contracting the disease at a “Covid Party.” Later, in hospital, he looked to his nurse and said, “I think I made a mistake. I thought it was a hoax, but it’s not.” [30] As his last words, he then died.
Maybe that’s not funny.
With America First! in Covid deaths, it’s fall to 25th place in democracies, a world record $29 trillion in debt, ranked 16th in infant mortality, 38th in mathematics education, 24th in science, utter ignorance of founding governance, and alone in the world with a decreasing life expectancy, maybe these aren’t funny either. [31] “Make America Great Again”? Let’s not.
We once thought Nazi Germany suffered a national madness. Psychologically, morally, half of America is little different.
And we have nukes.
That’s not funny.
[1] Recall the “large hands” remarks are in reference to an old tavern myth, equating the size of one’s hands to other parts of the male anatomy, thus “proving legitimacy as a leader.” Given its origin, it’s no surprise such comparisons play well in the tavern.
[2] LAUREN EDMONDS and FRANCES MULRANEY, Trump campaign is mocked for holding press conference in a parking lot between a sex shop and a crematorium, Daily Mail, 8 November 2020. Let’s see if sTupid, Rudy and the Goebbels Networks can get those AR-15s back out on the street for some real life 20th century-like fascist action on January 6 or thereafter. Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert is calling for it.
[3] Lisa Lerer, Giuliani in Public: ‘It’s a Fraud.’ Giuliani in Court: ‘This Is Not a Fraud Case.’, New York Times, Nov. 18, 2020.
Jonah Engel Bromwich, Whatever It Is, It’s Probably Not Hair Dye, New York Times, Nov. 19, 2020.
[4] TINA NGUYEN and MARK SCOTT, How 'SharpieGate' went from online chatter to Trumpworld strategy in Arizona, POLITICO, 11/05/2020.
Umair Irfan, Trump’s “Sharpiegate” grudge may have cost NOAA’s acting chief scientist his job, VOX, Oct 31, 2020.
[5] GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party.
Amy Gardner, ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor, Washington Post, Jan. 3, 2021.
Dan Balz, Trump knows no limits as he tries to overturn the election, Washington Post, Jan. 3, 2021.
Dean Obeidallah, Trump loves Rep. Mo Brooks' election objection. But Congress can't overturn Biden's win., NBC News, Dec. 4, 2020.
Dareh Gregorian, GOP senator to object to Electoral College results, forcing Congress to vote on overturning Biden's win, NBC News, Dec. 30, 2020.
[6] ED STETZER, On Christians Spreading Corona Conspiracies: Gullibility is not a Spiritual Gift, Christianity Today, April 15, 2020
[7] BBC, Why is QAnon going global?, The Real Story, September 4, 2020. The quote was abbreviated here from, “troll factories focused on…evangelical Christians.”
Ed Stetzer, Evangelicals need to address the QAnoners in our midst, USAToday, September 4, 2020.
Max Boot, Republicans are becoming the QAnon Party, Washington Post, August 12, 2020.
Boot on Twitter.
[8] Dana Milbank, Thanks to the Trump administration, one QAnon theory is panning out, Washington Post, September 15, 2020.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] According to BBC, this quintessentially American creation of QAnon has infiltrated 71 countries. (Who says America’s not an exporter?) These offshore adherents claim 5G radio waves can carry matter, in this case, the coronavirus. Naturally, those metal 5G towers had to be burned like a witch at the stake in 1692 Salem, Massachusetts. Pity, metal doesn’t burn. Is that not hilarious? However, while metal does not burn, unfortunately for customers of 5G and other effected normal people, the organic insulations and circuit boards which ride those metal towers do burn. Corinne Reichert, 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory leads to 77 mobile towers burned in UK, report says, CNET, May 7, 2020.
[13] Will Sommer, Trump’s New Favorite COVID Doctor Believes in Alien DNA, Demon Sperm, and Hydroxychloroquine, Daily Beast, Jul. 28, 2020.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Brett Williams, America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world, on Goodreads, September 7, 2020.
[17] Brett Williams, U.S. government Deep State impregnates our daughters with illegal aliens from other planets!, on Goodreads, December 2, 2019.
[18] Eliza Relman, 'You're not, like, someone's crazy uncle': Savannah Guthrie slams Trump at the NBC town hall over his promotion of conspiracy theories, Business Insider, October 15, 2020.
[19] MATT FRIEDMAN, Man featured at Giuliani press conference is a convicted sex offender, POLITICO, 11/09/2020.
Ben Smith, Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It., New York Times, Oct. 25, 2020.
Maxwell Tani, Wall Street Journal’s News Side Debunks Opinion Side’s Hunter Biden Screed, Daily Beast, Oct. 23, 2020.
[20] BBC, US election security officials reject Trump's fraud claims, BBC, 13 November, 2020.
Gregory Krieg, Trump's attempt to steal the election unravels as coronavirus cases surge, CNN, November 22, 2020.
Jemima McEvoy, Here Are The (Debunked) Voter Fraud Claims Trump And His Supporters Are Spreading, Nov 5, 2020, FORBES.
Tom Perkins, The dead voter conspiracy theory peddled by Trump voters, debunked, The Guardian, Wed 18 Nov 2020.
Oscar Gonzalez , Voter fraud: Social media is playing whack-a-mole with a bunch of bogus claims, CNET, Nov. 25, 2020.
[21] That’s 74,223,287 votes from sTupid times 77% who believe the vote was rigged. The Guardian, US election results 2020: Joe Biden's defeat of Donald Trump, The Guardian, December, 4, 2020.
Told J. Gillman, 77% of Trump voters blame fraud for loss to Biden, despite lack of evidence, Dallas Morning News, November 18, 2020.
[22] MAGGIE SEVERNS, Where Trump’s recount fundraising dollars are really going, POLITICO, 11/12/2020.
[23] Wikipedia, Post-election lawsuits related to the 2020 United States presidential election.
Zoe Tillman, Trump And His Allies Have Lost Nearly 60 Election Fights In Court (And Counting), BuzzFeed, December 14, 2020.
[24] Notice that two sides of the conspiracy fence are employed here. The conspiracy theorists of voter fraud with zero evidence vs. the conspiracy of Trump’s Putin-connection proven as collusion and obstruction by the Mueller Report and validated by the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report. There are “conspiracies,” fake, and conspiracies, real. One requires enough brain activity to tell the difference.
[25] JEFFREY GOLDBERG, Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’, The Atlantic, September, 2020.
[26] Matthew Lee, Mike Pompeo says there will be ‘smooth’ transition to a ‘second Trump administration’, Associated Press, November 11, 2020.
[27] Jamie Gangel, Jeremy Herb and Elizabeth Stuart, 'Play it down': Trump admits to concealing the true threat of coronavirus in new Woodward book, CNN. Spetember 9, 2020.
JESSICA LEE, Do Tulsa Trump Rally Attendees Have To Sign COVID-19 Waiver? TRUE, Snopes, 16 JUNE 2020. Like the fine print on Trump’s “STOP the STEAL legal fund” that gives him the money, picking fool’s pockets like his fake university. One last scam on his way out the door. MAGGIE SEVERNS, Where Trump’s recount fundraising dollars are really going, POLITICO, 11/12/2020.
[28] Nakia McNabb and Scottie Andrew, An Idaho pastor skeptical of masks lands in the ICU for Covid-19, CNN, September 18, 2020.
[29] Timothy Bella, A GOP sheriff vowed not to enforce Arizona’s coronavirus restrictions. Now he’s tested positive., Washington Post, June 18, 2020.
[30] Ella Torres, 30-year-old dies after attending 'COVID party' thinking virus was a 'hoax', ABC News, July 11, 2020.
[31] Referencing, The Economist, Democracy Index, Wikipedia.
U.S. debt, U.S. Debt Clock,
Validated by DATALAB, USAspending.gov, By the end of 2020, the federal government had $26.95 trillion in federal debt, ABC News, July 11, 2020.
macrotrends, U.S. Infant Mortality Rate 1950-2020, 2020.
DREW DESILVER, U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries, PEW Research Center, February 15, 2017.
Until next time: March 1, 2021.
November 2, 2020
November 2, 2020: Charlie’s Exposé, Part 1: When America’s Right-Wing Became What it Most Despised
Not long ago, America’s political Right could be defined by a host of principles and beliefs. Among them: respect for the Constitution; Edmond Burke-like esteem for traditions that bridle human nature’s negative inclinations; fiscal responsibility that considered excess debt as hazardous for the country as it was for the home; a strong national defense; respect for the teachings of Jesus; and since 9/11, sternly anti-terrorist.
Today, America's political Right—my old tribe— enthusiastically betrays the Constitution, from hostility to a free press to supporting non-State-regulated militias armed to intimidate in a perversion of the 2nd Amendment. Conservatism has been replaced by radicalism where compromise is treason. Human nature’s worst tendencies are embraced, foremost through their lies. Fiscal responsibility is so passé its once great purveyor, Rush Limbaugh, declared, “this concern for the deficit and budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around.” [1] Trump enthusiastically added $8 trillion to the national debt in just 4-years; a feat that took Obama twice that long to complete. The nation’s defense is scorned as Right-wingers dodge America’s war effort to combat a viral enemy. As for the teachings of Jesus... Jesus who? While the Right welcomes terrorists, from the Proud Boys, Nazis, Klan, QAnon, and the “Texas Trump Train” to America’s #1 terror threat, Donald Trump. Think not? Reference [2]. Recall, this is the “law and order” party.
It is this right-side of America’s failure that old-style Reagan conservative Charles Sykes wrote his postmortem about. [3] “Among the many ironies of the conservative implosion,” writes Sykes, “was how the Right became what it once mocked.” [4] “Conservatives once recognized that politics was a means, not an end because they believed that we live in communities sustained by moral capital, recognizing…that moral communities are ‘fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy.’ Somehow a movement based on ideas devolved into a new tribalism that valued neither principle nor truth…” [5]
Sykes’ focus is on the Right’s moral, ethical, and intellectual collapse. He hits a number of crucial causes, ignoring the Right’s economic debacles. Philosophical divisions were born early, says Sykes. “Fusionism” attempted to unify the countervailing conservative forces of freedom of the person with a Christian understanding of moral responsibility to others. Fusionists remind us that the “Constitutional Convention in 1787 had not embraced either the ‘libertarian’ vision of the Jeffersonian nor the ‘authoritarian’ politics of Alexander Hamilton, but instead steered a middle course laid out by James Madison…” [6] Conservative Russell Kirk resisted emphasis on individualism as “social atomism” incompatible with traditional Christianity. [7] One of the goals of the conservative flagship National Review was to reconcile these schools of thought, from traditionalists and libertarians to anticommunists. This required deliberation, analysis, and rational acumen. But anti-rationalism is a long-standing bone in the American posture. It only got stronger, and the Right now wields it like a weapon.
Echoing Allan Bloom, Sykes recognizes that prior ideas of conservatism and decency belonged to an age “when statesmen actually read books.” [8] “The American Founders… had in the main all consumed the same library of Greek and Latin classics, British and Continental literature from fiction to political economy… This did not lead to a uniformity of opinion [but] literate and enlightened argument.” [9] Today, the Right’s aggressive ignorance scraps the Founder’s Enlightenment while simultaneously lauding these very men whose expertise and science they reject. For Sykes, “Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is only possible in a society that doesn’t read or think much.” [10]
While “dumbing down the electorate” is not a solely Right-wing phenomenon, “An ignorant electorate is not likely to hold ignorant politicians to account… So ignorance begets ignorance and the tolerance of it in high places.” [11] How expansive can ignorance get before its mere stupidity? Such people are also often emotional, easily duped. Frequently what Right-wing populists defend as Constitutional is its very opposite. Instead, they fervently hold to what they’re told to believe by their propaganda-silos.
Sykes sees this “rise of illiterati” on the Right as a “broader populist anti-intellectualism [that] rejected expertise and authority alike.” [12] Add to this the technology we created that now manipulates us from foreign shores through banquets of gullibility served on Twitter and Facebook, and conservatism became “more personal and less principled—more flippant and less thoughtful. It became mean. It became lazy. As conservatives cultivated their everyman anti-intellectualism [to] deliberately shun erudition, academic excellence, experience, sagaciousness, and expertise in politics.” [13] Logically, the old GOP transformed itself into the new “party of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.” [14] Eventually, they would embrace foreign influence (from Putin), just as George Washington warned against in his 1796 Farwell Address.
When Sykes asks, “did we create this monster?” he provides a yes and no answer. While it was Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner who said, “We fed the beast that ate us”—fed by the liars of talk-radio and FOX—it’s also true that all social movements are counter-movements. As in warfare, where each technology is a response: the bow was a response to the spear, the cross-bow to the bow, the carbine to the cross-bow—measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. Right-wing radicalism was a response to Left-wing radicalism, which was a response to Right-wing abuses like the poll tax, lynchings, and Vietnam War. In a society that peddles sensationalism for a dollar, radicals are hard to miss. Radical minorities overpower silent majorities, and it doesn’t take many. Like the handful of incompetent misfits or criminals Trump gathered, from Corey Lewandowski to convicted felon Paul Manafort, Adolf Hitler began his career with just four cranks. [15]
With molestation from so many quarters, conservatism could no longer draw an even strain. By hindsight, Sykes recognizes an unraveling commence with Newt Gingrich as a pioneer of obstruction in 1994, later purified during Obama. [16] Republicans steered away from deliberation, analysis, and problem-solving. Sound bites like “establishment” and “elites” substituted for thought, in parallel with “a surge in anti-intellectualism in American life.” [17] This abdication of thought was justified by Right-wingers like Sarah Palin because, “It’s really funny to me to see the splodey heads keep ‘sploding,” she quipped. [18] Sound governance, and support for Arnold Toynbee’s thesis that civilizations fail through the disappearance of rigorous political innovators. As conservative Christian, Peter Wehner wrote, it became easier for conservatives to confuse “cruelty, vulgarity, and bluster with strength and straight talk.” [19] As when radio-talker and profanity enthusiast Mike Levin “screamed at a caller that her husband should shoot himself,” or when race-baiter Rush Limbaugh said in Obama’s America, “white kids deserve to get beat up by black kids.” [20] With the Right’s re-education, conservatives “pivoted to embrace Vladimir Putin as an exemplar of white Christian civilization,” orchestrated by Putin’s guns and Bible campaign, when he slithered into the NRA before Trump arrived to follow suit. [21] A task made easier for Putin given the Republican base had become more Southern, where the worst primary and secondary state education systems reside in a nation that ranks near bottom in the industrialized world. Headed south, the party also became more evangelical, primed for creed without question. [22] A shift occurred, tilting from “freedom to authoritarianism, from American ‘exceptionalism’ to nativism [with] repudiation of Reagan’s optimistic agenda replaced by the darker paranoid side of the Right.” [23] “In this environment, conformity was demanded… since even the mildest of dissent was punished by withering fire on-air and through [asocial] media.” [24] A cult was forming. With Trump’s arrival, it coalesced. One so sanctified its members signal fealty by risking their lives and that of loved ones through defiance of protective masks and social distancing at “Donny Appleseed’s” rallies, seeding the Trump virus, while deaths sore in red states. [25]
For the Left’s part, the pejorative mantra “angry white male”—their only accepted racist, sexist slur—“was seldom used in the context of asking whether those white men had any legitimate reason to be angry," says Sykes. “Instead, it was used to argue we should pay even less attention to their voices and issues.” [26] “White privilege” became another chant “even as white working-class America entered a period of acute economic and social decline [as] blue-collar workers faced the loss of jobs, income, and cohesive communities.” [27] The spike in white male suicides was so dramatic that U.S. life expectancy declined. [28] And while we see resurgent racism and sexism, the Left’s hurling of “racist, sexist, homophobe” became so overused that the Right not only responds with a collective yawn but wears it as a badge of honor like their t-shirts announcing, “I’m deplorable!” As one juvenile to another, and no longer feeling a need to grovel at the foot of what Bertrand Russel labeled the “superior virtue of the oppressed,” the Right now responds with, “Yes I am, all of the above. Now let me prove it to you.” Like manmade global warming denial, racism has become another tribal identifier.
“But this [Left-wing bigotry] does not let conservatives off the hook,” writes Sykes. [29] The Right ignored conspiracy theorists after William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan thought they’d defeated the John Birch Society decades before. That failure, says Sykes, became a tacit invitation, in the way Trump welcomes domestic terrorists with a wink, nod, and “stand back and stand by.” [30] Much as Hitler’s Brown Shirts had their own insignias, this phrase was turned into sleeve patches within hours available online.
While the Lincoln Project contributor in this chair (me) hopes our Carnival Barker and his party are eviscerated from every state legislature to the U.S. Senate and Executive in tomorrow’s election, their aberrant psychology is too rich to let alone. The Trump era is historic. It won’t be over even if Putin fails, even if Trump’s want-to-play-army misfits don’t intimidate voters at the polls, even if GOPP state legislators fail to corrupt the Electoral College. [31] With departure of the Greatest Generation along with their virtue and responsibility, this dark episode has peeled back the false layers of what Americans think we are. It exposed the naked fakes dominating still-Trump-supporting “Christians” as rank apostates. [32] And because much of this psychology is universal, it proved again just how dangerous humans can be. What better example of the need for proper governance when face-to-face with that? These and other topics make for fascinating analysis upon which action can be taken. But only if we’re able, freed from combat with cults.
[1] Billy Binion, Rush Limbaugh Abandons Fiscal Conservatism, Reason, 7.18.2019.
[2] Think Trump’s not a terrorist? Some definitions, commentary, and spleen-venting: “Terrorism:” the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes. “Violence:” damage through distortion or unwarranted alteration, rough or immoderate vehemence as of feeling or language, an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power as against rights or laws, rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment. [Dictionary.com] From Trump’s Secret Police beatings, his tear-gassing of peaceful protesters exercising their constitutional right for his photo-op with a Bible (upside-down), his daily assault on the rule of law, to his administration’s hunting of climate scientists early in his term, by these definitions and examples of his countless distortions, Trump is a terrorist. But who needs definitions? We've lived with this beast for four years. Like a dog's definition of a rat, the dog knows one when it sees it.
In Trump's position of authority, we label such people “tyrants,” which properly identifies tyrants as terrorists. A tyrant who invites his militias to terrorize voters, and “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” as Trump’s screwballs scheme to kidnap and execute state governors. It can’t get any clearer than that. Two days ago he lauded domestic terrorists—who also know enough to drive pickup trucks laden with Trump-flags as part of their “Texas Trump Train”—in their attempt to run a Biden / Harris bus off a Texas freeway. Ironically, many of those trucks also flew the U.S. Stars and Stripes. (If these people dislike being labeled “hayseed, hillbilly, hicks,” shouldn’t they stop acting like hayseed, hillbilly, hicks?)
Terrorists are also commonly associated with those who seek to kill innocent people. See SLATE’s The Trump Pandemic: A blow-by-blow account of how the president killed thousands of Americans. Tens of thousands of dead from Covid that would not have died were common-sense action taken to stop it. How many Americans have died and will die as Trump seeds the virus across this continent at his pep rallies where, in adolescent defiance and displays of loyalty, his disciples proudly pack close without masks? How many families have said the only thing their dead family members did wrong was to believe Trump’s dismissal of Covid-19? Instead of that, he told the public it was a hoax. Then he told people to ignore it after he was already recorded by Bob Woodward, saying it was a serious killer on February 10, 2020. Now he says our world-leading 100,000 cases per day and rising death rates (America First!) are numbers faked by the doctors “so they can make more money.” (And, how does that work, exactly? And do the people who buy this ever ask such obvious questions?) So far, at time of writing, that’s 240,000 dead, and at least another 40,000 uncounted, approaching 500,000 total deaths expected as the gift of Trump by Christmas. A tremendous death toll even ISIS would envy. Many fewer would have died if proper action were taken sooner. Still, even after Covid galloped into its first wave, as experts have suggested: $4T initial aid package coupled with four months nationwide shutdown with mandated mask-wearing and social distancing enforced by Federal law (which means coordinated action between Congress and the Executive—imagine that); Defense Production Act used to turn major manufacturers into test makers to test the entire or a satisfactory majority of the nation’s 330,000,000 people multiple times; then trace all infectious interactions and isolate the exposed and infected.
But Trump and his disciples are not problem solvers. Their solution is to lie about doing “a great job” as the dead pile up while Trump, Limbaugh, Hannity, FOX, et. al. say there’s nothing to worry about, Trump got it and look at him, the “strong man.” At least as late as September, Rush Limbaugh still claimed that Covid was less lethal than the flu with fewer than the flu’s 30k-50k deaths per year when Covid deaths were 150,000 by the day he said it, 9/4/20. (Have I said too many times that Limbaugh calls himself a “Christian”? In fact, 82% of “Republicans” call themselves “Christians.” The Apostle Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth.” Ephesians 4:25. Hmm…)
Are Trump’s Covid deaths as culpable as blowing himself up in a crowded market or pulling the trigger as he brags about being able to do on 5th Avenue with impunity? There’s an element of self-responsibility here. Someone has to be dumb enough to sucker themselves into Trump’s orbit and foolish enough to willfully stand near other potential coronavirus vectors to catch it. There are about 60 million such people in this country. They still call themselves “Republicans.” Oh… and did I say they still call themselves “Christians”? For weak men like Trump, who cover their weakness by pretending otherwise, the only power he has is what is granted by these people. It’s not his invisible intellect—one so powerful he paid other boys to take his college exams; it’s not his wealth, as we learn from his tax returns, he has none, but rather a mountain of debt owed to who we can’t yet say (Trump’s trail of money laundering for Russia is well documented by the U.S. Treasury and IRS as noted here before); it’s not even his physical abundance which might provide a caveman impression of power for the undereducated. He commands no innate respect nor fear. And yet, the cult persists, the lemmings follow.
[3] Charles J. Sykes, How The Right Lost Its Mind, St. Martin Griffin, 2018, pg. 25.
[4] Ibid., pg. 25
[5] Ibid., pg. xxxii, xxviii, 3.
[6] Ibid., pg. 37.
[7] Ibid., pg. 36.
[8] Ibid., pg. 28.
[9] Ibid., pg. 28.
[10] Ibid., pg. 29.
[11] Ibid., pg. 27.
[12] Ibid., pg. 28.
[13] Ibid., pg. 28.
[14] Ibid., pg. 28.
[15] William L. Shrier, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Touchstone, 1990. In the early 1920s the central figures were Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Herman Goering, Ernst Roehm, as well as lesser-known members Max Amman, Ulrich Graf, Heinrich Hoffmann, Christian Weber, Hermann Esser, Julius Streicher, described by Shrier as “crackpots of mediocre intelligence,” “confused and shallow philosophers,” “amateur wrestlers,” “lusty beer drinkers,” “scoundrels,” “Jew-baiters,” and “murders, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies.” [pg. 50]. By 1931 Gregor Strasser, Joseph Goebbels, Herman Goering, Ernst Roehm, and Frick Wilhelm were central.
[16] Sykes, pg. xxv.
[17] Ibid., pg. 6.
[18] Ibid, pg. 7.
[19] Ibid, pg. 7.
[20] Ibid, pg. 9.
[21] Ibid., pg. 9.
Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, Guns and religion: How American conservatives grew closer to Putin’s Russia, Washington Post, April 30, 2017. CASEY MICHEL, Russians and the American right started plotting in 1995. We have the notes from the first meeting., Think Progress, JUN 19, 2018. Matthew Rosenberg, Maria Butina Pleads Guilty to Role in a Russian Effort to Influence Conservatives, New York Times, Dec. 13, 2018.
[22] Ibid, pg. 6.
[23] Ibid., pg. 5.
[24] Ibid., pg. 6.
[25] Erin Mansfield, Josh Salman and Dinah Voyles Pulver, Trump’s campaign made stops nationwide. Coronavirus cases surged in his wake in at least five places., USA TODAY, Oct 22, 2020.
[26] Ibid., pg. 14.
[27] Ibid., pg. 14.
[28] BBC, Drug and suicide deaths rise as US life expectancy drops., BBC, 29 November 2018. For extensive detail, see Anne Case & Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton University Press, 2020.
[29] Sykes, pg. 14.
[30] MELISSA QUINN, "Stand back and stand by": Trump declines to condemn white supremacists at debate, CBS NEWS, SEPTEMBER 30, 2020.
[31] GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party, to designate Trump’s creation from Reagan and Lincoln’s GOP, Grand Old Party.
[32] Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, on Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodfreads, January 18, 2020.
Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world, on Goodreads, September 7, 2020.
Today, America's political Right—my old tribe— enthusiastically betrays the Constitution, from hostility to a free press to supporting non-State-regulated militias armed to intimidate in a perversion of the 2nd Amendment. Conservatism has been replaced by radicalism where compromise is treason. Human nature’s worst tendencies are embraced, foremost through their lies. Fiscal responsibility is so passé its once great purveyor, Rush Limbaugh, declared, “this concern for the deficit and budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around.” [1] Trump enthusiastically added $8 trillion to the national debt in just 4-years; a feat that took Obama twice that long to complete. The nation’s defense is scorned as Right-wingers dodge America’s war effort to combat a viral enemy. As for the teachings of Jesus... Jesus who? While the Right welcomes terrorists, from the Proud Boys, Nazis, Klan, QAnon, and the “Texas Trump Train” to America’s #1 terror threat, Donald Trump. Think not? Reference [2]. Recall, this is the “law and order” party.
It is this right-side of America’s failure that old-style Reagan conservative Charles Sykes wrote his postmortem about. [3] “Among the many ironies of the conservative implosion,” writes Sykes, “was how the Right became what it once mocked.” [4] “Conservatives once recognized that politics was a means, not an end because they believed that we live in communities sustained by moral capital, recognizing…that moral communities are ‘fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy.’ Somehow a movement based on ideas devolved into a new tribalism that valued neither principle nor truth…” [5]
Sykes’ focus is on the Right’s moral, ethical, and intellectual collapse. He hits a number of crucial causes, ignoring the Right’s economic debacles. Philosophical divisions were born early, says Sykes. “Fusionism” attempted to unify the countervailing conservative forces of freedom of the person with a Christian understanding of moral responsibility to others. Fusionists remind us that the “Constitutional Convention in 1787 had not embraced either the ‘libertarian’ vision of the Jeffersonian nor the ‘authoritarian’ politics of Alexander Hamilton, but instead steered a middle course laid out by James Madison…” [6] Conservative Russell Kirk resisted emphasis on individualism as “social atomism” incompatible with traditional Christianity. [7] One of the goals of the conservative flagship National Review was to reconcile these schools of thought, from traditionalists and libertarians to anticommunists. This required deliberation, analysis, and rational acumen. But anti-rationalism is a long-standing bone in the American posture. It only got stronger, and the Right now wields it like a weapon.
Echoing Allan Bloom, Sykes recognizes that prior ideas of conservatism and decency belonged to an age “when statesmen actually read books.” [8] “The American Founders… had in the main all consumed the same library of Greek and Latin classics, British and Continental literature from fiction to political economy… This did not lead to a uniformity of opinion [but] literate and enlightened argument.” [9] Today, the Right’s aggressive ignorance scraps the Founder’s Enlightenment while simultaneously lauding these very men whose expertise and science they reject. For Sykes, “Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is only possible in a society that doesn’t read or think much.” [10]
While “dumbing down the electorate” is not a solely Right-wing phenomenon, “An ignorant electorate is not likely to hold ignorant politicians to account… So ignorance begets ignorance and the tolerance of it in high places.” [11] How expansive can ignorance get before its mere stupidity? Such people are also often emotional, easily duped. Frequently what Right-wing populists defend as Constitutional is its very opposite. Instead, they fervently hold to what they’re told to believe by their propaganda-silos.
Sykes sees this “rise of illiterati” on the Right as a “broader populist anti-intellectualism [that] rejected expertise and authority alike.” [12] Add to this the technology we created that now manipulates us from foreign shores through banquets of gullibility served on Twitter and Facebook, and conservatism became “more personal and less principled—more flippant and less thoughtful. It became mean. It became lazy. As conservatives cultivated their everyman anti-intellectualism [to] deliberately shun erudition, academic excellence, experience, sagaciousness, and expertise in politics.” [13] Logically, the old GOP transformed itself into the new “party of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.” [14] Eventually, they would embrace foreign influence (from Putin), just as George Washington warned against in his 1796 Farwell Address.
When Sykes asks, “did we create this monster?” he provides a yes and no answer. While it was Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner who said, “We fed the beast that ate us”—fed by the liars of talk-radio and FOX—it’s also true that all social movements are counter-movements. As in warfare, where each technology is a response: the bow was a response to the spear, the cross-bow to the bow, the carbine to the cross-bow—measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure. Right-wing radicalism was a response to Left-wing radicalism, which was a response to Right-wing abuses like the poll tax, lynchings, and Vietnam War. In a society that peddles sensationalism for a dollar, radicals are hard to miss. Radical minorities overpower silent majorities, and it doesn’t take many. Like the handful of incompetent misfits or criminals Trump gathered, from Corey Lewandowski to convicted felon Paul Manafort, Adolf Hitler began his career with just four cranks. [15]
With molestation from so many quarters, conservatism could no longer draw an even strain. By hindsight, Sykes recognizes an unraveling commence with Newt Gingrich as a pioneer of obstruction in 1994, later purified during Obama. [16] Republicans steered away from deliberation, analysis, and problem-solving. Sound bites like “establishment” and “elites” substituted for thought, in parallel with “a surge in anti-intellectualism in American life.” [17] This abdication of thought was justified by Right-wingers like Sarah Palin because, “It’s really funny to me to see the splodey heads keep ‘sploding,” she quipped. [18] Sound governance, and support for Arnold Toynbee’s thesis that civilizations fail through the disappearance of rigorous political innovators. As conservative Christian, Peter Wehner wrote, it became easier for conservatives to confuse “cruelty, vulgarity, and bluster with strength and straight talk.” [19] As when radio-talker and profanity enthusiast Mike Levin “screamed at a caller that her husband should shoot himself,” or when race-baiter Rush Limbaugh said in Obama’s America, “white kids deserve to get beat up by black kids.” [20] With the Right’s re-education, conservatives “pivoted to embrace Vladimir Putin as an exemplar of white Christian civilization,” orchestrated by Putin’s guns and Bible campaign, when he slithered into the NRA before Trump arrived to follow suit. [21] A task made easier for Putin given the Republican base had become more Southern, where the worst primary and secondary state education systems reside in a nation that ranks near bottom in the industrialized world. Headed south, the party also became more evangelical, primed for creed without question. [22] A shift occurred, tilting from “freedom to authoritarianism, from American ‘exceptionalism’ to nativism [with] repudiation of Reagan’s optimistic agenda replaced by the darker paranoid side of the Right.” [23] “In this environment, conformity was demanded… since even the mildest of dissent was punished by withering fire on-air and through [asocial] media.” [24] A cult was forming. With Trump’s arrival, it coalesced. One so sanctified its members signal fealty by risking their lives and that of loved ones through defiance of protective masks and social distancing at “Donny Appleseed’s” rallies, seeding the Trump virus, while deaths sore in red states. [25]
For the Left’s part, the pejorative mantra “angry white male”—their only accepted racist, sexist slur—“was seldom used in the context of asking whether those white men had any legitimate reason to be angry," says Sykes. “Instead, it was used to argue we should pay even less attention to their voices and issues.” [26] “White privilege” became another chant “even as white working-class America entered a period of acute economic and social decline [as] blue-collar workers faced the loss of jobs, income, and cohesive communities.” [27] The spike in white male suicides was so dramatic that U.S. life expectancy declined. [28] And while we see resurgent racism and sexism, the Left’s hurling of “racist, sexist, homophobe” became so overused that the Right not only responds with a collective yawn but wears it as a badge of honor like their t-shirts announcing, “I’m deplorable!” As one juvenile to another, and no longer feeling a need to grovel at the foot of what Bertrand Russel labeled the “superior virtue of the oppressed,” the Right now responds with, “Yes I am, all of the above. Now let me prove it to you.” Like manmade global warming denial, racism has become another tribal identifier.
“But this [Left-wing bigotry] does not let conservatives off the hook,” writes Sykes. [29] The Right ignored conspiracy theorists after William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan thought they’d defeated the John Birch Society decades before. That failure, says Sykes, became a tacit invitation, in the way Trump welcomes domestic terrorists with a wink, nod, and “stand back and stand by.” [30] Much as Hitler’s Brown Shirts had their own insignias, this phrase was turned into sleeve patches within hours available online.
While the Lincoln Project contributor in this chair (me) hopes our Carnival Barker and his party are eviscerated from every state legislature to the U.S. Senate and Executive in tomorrow’s election, their aberrant psychology is too rich to let alone. The Trump era is historic. It won’t be over even if Putin fails, even if Trump’s want-to-play-army misfits don’t intimidate voters at the polls, even if GOPP state legislators fail to corrupt the Electoral College. [31] With departure of the Greatest Generation along with their virtue and responsibility, this dark episode has peeled back the false layers of what Americans think we are. It exposed the naked fakes dominating still-Trump-supporting “Christians” as rank apostates. [32] And because much of this psychology is universal, it proved again just how dangerous humans can be. What better example of the need for proper governance when face-to-face with that? These and other topics make for fascinating analysis upon which action can be taken. But only if we’re able, freed from combat with cults.
[1] Billy Binion, Rush Limbaugh Abandons Fiscal Conservatism, Reason, 7.18.2019.
[2] Think Trump’s not a terrorist? Some definitions, commentary, and spleen-venting: “Terrorism:” the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes. “Violence:” damage through distortion or unwarranted alteration, rough or immoderate vehemence as of feeling or language, an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power as against rights or laws, rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment. [Dictionary.com] From Trump’s Secret Police beatings, his tear-gassing of peaceful protesters exercising their constitutional right for his photo-op with a Bible (upside-down), his daily assault on the rule of law, to his administration’s hunting of climate scientists early in his term, by these definitions and examples of his countless distortions, Trump is a terrorist. But who needs definitions? We've lived with this beast for four years. Like a dog's definition of a rat, the dog knows one when it sees it.
In Trump's position of authority, we label such people “tyrants,” which properly identifies tyrants as terrorists. A tyrant who invites his militias to terrorize voters, and “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” as Trump’s screwballs scheme to kidnap and execute state governors. It can’t get any clearer than that. Two days ago he lauded domestic terrorists—who also know enough to drive pickup trucks laden with Trump-flags as part of their “Texas Trump Train”—in their attempt to run a Biden / Harris bus off a Texas freeway. Ironically, many of those trucks also flew the U.S. Stars and Stripes. (If these people dislike being labeled “hayseed, hillbilly, hicks,” shouldn’t they stop acting like hayseed, hillbilly, hicks?)
Terrorists are also commonly associated with those who seek to kill innocent people. See SLATE’s The Trump Pandemic: A blow-by-blow account of how the president killed thousands of Americans. Tens of thousands of dead from Covid that would not have died were common-sense action taken to stop it. How many Americans have died and will die as Trump seeds the virus across this continent at his pep rallies where, in adolescent defiance and displays of loyalty, his disciples proudly pack close without masks? How many families have said the only thing their dead family members did wrong was to believe Trump’s dismissal of Covid-19? Instead of that, he told the public it was a hoax. Then he told people to ignore it after he was already recorded by Bob Woodward, saying it was a serious killer on February 10, 2020. Now he says our world-leading 100,000 cases per day and rising death rates (America First!) are numbers faked by the doctors “so they can make more money.” (And, how does that work, exactly? And do the people who buy this ever ask such obvious questions?) So far, at time of writing, that’s 240,000 dead, and at least another 40,000 uncounted, approaching 500,000 total deaths expected as the gift of Trump by Christmas. A tremendous death toll even ISIS would envy. Many fewer would have died if proper action were taken sooner. Still, even after Covid galloped into its first wave, as experts have suggested: $4T initial aid package coupled with four months nationwide shutdown with mandated mask-wearing and social distancing enforced by Federal law (which means coordinated action between Congress and the Executive—imagine that); Defense Production Act used to turn major manufacturers into test makers to test the entire or a satisfactory majority of the nation’s 330,000,000 people multiple times; then trace all infectious interactions and isolate the exposed and infected.
But Trump and his disciples are not problem solvers. Their solution is to lie about doing “a great job” as the dead pile up while Trump, Limbaugh, Hannity, FOX, et. al. say there’s nothing to worry about, Trump got it and look at him, the “strong man.” At least as late as September, Rush Limbaugh still claimed that Covid was less lethal than the flu with fewer than the flu’s 30k-50k deaths per year when Covid deaths were 150,000 by the day he said it, 9/4/20. (Have I said too many times that Limbaugh calls himself a “Christian”? In fact, 82% of “Republicans” call themselves “Christians.” The Apostle Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth.” Ephesians 4:25. Hmm…)
Are Trump’s Covid deaths as culpable as blowing himself up in a crowded market or pulling the trigger as he brags about being able to do on 5th Avenue with impunity? There’s an element of self-responsibility here. Someone has to be dumb enough to sucker themselves into Trump’s orbit and foolish enough to willfully stand near other potential coronavirus vectors to catch it. There are about 60 million such people in this country. They still call themselves “Republicans.” Oh… and did I say they still call themselves “Christians”? For weak men like Trump, who cover their weakness by pretending otherwise, the only power he has is what is granted by these people. It’s not his invisible intellect—one so powerful he paid other boys to take his college exams; it’s not his wealth, as we learn from his tax returns, he has none, but rather a mountain of debt owed to who we can’t yet say (Trump’s trail of money laundering for Russia is well documented by the U.S. Treasury and IRS as noted here before); it’s not even his physical abundance which might provide a caveman impression of power for the undereducated. He commands no innate respect nor fear. And yet, the cult persists, the lemmings follow.
[3] Charles J. Sykes, How The Right Lost Its Mind, St. Martin Griffin, 2018, pg. 25.
[4] Ibid., pg. 25
[5] Ibid., pg. xxxii, xxviii, 3.
[6] Ibid., pg. 37.
[7] Ibid., pg. 36.
[8] Ibid., pg. 28.
[9] Ibid., pg. 28.
[10] Ibid., pg. 29.
[11] Ibid., pg. 27.
[12] Ibid., pg. 28.
[13] Ibid., pg. 28.
[14] Ibid., pg. 28.
[15] William L. Shrier, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Touchstone, 1990. In the early 1920s the central figures were Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Herman Goering, Ernst Roehm, as well as lesser-known members Max Amman, Ulrich Graf, Heinrich Hoffmann, Christian Weber, Hermann Esser, Julius Streicher, described by Shrier as “crackpots of mediocre intelligence,” “confused and shallow philosophers,” “amateur wrestlers,” “lusty beer drinkers,” “scoundrels,” “Jew-baiters,” and “murders, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies.” [pg. 50]. By 1931 Gregor Strasser, Joseph Goebbels, Herman Goering, Ernst Roehm, and Frick Wilhelm were central.
[16] Sykes, pg. xxv.
[17] Ibid., pg. 6.
[18] Ibid, pg. 7.
[19] Ibid, pg. 7.
[20] Ibid, pg. 9.
[21] Ibid., pg. 9.
Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, Guns and religion: How American conservatives grew closer to Putin’s Russia, Washington Post, April 30, 2017. CASEY MICHEL, Russians and the American right started plotting in 1995. We have the notes from the first meeting., Think Progress, JUN 19, 2018. Matthew Rosenberg, Maria Butina Pleads Guilty to Role in a Russian Effort to Influence Conservatives, New York Times, Dec. 13, 2018.
[22] Ibid, pg. 6.
[23] Ibid., pg. 5.
[24] Ibid., pg. 6.
[25] Erin Mansfield, Josh Salman and Dinah Voyles Pulver, Trump’s campaign made stops nationwide. Coronavirus cases surged in his wake in at least five places., USA TODAY, Oct 22, 2020.
[26] Ibid., pg. 14.
[27] Ibid., pg. 14.
[28] BBC, Drug and suicide deaths rise as US life expectancy drops., BBC, 29 November 2018. For extensive detail, see Anne Case & Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton University Press, 2020.
[29] Sykes, pg. 14.
[30] MELISSA QUINN, "Stand back and stand by": Trump declines to condemn white supremacists at debate, CBS NEWS, SEPTEMBER 30, 2020.
[31] GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party, to designate Trump’s creation from Reagan and Lincoln’s GOP, Grand Old Party.
[32] Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, on Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodfreads, January 18, 2020.
Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
Brett Williams, America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world, on Goodreads, September 7, 2020.
September 7, 2020
September 7, 2020: America’s history lesson: Seven truths Trump taught the world
In Peter Beinart’s review of books, he summarizes his collection as “chronicling both the decline of American power and the decline of American exceptionalism: [that is,] the belief that the United States is immune to tribalism and authoritarianism that plague other parts of the world.” [1] As we now know, it is not. As the New Right busies itself with making America a full-blown tyranny, the most common and sometimes cavalier comparison is Nazi Germany. (Clichés are clichés for a reason.) However, when it comes to political sects, as Brookings Institute’s Jonathan Rauch shows, ideology is irrelevant; fanatic cranks on both Left and Right operate in the same manner as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and now Trump have demonstrated. [2] For many humans suffering from disconnected modernity, our fix is a tribal cult based on who we hate—or more accurately, who we can be made to hate.
Ashamed to be Americans after four years of national humiliation, laughed at and pitied by the world, even incapable of facing a common viral enemy thanks to an all-rights-no-responsibilities faction stoked by our propaganda networks, we watch America retreat. [3] Dazed and impotent like a 3rd world country with a 1st world economy, "alternative facts" have lacerated truth and trust to dismember the social body, from our highest institutions to the man on the street. As moral philosopher Stuart Rachels illustrates, no civilization long survives without trust and the capacity for truth. [4]
Domestic institutions are hanging on by efforts of the rank and file, but political loyalists appointed to run them are in control. Many of them in “acting” roles, some illegal, free to abuse without the people’s review by a craven Senate. [5] With recent discoveries of executive powers undisclosed even to Congress, shadow authorities emerge, facilitated by Attorney General and Trump-fixer, Bill Barr, to direct Trump’s Secret Police. [6] Like Himmler’s early S.S., these unmarked agents kidnap people off streets far removed from Federal property they ostensibly protect (while some protesters provide Trump the vandal video he wants). They beat Navy veterans and break the skulls of old men with “lethal cell phones,” as China jokes about U.S. criticism of China’s human rights abuse. [7] Cultivated by hardships of the Great Depression and WWII, moral leadership by the Greatest Generation seems to have died with them and the last Cold War president.
Though not entirely. As Trump and his enablers denied, dithered, and diverted, frontline nurses and doctors risked and sometimes lost their lives to fight a virus that couldn’t be bullied by liars. While refrigerator trucks filled with dead people in blue-state New York, then a defiant red-state Texas as it swaggered into the record books, medical staff showed those with a spine can still stand up to evil. [8] We expect that every person they saved praised the science and expertise of someone who knew what they were doing, rather than vilify them under oath of tribal creed in a nation whose scientists and experts once put men on the moon. All the while, Trump and his bootlickers nurtured their conspiracy theories spoon-fed by comrade Putin.
As America appears to imitate 1934 Germany, we’ve arrived, after what seems an eternity, at the 2020 election just two months away. At this juncture, it might do to assess what’s been learned from Trump and his disciples:
1. Crime pays. Consider Trump’s money laundering through casinos and real estate; his fake university scam; his bribery of Ukraine; Russian collusion (not conspiracy) as proven by Mueller and validated by the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; his fleecing of U.S. taxpayers and foreign nations; all were considered here, supported by IRS, Treasury, Senate, House, and media investigations. [9] Trump is a walking crime wave, but a lucrative one. After 40-years immersed in New York and Russian mafia, surrounded by convicted felons, “law and order” Trump stumbled into a position he had no idea could be so safe for a life of crime. The only person in a nation of 330,000,000 above the law.
2. The stage was set, and we didn’t know it. Economists “assumed” their domestic models applied worldwide. [10] Jobs lost in one location would be offset by jobs created through innovation elsewhere. Instead, under “hyper-globalization,” when we paid China for manufactured goods, we also gave them our jobs. [11] Such are the economic “experts” blue-collar Americans rightly denounce, though the New Right includes hard science experts to make themselves feel better and because Rush Limbaugh told them to. For labor, this was groundwork, like Germany’s economic collapse delivered by a punitive Versailles Treaty. Add to this: corporations more powerful than nations; authoritarian political correctness; death of the Fairness Doctrine spawning our propaganda-silos; a U.S. K-12 educational system ranked near bottom in the industrialized world to yield attenuated reasoning and scientific illiteracy; collapse of Right-wing Christian morality; isolation through loss of belonging predictable in individualistic modernity, and the stage was set for a rise in primate behavior. [12] With demise of an external enemy in the USSR, The End of History turned out to be The Bumbling Superpower. Bush-Cheney’s Iraq Calamity and laissez-faire pandering to unregulated Wall Street gamblers who gave themselves a $20B bonus for wrecking the world economy further depleted American confidence as the working Joe lost his job and home. [13] People were pissed. They wanted to break things. Trump was just another dumb hammer.
3. The supremacy of our reptile brain. “The reptilian structure [in our brain] is the most primitive to ripen in the long line of human mental development. Responsible for feelings of urgency—gag, vomit, defecation, sex, fight or flight—it’s the oldest structure, fundamental to blind survival in a man-eating world, and irresistibly mighty.” [14] Commandeered by primate tribalism, this tool can make people defraud everything they once stood for. [15] Evolutionary mechanisms adapted to ensure species survival guarantee that any clan-threatening reason, proof, or science is rejected to save the clan. What Eric Hoffer terms that “fact proof screen between the faithful and realities of this world.” [16] “We are wired…so that our reasoning [supports] in-group solidarity,” writes Jonathan Rauch. “Presenting people with facts that challenge group-defining opinions does not work. Instead of changing their minds, they [reject] facts to double down on false beliefs…regardless of educational and cognitive firepower.” [17] Polarization is not a byproduct, “polarization is the product [as] cravings for shared outrage against a common adversary.” [18]
4. The internet is smarter than we are. With laws established to protect social media from litigation other media is subject to, anything goes on the internet. We invented and built a platform for hostile powers to upend nations for low cost and no risk, except for complaints about it. The internet proves how poorly humans sift fact from fake. We even prefer fake news over real news as more sensational. [19] Without regulation, social media business models profit off this sabotage of open Western society. [20]
5. As students of history, our Founders anticipated despots, but this? Could America’s Founders have conjured Trump and his true-believers hell-bent on subverting Constitutional governance? Trump defied Congressional subpoenas under claims of “absolute immunity” (“Wrong,” said the Court); hid or destroyed classified documents; appointed family members to the highest security positions despite Defense Investigative Service rejections; fired Inspector Generals as retribution and to hide his corruption; persists in secret meetings with America’s enemy, Putin, un-phased by Putin’s bounty on U.S. troops because, as Trump said, American soldiers are “losers” and “suckers;” and installed inept loyalist to intelligence and Health and Human Services amid a persistent KGB/FSB cyberwar and coronavirus pandemic to teeter this Republic and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. [21] All as Congress proved helpless to do anything about it, other than a momentous but symbolic gesture of impeachment. Who knew just how toothless Congress really is? [22]
6. Politics trumps religion. What is a Christian? Complex as that answer can be, might we simplify it as one who at least attempts to practice the teachings of Christ? But if someone who identifies as a Christian makes no such attempt, proudly rejecting those teachings for political orthodoxy, are they Christian? Is their “faith” simply a crutch when fate calls? For these people, their in-group is the party, not the church. Their idol is Trump, not Jesus. Per David Hume, “the highest zeal in religion and the deepest hypocrisy, far from being inconsistent, are commonly united in the same individual.” [23] Judged not by their commitment but by their actions, we’ve considered here before how Trump-supporting Christians betray their Savior for politics. [24] As evangelist Pat Robertson expressed Trump’s “Mandate of Heaven,” so too in 1937, Hans Kerrl said, “The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation.” [25]
7. A large faction in America is no different than any other totalitarian. Surveys show half of “Republicans” want an authoritarian dictatorship, discharging that Constitution they pretend to revere. A third of “Republicans” favor Putin. Their House and Senate representatives promote Putin’s talking points, and those like Representative Devin Nunez, assisted by Rudolph Giuliani, actively seek Russian assistance in the coming election. [26]
Once upon a time, the U.S. was the world’s champion of democratic governance. The post-WWII order implemented worldwide institutions (not worldwide government) to stall WWIII. For 70 of the most prosperous years in all of human history, it worked. [27] But the Greatest Generation gave way to the next, economists bumbled #2 noted above to stimulate that reptile brain of #3 inflamed by asocial media of #4, thus inviting America’s Carnival Barker in #5, only to find a large faction of Christians and Americans noted in #6 and #7 aren’t so special after all. On the heels of National Book Award winner George Packer’s conclusion that America is now a failed state, Reagan conservative George Will wrote, “This is what national decline looks like.” [28]
As 44 B.C. Rome, 1934 Germany, and 2020 America remind us, pathologies rooted in human mental circuitry have not changed since the rise of Homo sapiens. The Right-wing is not alone in this as campus free-speech bans, “Cancel Culture,” and despotic leftist postmodernism will attest. American “exceptionalism” Peter Beinart noted, is now a fallacy.
But there are glimmers in the dark. In two months, America’s tyranny will harden, or it won’t. And we are witness to history—live, not in a book.
[1] Peter Beinart, Obama’s Idealists: American Power in Theory and Practice, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2919, pg. 162-169.
[2] Jonathan Rauch, Rethinking Polarization, National Affairs, Fall 2019.
[3] Tom McTague, The Decline of the American World, The Atlantic, June 24, 2020.
Philip Bump, A majority of Americans are embarrassed by President Trump, The Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2017.
Timothy Egan, The World Is Taking Pity on Us, New York Times, May 8, 2020.
OLGA KHAZAN, Americans Are Getting Secondhand Embarrassment From Trump , The Atlantic, MARCH 27, 2019.
Aaron Blake, A brief history of world leaders laughing at Trump, The Washington Post, Dec. 4, 2019.
Megan McArdle, Conservatives who refuse to wear masks undercut a central claim of their beliefs, The Washington Post, May 27, 2020.
[4] Stuart Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, McGraw-Hill, 2010.
[5] Michael D. Shear, G.A.O. Says Top Homeland Security Officials Are Serving Illegally, New York Times, Aug. 14, 2020.
[6] Elizabeth Goitein and Andrew Boyle, Trump Has Emergency Powers We Aren’t Allowed to Know About, New York Times, April 10, 2020.
Gary Hart, How Powerful Is the President?, New York Times, July 23, 2020.
ERIC LUTZ, TRUMP'S SECRET POLICE: COMING TO A CITY NEAR YOU, Vanity Fair, July 21, 2020.
[7] TIM DICKINSON, How Oregon Is Pushing Back Against ‘Kidnap and False Arrest’ by Trump’s Agents, Rolling Stone, July 21, 2020
ANDREW SELSKY, Navy vet beaten by federal agents on the streets of Portland, Oregon: ‘They came out to fight’, ASSOCIATED PRESS, JUL 20, 2020.
QUINT FORGEY, Trump’s conspiracy theory on 75-year-old protester draws sharp backlash, POLITICO, 06/09/2020.
Peter Baker, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Monica Davey, Trump Threatens to Send Federal Law Enforcement Forces to More Cities, New York Times, July 24, 2020.
Dan Friedman, Federal Agents Invade Portland, Citing Trump’s Executive Order Protecting Statues, Mother Jones, July 17, 2020.
Riyaz ul Khaliq, ‘US world’s top human rights violator,’ China says, Anadolu Agency (ANKARA, Turkey), 16.07.2020.
[8] CAITLIN O'KANE, Refrigerated trucks requested in Texas and Arizona as morgues fill up due to coronavirus deaths, CBS NEWS, JULY 15, 2020.
Philip Bump, The shift of the coronavirus to primarily red states is complete — but it’s not that simple, Washington Post, June 24, 2020.
[9] Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
Brett Williams, America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”, on Goodreads, January 6, 2019.
Sean Illing, Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades: Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history”, VOX, Jan 12, 2019.
See The Asset Podcast for extensive details.
[10] To “assume” models work is unheard of in the hard sciences. Hence, one of many reasons why economics and the other social “sciences” should be called the social “studies” instead. Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade , Annu. Rev. Econ, 11/21/2016. Automation is now a significant factor in U.S. job loss, but not 30 years ago when this process started.
[11] Dani Rodrik, Globalization’s Wrong Turn, Foreign Affairs, July/August, 2019. As Rodrick writes, “Globalization became the end, national economies the means.”
[12] ARAG KHANNA, These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries, Foreign Policy, March/April, 2016.
Katy Steinmetz, The Death of the Fairness Doctrine, TIME, Aug. 23, 2011.
JILL BARSHAY, U.S. now ranks near the bottom among 35 industrialized nations in math, The Hechinger Report, December 6, 2016.
JILL BARSHAY, What 2018 PISA international rankings tell us about U.S. schools, The Hechinger Report,December 16, 2019.
Peter Wehner, Conservatives Have Only One Choice in 2020: After what we have seen during Trump’s first term, any true conservative should be appalled by the prospect of a second., New York Times, Aug. 24, 2020.
JEFF BRUMLEY, Support for Trump could spell end of the evangelical church. But when?, Baptist News Global, MARCH 19, 2018.
[13] CBS NEWS, Wall Street Doled $20B in Bonuses in 2009, CBS/AP, FEBRUARY 23, 2010.
[14] Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
[15] Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodfreads, January 18, 2020.
[16] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Perennial, 1989.
[17] Jonathan Rauch, Rethinking Polarization, National Affairs, Fall 2019.
[18] Ibid. Extreme partisanship may be addictive, says social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as justifying lies gives partisans a hit of dopamine. “Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things.”
[19] Hiawatha Bray, Survey says: Many Americans love their fake news, Boston Globe, January 17, 2020.
ROBINSON MEYER, The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News: Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information., The Atlantic, MARCH 8, 2018.
[20] FRONTLINE, The Facebook Dilemma (Part One), Goodreads, PBS, Aired: 10/29/18.
FRONTLINE, The Facebook Dilemma (Part Two), PBS, Aired: 10/30/18.
[21] JEFFREY GOLDBERG, Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’, The Atlantic, SEPTEMBER 3, 2020.
SCOTT DETROW, AYESHA RASCOE, CARRIE JOHNSON, Presidents Do Not Have Absolute Immunity, Supreme Court Rules, NPR, July 9, 2020.
Rachael Bade and Tom Hamburger, White House whistleblower says 25 security clearance denials were reversed during Trump administration, Washington Post, April 1, 2019.
George Packer, The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions, The Atlantic, APRIL 2020.
Aaron Blake, Pompeo just undercut Trump’s continued dismissal of Russian bounties, Washington Post, August 13, 2020.
James Glanz and Campbell Robertson, Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Show, New York Times, May 20, 2020.
Gene Jarecki, Trump’s covid-19 inaction killed Americans, Washington Post, May 6, 2020.
[22] Dareh Gregorian, Trump impeached by the House for abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, NBC NEWS, Dec. 18, 2019.
[23] David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Penguin, 1990 (1779), pg. 133.
[24] Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, on Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodfreads, January 18, 2020.
Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
[25] William L. Shrirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Touchstone Simon & Shuster, 1990, pg. 239. And as Thomas Paine wrote, “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind…he has prepared himself for commission of every other crime.” Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Prometheus Books, 1984 (1794), pg. 8.
[26] Vicky Ward, Giuliani associate willing to tell Congress Nunes met with ex-Ukrainian official to get dirt on Biden, CNN, November 23, 2019.
JOHN BOWDEN, Nunes declines to answer if he received information from Ukraine lawmaker meant to damage Biden, The Hill, 07/30/20. And yes, I meant "faction," a political portion, not "fraction," a portion.
[27] Wikipedia, Post–World War II economic expansion.
[28] George Packer, We Are Living in a Failed State, The Atlantic, JUNE 2020.
George F. Will, The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come., Washington Post, July 15, 2020.
Ashamed to be Americans after four years of national humiliation, laughed at and pitied by the world, even incapable of facing a common viral enemy thanks to an all-rights-no-responsibilities faction stoked by our propaganda networks, we watch America retreat. [3] Dazed and impotent like a 3rd world country with a 1st world economy, "alternative facts" have lacerated truth and trust to dismember the social body, from our highest institutions to the man on the street. As moral philosopher Stuart Rachels illustrates, no civilization long survives without trust and the capacity for truth. [4]
Domestic institutions are hanging on by efforts of the rank and file, but political loyalists appointed to run them are in control. Many of them in “acting” roles, some illegal, free to abuse without the people’s review by a craven Senate. [5] With recent discoveries of executive powers undisclosed even to Congress, shadow authorities emerge, facilitated by Attorney General and Trump-fixer, Bill Barr, to direct Trump’s Secret Police. [6] Like Himmler’s early S.S., these unmarked agents kidnap people off streets far removed from Federal property they ostensibly protect (while some protesters provide Trump the vandal video he wants). They beat Navy veterans and break the skulls of old men with “lethal cell phones,” as China jokes about U.S. criticism of China’s human rights abuse. [7] Cultivated by hardships of the Great Depression and WWII, moral leadership by the Greatest Generation seems to have died with them and the last Cold War president.
Though not entirely. As Trump and his enablers denied, dithered, and diverted, frontline nurses and doctors risked and sometimes lost their lives to fight a virus that couldn’t be bullied by liars. While refrigerator trucks filled with dead people in blue-state New York, then a defiant red-state Texas as it swaggered into the record books, medical staff showed those with a spine can still stand up to evil. [8] We expect that every person they saved praised the science and expertise of someone who knew what they were doing, rather than vilify them under oath of tribal creed in a nation whose scientists and experts once put men on the moon. All the while, Trump and his bootlickers nurtured their conspiracy theories spoon-fed by comrade Putin.
As America appears to imitate 1934 Germany, we’ve arrived, after what seems an eternity, at the 2020 election just two months away. At this juncture, it might do to assess what’s been learned from Trump and his disciples:
1. Crime pays. Consider Trump’s money laundering through casinos and real estate; his fake university scam; his bribery of Ukraine; Russian collusion (not conspiracy) as proven by Mueller and validated by the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; his fleecing of U.S. taxpayers and foreign nations; all were considered here, supported by IRS, Treasury, Senate, House, and media investigations. [9] Trump is a walking crime wave, but a lucrative one. After 40-years immersed in New York and Russian mafia, surrounded by convicted felons, “law and order” Trump stumbled into a position he had no idea could be so safe for a life of crime. The only person in a nation of 330,000,000 above the law.
2. The stage was set, and we didn’t know it. Economists “assumed” their domestic models applied worldwide. [10] Jobs lost in one location would be offset by jobs created through innovation elsewhere. Instead, under “hyper-globalization,” when we paid China for manufactured goods, we also gave them our jobs. [11] Such are the economic “experts” blue-collar Americans rightly denounce, though the New Right includes hard science experts to make themselves feel better and because Rush Limbaugh told them to. For labor, this was groundwork, like Germany’s economic collapse delivered by a punitive Versailles Treaty. Add to this: corporations more powerful than nations; authoritarian political correctness; death of the Fairness Doctrine spawning our propaganda-silos; a U.S. K-12 educational system ranked near bottom in the industrialized world to yield attenuated reasoning and scientific illiteracy; collapse of Right-wing Christian morality; isolation through loss of belonging predictable in individualistic modernity, and the stage was set for a rise in primate behavior. [12] With demise of an external enemy in the USSR, The End of History turned out to be The Bumbling Superpower. Bush-Cheney’s Iraq Calamity and laissez-faire pandering to unregulated Wall Street gamblers who gave themselves a $20B bonus for wrecking the world economy further depleted American confidence as the working Joe lost his job and home. [13] People were pissed. They wanted to break things. Trump was just another dumb hammer.
3. The supremacy of our reptile brain. “The reptilian structure [in our brain] is the most primitive to ripen in the long line of human mental development. Responsible for feelings of urgency—gag, vomit, defecation, sex, fight or flight—it’s the oldest structure, fundamental to blind survival in a man-eating world, and irresistibly mighty.” [14] Commandeered by primate tribalism, this tool can make people defraud everything they once stood for. [15] Evolutionary mechanisms adapted to ensure species survival guarantee that any clan-threatening reason, proof, or science is rejected to save the clan. What Eric Hoffer terms that “fact proof screen between the faithful and realities of this world.” [16] “We are wired…so that our reasoning [supports] in-group solidarity,” writes Jonathan Rauch. “Presenting people with facts that challenge group-defining opinions does not work. Instead of changing their minds, they [reject] facts to double down on false beliefs…regardless of educational and cognitive firepower.” [17] Polarization is not a byproduct, “polarization is the product [as] cravings for shared outrage against a common adversary.” [18]
4. The internet is smarter than we are. With laws established to protect social media from litigation other media is subject to, anything goes on the internet. We invented and built a platform for hostile powers to upend nations for low cost and no risk, except for complaints about it. The internet proves how poorly humans sift fact from fake. We even prefer fake news over real news as more sensational. [19] Without regulation, social media business models profit off this sabotage of open Western society. [20]
5. As students of history, our Founders anticipated despots, but this? Could America’s Founders have conjured Trump and his true-believers hell-bent on subverting Constitutional governance? Trump defied Congressional subpoenas under claims of “absolute immunity” (“Wrong,” said the Court); hid or destroyed classified documents; appointed family members to the highest security positions despite Defense Investigative Service rejections; fired Inspector Generals as retribution and to hide his corruption; persists in secret meetings with America’s enemy, Putin, un-phased by Putin’s bounty on U.S. troops because, as Trump said, American soldiers are “losers” and “suckers;” and installed inept loyalist to intelligence and Health and Human Services amid a persistent KGB/FSB cyberwar and coronavirus pandemic to teeter this Republic and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. [21] All as Congress proved helpless to do anything about it, other than a momentous but symbolic gesture of impeachment. Who knew just how toothless Congress really is? [22]
6. Politics trumps religion. What is a Christian? Complex as that answer can be, might we simplify it as one who at least attempts to practice the teachings of Christ? But if someone who identifies as a Christian makes no such attempt, proudly rejecting those teachings for political orthodoxy, are they Christian? Is their “faith” simply a crutch when fate calls? For these people, their in-group is the party, not the church. Their idol is Trump, not Jesus. Per David Hume, “the highest zeal in religion and the deepest hypocrisy, far from being inconsistent, are commonly united in the same individual.” [23] Judged not by their commitment but by their actions, we’ve considered here before how Trump-supporting Christians betray their Savior for politics. [24] As evangelist Pat Robertson expressed Trump’s “Mandate of Heaven,” so too in 1937, Hans Kerrl said, “The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation.” [25]
7. A large faction in America is no different than any other totalitarian. Surveys show half of “Republicans” want an authoritarian dictatorship, discharging that Constitution they pretend to revere. A third of “Republicans” favor Putin. Their House and Senate representatives promote Putin’s talking points, and those like Representative Devin Nunez, assisted by Rudolph Giuliani, actively seek Russian assistance in the coming election. [26]
Once upon a time, the U.S. was the world’s champion of democratic governance. The post-WWII order implemented worldwide institutions (not worldwide government) to stall WWIII. For 70 of the most prosperous years in all of human history, it worked. [27] But the Greatest Generation gave way to the next, economists bumbled #2 noted above to stimulate that reptile brain of #3 inflamed by asocial media of #4, thus inviting America’s Carnival Barker in #5, only to find a large faction of Christians and Americans noted in #6 and #7 aren’t so special after all. On the heels of National Book Award winner George Packer’s conclusion that America is now a failed state, Reagan conservative George Will wrote, “This is what national decline looks like.” [28]
As 44 B.C. Rome, 1934 Germany, and 2020 America remind us, pathologies rooted in human mental circuitry have not changed since the rise of Homo sapiens. The Right-wing is not alone in this as campus free-speech bans, “Cancel Culture,” and despotic leftist postmodernism will attest. American “exceptionalism” Peter Beinart noted, is now a fallacy.
But there are glimmers in the dark. In two months, America’s tyranny will harden, or it won’t. And we are witness to history—live, not in a book.
[1] Peter Beinart, Obama’s Idealists: American Power in Theory and Practice, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2919, pg. 162-169.
[2] Jonathan Rauch, Rethinking Polarization, National Affairs, Fall 2019.
[3] Tom McTague, The Decline of the American World, The Atlantic, June 24, 2020.
Philip Bump, A majority of Americans are embarrassed by President Trump, The Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2017.
Timothy Egan, The World Is Taking Pity on Us, New York Times, May 8, 2020.
OLGA KHAZAN, Americans Are Getting Secondhand Embarrassment From Trump , The Atlantic, MARCH 27, 2019.
Aaron Blake, A brief history of world leaders laughing at Trump, The Washington Post, Dec. 4, 2019.
Megan McArdle, Conservatives who refuse to wear masks undercut a central claim of their beliefs, The Washington Post, May 27, 2020.
[4] Stuart Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, McGraw-Hill, 2010.
[5] Michael D. Shear, G.A.O. Says Top Homeland Security Officials Are Serving Illegally, New York Times, Aug. 14, 2020.
[6] Elizabeth Goitein and Andrew Boyle, Trump Has Emergency Powers We Aren’t Allowed to Know About, New York Times, April 10, 2020.
Gary Hart, How Powerful Is the President?, New York Times, July 23, 2020.
ERIC LUTZ, TRUMP'S SECRET POLICE: COMING TO A CITY NEAR YOU, Vanity Fair, July 21, 2020.
[7] TIM DICKINSON, How Oregon Is Pushing Back Against ‘Kidnap and False Arrest’ by Trump’s Agents, Rolling Stone, July 21, 2020
ANDREW SELSKY, Navy vet beaten by federal agents on the streets of Portland, Oregon: ‘They came out to fight’, ASSOCIATED PRESS, JUL 20, 2020.
QUINT FORGEY, Trump’s conspiracy theory on 75-year-old protester draws sharp backlash, POLITICO, 06/09/2020.
Peter Baker, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Monica Davey, Trump Threatens to Send Federal Law Enforcement Forces to More Cities, New York Times, July 24, 2020.
Dan Friedman, Federal Agents Invade Portland, Citing Trump’s Executive Order Protecting Statues, Mother Jones, July 17, 2020.
Riyaz ul Khaliq, ‘US world’s top human rights violator,’ China says, Anadolu Agency (ANKARA, Turkey), 16.07.2020.
[8] CAITLIN O'KANE, Refrigerated trucks requested in Texas and Arizona as morgues fill up due to coronavirus deaths, CBS NEWS, JULY 15, 2020.
Philip Bump, The shift of the coronavirus to primarily red states is complete — but it’s not that simple, Washington Post, June 24, 2020.
[9] Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
Brett Williams, America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”, on Goodreads, January 6, 2019.
Sean Illing, Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades: Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history”, VOX, Jan 12, 2019.
See The Asset Podcast for extensive details.
[10] To “assume” models work is unheard of in the hard sciences. Hence, one of many reasons why economics and the other social “sciences” should be called the social “studies” instead. Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade , Annu. Rev. Econ, 11/21/2016. Automation is now a significant factor in U.S. job loss, but not 30 years ago when this process started.
[11] Dani Rodrik, Globalization’s Wrong Turn, Foreign Affairs, July/August, 2019. As Rodrick writes, “Globalization became the end, national economies the means.”
[12] ARAG KHANNA, These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries, Foreign Policy, March/April, 2016.
Katy Steinmetz, The Death of the Fairness Doctrine, TIME, Aug. 23, 2011.
JILL BARSHAY, U.S. now ranks near the bottom among 35 industrialized nations in math, The Hechinger Report, December 6, 2016.
JILL BARSHAY, What 2018 PISA international rankings tell us about U.S. schools, The Hechinger Report,December 16, 2019.
Peter Wehner, Conservatives Have Only One Choice in 2020: After what we have seen during Trump’s first term, any true conservative should be appalled by the prospect of a second., New York Times, Aug. 24, 2020.
JEFF BRUMLEY, Support for Trump could spell end of the evangelical church. But when?, Baptist News Global, MARCH 19, 2018.
[13] CBS NEWS, Wall Street Doled $20B in Bonuses in 2009, CBS/AP, FEBRUARY 23, 2010.
[14] Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
[15] Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodfreads, January 18, 2020.
[16] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Perennial, 1989.
[17] Jonathan Rauch, Rethinking Polarization, National Affairs, Fall 2019.
[18] Ibid. Extreme partisanship may be addictive, says social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as justifying lies gives partisans a hit of dopamine. “Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things.”
[19] Hiawatha Bray, Survey says: Many Americans love their fake news, Boston Globe, January 17, 2020.
ROBINSON MEYER, The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News: Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information., The Atlantic, MARCH 8, 2018.
[20] FRONTLINE, The Facebook Dilemma (Part One), Goodreads, PBS, Aired: 10/29/18.
FRONTLINE, The Facebook Dilemma (Part Two), PBS, Aired: 10/30/18.
[21] JEFFREY GOLDBERG, Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’, The Atlantic, SEPTEMBER 3, 2020.
SCOTT DETROW, AYESHA RASCOE, CARRIE JOHNSON, Presidents Do Not Have Absolute Immunity, Supreme Court Rules, NPR, July 9, 2020.
Rachael Bade and Tom Hamburger, White House whistleblower says 25 security clearance denials were reversed during Trump administration, Washington Post, April 1, 2019.
George Packer, The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions, The Atlantic, APRIL 2020.
Aaron Blake, Pompeo just undercut Trump’s continued dismissal of Russian bounties, Washington Post, August 13, 2020.
James Glanz and Campbell Robertson, Lockdown Delays Cost at Least 36,000 Lives, Data Show, New York Times, May 20, 2020.
Gene Jarecki, Trump’s covid-19 inaction killed Americans, Washington Post, May 6, 2020.
[22] Dareh Gregorian, Trump impeached by the House for abuse of power, obstruction of Congress, NBC NEWS, Dec. 18, 2019.
[23] David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Penguin, 1990 (1779), pg. 133.
[24] Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, on Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodfreads, January 18, 2020.
Brett Williams, Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for, on Goodreads, March 2, 2020.
[25] William L. Shrirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Touchstone Simon & Shuster, 1990, pg. 239. And as Thomas Paine wrote, “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind…he has prepared himself for commission of every other crime.” Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Prometheus Books, 1984 (1794), pg. 8.
[26] Vicky Ward, Giuliani associate willing to tell Congress Nunes met with ex-Ukrainian official to get dirt on Biden, CNN, November 23, 2019.
JOHN BOWDEN, Nunes declines to answer if he received information from Ukraine lawmaker meant to damage Biden, The Hill, 07/30/20. And yes, I meant "faction," a political portion, not "fraction," a portion.
[27] Wikipedia, Post–World War II economic expansion.
[28] George Packer, We Are Living in a Failed State, The Atlantic, JUNE 2020.
George F. Will, The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come., Washington Post, July 15, 2020.
July 6, 2020
July 6, 2020: Confronting the Constitution Part 6: Western ideals and idealists: The quest to balance too many humans
In Susan Shell’s contribution to Confronting the Constitution, her chapter, “Idealism,” surveys its impact on the American Founding and later Western experience. [1] Through examination of ideals by idealists, Shell considers their approach to “the political problem.” That is, the employment of classical liberal principles used to stabilize large numbers of inherently unstable humans. Rather than Rousseau’s (1712-1778) negative impression of science on society, these philosophers saw “science and the civilizing arts [as] not the enemy of morality but its tool.” [2] Instead of the likes of John Locke (1632-1704) and his ilk, Shell’s exemplars include Enlightenment late-comers Emanuel Kant (1724-1804), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), and George Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831).
Shell begins with the type of person who searches for the model socio-political framework. “The idealist,” she writes, “is a moralist: a person guided by visions of how things ought to be… He is likely to view the world with indignation and yet at the same time with hope. The distance between his visions of the world does not lead him to turn away from it in resignation and despair…but calls to action.” [3] Shell’s indignant-yet-hopeful idealists are seen throughout history as motors of moral advance: Socrates, John Adams, Martin Luther King. “At the same time,” writes Shell, “the idealist is not simply an activist… Idealism harbors an uneasy tension between external (or this-worldly) concern for results and an often overriding internal (or otherworldly) concern for purity of conscience.” [4]
Among them, we find a common assumption. By analogy in physics, there are unified field theories that merge, say, the separate natures of electricity and magnetism into a more coherent electromagnetism. Similarly, for these political idealists, apparent clashes between opposing forces, like freedom and equality (perfect freedom is chaos, perfect equality is tyranny), can only be resolved through unification at deeper philosophic levels, unified by the coherent moral theory they seek. Beneath this assumption is another: that conflicting ideals like freedom and equality are not reflections of the hopelessly contradictory nature of people. If so, isn't a unified political theory impossible?
As Shell elaborates, oxymora inherent in us and our societies did not spare the Constitution. “The Constitution derives its fundamental principles largely from the regime of reduced moral expectations characteristic of Montesquieu and Locke,” says Shell. [5] “It begins with equal rights of individuals, each assumed to be moved by a strong and overriding concern for self-preservation… And yet, by enshrining these concerns as rights, worthy to be upheld even at cost of life, the Constitution seems to lift these concerns above themselves.” [6]
Uh-oh.
Thus, chafing at the heart of America’s Founding “between the self-interested character of the rights it claims and the sacrifices of self-interest it must call upon if those rights are to be properly upheld—indeed if civil life is to be possible at all.” [7] An unstated paradox in the Founding itself.
Recall those uniquely American images of assault-rifle-toting gun-rights extremists recently menacing our state capitols. Or spittle-spewing militants shouting at nurses over a new-found right not to wear a COVID-19 protective mask, which shields others from more than adolescent defiance and ignorance of the Constitution these militants profess to know so well. All rights, no responsibilities. Those very responsibilities, not enunciated, are what Shell demonstrates the Constitution depends on or dies without.
Yet, the idealist’s believed the new political “science” of their day was capable of solving all political problems. Even the kind just noted. Kant’s attempt reveals the shock of his age. The Bible once described the world with an ethical bearing for us in it. Then along came science with a superior description of the world without comment on, nor moral direction, for people. [8] Consequently, while Kant admired the American Constitution, he considered its Enlightenment principles insufficiently “transcendent.” So, Kant became an evangelist for reason when he separated science and morality, yielding to the first but elevating the second as a kind of emergent property. Last time on this blog, we considered the “idea” of God as an emergent property of consciousness. Likewise, Kant’s emergence of morality is quite real for humans regardless of its reality in nature. By this means, Kant tries to make morality objective in humans, not a “transitory custom of a given age.” [9] Placing morality above self-preservation, Kant hoped to “set right and duty above the morally questionable ground of prudent selfishness.” [10] Rousseau’s obligation of individuals to others via the state becomes, for Kant, serving others by bypassing them, attaching the “individual directly to a universal and transcendent fellowship of reason.” [11]
In the end, Kant uncovered flaws in his philosophy. People “need more to buttress their practical faith than the austere dictates of an a priori moral logic.” [12] “The problem of organizing a state,” says Kant, “can be resolved for a nation of devils only if they are intelligent.” [13] Kant tried to replace God with a reasoned ideal—an authority people would follow when no one’s watching. But like America’s Founders, Kant was forced to come back to where he started: the low moral expectations of people, which Rousseau rejected, and Kant tried to patch.
Enter Fichte, who tried to nudge Kant’s otherworldly idealism toward the worldly. In opposition to Alexander Hamilton, Fichte saw material equality as paramount. Sounding Utilitarian, Fichte equates material equality with equal happiness. [14] Like Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1931 - ), who regards production and reproduction as central to human nature, labor is to Fichte, an “enduring source of dignity and joy.” [15] His state’s role is to eliminate risk, so Fichte requires an apparatus which knows “pretty much what everybody is doing at every time of day… [Lost] under such a yoke by way of freedom of choice is made up through freedom of uncertainty.” [16] Precisely what Michael Polanyi (1891 – 1976) argued is impossible omniscience, thus condemning such societies to failure. [17] Fichte believed “a unity of race,” which requires the homogeneous closed community of ancient Greek small republics, would bind the people with meaning. While Fichte didn’t intend it, he became a favorite of later idealists in the form of socialists, Marxists, and Nazis. Fichte, Shell argues, failed “to see that the pursuit of material well-being, whether rooted in resentment [the poor] or in greed [the rich], cannot support the sense of common purpose by which a political community is sustained.” [18]
Next stop, Hegel, for whom there was less a need to counter classical liberalism with Kant’s “transcendence” or Fichte’s Nanny State than to reimagine it. Integration of the ancient duty-bound citizen and contemporary individualist is realized in the modern state, says Hegel. Finally, philosophy and history paid off. The marketplace allows each to pursue their interests and, unwittingly, those interests of the whole. Under this arrangement, the people absorb functions previously of government with more potent means of public benefit than exhortations of self-sacrificing virtue. Under modern states, the individual is virtuous by being selfish. [19]
Though what such a society provides is anything but the spiritual connectedness of authentic community which Rousseau lamented the loss of. So Hegel sought to buttress modernity with sub-communities of guilds, class structure, and the family, “to supply at the level of feeling a supplement to one-sided individualism of the marketplace.” [20] Though Hegel’s nuclear family—as we know painfully well—has a temporal existence with the maturing of children and the death of parents that end it. Hegel also promoted patriotism to rouse us from “self-preoccupied existence into a fuller awareness of and participation in the whole.” [21] As some Roman generals contended, this could also be serviced by war. Ignoring that one side must lose and the benefit of death has its limits, war, for Hegel, is not only unavoidable but morally beneficial. All those private acts of self-interests he cast in a new light, as serving a semi-divine State.
By Hegel’s bearing, apparent contradictions in the Constitution noted above, are not. That which is unsaid—rights sacrificed for responsibilities—becomes, with echoes of Rousseau, a superior spiritual element that doesn’t need explaining. Even the all-rights-no-responsibilities anti-mask gun-rights radicals will agree in their support of a strong military defense, or soldiers do not parade their rights on the battlefield but surrender them and their self-preservation for the nation.
So enamored with the modern state was Hegel, he makes this fascinating assertion that each in their self-interested role as housewife, soldier, etc., “represent in their very ordinariness a qualitative moral and spiritual leap beyond the always exceptional heroics of the ancient polis. These modern human types are not so much the heroes of the modern world as proof that we no longer need heroes.” [22] What exceptional people once strived for has arrived for everybody.
For Hegel, “The superiority of modern virtue lies not only in its democratic accessibility to all but also in its accommodation of the ordinary passions—greed, fear, even vanity—that the classical Greek and Christian accounts of virtue held it necessary to check. Modern man, Hegel claims, need no longer live divided from himself.” [23]
But doesn’t this depend on the correct definition of the human? If hunter-gatherer community-connectedness of 25 people or less was for 40,000+ years the match for our nature, did civilization and modernity—with its world overpopulated by strangers—not create a division from each other? And wasn’t it civilization with its materialist self-focus that created the division of greed not seen in hunter-gatherers? As Shell states, “The conflicting demands of freedom and community do not seem so much resolved by the modern liberal state as left to lie in an uneasy tension.” [24]
As humans are so much more unpredictable than rational nature, we seem trapped one or more levels above unification in a paradox between poles. Those competing examples of freedom (conservatives) and equality (liberals) ebb and flow in Western society, but there’s never a truce. Adherents of one have a different moral emphasis than supporters of the other because no unified moral theory yet exists. While ideals of the idealists flash across the Western trajectory, America's Framers seemed “to skirt many of the theoretical difficulties with which the idealists so earnestly grappled [in a] practical accommodation of theory to political need.” [25] Through reason, late-Enlightenment idealists tried to find an irresistible motive to organize people and keep them tame. Like their earlier brethren for whom they embarked to compensate, they never found it. The new science of political philosophy was not a science, after all. Counterbalancing our lower natures seems, sadly, the most enduring option, though current political events and Patrick J. Deneen make us wonder if that too has run its course. [26]
Until next time, September 7, 2020.
[1] Allan Bloom, Ed. Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990.
[2] Ibid. pg. 260-261. See Michael Shermer The Moral Arc, Griffin, 2016, and Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature, Harper Perennial, 2011.
[3] Ibid., pg. 258
[4] Ibid., pg. 258
[5] Ibid., pg. 259
[6] Ibid., pg. 259
[7] Ibid., pg. 259
[8] This, of course, was the intent of Thales’ (625-456 B.C.) description of nature as it is, whether or not humans exist, and without recourse to supernatural powers. But Newton was such an astonishing success, what Thales started in a petite philosophical corner of the world was 2000 years later the foundation of innovations that built economies and weaponry that empires rode to world dominance.
[9] Ibid., pg. 263
[10] Ibid., pg. 264
[11] Ibid., pg. 265
[12] Ibid., pg. 267
[13] Ibid., pg. 268
[14] Emphasizing freedom and in opposition to such positions, Alexander Hamilton expected some level of inequality because all people have different talents more or less suitable to the times. “Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed,” he wrote, “and it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself,” while realizing excess inequality is another route to social instability.
[15] Bloom., pg. 271. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, House of Anansi Publishing, 1991
[16] Bloom., pg. 272
[17] Michael Polanyi, Meaning, University of Chicago Press, 1975
[18] Bloom, pg. 274
[19] As the old saying goes, “Private vice makes public virtue.”
[20] Ibid., pg. 277
[21] Ibid., pg. 278
[22] Ibid., pg. 279
[23] Ibid., pg. 279
[24] Ibid., pg. 280
[25] Ibid., pg. 282
[26] Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2018
Shell begins with the type of person who searches for the model socio-political framework. “The idealist,” she writes, “is a moralist: a person guided by visions of how things ought to be… He is likely to view the world with indignation and yet at the same time with hope. The distance between his visions of the world does not lead him to turn away from it in resignation and despair…but calls to action.” [3] Shell’s indignant-yet-hopeful idealists are seen throughout history as motors of moral advance: Socrates, John Adams, Martin Luther King. “At the same time,” writes Shell, “the idealist is not simply an activist… Idealism harbors an uneasy tension between external (or this-worldly) concern for results and an often overriding internal (or otherworldly) concern for purity of conscience.” [4]
Among them, we find a common assumption. By analogy in physics, there are unified field theories that merge, say, the separate natures of electricity and magnetism into a more coherent electromagnetism. Similarly, for these political idealists, apparent clashes between opposing forces, like freedom and equality (perfect freedom is chaos, perfect equality is tyranny), can only be resolved through unification at deeper philosophic levels, unified by the coherent moral theory they seek. Beneath this assumption is another: that conflicting ideals like freedom and equality are not reflections of the hopelessly contradictory nature of people. If so, isn't a unified political theory impossible?
As Shell elaborates, oxymora inherent in us and our societies did not spare the Constitution. “The Constitution derives its fundamental principles largely from the regime of reduced moral expectations characteristic of Montesquieu and Locke,” says Shell. [5] “It begins with equal rights of individuals, each assumed to be moved by a strong and overriding concern for self-preservation… And yet, by enshrining these concerns as rights, worthy to be upheld even at cost of life, the Constitution seems to lift these concerns above themselves.” [6]
Uh-oh.
Thus, chafing at the heart of America’s Founding “between the self-interested character of the rights it claims and the sacrifices of self-interest it must call upon if those rights are to be properly upheld—indeed if civil life is to be possible at all.” [7] An unstated paradox in the Founding itself.
Recall those uniquely American images of assault-rifle-toting gun-rights extremists recently menacing our state capitols. Or spittle-spewing militants shouting at nurses over a new-found right not to wear a COVID-19 protective mask, which shields others from more than adolescent defiance and ignorance of the Constitution these militants profess to know so well. All rights, no responsibilities. Those very responsibilities, not enunciated, are what Shell demonstrates the Constitution depends on or dies without.
Yet, the idealist’s believed the new political “science” of their day was capable of solving all political problems. Even the kind just noted. Kant’s attempt reveals the shock of his age. The Bible once described the world with an ethical bearing for us in it. Then along came science with a superior description of the world without comment on, nor moral direction, for people. [8] Consequently, while Kant admired the American Constitution, he considered its Enlightenment principles insufficiently “transcendent.” So, Kant became an evangelist for reason when he separated science and morality, yielding to the first but elevating the second as a kind of emergent property. Last time on this blog, we considered the “idea” of God as an emergent property of consciousness. Likewise, Kant’s emergence of morality is quite real for humans regardless of its reality in nature. By this means, Kant tries to make morality objective in humans, not a “transitory custom of a given age.” [9] Placing morality above self-preservation, Kant hoped to “set right and duty above the morally questionable ground of prudent selfishness.” [10] Rousseau’s obligation of individuals to others via the state becomes, for Kant, serving others by bypassing them, attaching the “individual directly to a universal and transcendent fellowship of reason.” [11]
In the end, Kant uncovered flaws in his philosophy. People “need more to buttress their practical faith than the austere dictates of an a priori moral logic.” [12] “The problem of organizing a state,” says Kant, “can be resolved for a nation of devils only if they are intelligent.” [13] Kant tried to replace God with a reasoned ideal—an authority people would follow when no one’s watching. But like America’s Founders, Kant was forced to come back to where he started: the low moral expectations of people, which Rousseau rejected, and Kant tried to patch.
Enter Fichte, who tried to nudge Kant’s otherworldly idealism toward the worldly. In opposition to Alexander Hamilton, Fichte saw material equality as paramount. Sounding Utilitarian, Fichte equates material equality with equal happiness. [14] Like Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1931 - ), who regards production and reproduction as central to human nature, labor is to Fichte, an “enduring source of dignity and joy.” [15] His state’s role is to eliminate risk, so Fichte requires an apparatus which knows “pretty much what everybody is doing at every time of day… [Lost] under such a yoke by way of freedom of choice is made up through freedom of uncertainty.” [16] Precisely what Michael Polanyi (1891 – 1976) argued is impossible omniscience, thus condemning such societies to failure. [17] Fichte believed “a unity of race,” which requires the homogeneous closed community of ancient Greek small republics, would bind the people with meaning. While Fichte didn’t intend it, he became a favorite of later idealists in the form of socialists, Marxists, and Nazis. Fichte, Shell argues, failed “to see that the pursuit of material well-being, whether rooted in resentment [the poor] or in greed [the rich], cannot support the sense of common purpose by which a political community is sustained.” [18]
Next stop, Hegel, for whom there was less a need to counter classical liberalism with Kant’s “transcendence” or Fichte’s Nanny State than to reimagine it. Integration of the ancient duty-bound citizen and contemporary individualist is realized in the modern state, says Hegel. Finally, philosophy and history paid off. The marketplace allows each to pursue their interests and, unwittingly, those interests of the whole. Under this arrangement, the people absorb functions previously of government with more potent means of public benefit than exhortations of self-sacrificing virtue. Under modern states, the individual is virtuous by being selfish. [19]
Though what such a society provides is anything but the spiritual connectedness of authentic community which Rousseau lamented the loss of. So Hegel sought to buttress modernity with sub-communities of guilds, class structure, and the family, “to supply at the level of feeling a supplement to one-sided individualism of the marketplace.” [20] Though Hegel’s nuclear family—as we know painfully well—has a temporal existence with the maturing of children and the death of parents that end it. Hegel also promoted patriotism to rouse us from “self-preoccupied existence into a fuller awareness of and participation in the whole.” [21] As some Roman generals contended, this could also be serviced by war. Ignoring that one side must lose and the benefit of death has its limits, war, for Hegel, is not only unavoidable but morally beneficial. All those private acts of self-interests he cast in a new light, as serving a semi-divine State.
By Hegel’s bearing, apparent contradictions in the Constitution noted above, are not. That which is unsaid—rights sacrificed for responsibilities—becomes, with echoes of Rousseau, a superior spiritual element that doesn’t need explaining. Even the all-rights-no-responsibilities anti-mask gun-rights radicals will agree in their support of a strong military defense, or soldiers do not parade their rights on the battlefield but surrender them and their self-preservation for the nation.
So enamored with the modern state was Hegel, he makes this fascinating assertion that each in their self-interested role as housewife, soldier, etc., “represent in their very ordinariness a qualitative moral and spiritual leap beyond the always exceptional heroics of the ancient polis. These modern human types are not so much the heroes of the modern world as proof that we no longer need heroes.” [22] What exceptional people once strived for has arrived for everybody.
For Hegel, “The superiority of modern virtue lies not only in its democratic accessibility to all but also in its accommodation of the ordinary passions—greed, fear, even vanity—that the classical Greek and Christian accounts of virtue held it necessary to check. Modern man, Hegel claims, need no longer live divided from himself.” [23]
But doesn’t this depend on the correct definition of the human? If hunter-gatherer community-connectedness of 25 people or less was for 40,000+ years the match for our nature, did civilization and modernity—with its world overpopulated by strangers—not create a division from each other? And wasn’t it civilization with its materialist self-focus that created the division of greed not seen in hunter-gatherers? As Shell states, “The conflicting demands of freedom and community do not seem so much resolved by the modern liberal state as left to lie in an uneasy tension.” [24]
As humans are so much more unpredictable than rational nature, we seem trapped one or more levels above unification in a paradox between poles. Those competing examples of freedom (conservatives) and equality (liberals) ebb and flow in Western society, but there’s never a truce. Adherents of one have a different moral emphasis than supporters of the other because no unified moral theory yet exists. While ideals of the idealists flash across the Western trajectory, America's Framers seemed “to skirt many of the theoretical difficulties with which the idealists so earnestly grappled [in a] practical accommodation of theory to political need.” [25] Through reason, late-Enlightenment idealists tried to find an irresistible motive to organize people and keep them tame. Like their earlier brethren for whom they embarked to compensate, they never found it. The new science of political philosophy was not a science, after all. Counterbalancing our lower natures seems, sadly, the most enduring option, though current political events and Patrick J. Deneen make us wonder if that too has run its course. [26]
Until next time, September 7, 2020.
[1] Allan Bloom, Ed. Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990.
[2] Ibid. pg. 260-261. See Michael Shermer The Moral Arc, Griffin, 2016, and Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature, Harper Perennial, 2011.
[3] Ibid., pg. 258
[4] Ibid., pg. 258
[5] Ibid., pg. 259
[6] Ibid., pg. 259
[7] Ibid., pg. 259
[8] This, of course, was the intent of Thales’ (625-456 B.C.) description of nature as it is, whether or not humans exist, and without recourse to supernatural powers. But Newton was such an astonishing success, what Thales started in a petite philosophical corner of the world was 2000 years later the foundation of innovations that built economies and weaponry that empires rode to world dominance.
[9] Ibid., pg. 263
[10] Ibid., pg. 264
[11] Ibid., pg. 265
[12] Ibid., pg. 267
[13] Ibid., pg. 268
[14] Emphasizing freedom and in opposition to such positions, Alexander Hamilton expected some level of inequality because all people have different talents more or less suitable to the times. “Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed,” he wrote, “and it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself,” while realizing excess inequality is another route to social instability.
[15] Bloom., pg. 271. Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, House of Anansi Publishing, 1991
[16] Bloom., pg. 272
[17] Michael Polanyi, Meaning, University of Chicago Press, 1975
[18] Bloom, pg. 274
[19] As the old saying goes, “Private vice makes public virtue.”
[20] Ibid., pg. 277
[21] Ibid., pg. 278
[22] Ibid., pg. 279
[23] Ibid., pg. 279
[24] Ibid., pg. 280
[25] Ibid., pg. 282
[26] Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2018
May 4, 2020
May 4, 2020: Is God an emergent property?
It was a frosty but luminous evening in Alpbach, Austria. Snuggled in a bowl lifted by the Kitzbühel Alps, Alpbach is a village of 2500 people at 1000 meters above sea level. Scattered about me were traditional Austrian homes like mountainside inserts seemingly assembled from chestnut colored sequoias. These broad wooden structures had low pitched roofs spread wide to shield stories below from heavy snows. So robust, they appeared able to support another building or a planet. Each story was draped in banks of pink and red flowers, four to five feet high, which flattered their way around the full circumference of the house. Appropriate for a place that won the “Most Beautiful Floral Village in Europe” award. [1] While spring had defeated snow in Alpbach, it was king for a while longer another thousand meters above me. Peaks so white against that cobalt sky, my iris exceeded its contraction limit, and I had to look away. Better than most cameras, my eyes had insufficient “dynamic range”—that distance between the darkest darks and lightest lights. I was there for a synthetic aperture radar symposium, and dynamic range was sure to arise as a radar’s response to radio waves, another sibling in the spectrum of light. At that moment, I felt what it meant.
Spiring over my head was the green steeple of St. Oswald Catholic Church. Hugging the church like the mountains hugged Alpbach was an immaculate graveyard and daily reminder of why the church was there. Each grave was capped by an ornate iron cross four feet high. Each held a plaque as identifier for those who once stood in this little town before they lay here. A ground-hugging custodian of chiseled stone enclosed each plot for the safety of more flowers, though these were for the dead.
I’d been anticipating this occasion for a while. To stretch the moment, I surveyed my surroundings, squinted back up at the white-tipped peaks beyond the green spire, then down to a tomb in front of me. Attached to its cross was an addition like no other in the yard. One of the most potent encapsulations of human mental horsepower. It was Schrödinger’s quantum mechanical wave equation, inscribed on a circle of iron. A short reach beneath my feet and two meters ahead lay the mortal remains of Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), tunneler to nature’s unseeable micro world. His famous equation, like a dusty window into the mind of God at his weirdest, bedeviled me as a university student. Perhaps anything so close to creation should. I assumed in those far off years of younger days that quantum mechanics made sense to everyone but me. So I suffered alone, in silence, lest I be discovered a fool (test scores proved it). Years later, I learned that a paragon of physics, Richard Feynman, declared, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” Rehabilitated, I made friends with quantum, and with the aid of engineering pals, produced a few innovations in the field. [2]
Schrödinger’s wave equation is, in the micro-world, the equivalent of Newton’s equations of motion in the macro. Almost. [3] In our everyday Newtonian existence, where something is and how fast it moves can be known with precision. Schrödinger allows only probabilities instead.
Standing before the old Austrian, I held his final book in my hand, My View of the World. [4] I extended my arm, holding its title in Schrödinger’s direction, in case by some marvel beyond me, he might be able to read it. If so, I decided, he’d be a bit happier than his current condition would suggest. Perhaps he’d not mind if I hovered a while. So I did.
I checked the people-less vacuum about me. I opened Schrödinger’s book to page 20. I read what he wrote out loud. “Suppose you are sitting on a bench beside a path in high mountain country. There are grassy slopes all around with rocks thrusting through. On the opposite slope of the valley, there is a stretch of scree with a low growth of alder bushes. Woods climb steeply on both sides of the valley up to a line of treeless pasture. Facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty glacier-tipped peak. Its smooth snowfields and hard-edged rock-faces touched at this moment with soft rose-color by the last rays of the departing sun...” I peeped overhead and wondered where he sat up there when he wrote this.
“According to the usual way of looking at it,” I read, “everything that you see has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while—not long—you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you. What is it that has so suddenly called you out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while this spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you?”
By then, the sun had dipped beneath the local Alps. Though too early to see the stars, with our solar orb obstructed, lanterns of Venus and Jupiter dimpled the dimming sky. Thanks to a colossal wreck between tectonic plates, those peaks above me got their biggest boost for the heavens about 100 million years ago, less than 1% the age of the universe. Once a seafloor, they were now a mile high, three in some places, and littered with the lives of once-dominant creatures that swam here. Hoisted by the earth, fossil offerings of life’s creative genius seemed tendered to the planets and stars soon-to-shine. So they could see what nature made here: trilobites, corals, snail-like brachiopods. And there I was, in the same line they led ahead of me, just behind Schrödinger. Each in the queue, here for an instant, compared to the cosmos, too small for even quantum mechanics to measure.
What called me out of nothingness may well be discovered by the current scientific revolution in complexity theory. Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe makes a stunning case for it and what he calls “order for free.” [5] The self-organization of complex molecules, catalytic processes, and self-reproductive systems appear to have given evolution a head start by the laws of physics and chemistry alone. From simple systems emerge new properties not envisioned by their building blocks. One example is wetness. Less than about a million water molecules will feel dry on your hands, dusty, not wet. But from the propinquity of a million such molecules is born the emergent property of wetness.
As Kauffman shows, natural reactions in sufficiently nutrient-rich environs, with disequilibrium energy gradients pushing reactions up or downhill, can find their way to islands of stability in a sea of complexity-collapse. Each isle a different stable molecule, catalyst, cell, or organism on a fitness landscape. Forces self-coordinate blindly toward the boundary between order and chaos. They cross into the oblivion of runaway reactions, fall off fitness peaks into valleys of less orderly arrangements, or tempt fate at the door to one or the other in long term survival. Evolution doesn’t need an eternity to wait on random chance and deterministic selection; the raw materials are already there. [6] (Sorry, Creationists.) Life becomes the expected outcome of fundamental physical laws, with all the implications this has for life in the universe.
What about consciousness? Was it an emergent property, budding from the structure of our brains and its bio-physics? If so, what happened next? One suspects recognition, not only of the external world but of a self, separate from other conscious beings. With a drive to survive pre-dating consciousness, respect for our ending couldn‘t be too far behind. And with that, the ending of others we know. Would grief, then morality, then desires for magic emerge to fix what’s wrong?
That such perceptions sprouted early in living complexity is implied by Neanderthal burials ca. 100,000 years ago. [7] They buried their dead with flowers (pollen remains) and red ochre in their graves. Like a womb, they were placed in fetal position. Facing east and the rising sun, they lay, like a seed or a savior, to be resurrected with the next season, poised for the sunrise of another day in a new life. There’s ample speculation in what they meant, yet the same symbols persist to this day in different parts of the world by a different species—our own. [8]
But is our lineage alone in this emergence? For centuries it was assumed only humans made tools, recognized faces, planned ahead, were self-aware, transmitted culture and ethics among their own kind, and only humans grieved. As primatologist Frans de Waal elaborates, all such assumptions have sunk under the weight of measured evidence. [9] Dolphins, with equal or larger brain-to-body mass ratios than humans, call for their pod, as men carve their live bodies for mercury-rich flesh to put in our mouths. Fur seal mothers cry over remains of snow-white infants ripped free of their skin for the vanity trade—a bloody carcass she labors for three days to feed. Infant rhinos bleat for their mothers, shot for nothing more than her horn (the same protein as toenails), pulverized and added to beer for better sex or miraculous cures—despite the fact it doesn’t work, and the planet doesn’t need more humans. And in 2018, a mother orca carried her dead newborn for 17 days across a thousand miles to prevent it from sinking, nudging it to the surface to breathe, in what the media labeled a “tour of grief.” A tour commenced by human decimation of north Pacific salmon fisheries, the sustenance for orcas. Humans aren’t the only ones conscious of self and others, a reckoning that leads to morality, ethics, and grief.
If consciousness emerged from ordered brains, spawning grief and magic yearnings, what about God? [10] Ignoring elaborations of the idea (scriptures, canon, dogmas), could God be an emergent property of consciousness? Would that mean God is or isn’t real? Will God disappear when humans are extinct? [11]
Reduce the count of water molecules below a million, and wetness goes away. But isn’t the emergence of wetness a physical reality? Try it in your shower. Is faith in water’s wetness, omnipresence, and aid in daily life, unfounded?
Perhaps God’s appearance is a matter of emergent capacity to perceive what’s already there, external, and independent of us. But if God is not external, born only from our brains, does that change anything for humans? Thanks to complexity theory, rather than irrational, God might be—like the emergence of complex molecules, cells, life, and consciousness—among the most rational and expected consequences of physical laws, and being human.
Until next time, July 6, 2020.
[1] Alpbach, Austria. And, Alpbach on Wikipedia.
[2] Specifically in the quasi quantum, quasi-electromagnetic field of plasmonics as applied to antennas and waveguides. See Plasmons on Wikipedia.
[3] Actually, Schrödinger’s equation should be simpler than Newton’s as Schrödinger’s is linear and Newton’s is not. So, for example, one wave will have a solution under Schrödinger as will another and another, as will the sum of those waves and the scaling of either one or both. As for Newton, his equation has a solution for the two body problem (like a planet that orbits a star), but add a third body for the so called “three body problem,” and it has no solution. No one knows what it’s going to do, so its position, velocity and momentum cannot be predicted exactly. Numerical methods come close.
[4] Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World, Oxbow Press, 1961.
[5] Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995.
[6] Order for free didn’t happen overnight.
[7] Paleolithic religion: Timeline, Wikipedia.
Michael Marshall, 70,000-year-old remains suggest Neanderthals buried their dead, New Scientist, 18 February 2020.
[8] Genetic markers show we did some mixing with Neanderthals before they went extinct, likely at our own hands. Interbreeding between archaic and modern humans, Wikipedia.
[9] Frans de Waals, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, Norton, 2016.
[10] The concept of “gods” accompanied the idea of magic early. See Henri Frankfort, Before Philosophy, Penguin, 1960. Our many cosmic bellhops (Sumer even had a god for the pickaxe) were simplified by coalescing the many benevolent or villainous gods down to one with the invention of monotheism, either by Akhenaton (ca. 1350 B.C.) or Zoroaster (ca. 1750 – 760 B.C., his dates vary wildly).
[11] Author and cherished skeptic, Michael Shermer maintains that God and consciousness are “mysterians” that can never be explained. Maybe that’s not so. Michael Shermer, The Final Mysterians, Scientific American, July 2018.
Spiring over my head was the green steeple of St. Oswald Catholic Church. Hugging the church like the mountains hugged Alpbach was an immaculate graveyard and daily reminder of why the church was there. Each grave was capped by an ornate iron cross four feet high. Each held a plaque as identifier for those who once stood in this little town before they lay here. A ground-hugging custodian of chiseled stone enclosed each plot for the safety of more flowers, though these were for the dead.
I’d been anticipating this occasion for a while. To stretch the moment, I surveyed my surroundings, squinted back up at the white-tipped peaks beyond the green spire, then down to a tomb in front of me. Attached to its cross was an addition like no other in the yard. One of the most potent encapsulations of human mental horsepower. It was Schrödinger’s quantum mechanical wave equation, inscribed on a circle of iron. A short reach beneath my feet and two meters ahead lay the mortal remains of Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), tunneler to nature’s unseeable micro world. His famous equation, like a dusty window into the mind of God at his weirdest, bedeviled me as a university student. Perhaps anything so close to creation should. I assumed in those far off years of younger days that quantum mechanics made sense to everyone but me. So I suffered alone, in silence, lest I be discovered a fool (test scores proved it). Years later, I learned that a paragon of physics, Richard Feynman, declared, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” Rehabilitated, I made friends with quantum, and with the aid of engineering pals, produced a few innovations in the field. [2]
Schrödinger’s wave equation is, in the micro-world, the equivalent of Newton’s equations of motion in the macro. Almost. [3] In our everyday Newtonian existence, where something is and how fast it moves can be known with precision. Schrödinger allows only probabilities instead.
Standing before the old Austrian, I held his final book in my hand, My View of the World. [4] I extended my arm, holding its title in Schrödinger’s direction, in case by some marvel beyond me, he might be able to read it. If so, I decided, he’d be a bit happier than his current condition would suggest. Perhaps he’d not mind if I hovered a while. So I did.
I checked the people-less vacuum about me. I opened Schrödinger’s book to page 20. I read what he wrote out loud. “Suppose you are sitting on a bench beside a path in high mountain country. There are grassy slopes all around with rocks thrusting through. On the opposite slope of the valley, there is a stretch of scree with a low growth of alder bushes. Woods climb steeply on both sides of the valley up to a line of treeless pasture. Facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty glacier-tipped peak. Its smooth snowfields and hard-edged rock-faces touched at this moment with soft rose-color by the last rays of the departing sun...” I peeped overhead and wondered where he sat up there when he wrote this.
“According to the usual way of looking at it,” I read, “everything that you see has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while—not long—you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you. What is it that has so suddenly called you out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while this spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you?”
By then, the sun had dipped beneath the local Alps. Though too early to see the stars, with our solar orb obstructed, lanterns of Venus and Jupiter dimpled the dimming sky. Thanks to a colossal wreck between tectonic plates, those peaks above me got their biggest boost for the heavens about 100 million years ago, less than 1% the age of the universe. Once a seafloor, they were now a mile high, three in some places, and littered with the lives of once-dominant creatures that swam here. Hoisted by the earth, fossil offerings of life’s creative genius seemed tendered to the planets and stars soon-to-shine. So they could see what nature made here: trilobites, corals, snail-like brachiopods. And there I was, in the same line they led ahead of me, just behind Schrödinger. Each in the queue, here for an instant, compared to the cosmos, too small for even quantum mechanics to measure.
What called me out of nothingness may well be discovered by the current scientific revolution in complexity theory. Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe makes a stunning case for it and what he calls “order for free.” [5] The self-organization of complex molecules, catalytic processes, and self-reproductive systems appear to have given evolution a head start by the laws of physics and chemistry alone. From simple systems emerge new properties not envisioned by their building blocks. One example is wetness. Less than about a million water molecules will feel dry on your hands, dusty, not wet. But from the propinquity of a million such molecules is born the emergent property of wetness.
As Kauffman shows, natural reactions in sufficiently nutrient-rich environs, with disequilibrium energy gradients pushing reactions up or downhill, can find their way to islands of stability in a sea of complexity-collapse. Each isle a different stable molecule, catalyst, cell, or organism on a fitness landscape. Forces self-coordinate blindly toward the boundary between order and chaos. They cross into the oblivion of runaway reactions, fall off fitness peaks into valleys of less orderly arrangements, or tempt fate at the door to one or the other in long term survival. Evolution doesn’t need an eternity to wait on random chance and deterministic selection; the raw materials are already there. [6] (Sorry, Creationists.) Life becomes the expected outcome of fundamental physical laws, with all the implications this has for life in the universe.
What about consciousness? Was it an emergent property, budding from the structure of our brains and its bio-physics? If so, what happened next? One suspects recognition, not only of the external world but of a self, separate from other conscious beings. With a drive to survive pre-dating consciousness, respect for our ending couldn‘t be too far behind. And with that, the ending of others we know. Would grief, then morality, then desires for magic emerge to fix what’s wrong?
That such perceptions sprouted early in living complexity is implied by Neanderthal burials ca. 100,000 years ago. [7] They buried their dead with flowers (pollen remains) and red ochre in their graves. Like a womb, they were placed in fetal position. Facing east and the rising sun, they lay, like a seed or a savior, to be resurrected with the next season, poised for the sunrise of another day in a new life. There’s ample speculation in what they meant, yet the same symbols persist to this day in different parts of the world by a different species—our own. [8]
But is our lineage alone in this emergence? For centuries it was assumed only humans made tools, recognized faces, planned ahead, were self-aware, transmitted culture and ethics among their own kind, and only humans grieved. As primatologist Frans de Waal elaborates, all such assumptions have sunk under the weight of measured evidence. [9] Dolphins, with equal or larger brain-to-body mass ratios than humans, call for their pod, as men carve their live bodies for mercury-rich flesh to put in our mouths. Fur seal mothers cry over remains of snow-white infants ripped free of their skin for the vanity trade—a bloody carcass she labors for three days to feed. Infant rhinos bleat for their mothers, shot for nothing more than her horn (the same protein as toenails), pulverized and added to beer for better sex or miraculous cures—despite the fact it doesn’t work, and the planet doesn’t need more humans. And in 2018, a mother orca carried her dead newborn for 17 days across a thousand miles to prevent it from sinking, nudging it to the surface to breathe, in what the media labeled a “tour of grief.” A tour commenced by human decimation of north Pacific salmon fisheries, the sustenance for orcas. Humans aren’t the only ones conscious of self and others, a reckoning that leads to morality, ethics, and grief.
If consciousness emerged from ordered brains, spawning grief and magic yearnings, what about God? [10] Ignoring elaborations of the idea (scriptures, canon, dogmas), could God be an emergent property of consciousness? Would that mean God is or isn’t real? Will God disappear when humans are extinct? [11]
Reduce the count of water molecules below a million, and wetness goes away. But isn’t the emergence of wetness a physical reality? Try it in your shower. Is faith in water’s wetness, omnipresence, and aid in daily life, unfounded?
Perhaps God’s appearance is a matter of emergent capacity to perceive what’s already there, external, and independent of us. But if God is not external, born only from our brains, does that change anything for humans? Thanks to complexity theory, rather than irrational, God might be—like the emergence of complex molecules, cells, life, and consciousness—among the most rational and expected consequences of physical laws, and being human.
Until next time, July 6, 2020.
[1] Alpbach, Austria. And, Alpbach on Wikipedia.
[2] Specifically in the quasi quantum, quasi-electromagnetic field of plasmonics as applied to antennas and waveguides. See Plasmons on Wikipedia.
[3] Actually, Schrödinger’s equation should be simpler than Newton’s as Schrödinger’s is linear and Newton’s is not. So, for example, one wave will have a solution under Schrödinger as will another and another, as will the sum of those waves and the scaling of either one or both. As for Newton, his equation has a solution for the two body problem (like a planet that orbits a star), but add a third body for the so called “three body problem,” and it has no solution. No one knows what it’s going to do, so its position, velocity and momentum cannot be predicted exactly. Numerical methods come close.
[4] Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World, Oxbow Press, 1961.
[5] Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995.
[6] Order for free didn’t happen overnight.
[7] Paleolithic religion: Timeline, Wikipedia.
Michael Marshall, 70,000-year-old remains suggest Neanderthals buried their dead, New Scientist, 18 February 2020.
[8] Genetic markers show we did some mixing with Neanderthals before they went extinct, likely at our own hands. Interbreeding between archaic and modern humans, Wikipedia.
[9] Frans de Waals, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, Norton, 2016.
[10] The concept of “gods” accompanied the idea of magic early. See Henri Frankfort, Before Philosophy, Penguin, 1960. Our many cosmic bellhops (Sumer even had a god for the pickaxe) were simplified by coalescing the many benevolent or villainous gods down to one with the invention of monotheism, either by Akhenaton (ca. 1350 B.C.) or Zoroaster (ca. 1750 – 760 B.C., his dates vary wildly).
[11] Author and cherished skeptic, Michael Shermer maintains that God and consciousness are “mysterians” that can never be explained. Maybe that’s not so. Michael Shermer, The Final Mysterians, Scientific American, July 2018.
March 2, 2020
March 2, 2020: Why my old Right-wing tribe betrayed everything it once stood for
I’ve noted how lying for my tribe ended with 2003’s Iraq invasion, a stark contradiction with my pursuit of truth in nature required in the workplace. [1] Get nature wrong, whatever’s built from that analysis won’t operate. The way Right-wing “morality” undermines America today, the cost of nurtured immorality came home to roost for me then as it has now for the U.S., though half the country denies it. [2] “Mass movements,” wrote Eric Hoffer, “interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and realities of the world… [The true believer] cannot be frightened by danger nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence.” [3] Like Rome after Republic, the U.S. Senate just completed their impeachment show-trial, which validated Hoffer, and demonstrates how menacing this is. [4] Before our eyes, Constitutional governance is unraveling due to embrace, protection, and celebration of lies and liars.
But professional liars like Trump—who lies as he breathes—and his propaganda networks are different now than I was then and different from Trump’s disciples today. Iraq made me see what I was doing, but for years I thought I was (mostly) telling the truth defined by FOX and radio talker Rush Limbaugh, just as many do among Trump’s GOPP. [5] (How can I know I’m not lying now? Reference [6].) Without too much self-analysis (zero), Trump’s believers think they’re telling the truth when they defend their tribe. As it turns out, what they’re doing is a matter of biological evolution and its emergent psychology roused by recent history. As we’ll see, it’s no different for the Left. First, the biology.
Neurologist Paul MacLean’s triune brain-model subdivides our noodle into three structures that reflect its evolution: the reptile brain capping our spine at the back of our head; its mammal brain overlay; the cerebral cortex with its curvaceous terrain atop that mammal inheritance. [7] Our reptilian structure is the most primitive to ripen in the long line of human mental development. Responsible for feelings of urgency—gag, vomit, defecation, sex, fight or flight—it’s the oldest structure, fundamental to blind survival in a man-eating world, and irresistibly mighty. The mammal brain houses our emotions. The human cerebral cortex handles high-order abstractions like mathematics and religion. Our reptile brain works fast, no thinking necessary (don’t pontificate in a fistfight). The cerebral cortex works slow, rumination required. From these structures emerge primate-human psychology.
For a people too harried for inquiry since Tocqueville said we were in 1840, if one can appeal to our fast-acting reptile brain, they’ve abruptly got our attention. [8] Lace emotional attachments of the mammal brain to our tribe with threats to its survival and we’re supercharged for action. But there’s still that cerebral cortex to protect us from manipulators, right?
Not right.
“Humans are designed to be tribal,” writes Brookings Institute senior fellow, Jonathan Rauch. “We are wired to organize into in-groups…so that our reasoning and even our sensory perceptions support in-group solidarity. ‘Believing is belonging.’” [9] In an individualist nation that evacuated communities along with that belonging, as we’ve found, (human) nature abhors a vacuum. Our backfill is a mostly faceless techno-media-tribe. As an evolutionary survival mechanism, tribes are naturally partisan. But “what if partisanship is not really about anything?” asks Rauch. [10] “What if tribalism, not ideological disagreement, is behind [our] polarization? ...not so much rallying for a cause or party we believe in, as banding together to fight a collective enemy.” [11] But surely that cerebral cortex which put men on the moon honors facts that reveal how dangerous tribal factions are for republics built on compromise.
Surely not.
“Presenting people with facts that challenge a group-defining opinion does not work,” says Rauch, “instead of changing their minds, they [reject] facts to double down on false beliefs…regardless of educational and cognitive firepower. Belonging to a particular political party should distort our reasoning.” [12] As Democrats justified Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades and Republicans justify Trump’s extortion of Ukraine. “Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive,” writes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. [13] Rationalizing their beliefs gives partisans a hit of dopamine, “Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans [Left & Right] may be simply unable to stop believing weird things.” [14]
Tribal solidarity also invites flip-flops on long-standing beliefs. “We flip, then rationalize the reversal,” says Rauch. [15] As Limbaugh preached fiscal responsibility for 30-years, ripping Obama for his failures. But with Trump’s populist tactic of spend-everything-now-who-cares-about-the-future, Limbaugh’s tribal-primate-psychology forces him to convert with, “All…this concern for the deficit and budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around.” [16]
“[Republicans didn’t] rally to Trump because they embraced his message,” says Rauch, “they embraced his message in order to rally to Trump. Once what ‘we’ believe was redefined, the party preserved its identity by scrambling aboard. Partisans felt no psychological inconsistency or lurch, because, as a result of their ideological somersaults, they continued to be aligned with the same in-group and opposed to the same out-group. The Republican base likes Trump precisely because the Democratic base hates him. Polarization is not a byproduct of his policies and rhetoric; polarization is the product…cravings for shared outrage against a common adversary.” [17]
When it comes to influence, keep that cerebral cortex and its powers of reason out of it. Like the replacement for a dying god, the tribe can do no wrong, is sanctioned for every obscenity, beyond reproach, and must be obeyed no matter how corrupt. [18] Just as Hoffer wrote and our bio-based psychology demands.
With this psychology common to all humans, is it any wonder that conservatives would betray Jesus for political power and material gain, deny manmade global warming yet depend on science in their daily lives, or claim Trump saved democracy as everyday he attacks it? [19] Should we be shocked to find liberals are just as anti-science as conservatives but about different things, or that succeeding where the Klan failed their multiculturalism self-segregates by identity, celebrating every culture but our own? [20] Crazy? Irrelevant. It’s church dogma, defined by tribal priests. Who we hate matters most. True believers fall in line. Echo chambers assure there’s no logic clash, and the dogma is amplified for psychological comforts of belonging. With little effort, no wonder Putin upends nations. Primate psychology performs the heavy lift.
And recent history helps. [21] Snubbing simple-minded apologetics of Obama / Clinton “what aboutism,” examples of the Right’s inducement include a 2013 incident at Florida Atlantic University. A professor assigned students to write JESUS on a piece of paper, put it on the floor, and step on it. [22] One devout student refused, was suspended, and made national news. U.S. college campuses are places where people protest over photos of white girls in sombrero-and-mustache Halloween costumes (imitation is no longer flattery, but “appropriation” of minority culture). [23] However, that this assignment could insult Christians remained a mystery. Would the name MUHAMMAD have been allowed? What could make a liberal want to insult a victim of an imperial power (Rome), wrongly accused of a crime for which he was executed? Isn’t this the very type of minority the Left defends?
Something as innocuous as product advertising shows how ubiquitous this liberal bias is. A Honda SUV commercial shows men lifting their hatchback to grab and open food bags and beer bottles smashed into or poured over their ravenous faces as the scene draws back to reveal a woman with headphones, recording their animal behavior. A white man struggles to cook his breakfast seated on a moving bus as a black woman stands over him, shaking her head with amused disgust, a Kellogg’s breakfast bar in hand. Obese white men clad only in mini-skirts and bikini-tops stumble in their high heels to refuel Danica Patrick’s Formula 1 racecar for Boost Mobile. [24] Funny, were it not that outrage would flood the continent with reversal of race and gender. Advertisers know this, but did they assume “white males” wouldn’t notice, or could it be so ingrained in this society it didn’t occur to them?
These illustrations compare with bigotry witnessed at gun-toting Right-wing rallies against Obama, but not with torch-bearing boys marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, soon to murder with a car, or a white supremacist executing blacks at their church in Charleston, South Carolina. [25] But discharged from their factory jobs exported to China, working-class whites were inattentive. White men took the brunt of the Great Recession, decreasing American life expectancy with their suicides and opioid overdoses. [26] While talk radio reported that illegal foreigners gain driver’s licenses, rent assistance, and in-state tuition in some states, which (surprise) happens to be true. [27] When Obama DOJ AG Eric Holder announced we don’t talk enough about race, these same displaced whites asked, “Is there another topic?” [28] So Putin helped Trump win the last election; to them, it’s all the better Putin help win the next. Facts, truth, morality, the Constitution, and Christ be damned; these people are enraged. And not just at the Left. Immigration reform is stalled because the rich get richer on the backs of cheap-labor-illegals. And it’s not hard labor Americans won’t do, it slave wages they won’t take. Many lost their homes when Wall Street gamblers—saved by taxpayers—tanked the world economy, awarded themselves a $21B bonus for doing so, and not one of them went to prison. [29]
This is how my old Right-wing tribe came to betray everything it once stood for. Recent history ignited primate psychology poised for threats to survival of the clan, biologically hardwired for defense. And their answer? A self-destructive counter-movement led by our newly anointed Emperor and mafia mobster. [30]
Emperor Trump is a carnival barker, but this barker bites. His worldwide criminal network is just what the Right wanted. The more corrupt he is, the more likely he’s to cure the disease by killing the patient as he obliterates the rule of law for personal gain under guise of a despot’s refrain, “For the people!” (But he “promotes ‘conservative’ policies!”) Trump’s hypnotic perversity has seized even those few remaining Republican rationalists (except Mitt Romney and Justin Amash) who can no more ignore him than they can stand still to face a grizzly on a sixty mile per hour charge. They run. And in just the direction Trump knows they will. Onto that terrain of fear and revenge governed by automatic response of their reptile brain. [31]
Does this sound like an “intelligent species”?
Ponder Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Nazi Germany, the Bolshevik Revolution, Thirty Years War, and Crusades in this light.
Could this be symptomatic of that hypothetical PCD (Programmed Civilization Death) we considered? [32] Isn’t including this in the “human definition” a more complete characterization of unstable humans, hinting at proper governance? Enlightenment’s “natural man” never saw this. Could this biologically-based primate-tribalism garner forgiveness? After all, I did it. It’s remarkable that what saved us in the primeval beginning when there weren’t enough humans, could wreck us in the end when there’s too many.
After this 6th-consecutive Trump-GOPP-related posting, a shower is needed, shock therapy, and a passport from another country. On Monday, May 4, 2020, we return to matters more uplifting than America’s moral dive, precursor to all great power endings despite their economic prowess. [33]
[1] Brett Williams, Has America become a nation of liars?, on Goodreads, September 4, 2017.
[2] Trump disciples will claim his immorality works quite well with a boom economy almost as good as Bill Clinton’s who saw a national budget surplus, not already $3T in debt generated by Trump. Recall these same mostly self-described Christians ranked character as their #1 concern during Clinton, not his boom economy. According to Trump’s budget, he’s pushing for $30T in debt after inheriting Obama and his forerunner’s $20T. Trump’s average growth rate in his first 3-years is equal to Obama’s average of 2.1%/yr. As witnessed in Trump’s State of the Union, most of Trump’s historic economic claims are fake. What he calls in his Art of the Deal “truthful hyperbole,” which the rest of us call “lies.”
[3] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Perennial, 1989
[4] With the exception of one moral man in the GOPP Senate, Mitt Romney (R-UT), the U.S. Senate sanctioned Trump’s attempts to rig the 2020 election in his favor through extortion of Ukraine, and thus invited him to continue his corruption. Which he has, with all the levers of governmental power now at his disposal unchecked. This includes DOJ AG Bill Barr’s repeat corruption of justice beginning with his lies about the Mueller Report, to his interference of sentencing for convicted felon and Trump criminal associate, Roger Stone; Pelosi’s correct designation of “Moscow” Mitch McConnell’s blocking of election protections against foreign interference; and coordination with the Putin, FOX and American talk radio propaganda networks. Only an almost impotent Democrat House stands in Trump’s way from rescinding the Constitution as 52% of GOPP “Republicans” hope to do (noted and referenced in previous posts). The Right has decided to kill the patient to defeat what they view as the disease of liberalism. It cannot be repeated enough that these people call themselves “Christians” for whom Jesus said, “What good is it to win the whole world and lose your soul?” as expanded on this blog last time.
[5] Trump’s “GOPP:” Grand Old Putin Party, to distinguish it from Lincoln and Reagan’s GOP: Grand Old Party.
[6] If I didn’t know I was lying (usually) for my tribe when I was a member, how do I know I’m not lying now? There are only two tribes in America. The “Reason Tribe” does not exist, unless we decide most scientists, some sector of philosophers of reason, and true independents are its members, even though they don’t know it, which refutes the idea of a tribe from the start. I didn’t join the Left-wing tribe, so what tribe would I lie for? As I’ll elucidate in a future post, I oppose abortion (with caveats) and support mammal rights (with caveats), both based on the same reasoned argument. Am I a conservative or a liberal? This violates both dogmas, relying instead on reason, thus open to change should superior reasoned arguments warrant. Would that not constitute a “flip-flop”? No, because it’s not a “belief.” Reason is based on facts, data, nature as it is, not how we feel about it. Finding the earth orbits the sun rather than the sun orbits the earth, what is our position on the orbit? “Belief” wanted to ignore reality to keep humans at the center. Reason places truth above dogma. In the political arena, I didn’t join another tribe because based on my own actions I came to suspect I couldn’t tell the truth if I were married to one of them. Now I know why—biology. From that biology is the emergent property of primate psychology. From that psychology springs the need for belonging, and that means a tribe. In pluralistic modernity on a massively overcrowded planet in one of the poorest educated nations in the industrialized world, tribe means cult. However, none of this means I can’t be wrong. Just because I don’t lie for a tribe is not to say I’m not ignorant about something that could change some conclusion based on reason. Tribes make life easier with absolutism, as Limbaugh (whom I listen to daily) proves. Only by knowing the truth can civilization be made to work, like those devices we build that depend on knowing the truth of nature, regardless of how we feel about it. We’re now seeing in real-time the social failures of lying with Trump and his GOPP’s defense against the coronavirus as a “liberal/Democrat hoax.” How to manage reality while simultaneously satisfying Trump’s inferiority disease and keeping him in office (and out of prison) has been an historic example of societal failures when the truth can no longer be spun, faked, or lied about as the corona pandemic spreads and body counts get the attention of all those reptile brains.
[7] Richard Restak, The Brain, Bantam, 1984, pg. 136
[8] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Mentor, 1984
[9] Jonathan Rauch, Rethinking Polarization, National Affairs, Fall 2019.
[10] ibid
[11] ibid. Our Founders called tribes “factions” and sought to defang them.
[12] ibid. And Steve Rathje, Why People Ignore Facts, Psychology Today, Oct 25, 2018. As an example, and in keeping with Hoffer, recall that in our November 2018 post was noted a man who said, “I’m not going to listen to your facts and data” about manmade global warming. And might I repeat for the n-th time, he’s a devout Christian, for whom Jesus said, “Seek the truth to set you free.” See, Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, on Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
[13] Rauch
[14] ibid
[15] ibid
[16] Billy Binion, Rush Limbaugh Abandons Fiscal Conservatism, Reason, 7.18.2019. And for Limbaugh’s flip-flopping and lifetime of lies—a man who claims to live in Realville—he got the Medal Of Freedom (which used to mean something, until now) from Trump as reward for fealty. Hence the value of liars when lies run the country. Talmon Joseph Smith, Rush Limbaugh in His Own Words: A collection of comments from the latest recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, New York Times, Feb. 7, 2020.
[17] Rauch
[18] The “death of god” remark is a direct reference to the last post here as it applies to the descent of religion in America, but tangentially invites a much larger discussion for another occasion in regards to what came first, the God or the tribe. Marcel Gauchet makes a strong case for the latter in his Disenchantment of the World: The Political History of Religion. In that case, the tribe exists, the scriptures are then written as though God precedes the tribe and must be adhered to. In Gauceht’s reading, God then depends completely on the tribe for existence. When the Maya disappeared, so did their gods. For the former reference, see Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodreads, January 18, 2020.
[19] A very few examples of Trump and his GOPP’s attacks on democracy, America, and its place in the world are provided here. Others noted are easily Googled. His motivation is trifold: feed his malignant inferiority disease, stay out of prison, and keep fleecing the country and foreign powers for his bank account. On this blog, we’ve discussed how science is the father of modern democracy, as supported by Michael Shermer and Timothy Ferris. Trump inaugurated his term by chasing down scientists who performed climate science research. He’s dismissed science and his intel agencies from the beginning, and now with the coronavirus, he suddenly needs the science and all those he chased out of the Center For Disease Control and National Institutes of Health where’s he’s cut budgets and closed departments meant to manage pandemics. Trump repeatedly assaults the Constitutional guarantee of a free press with his Stalinist claim that the press is “the enemy of the people,” his restrictions on named reporters and media outlets, his discontinuation of press briefings, his support of or silence concerning reporters murdered by his favored despots including his tacit sanction of Putin and MBS assassinations. Trump now interferes with the judicial branch by attacking judges and jurors who threaten his criminal associates with justice, as he seeks to change sentencing and “promises” pardons for convicted felons like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn after granting clemency to white-collar criminals who were promoted by FOX, and for those who gave him $580,600/couple at a fundraising event. Trump is directing DOJ to kill multiple investigations into his own decades of corruption moving cases from the independent Sothern District of New York to the more compliant Eastern District. Trump’s foreign policy is slave to his business interests in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, etc. The list of corrupted U.S. government institutions by Trump continues to grow: DOJ, State, EPA, and now intel agencies with loyalist installed at their head. He seeks to corrupt DOD, but his success there is as yet unclear to this reader. Trump’s lauding of despots from Kim to Xi and Putin supports the growing worldview that republican democracy and classical Founder’s liberalism is, as Putin said, over. The U.S. now ranks 25th as a “flawed democracy,” with Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Brazil tied or slightly ahead of us in the global collapse of democratic forms of governance. Trump’s suggestion that NATO be dismantled, his imitation concern for their short defense budgets, which cost the U.S. nothing, and his continued belligerence against Europe and it’s leaders per Putin’s delight make it no surprise that as they laugh at Trump behind his back and turn to China for trade deals (even Italy’s part of China’s Belt & Road), while Europe embrace’s Huawei’s 5G despite pleas from Trump not to. Like Hugo Chavez, Trump interferes with existing contractual agreements not under his auspices (e.g. between Amazon and the USPO), under Constitutional and Congressional controls. Trump has repeatedly noted how collusion with foreign powers that so terrified the Founders—notably George Washington as noted in his Farewell Address—is the right thing to do. It appears that in keeping with Trump’s mafia history since at least 1985 when he bragged about his Russian connections in his Art of the Deal, that and he and his family may be profiting from repeat manipulations of the markets with fake news and exaggerations. A few links illuminating points noted are provided here, recalling that previous posts have shown that Right-wing media is now made up almost universally of liars and that Left-wing media in regards to Trump has been validated by our own eyes, the Mueller Report, and its validation by the Republican Senate intel report:
Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin, Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in climate meetings, Washington Post, December 9, 2016.
Rush Limbaugh, The Four Corners of Deceit : Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up, Rush Limbaugh .com, April 29, 2013.
Heather Horn, Is the Right Wing Anti-Science?, The Atlantic, 9.10.2010.
Zack Beauchamp, A major democracy watchdog just published a scathing report on Trump, VOX, January 5, 2019.
Robert C. Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, Thomas B. Pepinsky, Kenneth M. Roberts and Richard Valelly, The Trump Presidency and American Democracy: A Historical and Comparative Analysis, Cambridge, January 5, 2019.
URI FRIEDMAN, Democrats Have Found Their Battle Cry, The Atlantic, JULY 15, 2019.
Alan Crawford, Andre Tartar and Hayley Warren, Europe Has Had Enough of Trump’s Tirades From Trade to Security, Bloomberg, August 19, 2019.
David E. Sanger and David McCabe, Huawei Is Winning the Argument in Europe, as the U.S. Fumbles to Develop Alternatives, New York Times, Feb. 17, 2020.
Damian Paletta and Josh Dawsey , Trump personally pushed postmaster general to double rates on Amazon, other firms, The Washington Post, May 18, 2018.
Justin Baragona, Asawin Suebsaeng, Trump Grants Clemency to Another Round of Crooks He Saw on Fox News, The Daily Beast, Feb. 19, 2020.
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA, Are Trump and his circle manipulating the markets for personal gain? Here's the evidence, Salon, JANUARY 26, 2020.
[20] Brett Williams, Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter: Part II, The Left, on Goodreads, January 1, 2018.
Brett Williams, Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter. Part I: The Right, on Goodreads, March 6, 2017.
[21] While every social movement is a counter-movement, who started what when is a chicken-or-the-egg question. The Left is now responding to the Right with their own populism in Bernie Sanders. But didn’t the Right respond to the Left’s proliferation of minorities with special rights and privileges as the Left vilified white males as dominant oppressors? But wasn’t the Left’s emphasis on minorities a response to racism in the Sixties, when blacks exercising their Constitutional right to peaceful protest were blown off their feet by water cannons and attacked by white, baton-wielding cops? This could go on for volumes, hence, it is suggested here that the Left started this latest round of tribalism if for no other reason than the Right was so slow to realize that institutionalized lying had real power in a nation that had—by a significant fraction—become a nation of liars. The Left was well on to this thanks to their embrace of 1950s, 60s French postmodernist liars like Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan.
[22] “What aboutism” is American slang adopted from Russian espionage tactics, this time for the mental acrobatics “conservatives” go through to protect Trump and deflect from his corruption. “What about Obama’s whisper to Russia’s Medvedev?” “What about Obama’s debt?” “What about Antifa radicals at Charlottesville?” “What about Hillary’s emails?” Greg Lukianoff, FAU College Student Who Didn’t Want To Stomp On ’Jesus’ Runs Afoul of Speech Code, Forbes, Mar 26, 2013.
Avik Roy, FAU College Student Who Didn't Want To Stomp On 'Jesus' Runs Afoul of Speech Code, Forbes, Mar 26, 2013.
[23] There are so many references to "racial appropriation" by Halloween costumes, I picked this, the first to popup on Google: Kirk Johnson, Halloween Costume Correctness on Campus: Feel Free to Be You, but Not Me, New York Times, Oct. 30, 2015.
[24] Boost mobile commercial.
[25] Paul P. Murphy, White nationalists use tiki torches to light up Charlottesville march, CNN, August 14, 2017.
Wikipedia, Charleston church shooting.
[26] Erica Meade, Men hit harder during the recession, but are recovering jobs faster than women, Urban Institute, July 11, 2012.
Alison Burke, Working class white Americans are now dying in middle age at faster rates than minority groups, Brookings Institute, March 23, 2017.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, PNAS December 8, 2015.
[27] Wikipedia, Driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in the United States.
Housing for Eligible Noncitizens.
Assistance for undocumented or illegal immigrants. This site is full of information but no links to the organizations it notes:
Housing for Eligible Noncitizens.
[28] ANDY BARR, States remains “a nation of cowards” on issues involving race, POLITICO, 02/18/2009.
[29] Louise Story and Eric Dash, Bankers Reaped Lavish Bonuses During Bailouts, New York Times, July 30, 2009.
[30] Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, on Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
[31] Combine all this (our reptile brain, etc.) with a U.S. primary and secondary educational system ranking near bottom in the industrialized world and it’s no wonder Trump’s Senate tribe would sanction his extortion of Ukraine to rig the next election. The study of Constitutional governance (civics) was killed in states across America decades ago. When Trump’s lawyers claimed impeachment was some alien construct invented by Democrats; that “the people” should decide his impeachment by their vote the way Moscow Mitch McConnell (Pelosi’s correct assessment) said they should for Supreme Court Justice nominee Merrick Garland; that no executive commits a crime by bribing another country to cheat elections if he claims his re-election is in the public interest; most Americans have no more understanding of what Constitutional desecrations these are than Trump himself.
[32] Like Programmed Cell Death responsible for the death of our bodies once our DNA “knows” our reproductive years have passed, instead Programmed Civilization Death has been hypothesized here as responsible for the death of society once some psychological threshold is crossed, perhaps too many of us. Brett Williams, Is PCD an acronym for Programmed Civilization Death?, on Goodreads, November 7, 2016.
[33] Moral depravity is central to Will Durant’s hypothesis for why civilizations fail in his Lessons From History, built on his 11 volume, ~ 10,000 word Story Of Civilization. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West offers a youth to old age trajectory. Brooks Adam’s Law of Civilization and Decay notes a cyclic process from religious fear and emergent creativity to organization so stifling that society is eviscerated by hyper-economic control and humane debasement in the limit when civilization returns to religious fear. Arnold Toynbee emphasizes incompetent leadership, unable to adjust to rapid change in mature societies as to blame for their collapse.
But professional liars like Trump—who lies as he breathes—and his propaganda networks are different now than I was then and different from Trump’s disciples today. Iraq made me see what I was doing, but for years I thought I was (mostly) telling the truth defined by FOX and radio talker Rush Limbaugh, just as many do among Trump’s GOPP. [5] (How can I know I’m not lying now? Reference [6].) Without too much self-analysis (zero), Trump’s believers think they’re telling the truth when they defend their tribe. As it turns out, what they’re doing is a matter of biological evolution and its emergent psychology roused by recent history. As we’ll see, it’s no different for the Left. First, the biology.
Neurologist Paul MacLean’s triune brain-model subdivides our noodle into three structures that reflect its evolution: the reptile brain capping our spine at the back of our head; its mammal brain overlay; the cerebral cortex with its curvaceous terrain atop that mammal inheritance. [7] Our reptilian structure is the most primitive to ripen in the long line of human mental development. Responsible for feelings of urgency—gag, vomit, defecation, sex, fight or flight—it’s the oldest structure, fundamental to blind survival in a man-eating world, and irresistibly mighty. The mammal brain houses our emotions. The human cerebral cortex handles high-order abstractions like mathematics and religion. Our reptile brain works fast, no thinking necessary (don’t pontificate in a fistfight). The cerebral cortex works slow, rumination required. From these structures emerge primate-human psychology.
For a people too harried for inquiry since Tocqueville said we were in 1840, if one can appeal to our fast-acting reptile brain, they’ve abruptly got our attention. [8] Lace emotional attachments of the mammal brain to our tribe with threats to its survival and we’re supercharged for action. But there’s still that cerebral cortex to protect us from manipulators, right?
Not right.
“Humans are designed to be tribal,” writes Brookings Institute senior fellow, Jonathan Rauch. “We are wired to organize into in-groups…so that our reasoning and even our sensory perceptions support in-group solidarity. ‘Believing is belonging.’” [9] In an individualist nation that evacuated communities along with that belonging, as we’ve found, (human) nature abhors a vacuum. Our backfill is a mostly faceless techno-media-tribe. As an evolutionary survival mechanism, tribes are naturally partisan. But “what if partisanship is not really about anything?” asks Rauch. [10] “What if tribalism, not ideological disagreement, is behind [our] polarization? ...not so much rallying for a cause or party we believe in, as banding together to fight a collective enemy.” [11] But surely that cerebral cortex which put men on the moon honors facts that reveal how dangerous tribal factions are for republics built on compromise.
Surely not.
“Presenting people with facts that challenge a group-defining opinion does not work,” says Rauch, “instead of changing their minds, they [reject] facts to double down on false beliefs…regardless of educational and cognitive firepower. Belonging to a particular political party should distort our reasoning.” [12] As Democrats justified Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades and Republicans justify Trump’s extortion of Ukraine. “Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive,” writes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. [13] Rationalizing their beliefs gives partisans a hit of dopamine, “Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans [Left & Right] may be simply unable to stop believing weird things.” [14]
Tribal solidarity also invites flip-flops on long-standing beliefs. “We flip, then rationalize the reversal,” says Rauch. [15] As Limbaugh preached fiscal responsibility for 30-years, ripping Obama for his failures. But with Trump’s populist tactic of spend-everything-now-who-cares-about-the-future, Limbaugh’s tribal-primate-psychology forces him to convert with, “All…this concern for the deficit and budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around.” [16]
“[Republicans didn’t] rally to Trump because they embraced his message,” says Rauch, “they embraced his message in order to rally to Trump. Once what ‘we’ believe was redefined, the party preserved its identity by scrambling aboard. Partisans felt no psychological inconsistency or lurch, because, as a result of their ideological somersaults, they continued to be aligned with the same in-group and opposed to the same out-group. The Republican base likes Trump precisely because the Democratic base hates him. Polarization is not a byproduct of his policies and rhetoric; polarization is the product…cravings for shared outrage against a common adversary.” [17]
When it comes to influence, keep that cerebral cortex and its powers of reason out of it. Like the replacement for a dying god, the tribe can do no wrong, is sanctioned for every obscenity, beyond reproach, and must be obeyed no matter how corrupt. [18] Just as Hoffer wrote and our bio-based psychology demands.
With this psychology common to all humans, is it any wonder that conservatives would betray Jesus for political power and material gain, deny manmade global warming yet depend on science in their daily lives, or claim Trump saved democracy as everyday he attacks it? [19] Should we be shocked to find liberals are just as anti-science as conservatives but about different things, or that succeeding where the Klan failed their multiculturalism self-segregates by identity, celebrating every culture but our own? [20] Crazy? Irrelevant. It’s church dogma, defined by tribal priests. Who we hate matters most. True believers fall in line. Echo chambers assure there’s no logic clash, and the dogma is amplified for psychological comforts of belonging. With little effort, no wonder Putin upends nations. Primate psychology performs the heavy lift.
And recent history helps. [21] Snubbing simple-minded apologetics of Obama / Clinton “what aboutism,” examples of the Right’s inducement include a 2013 incident at Florida Atlantic University. A professor assigned students to write JESUS on a piece of paper, put it on the floor, and step on it. [22] One devout student refused, was suspended, and made national news. U.S. college campuses are places where people protest over photos of white girls in sombrero-and-mustache Halloween costumes (imitation is no longer flattery, but “appropriation” of minority culture). [23] However, that this assignment could insult Christians remained a mystery. Would the name MUHAMMAD have been allowed? What could make a liberal want to insult a victim of an imperial power (Rome), wrongly accused of a crime for which he was executed? Isn’t this the very type of minority the Left defends?
Something as innocuous as product advertising shows how ubiquitous this liberal bias is. A Honda SUV commercial shows men lifting their hatchback to grab and open food bags and beer bottles smashed into or poured over their ravenous faces as the scene draws back to reveal a woman with headphones, recording their animal behavior. A white man struggles to cook his breakfast seated on a moving bus as a black woman stands over him, shaking her head with amused disgust, a Kellogg’s breakfast bar in hand. Obese white men clad only in mini-skirts and bikini-tops stumble in their high heels to refuel Danica Patrick’s Formula 1 racecar for Boost Mobile. [24] Funny, were it not that outrage would flood the continent with reversal of race and gender. Advertisers know this, but did they assume “white males” wouldn’t notice, or could it be so ingrained in this society it didn’t occur to them?
These illustrations compare with bigotry witnessed at gun-toting Right-wing rallies against Obama, but not with torch-bearing boys marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, soon to murder with a car, or a white supremacist executing blacks at their church in Charleston, South Carolina. [25] But discharged from their factory jobs exported to China, working-class whites were inattentive. White men took the brunt of the Great Recession, decreasing American life expectancy with their suicides and opioid overdoses. [26] While talk radio reported that illegal foreigners gain driver’s licenses, rent assistance, and in-state tuition in some states, which (surprise) happens to be true. [27] When Obama DOJ AG Eric Holder announced we don’t talk enough about race, these same displaced whites asked, “Is there another topic?” [28] So Putin helped Trump win the last election; to them, it’s all the better Putin help win the next. Facts, truth, morality, the Constitution, and Christ be damned; these people are enraged. And not just at the Left. Immigration reform is stalled because the rich get richer on the backs of cheap-labor-illegals. And it’s not hard labor Americans won’t do, it slave wages they won’t take. Many lost their homes when Wall Street gamblers—saved by taxpayers—tanked the world economy, awarded themselves a $21B bonus for doing so, and not one of them went to prison. [29]
This is how my old Right-wing tribe came to betray everything it once stood for. Recent history ignited primate psychology poised for threats to survival of the clan, biologically hardwired for defense. And their answer? A self-destructive counter-movement led by our newly anointed Emperor and mafia mobster. [30]
Emperor Trump is a carnival barker, but this barker bites. His worldwide criminal network is just what the Right wanted. The more corrupt he is, the more likely he’s to cure the disease by killing the patient as he obliterates the rule of law for personal gain under guise of a despot’s refrain, “For the people!” (But he “promotes ‘conservative’ policies!”) Trump’s hypnotic perversity has seized even those few remaining Republican rationalists (except Mitt Romney and Justin Amash) who can no more ignore him than they can stand still to face a grizzly on a sixty mile per hour charge. They run. And in just the direction Trump knows they will. Onto that terrain of fear and revenge governed by automatic response of their reptile brain. [31]
Does this sound like an “intelligent species”?
Ponder Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Nazi Germany, the Bolshevik Revolution, Thirty Years War, and Crusades in this light.
Could this be symptomatic of that hypothetical PCD (Programmed Civilization Death) we considered? [32] Isn’t including this in the “human definition” a more complete characterization of unstable humans, hinting at proper governance? Enlightenment’s “natural man” never saw this. Could this biologically-based primate-tribalism garner forgiveness? After all, I did it. It’s remarkable that what saved us in the primeval beginning when there weren’t enough humans, could wreck us in the end when there’s too many.
After this 6th-consecutive Trump-GOPP-related posting, a shower is needed, shock therapy, and a passport from another country. On Monday, May 4, 2020, we return to matters more uplifting than America’s moral dive, precursor to all great power endings despite their economic prowess. [33]
[1] Brett Williams, Has America become a nation of liars?, on Goodreads, September 4, 2017.
[2] Trump disciples will claim his immorality works quite well with a boom economy almost as good as Bill Clinton’s who saw a national budget surplus, not already $3T in debt generated by Trump. Recall these same mostly self-described Christians ranked character as their #1 concern during Clinton, not his boom economy. According to Trump’s budget, he’s pushing for $30T in debt after inheriting Obama and his forerunner’s $20T. Trump’s average growth rate in his first 3-years is equal to Obama’s average of 2.1%/yr. As witnessed in Trump’s State of the Union, most of Trump’s historic economic claims are fake. What he calls in his Art of the Deal “truthful hyperbole,” which the rest of us call “lies.”
[3] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Perennial, 1989
[4] With the exception of one moral man in the GOPP Senate, Mitt Romney (R-UT), the U.S. Senate sanctioned Trump’s attempts to rig the 2020 election in his favor through extortion of Ukraine, and thus invited him to continue his corruption. Which he has, with all the levers of governmental power now at his disposal unchecked. This includes DOJ AG Bill Barr’s repeat corruption of justice beginning with his lies about the Mueller Report, to his interference of sentencing for convicted felon and Trump criminal associate, Roger Stone; Pelosi’s correct designation of “Moscow” Mitch McConnell’s blocking of election protections against foreign interference; and coordination with the Putin, FOX and American talk radio propaganda networks. Only an almost impotent Democrat House stands in Trump’s way from rescinding the Constitution as 52% of GOPP “Republicans” hope to do (noted and referenced in previous posts). The Right has decided to kill the patient to defeat what they view as the disease of liberalism. It cannot be repeated enough that these people call themselves “Christians” for whom Jesus said, “What good is it to win the whole world and lose your soul?” as expanded on this blog last time.
[5] Trump’s “GOPP:” Grand Old Putin Party, to distinguish it from Lincoln and Reagan’s GOP: Grand Old Party.
[6] If I didn’t know I was lying (usually) for my tribe when I was a member, how do I know I’m not lying now? There are only two tribes in America. The “Reason Tribe” does not exist, unless we decide most scientists, some sector of philosophers of reason, and true independents are its members, even though they don’t know it, which refutes the idea of a tribe from the start. I didn’t join the Left-wing tribe, so what tribe would I lie for? As I’ll elucidate in a future post, I oppose abortion (with caveats) and support mammal rights (with caveats), both based on the same reasoned argument. Am I a conservative or a liberal? This violates both dogmas, relying instead on reason, thus open to change should superior reasoned arguments warrant. Would that not constitute a “flip-flop”? No, because it’s not a “belief.” Reason is based on facts, data, nature as it is, not how we feel about it. Finding the earth orbits the sun rather than the sun orbits the earth, what is our position on the orbit? “Belief” wanted to ignore reality to keep humans at the center. Reason places truth above dogma. In the political arena, I didn’t join another tribe because based on my own actions I came to suspect I couldn’t tell the truth if I were married to one of them. Now I know why—biology. From that biology is the emergent property of primate psychology. From that psychology springs the need for belonging, and that means a tribe. In pluralistic modernity on a massively overcrowded planet in one of the poorest educated nations in the industrialized world, tribe means cult. However, none of this means I can’t be wrong. Just because I don’t lie for a tribe is not to say I’m not ignorant about something that could change some conclusion based on reason. Tribes make life easier with absolutism, as Limbaugh (whom I listen to daily) proves. Only by knowing the truth can civilization be made to work, like those devices we build that depend on knowing the truth of nature, regardless of how we feel about it. We’re now seeing in real-time the social failures of lying with Trump and his GOPP’s defense against the coronavirus as a “liberal/Democrat hoax.” How to manage reality while simultaneously satisfying Trump’s inferiority disease and keeping him in office (and out of prison) has been an historic example of societal failures when the truth can no longer be spun, faked, or lied about as the corona pandemic spreads and body counts get the attention of all those reptile brains.
[7] Richard Restak, The Brain, Bantam, 1984, pg. 136
[8] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Mentor, 1984
[9] Jonathan Rauch, Rethinking Polarization, National Affairs, Fall 2019.
[10] ibid
[11] ibid. Our Founders called tribes “factions” and sought to defang them.
[12] ibid. And Steve Rathje, Why People Ignore Facts, Psychology Today, Oct 25, 2018. As an example, and in keeping with Hoffer, recall that in our November 2018 post was noted a man who said, “I’m not going to listen to your facts and data” about manmade global warming. And might I repeat for the n-th time, he’s a devout Christian, for whom Jesus said, “Seek the truth to set you free.” See, Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, on Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
[13] Rauch
[14] ibid
[15] ibid
[16] Billy Binion, Rush Limbaugh Abandons Fiscal Conservatism, Reason, 7.18.2019. And for Limbaugh’s flip-flopping and lifetime of lies—a man who claims to live in Realville—he got the Medal Of Freedom (which used to mean something, until now) from Trump as reward for fealty. Hence the value of liars when lies run the country. Talmon Joseph Smith, Rush Limbaugh in His Own Words: A collection of comments from the latest recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, New York Times, Feb. 7, 2020.
[17] Rauch
[18] The “death of god” remark is a direct reference to the last post here as it applies to the descent of religion in America, but tangentially invites a much larger discussion for another occasion in regards to what came first, the God or the tribe. Marcel Gauchet makes a strong case for the latter in his Disenchantment of the World: The Political History of Religion. In that case, the tribe exists, the scriptures are then written as though God precedes the tribe and must be adhered to. In Gauceht’s reading, God then depends completely on the tribe for existence. When the Maya disappeared, so did their gods. For the former reference, see Brett Williams, The Collapse of American Christianity, on Goodreads, January 18, 2020.
[19] A very few examples of Trump and his GOPP’s attacks on democracy, America, and its place in the world are provided here. Others noted are easily Googled. His motivation is trifold: feed his malignant inferiority disease, stay out of prison, and keep fleecing the country and foreign powers for his bank account. On this blog, we’ve discussed how science is the father of modern democracy, as supported by Michael Shermer and Timothy Ferris. Trump inaugurated his term by chasing down scientists who performed climate science research. He’s dismissed science and his intel agencies from the beginning, and now with the coronavirus, he suddenly needs the science and all those he chased out of the Center For Disease Control and National Institutes of Health where’s he’s cut budgets and closed departments meant to manage pandemics. Trump repeatedly assaults the Constitutional guarantee of a free press with his Stalinist claim that the press is “the enemy of the people,” his restrictions on named reporters and media outlets, his discontinuation of press briefings, his support of or silence concerning reporters murdered by his favored despots including his tacit sanction of Putin and MBS assassinations. Trump now interferes with the judicial branch by attacking judges and jurors who threaten his criminal associates with justice, as he seeks to change sentencing and “promises” pardons for convicted felons like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn after granting clemency to white-collar criminals who were promoted by FOX, and for those who gave him $580,600/couple at a fundraising event. Trump is directing DOJ to kill multiple investigations into his own decades of corruption moving cases from the independent Sothern District of New York to the more compliant Eastern District. Trump’s foreign policy is slave to his business interests in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, etc. The list of corrupted U.S. government institutions by Trump continues to grow: DOJ, State, EPA, and now intel agencies with loyalist installed at their head. He seeks to corrupt DOD, but his success there is as yet unclear to this reader. Trump’s lauding of despots from Kim to Xi and Putin supports the growing worldview that republican democracy and classical Founder’s liberalism is, as Putin said, over. The U.S. now ranks 25th as a “flawed democracy,” with Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Brazil tied or slightly ahead of us in the global collapse of democratic forms of governance. Trump’s suggestion that NATO be dismantled, his imitation concern for their short defense budgets, which cost the U.S. nothing, and his continued belligerence against Europe and it’s leaders per Putin’s delight make it no surprise that as they laugh at Trump behind his back and turn to China for trade deals (even Italy’s part of China’s Belt & Road), while Europe embrace’s Huawei’s 5G despite pleas from Trump not to. Like Hugo Chavez, Trump interferes with existing contractual agreements not under his auspices (e.g. between Amazon and the USPO), under Constitutional and Congressional controls. Trump has repeatedly noted how collusion with foreign powers that so terrified the Founders—notably George Washington as noted in his Farewell Address—is the right thing to do. It appears that in keeping with Trump’s mafia history since at least 1985 when he bragged about his Russian connections in his Art of the Deal, that and he and his family may be profiting from repeat manipulations of the markets with fake news and exaggerations. A few links illuminating points noted are provided here, recalling that previous posts have shown that Right-wing media is now made up almost universally of liars and that Left-wing media in regards to Trump has been validated by our own eyes, the Mueller Report, and its validation by the Republican Senate intel report:
Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin, Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in climate meetings, Washington Post, December 9, 2016.
Rush Limbaugh, The Four Corners of Deceit : Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up, Rush Limbaugh .com, April 29, 2013.
Heather Horn, Is the Right Wing Anti-Science?, The Atlantic, 9.10.2010.
Zack Beauchamp, A major democracy watchdog just published a scathing report on Trump, VOX, January 5, 2019.
Robert C. Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, Thomas B. Pepinsky, Kenneth M. Roberts and Richard Valelly, The Trump Presidency and American Democracy: A Historical and Comparative Analysis, Cambridge, January 5, 2019.
URI FRIEDMAN, Democrats Have Found Their Battle Cry, The Atlantic, JULY 15, 2019.
Alan Crawford, Andre Tartar and Hayley Warren, Europe Has Had Enough of Trump’s Tirades From Trade to Security, Bloomberg, August 19, 2019.
David E. Sanger and David McCabe, Huawei Is Winning the Argument in Europe, as the U.S. Fumbles to Develop Alternatives, New York Times, Feb. 17, 2020.
Damian Paletta and Josh Dawsey , Trump personally pushed postmaster general to double rates on Amazon, other firms, The Washington Post, May 18, 2018.
Justin Baragona, Asawin Suebsaeng, Trump Grants Clemency to Another Round of Crooks He Saw on Fox News, The Daily Beast, Feb. 19, 2020.
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA, Are Trump and his circle manipulating the markets for personal gain? Here's the evidence, Salon, JANUARY 26, 2020.
[20] Brett Williams, Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter: Part II, The Left, on Goodreads, January 1, 2018.
Brett Williams, Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter. Part I: The Right, on Goodreads, March 6, 2017.
[21] While every social movement is a counter-movement, who started what when is a chicken-or-the-egg question. The Left is now responding to the Right with their own populism in Bernie Sanders. But didn’t the Right respond to the Left’s proliferation of minorities with special rights and privileges as the Left vilified white males as dominant oppressors? But wasn’t the Left’s emphasis on minorities a response to racism in the Sixties, when blacks exercising their Constitutional right to peaceful protest were blown off their feet by water cannons and attacked by white, baton-wielding cops? This could go on for volumes, hence, it is suggested here that the Left started this latest round of tribalism if for no other reason than the Right was so slow to realize that institutionalized lying had real power in a nation that had—by a significant fraction—become a nation of liars. The Left was well on to this thanks to their embrace of 1950s, 60s French postmodernist liars like Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan.
[22] “What aboutism” is American slang adopted from Russian espionage tactics, this time for the mental acrobatics “conservatives” go through to protect Trump and deflect from his corruption. “What about Obama’s whisper to Russia’s Medvedev?” “What about Obama’s debt?” “What about Antifa radicals at Charlottesville?” “What about Hillary’s emails?” Greg Lukianoff, FAU College Student Who Didn’t Want To Stomp On ’Jesus’ Runs Afoul of Speech Code, Forbes, Mar 26, 2013.
Avik Roy, FAU College Student Who Didn't Want To Stomp On 'Jesus' Runs Afoul of Speech Code, Forbes, Mar 26, 2013.
[23] There are so many references to "racial appropriation" by Halloween costumes, I picked this, the first to popup on Google: Kirk Johnson, Halloween Costume Correctness on Campus: Feel Free to Be You, but Not Me, New York Times, Oct. 30, 2015.
[24] Boost mobile commercial.
[25] Paul P. Murphy, White nationalists use tiki torches to light up Charlottesville march, CNN, August 14, 2017.
Wikipedia, Charleston church shooting.
[26] Erica Meade, Men hit harder during the recession, but are recovering jobs faster than women, Urban Institute, July 11, 2012.
Alison Burke, Working class white Americans are now dying in middle age at faster rates than minority groups, Brookings Institute, March 23, 2017.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, PNAS December 8, 2015.
[27] Wikipedia, Driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in the United States.
Housing for Eligible Noncitizens.
Assistance for undocumented or illegal immigrants. This site is full of information but no links to the organizations it notes:
Housing for Eligible Noncitizens.
[28] ANDY BARR, States remains “a nation of cowards” on issues involving race, POLITICO, 02/18/2009.
[29] Louise Story and Eric Dash, Bankers Reaped Lavish Bonuses During Bailouts, New York Times, July 30, 2009.
[30] Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, on Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
[31] Combine all this (our reptile brain, etc.) with a U.S. primary and secondary educational system ranking near bottom in the industrialized world and it’s no wonder Trump’s Senate tribe would sanction his extortion of Ukraine to rig the next election. The study of Constitutional governance (civics) was killed in states across America decades ago. When Trump’s lawyers claimed impeachment was some alien construct invented by Democrats; that “the people” should decide his impeachment by their vote the way Moscow Mitch McConnell (Pelosi’s correct assessment) said they should for Supreme Court Justice nominee Merrick Garland; that no executive commits a crime by bribing another country to cheat elections if he claims his re-election is in the public interest; most Americans have no more understanding of what Constitutional desecrations these are than Trump himself.
[32] Like Programmed Cell Death responsible for the death of our bodies once our DNA “knows” our reproductive years have passed, instead Programmed Civilization Death has been hypothesized here as responsible for the death of society once some psychological threshold is crossed, perhaps too many of us. Brett Williams, Is PCD an acronym for Programmed Civilization Death?, on Goodreads, November 7, 2016.
[33] Moral depravity is central to Will Durant’s hypothesis for why civilizations fail in his Lessons From History, built on his 11 volume, ~ 10,000 word Story Of Civilization. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West offers a youth to old age trajectory. Brooks Adam’s Law of Civilization and Decay notes a cyclic process from religious fear and emergent creativity to organization so stifling that society is eviscerated by hyper-economic control and humane debasement in the limit when civilization returns to religious fear. Arnold Toynbee emphasizes incompetent leadership, unable to adjust to rapid change in mature societies as to blame for their collapse.
January 18, 2020
January 18, 2020: The Collapse of American Christianity
Christianity is under threat in America. Today just half of its young people identify as religious. Over a third of Americans identify as nonreligious, a four-fold increase in 30 years. [1] What threatens Christianity in America is not science, reason, or liberals, but Christians. Widespread pedophilia in the Catholic priesthood, sexual predation by or against Nuns, and abuse by Southern Baptist clergy are ancillary compared to wanton betrayal by the flock themselves. Betrayal not hidden or embarrassing to a specific sect of American Christians, it is a badge of honor and part of a creed much more inviting than Jesus. Why? Because open infidelity announces membership that provides a sense of belonging in an individualist nation where belonging is as dead as communities that once provided it.
I was born into a conservative Christian family in the Midwest, which in adulthood, having lived across the country, I found different from other places. In the Midwest, believers were devout in a private way that monitored their own behavior, recognized failures, and sought correction, all without an audience. Quite the contrast when living elsewhere, I found the most “devout” Christianity a public performance, though sporadic and impulsive. The audience took two forms: as others one felt a need to impress, or oneself. Both needed convincing. As though the more flamboyant, effusive, and—to a Midwesterner—outlandish, the more firmly doubt could be concealed.
Today, from among these very people, are those most likely to betray their Savior’s teachings, replaced by a new idol. A focus on those verses commonly known reveals the deception. It comes in the arena Mark the disciple said, “false prophets would lead astray the elect.” [2] Through the influence of one whom John claimed, “does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is the father of lies.” [3] An idol who publicly lied over 13,000 times in 1000 days, while Jesus preached to “Seek the truth,” and Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth.” [4] Rather than “Turn the other cheek,” this idol claims to hit back ten times harder. [5] And though Jesus advises to “Pull the plank from your own eye first,” this idol blames only others for his failings. [6] In that celebrated reference to those things that are Caesar’s and those that are God’s, Caesar’s world is paramount to this idol and his supporters, no matter how immoral, corrupt, or treasonous the means to win it. [7] Yet Jesus asked, “What good is it to win the whole world and lose your soul?” [8] With such teachings conservatism once associated, however imperfectly, to shade its politics with moral guidance. No more.
With repeat displays of mental derangement, this idol proudly parades behavior befitting a malignant juvenile. A testament to the arrested development of an admitted adulterer and draft dodger, a thief who would launder millions in stolen Russian money and rip off thousands of students at his fake university for millions more. [9] A man who has fleeced other nations for his financial gain and that of his family, while fleecing American taxpayers by filling his hotels with administrative staff and military personnel. [10] A man who excluded all Sunni countries (where he does business) from his Shia Muslim ban, said to “keep us safe,” while only Sunnis killed Americans on 9/11. [11] A man who told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that help from foreign entities to rig an American election is the right thing to do, and he’d do it again. [12] Then did, when he sought to extort Ukraine into “announcing” an investigation of his political opponent (he didn’t want a real investigation). This was to be exchanged for Congressionally-mandated military aid to fight our mutual Russian enemy—illegal according to the GAO [13]—followed by a cover-up. [14] A man for whom witnessed and documented court and congressional evidence has all the markings of a Putin asset. [15] As all the while his party, propaganda machine, and supporters promote his lies to ensure belonging, placing their clan higher than America or their Messiah. These people excuse their idol’s sleaze by reference to God’s use of the adulterer King David for good, while Paul said to do evil so good may come is wrong. [16] They even block legislation that makes collusion with foreign powers illegal. [17] Among their rally compatriots: QAnon, the Klan, and Neo-Nazis—fanaticism my father and 16-million others enlisted in the US Armed Forces to defend this nation against in WWII, now embraced. As Thomas Paine wrote, “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind…he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.” [18]
Who could imagine that such an idol risks losing—like some ancient Chinese emperor—“The Mandate of Heaven,” as evangelical Pat Robertson warned for the “chosen one’s” ineptitude in Syria? [19] Prime example of the magnitude to which these people can lie to themselves, and an echo from the 20th century. It was then history witnessed three different ideologies commit the most egregious of crimes. They, too, called it moral. They, too, branded the press “enemies of the people.” They, too, bathed in the kind of conspiracy theories peddled by America’s propaganda networks today. And they had their own idol. Look what happened to them. As Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
The integrity of this idol’s Christian Right has collapsed. Immorality is not only their identity, but also their tool. From a newly “results” oriented people touting the economy, for whom moral character was paramount in their abhorrence of Bill Clinton, not his budget surplus and boom economy. Their ends justify any means.
Yet, America’s Founders wrapped morality into our form of governance, where the means were made a moral matter more vital than the ends. Delays, checks, and balances were meant to frustrate tyrants, encouraging moral means to win over corruption. If means don’t matter, why not adopt a more efficient tyranny than the messy nature of republican democracy?
An old story illustrates the moral process of Jesus and the Founder’s: A man can secure a million dollars for his church to feed the poor if only he can win a foot race. Should he cheat? Imagine the benefits his church could provide, while his corrupt means corrupt his ends. But supporters of this idol, Donald Trump, say the system is rigged against them, they’re forced to cheat (and forever revive Hillary to hate as though she's still here to beat). At least immoral actions might produce positive material outcomes, violating Jesus, Paul, and the Founders.
So put Jesus in the runner’s place. Knowing his contestants are swindlers, would he practice corruption to win? An individual who stood for truth all the way to the cross when he could have cheated truth and Pilate to save his life. This practice of the Right’s duplicity ignores that immorality has no check and balance. Corruption is unlimited in what it seeks and how it seeks it. What will the Right do when losing the election, the corruption they sanctioned turns against them? They’ll be calling for their Redeemer, morality, and justice. That is, if they can lose after they've rigged state systems.
I, too, feel the populist anger, my hometown eviscerated of factory jobs; globalization that gave sovereignty to corporations, not nations; and I bristle at the authoritarianism of political correctness that dictates how I can talk, what I must defend and reject. But the treason we saw from our ex and twice-impeached executive, his party, and lie factories, all opposed to character and morality matters to me more. As the Founders knew, ethical actions must be sustained or liberty is lost. To endorse a lawless criminal in violation of the Founder’s and Jesus—both of whom the Christian Right pretend to revere—dooms this republic founded on moral means. [20] What a surprise that immorality would have tangible costs to American Christianity and America as world leaders laughed at the idol behind his back and the world turned to China.
Part of the appeal of Christianity is its emphasis on ethics in an unethical world filled with habitually unethical humans. While I still pine for Reagan and revere the Teachings, I’m no longer a Christian by traditional definitions, nor would I join associations of people who so zealously vandalize their faith. This degeneracy will only hasten its collapse. Though it’s hard to remember, American Christianity is not a monolith, as evidenced by founder Billy Graham’s Christianity Today when it defined Trump as “grossly immoral,” calling for his removal. [21] Or as Baptist News Global’s Jeff Brumley wrote, “evangelical support for a scandal-ridden [Trump] could spell the end of Christianity in the United States.” [22] Not without rejoinder by evangelical loyalists, including the president of Christian Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr., notable for his alleged nepotistic administration, trafficking in nude photos of his wife, and investments in a Miami brothel. [23] After all we now know, what we’ve seen, and what the world has experienced as a result of Trump’s malevolent seizures, and yet an overwhelming majority of “evangelical” / “conservative” / “Republicans” still support him. [24] This is a cult. As Minister of Church Affairs, Hans Kerrl said in 1937, “True Christianity is represented by the Party, and the German people are now called by the Party and especially the Fuehrer to a real Christianity.” [25] Evidence that in the perennial contest between everlasting salvation and political power, the here-and-now wins.
I’ve sparred with people like this for years and frequently learn from them. Their denials, obfuscation, and mental acrobatics prove miracles do happen. Rational analysis, right-reason, and truth are an obstacle to winning their political arguments. Psychological perversions like this have not been witnessed in such breadth and depth in America since Southern Christians justified slavery with Hebrew Scriptures. One would do better to debate democracy with the Taliban. And while much is said about a return to civility in America, when it comes to their sacred dogmas, to approach these people with civility is like taking a Bible to a knife fight. Just what Putin wanted. He won. America was defeated.
And now, thanks to advances in cognitive psychology and a bit of history, we know why. Aside from Putin’s leverage of our gullibility, the Right didn’t betray all they once stood for without help from the Left and primate biology. Next time, after this our 5th of 5 irregular installments portending America’s monarchy, and a return to the bimonthly Monday: March 2, 2020.
[1] Allen Downey, The U.S. Is Retreating from Religion, Scientific American, October 20, 2017.
Jana Riess, "Religion declining in importance for many Americans," especially for Millennials, Religious News Service, December 10, 2018.
[2] Mark 13:22
[3] John 8:44
[4] John 8:32, and Ephesians 4:25
[5] Matthew 5:39
[6] Matthew 7:5
[7] Mathew 22:21
[8] Matthew 16:26
[9] Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
[10] Ibid
[11] Wikipedia, Trump travel ban.
Patrick Cockburn, Donald Trump puts US on Sunni Muslim side of bitter sectarian war with Shias, Independent, 21 May 2017.
[12] Lucien Bruggeman, 'I think I’d take it': In exclusive interview, Trump says he would listen if foreigners offered dirt on opponents, ABC NEWS, June 13, 2019.
[13] Emily Cochrane, Eric Lipton and Chris Cameron, G.A.O. Report Says Trump Administration Broke Law in Withholding Ukraine Aid, New York Times, Jan. 16, 2020.
[14] Elie Honig, The Trump cover-up is unfolding before our eyes, CNN, December 31, 2019.
[15] Brett Williams, America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”, Goodreads, January 6, 2019.
[16] Romans 3:8.
[17] JORDAIN CARNEY, Senate GOP blocks bill to require campaigns report foreign election assistance, The HILL, 06/13/19.
Senate Democrats, UPDATED: DESPITE HIS CLAIMS TO THE CONTRARY, SENATE MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL IS BLOCKING ELECTION SECURITY LEGISLATION – PART OF A LONGSTANDING REFUSAL TO STAND UP TO RUSSIAN ELECTION INTERFERENCE, July 29, 2019.
SOPHIA TESFAYE, Sen. Marsha Blackburn takes one for Trump, defends flow of Russian money, SOLON, JUNE 14, 2019
[18] Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Prometheus Books, 1984 (1794), pg. 8
[19] Kim Bellware, Trump ‘in danger of losing the mandate of heaven’ over Syria decision, Pat Robertson warns, Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2019.
[20] While Right-wing radio talker, self-designated Christian, and devotee of our moral process document, the Constitution, Rush Limbaugh asserts “Trump is results oriented…and results mean there’s no need for process.” 1/9/2020 Apparently, Limbaugh’s a Bill Clinton fan now as well.
[21] MARK GALLI, Trump Should Be Removed from Office, Christianity Today, DECEMBER 19, 2019.
[22] JEFF BRUMLEY , Support for Trump could spell end of the evangelical church. But when?, Baptist News Global, MARCH 19, 2018.
[23] BRANDON AMBROSINO, My Weekend at the Falwells’ South Beach Flophouse, POLITICO, August 25, 2017.
Frances Robles and Jim Rutenberg, The Evangelical, the ‘Pool Boy,’ the Comedian and Michael Cohen, The New York Times, June 18, 2019.
Brendan Skwire, Jerry Falwell Jr. Sends Pictures Of His Half-Naked Wife To His Buddies:, Progress Pond, Sep 9, 2019.
[24] Philip Bump, A popular theory for Trump’s popularity among Republicans appears to be wrong, Washington Post, Jan. 8, 2020.
[25] William Shrier, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Touchstone Simon & Shuster, 1990, pg. 239. Likewise, though ideologically different, be they evangelicals or any Trump-idol-supporting Christian, these people hate liberals more than they love Jesus. And what is liberal? Whatever their propaganda machine says it is, from science and scientists to wind power and LED light bulbs.
I was born into a conservative Christian family in the Midwest, which in adulthood, having lived across the country, I found different from other places. In the Midwest, believers were devout in a private way that monitored their own behavior, recognized failures, and sought correction, all without an audience. Quite the contrast when living elsewhere, I found the most “devout” Christianity a public performance, though sporadic and impulsive. The audience took two forms: as others one felt a need to impress, or oneself. Both needed convincing. As though the more flamboyant, effusive, and—to a Midwesterner—outlandish, the more firmly doubt could be concealed.
Today, from among these very people, are those most likely to betray their Savior’s teachings, replaced by a new idol. A focus on those verses commonly known reveals the deception. It comes in the arena Mark the disciple said, “false prophets would lead astray the elect.” [2] Through the influence of one whom John claimed, “does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is the father of lies.” [3] An idol who publicly lied over 13,000 times in 1000 days, while Jesus preached to “Seek the truth,” and Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth.” [4] Rather than “Turn the other cheek,” this idol claims to hit back ten times harder. [5] And though Jesus advises to “Pull the plank from your own eye first,” this idol blames only others for his failings. [6] In that celebrated reference to those things that are Caesar’s and those that are God’s, Caesar’s world is paramount to this idol and his supporters, no matter how immoral, corrupt, or treasonous the means to win it. [7] Yet Jesus asked, “What good is it to win the whole world and lose your soul?” [8] With such teachings conservatism once associated, however imperfectly, to shade its politics with moral guidance. No more.
With repeat displays of mental derangement, this idol proudly parades behavior befitting a malignant juvenile. A testament to the arrested development of an admitted adulterer and draft dodger, a thief who would launder millions in stolen Russian money and rip off thousands of students at his fake university for millions more. [9] A man who has fleeced other nations for his financial gain and that of his family, while fleecing American taxpayers by filling his hotels with administrative staff and military personnel. [10] A man who excluded all Sunni countries (where he does business) from his Shia Muslim ban, said to “keep us safe,” while only Sunnis killed Americans on 9/11. [11] A man who told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that help from foreign entities to rig an American election is the right thing to do, and he’d do it again. [12] Then did, when he sought to extort Ukraine into “announcing” an investigation of his political opponent (he didn’t want a real investigation). This was to be exchanged for Congressionally-mandated military aid to fight our mutual Russian enemy—illegal according to the GAO [13]—followed by a cover-up. [14] A man for whom witnessed and documented court and congressional evidence has all the markings of a Putin asset. [15] As all the while his party, propaganda machine, and supporters promote his lies to ensure belonging, placing their clan higher than America or their Messiah. These people excuse their idol’s sleaze by reference to God’s use of the adulterer King David for good, while Paul said to do evil so good may come is wrong. [16] They even block legislation that makes collusion with foreign powers illegal. [17] Among their rally compatriots: QAnon, the Klan, and Neo-Nazis—fanaticism my father and 16-million others enlisted in the US Armed Forces to defend this nation against in WWII, now embraced. As Thomas Paine wrote, “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind…he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.” [18]
Who could imagine that such an idol risks losing—like some ancient Chinese emperor—“The Mandate of Heaven,” as evangelical Pat Robertson warned for the “chosen one’s” ineptitude in Syria? [19] Prime example of the magnitude to which these people can lie to themselves, and an echo from the 20th century. It was then history witnessed three different ideologies commit the most egregious of crimes. They, too, called it moral. They, too, branded the press “enemies of the people.” They, too, bathed in the kind of conspiracy theories peddled by America’s propaganda networks today. And they had their own idol. Look what happened to them. As Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
The integrity of this idol’s Christian Right has collapsed. Immorality is not only their identity, but also their tool. From a newly “results” oriented people touting the economy, for whom moral character was paramount in their abhorrence of Bill Clinton, not his budget surplus and boom economy. Their ends justify any means.
Yet, America’s Founders wrapped morality into our form of governance, where the means were made a moral matter more vital than the ends. Delays, checks, and balances were meant to frustrate tyrants, encouraging moral means to win over corruption. If means don’t matter, why not adopt a more efficient tyranny than the messy nature of republican democracy?
An old story illustrates the moral process of Jesus and the Founder’s: A man can secure a million dollars for his church to feed the poor if only he can win a foot race. Should he cheat? Imagine the benefits his church could provide, while his corrupt means corrupt his ends. But supporters of this idol, Donald Trump, say the system is rigged against them, they’re forced to cheat (and forever revive Hillary to hate as though she's still here to beat). At least immoral actions might produce positive material outcomes, violating Jesus, Paul, and the Founders.
So put Jesus in the runner’s place. Knowing his contestants are swindlers, would he practice corruption to win? An individual who stood for truth all the way to the cross when he could have cheated truth and Pilate to save his life. This practice of the Right’s duplicity ignores that immorality has no check and balance. Corruption is unlimited in what it seeks and how it seeks it. What will the Right do when losing the election, the corruption they sanctioned turns against them? They’ll be calling for their Redeemer, morality, and justice. That is, if they can lose after they've rigged state systems.
I, too, feel the populist anger, my hometown eviscerated of factory jobs; globalization that gave sovereignty to corporations, not nations; and I bristle at the authoritarianism of political correctness that dictates how I can talk, what I must defend and reject. But the treason we saw from our ex and twice-impeached executive, his party, and lie factories, all opposed to character and morality matters to me more. As the Founders knew, ethical actions must be sustained or liberty is lost. To endorse a lawless criminal in violation of the Founder’s and Jesus—both of whom the Christian Right pretend to revere—dooms this republic founded on moral means. [20] What a surprise that immorality would have tangible costs to American Christianity and America as world leaders laughed at the idol behind his back and the world turned to China.
Part of the appeal of Christianity is its emphasis on ethics in an unethical world filled with habitually unethical humans. While I still pine for Reagan and revere the Teachings, I’m no longer a Christian by traditional definitions, nor would I join associations of people who so zealously vandalize their faith. This degeneracy will only hasten its collapse. Though it’s hard to remember, American Christianity is not a monolith, as evidenced by founder Billy Graham’s Christianity Today when it defined Trump as “grossly immoral,” calling for his removal. [21] Or as Baptist News Global’s Jeff Brumley wrote, “evangelical support for a scandal-ridden [Trump] could spell the end of Christianity in the United States.” [22] Not without rejoinder by evangelical loyalists, including the president of Christian Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr., notable for his alleged nepotistic administration, trafficking in nude photos of his wife, and investments in a Miami brothel. [23] After all we now know, what we’ve seen, and what the world has experienced as a result of Trump’s malevolent seizures, and yet an overwhelming majority of “evangelical” / “conservative” / “Republicans” still support him. [24] This is a cult. As Minister of Church Affairs, Hans Kerrl said in 1937, “True Christianity is represented by the Party, and the German people are now called by the Party and especially the Fuehrer to a real Christianity.” [25] Evidence that in the perennial contest between everlasting salvation and political power, the here-and-now wins.
I’ve sparred with people like this for years and frequently learn from them. Their denials, obfuscation, and mental acrobatics prove miracles do happen. Rational analysis, right-reason, and truth are an obstacle to winning their political arguments. Psychological perversions like this have not been witnessed in such breadth and depth in America since Southern Christians justified slavery with Hebrew Scriptures. One would do better to debate democracy with the Taliban. And while much is said about a return to civility in America, when it comes to their sacred dogmas, to approach these people with civility is like taking a Bible to a knife fight. Just what Putin wanted. He won. America was defeated.
And now, thanks to advances in cognitive psychology and a bit of history, we know why. Aside from Putin’s leverage of our gullibility, the Right didn’t betray all they once stood for without help from the Left and primate biology. Next time, after this our 5th of 5 irregular installments portending America’s monarchy, and a return to the bimonthly Monday: March 2, 2020.
[1] Allen Downey, The U.S. Is Retreating from Religion, Scientific American, October 20, 2017.
Jana Riess, "Religion declining in importance for many Americans," especially for Millennials, Religious News Service, December 10, 2018.
[2] Mark 13:22
[3] John 8:44
[4] John 8:32, and Ephesians 4:25
[5] Matthew 5:39
[6] Matthew 7:5
[7] Mathew 22:21
[8] Matthew 16:26
[9] Brett Williams, Our Dear (mafia) Leader, Goodreads, December 24, 2019.
[10] Ibid
[11] Wikipedia, Trump travel ban.
Patrick Cockburn, Donald Trump puts US on Sunni Muslim side of bitter sectarian war with Shias, Independent, 21 May 2017.
[12] Lucien Bruggeman, 'I think I’d take it': In exclusive interview, Trump says he would listen if foreigners offered dirt on opponents, ABC NEWS, June 13, 2019.
[13] Emily Cochrane, Eric Lipton and Chris Cameron, G.A.O. Report Says Trump Administration Broke Law in Withholding Ukraine Aid, New York Times, Jan. 16, 2020.
[14] Elie Honig, The Trump cover-up is unfolding before our eyes, CNN, December 31, 2019.
[15] Brett Williams, America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”, Goodreads, January 6, 2019.
[16] Romans 3:8.
[17] JORDAIN CARNEY, Senate GOP blocks bill to require campaigns report foreign election assistance, The HILL, 06/13/19.
Senate Democrats, UPDATED: DESPITE HIS CLAIMS TO THE CONTRARY, SENATE MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL IS BLOCKING ELECTION SECURITY LEGISLATION – PART OF A LONGSTANDING REFUSAL TO STAND UP TO RUSSIAN ELECTION INTERFERENCE, July 29, 2019.
SOPHIA TESFAYE, Sen. Marsha Blackburn takes one for Trump, defends flow of Russian money, SOLON, JUNE 14, 2019
[18] Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Prometheus Books, 1984 (1794), pg. 8
[19] Kim Bellware, Trump ‘in danger of losing the mandate of heaven’ over Syria decision, Pat Robertson warns, Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2019.
[20] While Right-wing radio talker, self-designated Christian, and devotee of our moral process document, the Constitution, Rush Limbaugh asserts “Trump is results oriented…and results mean there’s no need for process.” 1/9/2020 Apparently, Limbaugh’s a Bill Clinton fan now as well.
[21] MARK GALLI, Trump Should Be Removed from Office, Christianity Today, DECEMBER 19, 2019.
[22] JEFF BRUMLEY , Support for Trump could spell end of the evangelical church. But when?, Baptist News Global, MARCH 19, 2018.
[23] BRANDON AMBROSINO, My Weekend at the Falwells’ South Beach Flophouse, POLITICO, August 25, 2017.
Frances Robles and Jim Rutenberg, The Evangelical, the ‘Pool Boy,’ the Comedian and Michael Cohen, The New York Times, June 18, 2019.
Brendan Skwire, Jerry Falwell Jr. Sends Pictures Of His Half-Naked Wife To His Buddies:, Progress Pond, Sep 9, 2019.
[24] Philip Bump, A popular theory for Trump’s popularity among Republicans appears to be wrong, Washington Post, Jan. 8, 2020.
[25] William Shrier, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Touchstone Simon & Shuster, 1990, pg. 239. Likewise, though ideologically different, be they evangelicals or any Trump-idol-supporting Christian, these people hate liberals more than they love Jesus. And what is liberal? Whatever their propaganda machine says it is, from science and scientists to wind power and LED light bulbs.
January 6, 2020
January 6, 2020: America is asking, “Are Trump and his Party, traitors?”
Just one week after Trump found himself in office, on January 29, 2017, Republican Bush Administration State Department counselor Eliot Cohn wrote his prophetic acid bath blistering in The Atlantic. “Precisely because [Trump’s] problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse as power intoxicates him… It will probably end in calamity. It will not be surprising if his term ends with impeachment… When you sell your soul to the Devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan. To be associated with [Trump is] an exercise in moral self-destruction.” [1] Prophecy, like Bill Clinton’s philandering, and Weapons of Mass Destruction we knew didn’t exist in Iraq; not hard to predict.
What was harder to predict was the collapse of the Reagan’s GOP (Grand Old Party) for Trump’s GOPP (Grand Old Putin Party) with their willful participation in Russian Operations to destabilize America and rig our elections; the ever more fanatical lie factories in Right-wing media that rallies their troops to cash in on hatred and provide shelter for Trump; and, most surprising of all, the collapse of American evangelical Christianity in the flock’s betrayal of their Savior through cultic worship of Trump that we’ll look at next time. With witness to this, is it so strange to wonder if Trump and his Party are traitors? Is that a logical extension of their moral self-destruction, or exaggeration? Or are they simply, per conservative Reaganite Max Boot, “the Kremlin’s useful idiots”? [2]
First, a definition. Treason: “disloyalty or treachery to one’s own country or its government, giving aid or comfort to the enemy.” [3] No small offense, punishment for treason, almost universally around the world, is execution by a military firing squad.
During the House Intelligence Committee hearings concerning Trump’s attempted bribery of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and subsequent cover-up, we witnessed former National Security Council Senior Director for European and Russian affairs, Dr. Fiona Hill, tutor Trump’s Party face-to-face. “Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill said. “This is a fictional narrative perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves… [Russia] deploys millions of dollars to weaponize our own false narratives to divide us against each other, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy… [They] are gearing up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. [Don’t] promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.” [4] And what was the Republican response? They handed Hill their report claiming Ukraine was to blame—as though they know what the CIA, NSA, FBI, and 14 other intel agencies do not.
On each day of the hearings, California House Republican ranking member Devin Nunez’s opening remarks were a version of, “What is the full extent of Ukraine’s election meddling against the Trump campaign?” [5] The answer is, there is and was none. Nunez and his comrades are well aware of agency and Senate findings to the contrary. [6] (Nunez was later found to be secretly in Ukraine seeking conspiracy theories against Biden, and suddenly recalled his forgotten contacts with Giuliani co-conspirator and indicted Lev Parnas [7].) But each day was another promotion of the Ukrainian conspiracy as part of Russian Ops explicitly traced to Putin by U.S. intel and already briefed to Congress. [8] House Republicans Jim Jordan (OH), Mark Meadows (NC), Matt Gaetz (FL), Doug Collins, (GA), Mike Conaway, Louie Gohmert, and John Ratcliffe, all of Texas, promote this or other Russian propaganda attached to Right-wing hot button issues like guns, Christianity, and abortion. [9] Republican Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana chimed in with his House comrades to assure us it was Ukraine, the next day he admitted it wasn’t, while the day after it was Ukraine again. [10] Soon after, Republican Senator Ted Cruz (whose father, according to Trump, assisted Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK’s assassination [11]) joined the Russian Op encouraged by Trump. [12] There’s an old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Notice, this is the same Party for which the Republican Senate Majority Leader—whom House Speaker Nancy Pelosi addressed as Moscow Mitch McConnell—repeatedly blocks bills passed by the House that make collusion with foreign powers illegal. [13] Thus making true the fear of foreign incursion George Washington expressed in his 1796 Farewell Address. This is a Party and its supporters who claim to so love the Constitution that 52% of them want it rescinded for authoritarian governance, clearing the way for Trump as dictator. [14] What Max Boot wrote was once “the party of moral clarity,” is now the party where FOX fake-news-generator and conservative patriot, Tucker Carlson says, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.” “The Republican Party,” says Boot, “has become all that it once despised.” Cohn’s warning has come true. The GOP’s soul has been evacuated by the Devil that Cohn said they’d sell it to, while that Devil retains his seat with 7 of his minions in or about to be in prison. [15] “Moral self-destruction” complete.
But why blame Ukraine for something Russia did? Will taking the blame off Putin ease the pain of a man who murders people in other countries with Novichok? [16] Could there be a connection with Trump’s soon-to-be-imprisoned National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s promise to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that Obama sanctions would be removed? [17] Could it be the same reason Trump refused to impose Russian election meddling sanctions from a near-unanimous Congress after the election until he was forced to, then missed the implementation deadline? [18] Why did Trump privately discuss destroying NATO and publicly call into question Article 5, that any attack on a NATO nation is an attack on the U.S.? [19] In another of his knee-jerk reactions without consultation with allies, why would Trump dispose of our anti-ISIS allies, the Kurds, after a phone call to Turkey’s Erdogan, (Trump has two towers in Istanbul), then pull all U.S. troops from the Syria-Turkey border where Russia now occupies U.S. bases? [20] Given that the government fiscal year was 5-days away when Trump reversed course on Ukraine extortion after he was caught; given that expiration would have made $391M in Ukraine weapons aid disappear; given this episode has a curious echo in the removal of lethal-weapons-aid-to-Ukraine language from the 2016 RNC Platform, who could be the beneficiary of all this? [21] (For those who believe Trump gave Ukraine Javelin missiles, while Obama gave only “pillows and bead sheets,” see the references for a laugh. [22]) Who gains when Trump gives Israeli secrets to Russians in the Oval Office? [23]
Hmm…
Could it be that if Trump, his Party, and propaganda machine convince enough people that Putin is the victim of Russia-bashing liberals, that all Russian sanctions will vanish? Would that effect Russia’s stumbling economy and Putin’s power? Perhaps a bit like Trump’s removal of sanctions on Russian oligarchs that netted one of them hundreds of millions of dollars in a day. [24] And if all this were to benefit America’s enemy, why would Trump want to do that? Is there any connection to Trump’s staff having 140+ meetings with Russians, their agents, or cutouts during his campaign? [25] Why does Trump hold secret meetings with Putin with no Americans present? Why in the last meeting in which an American was present (the translator) were notes seized by Trump with an order not to talk? [26] After 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to aid Trump, why would he ingratiate himself to Putin in Helsinki, validating Vlad’s, “Who, me?” [27]
For the “Republican” Party, it’s a mixed story. They sanction Putin but later parrot his propaganda. They protest Trump’s coddling of Putin, but later protect Trump’s abuse of power that favors Putin. Did it take them three years to make the full conversion from GOP to GOPP-Putin-asset? Their ham-handed rollicking during the House Intel and Judiciary Hearings sure looked like it. For Trump, it’s more clear. What other reason could Trump have for these actions right from the start, beyond treason or blackmail? (See The Asset podcast series by the Moscow Project for details.) Perhaps there are other reasons, but if Trump acts out of blackmail in Putin’s favor, is that not treason?
America needs a lawyer.
But U.S. Attorney General William Barr has proven he works for Trump, not America. He lied about the Mueller Report before its release (did he think we wouldn’t read it?), he tried to bury the Ukraine-extortion-whistleblower notice, he tours Europe in search of conspiracy theories, and he repeated his Mueller gag on the Inspector General’s exoneration of FBI / Obama / Deep-State-alien-impregnators-from-other-planets spying on Trump. The NYC Bar is currently seeking a Congressional investigation of DOJ AG William Bar. [28]
Maybe it’s not that complicated. There’s an old saying in the American Midwest where I was born: If it walks like a traitor and quacks like a traitor, it’s probably a traitor.
How ‘bout a prediction. Given the Steele Dossier appears mixed—some of it corroborated, some not; given the CIA asserts if this kind of raw intel is 75% wrong, it’s great intel; then if Trump loses the next election, of no use to Putin, might we anticipate that juicy video of Trump’s naked abundance mounting prostitutes in a monitored Moscow hotel room after the infamous golden shower? [29] It would be in perfect keeping with the character of our man in the Oval Office. [30] As a game show host and World Wrestling Entertainment imp, he’d be delighted with its ratings. [31 – a video of Trump’s wrestling pranks]
Next time, the 5th in an irregular series of 5 on America’s soon to be Pharaoh, we look at the most base of Trump’s base. Those people who are the only reason Trump is able to continue his mafia ways we examined last time, and why Trump’s GOPP so blatantly lie for him.
[1] Eliot Cohen, A Clarifying Moment in American History, The Atlantic, Jan 29, 2017.
[2] Max Boot, The Republicans have become the party of Russia. This makes me sick, The Washington Post, December 4, 2019.
[3] American College Dictionary, 1969
[4] John Cassidy, The Extraordinary Impeachment Testimony of Fiona Hill, The New Yorker, November 21, 2019.
[5] KATE IRBY, Decoding Devin Nunes’ opening statement at impeachment hearing, McClatchy News, NOVEMBER 13, 2019.
[6] Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election (PDF), U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, October 2019.
[7] ERIC LUTZ, DEVIN NUNES IS HAVING SOME UKRAINE PROBLEMS OF HIS OWN, Vanity Fair, NOVEMBER 25, 2019.
DAVID LIGHTMAN, Giuliani aide links Devin Nunes to Trump’s Ukraine effort: ‘He knows who I am’, McClatchy News, JANUARY 16, 2020.
KIM WEHLE, Phone Records Drag Nunes into the Ukraine Scandal, The Bulwark, DECEMBER 4, 2019.
[8] Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg Charges of Ukrainian Meddling? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says< i>, New York Times, Nov. 22, 2019.
[9] David Kocieniewski, Greg Farrell, Polly Mosendz, Prayer, Guns Paved Path to GOP Influence for Accused Russian, Bloomberg, July 17, 2018. Michelle Goldberg, Are Republicans Covering for Trump, or for Themselves? If the N.R.A. was compromised by Russia, the whole party's in trouble, New York Times, July 20, 2018.
[10] MARIANNE LEVINE and BURGESS EVERETT Folksy John Kennedy gets serious pushback on Ukraine mess,, POLITICO, 12/03/2019. WILLIAM CUMMINGS, 'I was wrong': Sen. Kennedy takes back claim that Ukraine may have been behind 2016 election email hack, USA TODAY, Nov. 27, 2019. DANIEL POLITI,
Watch Chuck Todd Challenge Sen. John Kennedy as He Doubles Down on Ukraine Interference Claim, SLATE, DEC 01, 2019.
[11] DAN SPINELLI, Trump revives rumor linking Cruz's father to JFK assassination, POLITICO, 07/22/2016.
[12] Jacob Knutson, Cruz promotes conspiracy that Ukraine "blatantly interfered" in U.S. election, Axios, Dec 8, 2019.
[13] Recall Moscow Mitch McConnell blocked Obama’s release of the 2016 Russian eletion invasion before and after the election. Majority Leader McConnell Blocks Bill That 75% of Republicans Support To Require Campaigns To Report Foreign Interference, Law Works, 2019. Barrett, Manu Raju and Clare Foran, Why Mitch McConnell is rejecting Hill calls on election security, as House Dems plan new push, CNN, June 14, 2019.
[14] Aaron Blake, The GOP has caught autocratic fever, The Washington Post, August 7, 2019.
[15] Tasos Katopodis, Here's a breakdown of indictments and cases in Mueller's probe, ABC News, November 15, 2019.
[16] NIGEL NELSON, Vladimir Putin 'ordered novichok assassin to murder British spy behind Trump sex dossier', MIRROR, OCTOBER 14, 2018.
[17] BEN MATHIS-LILLEY, Report: Flynn Proposed Sanctions Relief Deal to Russia While Working for Trump Campaign, SLATE, DEC 13, 2018.
[18] MAX BERGMANN, JAMES LAMOND, Trump’s Attitude Toward Russia Sanctions Makes a Mockery of the United States, Foreign Policy, MARCH 1, 2018.
[19] Nicholas Burns and Douglas Lute , NATO’s biggest problem is President Trump, The Washington Post, April 2, 2019. ERIC LUTZ, TRUMP PRIVATELY DISCUSSED DESTROYING NATO ALLIANCE, Vanity Fair, JANUARY 15, 2019
[20] JASON MOTLAGH, ‘Trump Is Pleased to Watch Us Suffer’ — Scenes From the President’s Kurdish Betrayal , The Rolling Stone, October 31, 2019. Tracy Connor
, Russians Take Over 3rd U.S. Base in Northern Syria, The Daily Beast, Dec. 26, 2019.
[21] R. Jeffrey Smith, TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WORRIED UKRAINE AID HALT VIOLATED SPENDING LAW, Public Integrity, December 21, 2019.
Josh Rogin, Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russia stance on Ukraine, The Washington Post, July 18, 2016.
[22] “Republicans involved in the impeachment inquiry have repeatedly touted the Trump administration's sale of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine as evidence the president is supportive of the country against Russian aggression, but they've left out key details in the process. Under the rules of the sale, the Javelin missiles have to be stored in western Ukraine, which is far from the frontlines of the ongoing conflict in the eastern part of the country (the Donbas region) against pro-Russia separatists. In short, the Javelins were essentially provided to Ukraine under the condition that they not be used in the conflict zone.”
John Haltiwanger, There's a huge loophole in the GOP's claim that Trump's sale of Javelin missiles to Ukraine shows his support for the country, Business Insider, Jan 23, 2020.
“But while there is evidence that the Javelin sale has been a powerful gesture of support for Kyiv, the missiles’ military application has been far more limited. Under the conditions of the foreign military sale, the Trump administration stipulates that the Javelins must be stored in western Ukraine—hundreds of miles from the battlefield. ‘I see these more as symbolic weapons than anything else,’ said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. Experts say the conditions of the sale render them useless in the event of a sustained low-level assault—the kind of attack Ukraine is most likely to face from Russia.” AMY MACKINNON & LARA SELIGMAN, Far From the Front Lines, Javelin Missiles Go Unused in Ukraine, Foreign Policy, OCTOBER 3, 2019.
[23] Carol E. Lee and Shane Harris, Trump Shared Intelligence Secrets With Russians in Oval Office Meeting, The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2017.
[24] Tom Embury-Dennis, Trump lifts sanctions on Russia oligarch Oleg Deripaska in 'huge gift to Putin', The Independent, 28 January 2019. Karoun Demirjian and Jeanne Whalen, Russian oligarch’s deal for sanctions relief is sweeter than publicly portrayed, document suggests, The Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2019.
[25] KAREN YOURISH and LARRY BUCHANAN, Mueller Report Shows Depth of Connections Between Trump Campaign and Russians, The New York Times, APRIL 19, 2019.
[26] WILLIAM CUMMINGS, President Trump went to 'extraordinary lengths' to hide details of Putin meetings, report says, USA TODAY, Jan. 14, 2019.
[27] Ron Elving, Trump's Helsinki Bow To Putin Leaves World Wondering: Why?, NPR, July 17, 2018.
[28] Recall it took Trump 3 tries to find a loyalist DOJ AG who would so flagrantly betray the Cosntitution. Greg Farrell, NYC Bar Association Asks Congress to Investigate AG Barr for Bias, Bloomberg, January 9, 2020. WILLIAM SALETAN, Barr Is Trying to Erase the Truth: He’s smearing the Russia investigation and covering up Trump’s guilt, SLATE, DEC 13, 2019. Michelle Goldberg, Just How Corrupt Is Bill Barr?, New York Times, SEPT. 26, 2019. Jay Willis, How Bill Barr Turned the Justice Department Into a Cover-up Operation for Trump, GQ, September 27, 2019.
[29] Sarah Grant, Chuck Rosenberg, The Steele Dossier: A Retrospective, Lawfare, December 14, 2018. Erik Wemple, ‘The story stands’: McClatchy won’t back off its Michael Cohen-Prague reporting (8-part series), The Washington Post, Dec. 13, 2019.
[30] Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, Crime In Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump, Random House, 2019.
[31] A special look at 2013 WWE Hall of Fame Inductee Donald Trump: Raw, YouTube, Feb. 25, 2013. EDWIN RIOS, 6 Unreal Moments From Trump’s Pro Wrestling Career, Mother Jones, JULY 4, 2017.
What was harder to predict was the collapse of the Reagan’s GOP (Grand Old Party) for Trump’s GOPP (Grand Old Putin Party) with their willful participation in Russian Operations to destabilize America and rig our elections; the ever more fanatical lie factories in Right-wing media that rallies their troops to cash in on hatred and provide shelter for Trump; and, most surprising of all, the collapse of American evangelical Christianity in the flock’s betrayal of their Savior through cultic worship of Trump that we’ll look at next time. With witness to this, is it so strange to wonder if Trump and his Party are traitors? Is that a logical extension of their moral self-destruction, or exaggeration? Or are they simply, per conservative Reaganite Max Boot, “the Kremlin’s useful idiots”? [2]
First, a definition. Treason: “disloyalty or treachery to one’s own country or its government, giving aid or comfort to the enemy.” [3] No small offense, punishment for treason, almost universally around the world, is execution by a military firing squad.
During the House Intelligence Committee hearings concerning Trump’s attempted bribery of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and subsequent cover-up, we witnessed former National Security Council Senior Director for European and Russian affairs, Dr. Fiona Hill, tutor Trump’s Party face-to-face. “Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill said. “This is a fictional narrative perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves… [Russia] deploys millions of dollars to weaponize our own false narratives to divide us against each other, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy… [They] are gearing up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them. [Don’t] promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.” [4] And what was the Republican response? They handed Hill their report claiming Ukraine was to blame—as though they know what the CIA, NSA, FBI, and 14 other intel agencies do not.
On each day of the hearings, California House Republican ranking member Devin Nunez’s opening remarks were a version of, “What is the full extent of Ukraine’s election meddling against the Trump campaign?” [5] The answer is, there is and was none. Nunez and his comrades are well aware of agency and Senate findings to the contrary. [6] (Nunez was later found to be secretly in Ukraine seeking conspiracy theories against Biden, and suddenly recalled his forgotten contacts with Giuliani co-conspirator and indicted Lev Parnas [7].) But each day was another promotion of the Ukrainian conspiracy as part of Russian Ops explicitly traced to Putin by U.S. intel and already briefed to Congress. [8] House Republicans Jim Jordan (OH), Mark Meadows (NC), Matt Gaetz (FL), Doug Collins, (GA), Mike Conaway, Louie Gohmert, and John Ratcliffe, all of Texas, promote this or other Russian propaganda attached to Right-wing hot button issues like guns, Christianity, and abortion. [9] Republican Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana chimed in with his House comrades to assure us it was Ukraine, the next day he admitted it wasn’t, while the day after it was Ukraine again. [10] Soon after, Republican Senator Ted Cruz (whose father, according to Trump, assisted Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK’s assassination [11]) joined the Russian Op encouraged by Trump. [12] There’s an old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Notice, this is the same Party for which the Republican Senate Majority Leader—whom House Speaker Nancy Pelosi addressed as Moscow Mitch McConnell—repeatedly blocks bills passed by the House that make collusion with foreign powers illegal. [13] Thus making true the fear of foreign incursion George Washington expressed in his 1796 Farewell Address. This is a Party and its supporters who claim to so love the Constitution that 52% of them want it rescinded for authoritarian governance, clearing the way for Trump as dictator. [14] What Max Boot wrote was once “the party of moral clarity,” is now the party where FOX fake-news-generator and conservative patriot, Tucker Carlson says, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.” “The Republican Party,” says Boot, “has become all that it once despised.” Cohn’s warning has come true. The GOP’s soul has been evacuated by the Devil that Cohn said they’d sell it to, while that Devil retains his seat with 7 of his minions in or about to be in prison. [15] “Moral self-destruction” complete.
But why blame Ukraine for something Russia did? Will taking the blame off Putin ease the pain of a man who murders people in other countries with Novichok? [16] Could there be a connection with Trump’s soon-to-be-imprisoned National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s promise to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that Obama sanctions would be removed? [17] Could it be the same reason Trump refused to impose Russian election meddling sanctions from a near-unanimous Congress after the election until he was forced to, then missed the implementation deadline? [18] Why did Trump privately discuss destroying NATO and publicly call into question Article 5, that any attack on a NATO nation is an attack on the U.S.? [19] In another of his knee-jerk reactions without consultation with allies, why would Trump dispose of our anti-ISIS allies, the Kurds, after a phone call to Turkey’s Erdogan, (Trump has two towers in Istanbul), then pull all U.S. troops from the Syria-Turkey border where Russia now occupies U.S. bases? [20] Given that the government fiscal year was 5-days away when Trump reversed course on Ukraine extortion after he was caught; given that expiration would have made $391M in Ukraine weapons aid disappear; given this episode has a curious echo in the removal of lethal-weapons-aid-to-Ukraine language from the 2016 RNC Platform, who could be the beneficiary of all this? [21] (For those who believe Trump gave Ukraine Javelin missiles, while Obama gave only “pillows and bead sheets,” see the references for a laugh. [22]) Who gains when Trump gives Israeli secrets to Russians in the Oval Office? [23]
Hmm…
Could it be that if Trump, his Party, and propaganda machine convince enough people that Putin is the victim of Russia-bashing liberals, that all Russian sanctions will vanish? Would that effect Russia’s stumbling economy and Putin’s power? Perhaps a bit like Trump’s removal of sanctions on Russian oligarchs that netted one of them hundreds of millions of dollars in a day. [24] And if all this were to benefit America’s enemy, why would Trump want to do that? Is there any connection to Trump’s staff having 140+ meetings with Russians, their agents, or cutouts during his campaign? [25] Why does Trump hold secret meetings with Putin with no Americans present? Why in the last meeting in which an American was present (the translator) were notes seized by Trump with an order not to talk? [26] After 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to aid Trump, why would he ingratiate himself to Putin in Helsinki, validating Vlad’s, “Who, me?” [27]
For the “Republican” Party, it’s a mixed story. They sanction Putin but later parrot his propaganda. They protest Trump’s coddling of Putin, but later protect Trump’s abuse of power that favors Putin. Did it take them three years to make the full conversion from GOP to GOPP-Putin-asset? Their ham-handed rollicking during the House Intel and Judiciary Hearings sure looked like it. For Trump, it’s more clear. What other reason could Trump have for these actions right from the start, beyond treason or blackmail? (See The Asset podcast series by the Moscow Project for details.) Perhaps there are other reasons, but if Trump acts out of blackmail in Putin’s favor, is that not treason?
America needs a lawyer.
But U.S. Attorney General William Barr has proven he works for Trump, not America. He lied about the Mueller Report before its release (did he think we wouldn’t read it?), he tried to bury the Ukraine-extortion-whistleblower notice, he tours Europe in search of conspiracy theories, and he repeated his Mueller gag on the Inspector General’s exoneration of FBI / Obama / Deep-State-alien-impregnators-from-other-planets spying on Trump. The NYC Bar is currently seeking a Congressional investigation of DOJ AG William Bar. [28]
Maybe it’s not that complicated. There’s an old saying in the American Midwest where I was born: If it walks like a traitor and quacks like a traitor, it’s probably a traitor.
How ‘bout a prediction. Given the Steele Dossier appears mixed—some of it corroborated, some not; given the CIA asserts if this kind of raw intel is 75% wrong, it’s great intel; then if Trump loses the next election, of no use to Putin, might we anticipate that juicy video of Trump’s naked abundance mounting prostitutes in a monitored Moscow hotel room after the infamous golden shower? [29] It would be in perfect keeping with the character of our man in the Oval Office. [30] As a game show host and World Wrestling Entertainment imp, he’d be delighted with its ratings. [31 – a video of Trump’s wrestling pranks]
Next time, the 5th in an irregular series of 5 on America’s soon to be Pharaoh, we look at the most base of Trump’s base. Those people who are the only reason Trump is able to continue his mafia ways we examined last time, and why Trump’s GOPP so blatantly lie for him.
[1] Eliot Cohen, A Clarifying Moment in American History, The Atlantic, Jan 29, 2017.
[2] Max Boot, The Republicans have become the party of Russia. This makes me sick, The Washington Post, December 4, 2019.
[3] American College Dictionary, 1969
[4] John Cassidy, The Extraordinary Impeachment Testimony of Fiona Hill, The New Yorker, November 21, 2019.
[5] KATE IRBY, Decoding Devin Nunes’ opening statement at impeachment hearing, McClatchy News, NOVEMBER 13, 2019.
[6] Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election (PDF), U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, October 2019.
[7] ERIC LUTZ, DEVIN NUNES IS HAVING SOME UKRAINE PROBLEMS OF HIS OWN, Vanity Fair, NOVEMBER 25, 2019.
DAVID LIGHTMAN, Giuliani aide links Devin Nunes to Trump’s Ukraine effort: ‘He knows who I am’, McClatchy News, JANUARY 16, 2020.
KIM WEHLE, Phone Records Drag Nunes into the Ukraine Scandal, The Bulwark, DECEMBER 4, 2019.
[8] Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg Charges of Ukrainian Meddling? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says< i>, New York Times, Nov. 22, 2019.
[9] David Kocieniewski, Greg Farrell, Polly Mosendz, Prayer, Guns Paved Path to GOP Influence for Accused Russian, Bloomberg, July 17, 2018. Michelle Goldberg, Are Republicans Covering for Trump, or for Themselves? If the N.R.A. was compromised by Russia, the whole party's in trouble, New York Times, July 20, 2018.
[10] MARIANNE LEVINE and BURGESS EVERETT Folksy John Kennedy gets serious pushback on Ukraine mess,, POLITICO, 12/03/2019. WILLIAM CUMMINGS, 'I was wrong': Sen. Kennedy takes back claim that Ukraine may have been behind 2016 election email hack, USA TODAY, Nov. 27, 2019. DANIEL POLITI,
Watch Chuck Todd Challenge Sen. John Kennedy as He Doubles Down on Ukraine Interference Claim, SLATE, DEC 01, 2019.
[11] DAN SPINELLI, Trump revives rumor linking Cruz's father to JFK assassination, POLITICO, 07/22/2016.
[12] Jacob Knutson, Cruz promotes conspiracy that Ukraine "blatantly interfered" in U.S. election, Axios, Dec 8, 2019.
[13] Recall Moscow Mitch McConnell blocked Obama’s release of the 2016 Russian eletion invasion before and after the election. Majority Leader McConnell Blocks Bill That 75% of Republicans Support To Require Campaigns To Report Foreign Interference, Law Works, 2019. Barrett, Manu Raju and Clare Foran, Why Mitch McConnell is rejecting Hill calls on election security, as House Dems plan new push, CNN, June 14, 2019.
[14] Aaron Blake, The GOP has caught autocratic fever, The Washington Post, August 7, 2019.
[15] Tasos Katopodis, Here's a breakdown of indictments and cases in Mueller's probe, ABC News, November 15, 2019.
[16] NIGEL NELSON, Vladimir Putin 'ordered novichok assassin to murder British spy behind Trump sex dossier', MIRROR, OCTOBER 14, 2018.
[17] BEN MATHIS-LILLEY, Report: Flynn Proposed Sanctions Relief Deal to Russia While Working for Trump Campaign, SLATE, DEC 13, 2018.
[18] MAX BERGMANN, JAMES LAMOND, Trump’s Attitude Toward Russia Sanctions Makes a Mockery of the United States, Foreign Policy, MARCH 1, 2018.
[19] Nicholas Burns and Douglas Lute , NATO’s biggest problem is President Trump, The Washington Post, April 2, 2019. ERIC LUTZ, TRUMP PRIVATELY DISCUSSED DESTROYING NATO ALLIANCE, Vanity Fair, JANUARY 15, 2019
[20] JASON MOTLAGH, ‘Trump Is Pleased to Watch Us Suffer’ — Scenes From the President’s Kurdish Betrayal , The Rolling Stone, October 31, 2019. Tracy Connor
, Russians Take Over 3rd U.S. Base in Northern Syria, The Daily Beast, Dec. 26, 2019.
[21] R. Jeffrey Smith, TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WORRIED UKRAINE AID HALT VIOLATED SPENDING LAW, Public Integrity, December 21, 2019.
Josh Rogin, Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russia stance on Ukraine, The Washington Post, July 18, 2016.
[22] “Republicans involved in the impeachment inquiry have repeatedly touted the Trump administration's sale of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine as evidence the president is supportive of the country against Russian aggression, but they've left out key details in the process. Under the rules of the sale, the Javelin missiles have to be stored in western Ukraine, which is far from the frontlines of the ongoing conflict in the eastern part of the country (the Donbas region) against pro-Russia separatists. In short, the Javelins were essentially provided to Ukraine under the condition that they not be used in the conflict zone.”
John Haltiwanger, There's a huge loophole in the GOP's claim that Trump's sale of Javelin missiles to Ukraine shows his support for the country, Business Insider, Jan 23, 2020.
“But while there is evidence that the Javelin sale has been a powerful gesture of support for Kyiv, the missiles’ military application has been far more limited. Under the conditions of the foreign military sale, the Trump administration stipulates that the Javelins must be stored in western Ukraine—hundreds of miles from the battlefield. ‘I see these more as symbolic weapons than anything else,’ said Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at Rand Corp. Experts say the conditions of the sale render them useless in the event of a sustained low-level assault—the kind of attack Ukraine is most likely to face from Russia.” AMY MACKINNON & LARA SELIGMAN, Far From the Front Lines, Javelin Missiles Go Unused in Ukraine, Foreign Policy, OCTOBER 3, 2019.
[23] Carol E. Lee and Shane Harris, Trump Shared Intelligence Secrets With Russians in Oval Office Meeting, The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2017.
[24] Tom Embury-Dennis, Trump lifts sanctions on Russia oligarch Oleg Deripaska in 'huge gift to Putin', The Independent, 28 January 2019. Karoun Demirjian and Jeanne Whalen, Russian oligarch’s deal for sanctions relief is sweeter than publicly portrayed, document suggests, The Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2019.
[25] KAREN YOURISH and LARRY BUCHANAN, Mueller Report Shows Depth of Connections Between Trump Campaign and Russians, The New York Times, APRIL 19, 2019.
[26] WILLIAM CUMMINGS, President Trump went to 'extraordinary lengths' to hide details of Putin meetings, report says, USA TODAY, Jan. 14, 2019.
[27] Ron Elving, Trump's Helsinki Bow To Putin Leaves World Wondering: Why?, NPR, July 17, 2018.
[28] Recall it took Trump 3 tries to find a loyalist DOJ AG who would so flagrantly betray the Cosntitution. Greg Farrell, NYC Bar Association Asks Congress to Investigate AG Barr for Bias, Bloomberg, January 9, 2020. WILLIAM SALETAN, Barr Is Trying to Erase the Truth: He’s smearing the Russia investigation and covering up Trump’s guilt, SLATE, DEC 13, 2019. Michelle Goldberg, Just How Corrupt Is Bill Barr?, New York Times, SEPT. 26, 2019. Jay Willis, How Bill Barr Turned the Justice Department Into a Cover-up Operation for Trump, GQ, September 27, 2019.
[29] Sarah Grant, Chuck Rosenberg, The Steele Dossier: A Retrospective, Lawfare, December 14, 2018. Erik Wemple, ‘The story stands’: McClatchy won’t back off its Michael Cohen-Prague reporting (8-part series), The Washington Post, Dec. 13, 2019.
[30] Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, Crime In Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump, Random House, 2019.
[31] A special look at 2013 WWE Hall of Fame Inductee Donald Trump: Raw, YouTube, Feb. 25, 2013. EDWIN RIOS, 6 Unreal Moments From Trump’s Pro Wrestling Career, Mother Jones, JULY 4, 2017.
December 24, 2019
December 24, 2019: Our Dear (mafia) Leader
With Trump’s months-long effort to bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (or attempted bribery, depending on one’s tribe—both acts are illegal [1]), and the resulting House Intelligence Committee hearings which so gripped America, much has been made of Trump’s “pattern of behavior.” [2] As we’ll see here, Trump’s pattern has been documented in court records from over 3500 lawsuits, 1990s U.S. Senate investigations, media tracking, and commercial / intelligence research over three decades. [3] Trump’s pattern we now know well was made clear before the 2016 election by Trump’s ghostwriter of Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz: “So somebody comes after him and says he’s done something…horrible, and he just goes back at them with all guns blazing… And admits nothing, never admit anything, never say you made a mistake… And if you lose, declare victory.” [4] “When Trump is feeling cornered, in business or politics, he has a go-to strategy: He lies, and he just keeps lying.” [5] Trump didn’t divine this pattern by himself.
Trump’s father introduced him to corruption in real estate, but Trump’s personal operations got a boost with his 1973 introduction to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and eventually disbarred lawyer, Roy Cohn, who gave birth to the pattern Schwartz noted. [6] Cohn also represented mobsters Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti, who died in prison, of multiple gunshot wounds, and in prison, respectively. [7] In the 1980s, Trump got into the casino business. He sold $675M in junk bonds to complete his Taj Mahal Casino Resort in Atlantic City. [8] When he failed to make a $47M interest payment, he was forced to turn over half ownership to bondholders and enter bankruptcy. This was Trump’s 3rd casino in Atlantic City after the Castle and Plaza. When Trump finished the Taj Mahal Casino it so cut into Castle and Plaza business that Trump was eventually unable to make a whopping $338M payment on the Castle (there also commenced a recession), hence another bankruptcy; three in the same town at the same time. [9] Costs of the Taj ended up at nearly $1B. [10] It was when the Taj teetered on bankruptcy right from the start that it became the “preferred gambling spot of Russian mobsters,” and “broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s according to the IRS…” [11] With a slap on the wrist, Trump paid the Treasury almost a half million in fines for violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.
By 1992 the U.S. Senate released a report, “Asian Organized Crime: The New International Criminal,” which linked Trump’s businesses to that sector. [12] Trump’s Taj VP for Foreign Marketing was Danny Sau Leung, and according to the Senate report, an associate of Hong Kong-based crime syndicate 14K Triad linked to murder, extortion and heroin smuggling. [13] In this same timeframe, the USSR had collapsed, as oligarchs, Russian mobsters, a broken KGB, and bankrupt government officials clambered to consolidate control over resulting chaos. They did so through the brute force of an amalgamated machine. As Russian General Oleg Kalugin said of the Russian mafia, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government.” [14]
“Throughout the 1990s,” writes Craig Unger, “untold millions from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s luxury developments and Atlantic City casinos. But all that money wasn’t enough to save Trump from his own failings… He owed $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with a mind-boggling $800 million of it personally guaranteed. He spent much of the decade mired in litigation, filing multiple bankruptcies and scrambling to survive… Fortunately for Trump, his own economic crisis coincided with one in Russia.” [15] To Western banks, Trump was poison, but not to stolen Russian money.
After multiple attempts at selling and refinancing his casinos, Trump recovered control. That only made things worse, and the Castle was finally sold to Landry’s for a paltry $38M in 2011. Landry’s turned it into a gambling revenue giant. [16]
Trump’s talent for business continued its display through bankruptcy of his airline (Trump Shuttle), his football team (New Jersey Generals), and his part in impoverishing the entire league (USFL). These failures turned Trump’s focus to hotels, condos, and resorts. Things were looking up. As Unger writes, “From the day [Trump Tower] opened, the building was a hit…” [17] But, “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for international law enforcement, Jonathan Winer. “…it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold, but no one is living in them.” [18] David Bogatin (a former Soviet pilot shooting down Americans over North Vietnam) bought five condos in Trump Tower for $6M (~$15M today). Bogatin pled guilty in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. He fled the U.S. and his Trump condos used to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets” were seized. [19] Vyacheslav Ivankov, “infamous for torturing his victims and boasting about the murders he arranged...oversaw the mob’s growth from a local extortion racket to a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. ‘… we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower,’’’ said James Moody, chief of the FBI’s organized crime unit. [20] Ivankov was later gunned down on the streets of Moscow. Another Trump tower resident and diamond dealer from Uzbekistan, Eduard Nektalov, lived “directly below Trump’s future campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway.” [21] After rumors Nektalov was cooperating with federal investigators, he was shot in the back of the head on Sixth Avenue in NYC. [22] At least “13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties… ‘They saved his bacon,’ says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration.” [23]
Another hotel property, Trump SoHo, had “multiple ties to an alleged international money-laundering network,” according to the Financial Times. [24] In one case, FT reported a former Kazakh energy minister was sued for conspiring to “systematically loot hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets,” then purchased three condos in Trump SoHo to launder his “ill-gotten funds.” Trump SoHo was the brainchild of two development companies, including Bayrock Group located on the 24th floor of Trump Tower, run by Trump business partner, Felix Sater. It wouldn’t be until 1998 that “Sater pleaded guilty to racketeering…with alleged Russian mobsters that bilked investors of at least $40 million… By 2003, the suit alleges, Sater…proceeded to use the firm to launder hundreds of millions of dollars while skimming and extorting millions more...” [25]
Is this guilt by association? In 2015 a long-running investigation by the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) caught up with Trump in the amount of a $10M fine for “willful and repeated” “significant and long-standing money laundering,” the highest fine ever levied by FinCEN against a casino enterprise. [26]
“My name’s Donald Trump,” Trump declared in his introduction to The Apprentice, “I’ve mastered the art of the deal.” What Trump mastered was the art of laundering billions in dirty Russian money.
“I document something like 1,300 transactions of this kind with Russian mobsters,” said Unger, “…real estate transactions that were all-cash purchases made by anonymous shell companies…obviously fronts for criminal money-laundering operations…” [27] “It’s not as though [Russians] zeroed in on Trump 30 years ago, and only Trump. Russia had hundreds of agents and assets in the US, and General Kalugin, the former head of KGB operations in Russia, told me that America was a paradise for Russian spies and that they had recruited roughly 300 assets and agents in the United States, and Trump was one of them.” [28]
Read those last five words again. How can we believe such spectacular assertions are true? Last time we looked at the proven performance of Left-wing media in regards to Trump (and why he’s forced to call it fake news); the Joseph Goebbels-like nature of America’s Right-wing media that covers for him; our own observations of Trump’s odious character validated by the Mueller Report, which was validated by the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But two posts ago I claimed with certainty “U.S. government Deep State impregnates our daughters with illegal aliens from other planets!” Some people took it seriously, despite its thick syrup of irony and closing statement to the contrary. First, like Rudy Giuliani’s hallucinations, it didn't pass the laugh test. Second, my invention of space alien impregnation had as much justification as similar QAnon / 8Chan / 4Chan / Brietbart / Alex Jones / Limbaugh / and FOX-commentator declarations. Passion, intensity, conviction, or flawless delivery by our propaganda networks do not make their claims true. No question, Putin and his U.S. propaganda associates noted here often do better. [29] But the assertions offered above can be tracked, validated, and in some cases pulled from public court and Congressional records as linked here or in the references themselves. And lest we forget, we have three years of Trump's lawlessness, impeachment for international extortion, and 34 indictments with 7 of Trump’s inner circle in prison as supporting evidence for the kind of man he is. Corruption runs in his veins. Again I ask, by now, isn't this plain common sense?
Like Trump’s adultery, this pattern of behavior didn’t end simply because Trump got another wife or executive position. While filling his hotels with U.S. administrative staff and military personnel on taxpayer dollars, it appears Trump extorted Qatar for over $1B to bail out his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his worthless 666 Fifth Avenue tower. Recall, without justification, Trump declared Qatar a terrorist state much to the confusion of the Department of Defense, its largest Mid-East base stationed in Qatar. After months of Trump insults, Qatar was just as suddenly America’s great ally again. Trump’s noise machine flew these stories under the public radar, but not that of Congress currently investigating all of the above. [30]
As Unger remarks, “Russian mobsters and corrupt oligarchs...propped up Trump’s business and enabled him to reinvent his image. Without the Russian mafia, it is fair to say, Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.” [31]
As this post can only scratch the surface of Trump’s corruption, see The Asset podcast series for in-death treatment. But there’s more to being an asset than just a partner in crime. Does Trump answer to Putin?
Next time, in the 4th of these 5 irregular posts before our Senate inaugurates America’s monarchy.
[1] US Legal, Solicitation And Attempted Bribery, “The difference between an attempt to bribe and the actual passage of money or property as a bribe is of little practical importance where the definition of the crime includes an attempt to commit it.”
[2] LISA MASCARO and MARY CLARE JALONICK, President Donald Trump impeached by US House, 3rd in history, AP, December 18, 2019.
[3] NICK PENZENSTADLER, SUSAN PAGE, Exclusive: Trump's 3,500 lawsuits unprecedented for a presidential nominee, USA TODAY, Oct. 23, 2017.
[4] FRONTLINE TRANSCRIPT, President Trump, PBS, January 3, 2017.
[5] David Leonhardt, Donald Trump’s Playbook for Smearing, New York Times, Oct. 17, 2016.
[6] Matt Levine, Fred Trump's Tax Scheme Was Quite Impressive, Bloomberg, October 3, 2018.
MARIE BRENNER, HOW DONALD TRUMP AND ROY COHN’S RUTHLESS SYMBIOSIS CHANGED AMERICA, Vanity Fair, JUNE 28, 2017. Roy Cohn, Wikipedia.
[7] Roy Cohn: Legal Carreer, Wikipedia.
[8] Richard D. Hylton, Trump, $47 Million Short, Gives Investors 50% of His Prize Casino, New York Times, Nov. 17, 1990.
[9] Richard D. Hylton, Trump's Castle and Plaza file for bankruptcy, UPI, MARCH 9, 1992.
Trump Castle/ Golden Nugget Atlantic City, Wikipedia
[10] $1B Taj debt, this included those incurred by its originator, Resorts International, from which Trump bought the unfinished project. Wikipedia
[11] Jose Pagliery, Trump's casino was a money laundering concern shortly after it opened, CNN Investigates, May 22, 2017.
[12] Search Trump, Taj Mahal, and his dealings here, Asian Organized Crime: the New International Criminal, The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate. 1992.
[13] Links to organized crime, this included those incurred by its originator, Resorts International, from which Trump bought the unfinished project. Wikipedia
[14] Sean Illing, Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history”, VOX, Jan 12, 2019.
[15] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
[16] Trump Castle/ Golden Nugget Atlantic City, Wikipedia. By 2014, Trump Entertainment Resorts sought bankruptcy and was eventually absorbed by Ichan Enterprises.
[17] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
[18] ibid
[19] ibid
[20] ibid
[21] ibid
[22] Craig Horowitz, Iced, New York Magazine, Nov. 19, 2004.
[23] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
Linda Qiu, Yes, Donald Trump has been linked to the mob, POLITIFACT, March 2nd, 2016.
[24] Tom Burgis, Dirty money: Trump and the Kazakh connection, Financial Times, OCTOBER 19 2016. And quoted from Craig Unger.
[25] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
[26] Steve Hudak, FinCEN Fines Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort $10 Million for Significant and Long Standing Anti-Money Laundering Violations, U.S. Treasury Department: Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, March 06, 2015.
[27] Sean Illing, Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades: Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history”, VOX, Jan 12, 2019.
[28] ibid
[29] In one email virus I received during the Obama administration, a slick and well polished story complete with media links pushed the perennially popular notion that Obama was out to get our guns. Cunning as Obama was, he found a backdoor way to do that by shutting down all lead smelters to choke off ammo. It took me 5 hours of search and destroy before I debunked all its many claims. Yes, the "primary" smelter in St. Louis had just been closed, by market forces. The company's owner had just built the world's largest "secondary" smelter, because there's no market for mined lead, given 85% of all lead comes from recycled car batteries, which is what secondary smelters do. The law referenced was passed by George Bush, not Obama, with links to WhiteHouse.gov and its link to the law in all its legalese available online. Who's likely to spend 5 hours tracking down what was likely a Putin product? It's much easier to believe what we’re told to believe.
[30] Riley Beggin, The US military may have spent millions to help prop up a Trump resort, VOX Sep 7, 2019.
NATASHA BERTRAND and BRYAN BENDER, Air Force crew made an odd stop on a routine trip: Trump’s Scottish resort, POLITICO, 09/06/2019.
Derek Kravitz, Alex Mierjeski and Gabriel Sandoval, We’ve Found $16.1 Million in Political and Taxpayer Spending at Trump Properties, ProPublica, June 27, 2018.
Roberta Rampton, Trump takes sides in Arab rift, suggests support for isolation of Qatar, Reuters, JUNE 6, 2017.
David Smith and Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington and Peter Beaumont in Doha, Gulf crisis: Trump escalates row by accusing Qatar of sponsoring terror, The Guardian, Fri 9 Jun 2017.
Emily Shugerman, Jared Kushner 'tried and failed to get a $500m loan from Qatar before pushing Trump to take hard line against country', The Independent, 10 July 2017.
Dmitry Zhdannikov,Herbert Lash,Saeed Azhar, Qatar admits it unwittingly helped bail out Jared Kushner's skyscraper, The Independent, 12 February 2019.
BESS LEVIN, MIRACULOUS BAILOUT OF JARED KUSHNER, Vanity Fair, MARCH 8, 2019.
EDDIE KRASSENSTEIN & BRIAN KRASSENSTEIN, Bombshell New Allegations: Kushner Appears to be Extorting Qatari Government, The Hill Reporter, March 29, 2019.
Miriam Hall, Brookfield Bails Out Kushner at 666 Fifth Ave. With 99-Year Ground Lease Deal New YorkCapital Markets, Bisnow, August 5, 2018.
[31] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
Trump’s father introduced him to corruption in real estate, but Trump’s personal operations got a boost with his 1973 introduction to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and eventually disbarred lawyer, Roy Cohn, who gave birth to the pattern Schwartz noted. [6] Cohn also represented mobsters Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti, who died in prison, of multiple gunshot wounds, and in prison, respectively. [7] In the 1980s, Trump got into the casino business. He sold $675M in junk bonds to complete his Taj Mahal Casino Resort in Atlantic City. [8] When he failed to make a $47M interest payment, he was forced to turn over half ownership to bondholders and enter bankruptcy. This was Trump’s 3rd casino in Atlantic City after the Castle and Plaza. When Trump finished the Taj Mahal Casino it so cut into Castle and Plaza business that Trump was eventually unable to make a whopping $338M payment on the Castle (there also commenced a recession), hence another bankruptcy; three in the same town at the same time. [9] Costs of the Taj ended up at nearly $1B. [10] It was when the Taj teetered on bankruptcy right from the start that it became the “preferred gambling spot of Russian mobsters,” and “broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s according to the IRS…” [11] With a slap on the wrist, Trump paid the Treasury almost a half million in fines for violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.
By 1992 the U.S. Senate released a report, “Asian Organized Crime: The New International Criminal,” which linked Trump’s businesses to that sector. [12] Trump’s Taj VP for Foreign Marketing was Danny Sau Leung, and according to the Senate report, an associate of Hong Kong-based crime syndicate 14K Triad linked to murder, extortion and heroin smuggling. [13] In this same timeframe, the USSR had collapsed, as oligarchs, Russian mobsters, a broken KGB, and bankrupt government officials clambered to consolidate control over resulting chaos. They did so through the brute force of an amalgamated machine. As Russian General Oleg Kalugin said of the Russian mafia, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government.” [14]
“Throughout the 1990s,” writes Craig Unger, “untold millions from the former Soviet Union flowed into Trump’s luxury developments and Atlantic City casinos. But all that money wasn’t enough to save Trump from his own failings… He owed $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with a mind-boggling $800 million of it personally guaranteed. He spent much of the decade mired in litigation, filing multiple bankruptcies and scrambling to survive… Fortunately for Trump, his own economic crisis coincided with one in Russia.” [15] To Western banks, Trump was poison, but not to stolen Russian money.
After multiple attempts at selling and refinancing his casinos, Trump recovered control. That only made things worse, and the Castle was finally sold to Landry’s for a paltry $38M in 2011. Landry’s turned it into a gambling revenue giant. [16]
Trump’s talent for business continued its display through bankruptcy of his airline (Trump Shuttle), his football team (New Jersey Generals), and his part in impoverishing the entire league (USFL). These failures turned Trump’s focus to hotels, condos, and resorts. Things were looking up. As Unger writes, “From the day [Trump Tower] opened, the building was a hit…” [17] But, “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for international law enforcement, Jonathan Winer. “…it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold, but no one is living in them.” [18] David Bogatin (a former Soviet pilot shooting down Americans over North Vietnam) bought five condos in Trump Tower for $6M (~$15M today). Bogatin pled guilty in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. He fled the U.S. and his Trump condos used to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets” were seized. [19] Vyacheslav Ivankov, “infamous for torturing his victims and boasting about the murders he arranged...oversaw the mob’s growth from a local extortion racket to a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise. ‘… we found out that he was living in a luxury condo in Trump Tower,’’’ said James Moody, chief of the FBI’s organized crime unit. [20] Ivankov was later gunned down on the streets of Moscow. Another Trump tower resident and diamond dealer from Uzbekistan, Eduard Nektalov, lived “directly below Trump’s future campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway.” [21] After rumors Nektalov was cooperating with federal investigators, he was shot in the back of the head on Sixth Avenue in NYC. [22] At least “13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties… ‘They saved his bacon,’ says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration.” [23]
Another hotel property, Trump SoHo, had “multiple ties to an alleged international money-laundering network,” according to the Financial Times. [24] In one case, FT reported a former Kazakh energy minister was sued for conspiring to “systematically loot hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets,” then purchased three condos in Trump SoHo to launder his “ill-gotten funds.” Trump SoHo was the brainchild of two development companies, including Bayrock Group located on the 24th floor of Trump Tower, run by Trump business partner, Felix Sater. It wouldn’t be until 1998 that “Sater pleaded guilty to racketeering…with alleged Russian mobsters that bilked investors of at least $40 million… By 2003, the suit alleges, Sater…proceeded to use the firm to launder hundreds of millions of dollars while skimming and extorting millions more...” [25]
Is this guilt by association? In 2015 a long-running investigation by the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) caught up with Trump in the amount of a $10M fine for “willful and repeated” “significant and long-standing money laundering,” the highest fine ever levied by FinCEN against a casino enterprise. [26]
“My name’s Donald Trump,” Trump declared in his introduction to The Apprentice, “I’ve mastered the art of the deal.” What Trump mastered was the art of laundering billions in dirty Russian money.
“I document something like 1,300 transactions of this kind with Russian mobsters,” said Unger, “…real estate transactions that were all-cash purchases made by anonymous shell companies…obviously fronts for criminal money-laundering operations…” [27] “It’s not as though [Russians] zeroed in on Trump 30 years ago, and only Trump. Russia had hundreds of agents and assets in the US, and General Kalugin, the former head of KGB operations in Russia, told me that America was a paradise for Russian spies and that they had recruited roughly 300 assets and agents in the United States, and Trump was one of them.” [28]
Read those last five words again. How can we believe such spectacular assertions are true? Last time we looked at the proven performance of Left-wing media in regards to Trump (and why he’s forced to call it fake news); the Joseph Goebbels-like nature of America’s Right-wing media that covers for him; our own observations of Trump’s odious character validated by the Mueller Report, which was validated by the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But two posts ago I claimed with certainty “U.S. government Deep State impregnates our daughters with illegal aliens from other planets!” Some people took it seriously, despite its thick syrup of irony and closing statement to the contrary. First, like Rudy Giuliani’s hallucinations, it didn't pass the laugh test. Second, my invention of space alien impregnation had as much justification as similar QAnon / 8Chan / 4Chan / Brietbart / Alex Jones / Limbaugh / and FOX-commentator declarations. Passion, intensity, conviction, or flawless delivery by our propaganda networks do not make their claims true. No question, Putin and his U.S. propaganda associates noted here often do better. [29] But the assertions offered above can be tracked, validated, and in some cases pulled from public court and Congressional records as linked here or in the references themselves. And lest we forget, we have three years of Trump's lawlessness, impeachment for international extortion, and 34 indictments with 7 of Trump’s inner circle in prison as supporting evidence for the kind of man he is. Corruption runs in his veins. Again I ask, by now, isn't this plain common sense?
Like Trump’s adultery, this pattern of behavior didn’t end simply because Trump got another wife or executive position. While filling his hotels with U.S. administrative staff and military personnel on taxpayer dollars, it appears Trump extorted Qatar for over $1B to bail out his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his worthless 666 Fifth Avenue tower. Recall, without justification, Trump declared Qatar a terrorist state much to the confusion of the Department of Defense, its largest Mid-East base stationed in Qatar. After months of Trump insults, Qatar was just as suddenly America’s great ally again. Trump’s noise machine flew these stories under the public radar, but not that of Congress currently investigating all of the above. [30]
As Unger remarks, “Russian mobsters and corrupt oligarchs...propped up Trump’s business and enabled him to reinvent his image. Without the Russian mafia, it is fair to say, Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.” [31]
As this post can only scratch the surface of Trump’s corruption, see The Asset podcast series for in-death treatment. But there’s more to being an asset than just a partner in crime. Does Trump answer to Putin?
Next time, in the 4th of these 5 irregular posts before our Senate inaugurates America’s monarchy.
[1] US Legal, Solicitation And Attempted Bribery, “The difference between an attempt to bribe and the actual passage of money or property as a bribe is of little practical importance where the definition of the crime includes an attempt to commit it.”
[2] LISA MASCARO and MARY CLARE JALONICK, President Donald Trump impeached by US House, 3rd in history, AP, December 18, 2019.
[3] NICK PENZENSTADLER, SUSAN PAGE, Exclusive: Trump's 3,500 lawsuits unprecedented for a presidential nominee, USA TODAY, Oct. 23, 2017.
[4] FRONTLINE TRANSCRIPT, President Trump, PBS, January 3, 2017.
[5] David Leonhardt, Donald Trump’s Playbook for Smearing, New York Times, Oct. 17, 2016.
[6] Matt Levine, Fred Trump's Tax Scheme Was Quite Impressive, Bloomberg, October 3, 2018.
MARIE BRENNER, HOW DONALD TRUMP AND ROY COHN’S RUTHLESS SYMBIOSIS CHANGED AMERICA, Vanity Fair, JUNE 28, 2017. Roy Cohn, Wikipedia.
[7] Roy Cohn: Legal Carreer, Wikipedia.
[8] Richard D. Hylton, Trump, $47 Million Short, Gives Investors 50% of His Prize Casino, New York Times, Nov. 17, 1990.
[9] Richard D. Hylton, Trump's Castle and Plaza file for bankruptcy, UPI, MARCH 9, 1992.
Trump Castle/ Golden Nugget Atlantic City, Wikipedia
[10] $1B Taj debt, this included those incurred by its originator, Resorts International, from which Trump bought the unfinished project. Wikipedia
[11] Jose Pagliery, Trump's casino was a money laundering concern shortly after it opened, CNN Investigates, May 22, 2017.
[12] Search Trump, Taj Mahal, and his dealings here, Asian Organized Crime: the New International Criminal, The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate. 1992.
[13] Links to organized crime, this included those incurred by its originator, Resorts International, from which Trump bought the unfinished project. Wikipedia
[14] Sean Illing, Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history”, VOX, Jan 12, 2019.
[15] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
[16] Trump Castle/ Golden Nugget Atlantic City, Wikipedia. By 2014, Trump Entertainment Resorts sought bankruptcy and was eventually absorbed by Ichan Enterprises.
[17] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
[18] ibid
[19] ibid
[20] ibid
[21] ibid
[22] Craig Horowitz, Iced, New York Magazine, Nov. 19, 2004.
[23] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
Linda Qiu, Yes, Donald Trump has been linked to the mob, POLITIFACT, March 2nd, 2016.
[24] Tom Burgis, Dirty money: Trump and the Kazakh connection, Financial Times, OCTOBER 19 2016. And quoted from Craig Unger.
[25] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
[26] Steve Hudak, FinCEN Fines Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort $10 Million for Significant and Long Standing Anti-Money Laundering Violations, U.S. Treasury Department: Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, March 06, 2015.
[27] Sean Illing, Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades: Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history”, VOX, Jan 12, 2019.
[28] ibid
[29] In one email virus I received during the Obama administration, a slick and well polished story complete with media links pushed the perennially popular notion that Obama was out to get our guns. Cunning as Obama was, he found a backdoor way to do that by shutting down all lead smelters to choke off ammo. It took me 5 hours of search and destroy before I debunked all its many claims. Yes, the "primary" smelter in St. Louis had just been closed, by market forces. The company's owner had just built the world's largest "secondary" smelter, because there's no market for mined lead, given 85% of all lead comes from recycled car batteries, which is what secondary smelters do. The law referenced was passed by George Bush, not Obama, with links to WhiteHouse.gov and its link to the law in all its legalese available online. Who's likely to spend 5 hours tracking down what was likely a Putin product? It's much easier to believe what we’re told to believe.
[30] Riley Beggin, The US military may have spent millions to help prop up a Trump resort, VOX Sep 7, 2019.
NATASHA BERTRAND and BRYAN BENDER, Air Force crew made an odd stop on a routine trip: Trump’s Scottish resort, POLITICO, 09/06/2019.
Derek Kravitz, Alex Mierjeski and Gabriel Sandoval, We’ve Found $16.1 Million in Political and Taxpayer Spending at Trump Properties, ProPublica, June 27, 2018.
Roberta Rampton, Trump takes sides in Arab rift, suggests support for isolation of Qatar, Reuters, JUNE 6, 2017.
David Smith and Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington and Peter Beaumont in Doha, Gulf crisis: Trump escalates row by accusing Qatar of sponsoring terror, The Guardian, Fri 9 Jun 2017.
Emily Shugerman, Jared Kushner 'tried and failed to get a $500m loan from Qatar before pushing Trump to take hard line against country', The Independent, 10 July 2017.
Dmitry Zhdannikov,Herbert Lash,Saeed Azhar, Qatar admits it unwittingly helped bail out Jared Kushner's skyscraper, The Independent, 12 February 2019.
BESS LEVIN, MIRACULOUS BAILOUT OF JARED KUSHNER, Vanity Fair, MARCH 8, 2019.
EDDIE KRASSENSTEIN & BRIAN KRASSENSTEIN, Bombshell New Allegations: Kushner Appears to be Extorting Qatari Government, The Hill Reporter, March 29, 2019.
Miriam Hall, Brookfield Bails Out Kushner at 666 Fifth Ave. With 99-Year Ground Lease Deal New YorkCapital Markets, Bisnow, August 5, 2018.
[31] CRAIG UNGER, Trump’s Russian Laundromat, New Republic, July 13, 2017.
December 12, 2019
December 12, 2019: What is “truth” in America’s post-truth fog, and how can we find it?
“Ours is a nation of liars, John. We lie about the big things, we lie about the small, we lie about it all… Why? Because lies elevate our self-esteem, blame somebody else, defend our tribes, and are worth a lot of money.” Such are the words of a fictional character, Morgan Whitaker, spoken to his son, John, ca. 2028. [1] Morgan continues, “Remember, John, America’s most important commodity is doubt. Spawn it, you paralyze correction and get rich. Remove it with dogma, you create impossibly perfect certainty. You’re dealing with cunning primates. Never forget that.”
If the previous 30-years have not proven this is America's reality, the last seven have. Truth is now the enemy of political dogma as physical truths in nature have been the enemy of mythical aspects in religious dogma for centuries. But lies and dogma imply conscious knowledge of truth. What is "truth" in a post-truth America, and how can we find it?
The fog started long ago. Postmodernism led the way. Postmodernism was born from a mid-twentieth-century notion that Western reason was responsible for or could not stop the Great Depression and two world wars, so reason was to be replaced by pseudo-reason, by all appearances, on its own terms. As Wikipedia has it, while "Various authors have criticized postmodernism as promoting obscurantism…" postmodernists claim, "objective facts are dismissed as naive realism." Like the conservation of mass/energy and angular momentum, Newtonian mechanics or Maxwell's electromagnetism - from which all working technologies are built, performing just as science designed them to work. From the beginning, leftist French postmodernists of the 1950s and '60s claimed a paradox: the truth is there is no truth. Then they proclaimed the "truth of relativity" of values, traditions, norms, knowledge. This served to dismantle moral judgment, which requires a footing on social norms of assumed certainty, which happened to have been the individualistic utility of this "philosophy." But postmodernism aimed at much bigger game. In Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut's, French Philosophy of the Sixties, we find that once Marxism could be seen to fail its meeting with human nature, postmodernism became the radical Left's tool against the West built on ancient Greek philosophy and European Enlightenment foundations of reason. [2] To emphasize its anti-West posture, every other culture became its favorite. A minority of anything became superior to the majority of anything else. And all which was not Western took on the halo of what Bertrand Russel termed, "The superior virtue of the oppressed."
However, at the root of right-reason is a core of healthy doubt; a recognition of fallibility to preserve open-minded examination in the interest of truth. Postmodernists transformed this doubt from a stimulus for knowledge to paralysis. By the end of the Sixties, French postmodernism infected American universities, which commenced to flush its untreated (and untested) notions in torrents from academia to literature, media, and policymakers. A public philosophy of relativism began to leach its way through the American psyche. Postmodernists were building a vacuum. But the human psyche abhors a vacuum, especially for those losing their traditions. The vacuum was looking for a way to fill.
What the postmodern Left pioneered as doubt in knowledge was eventually embraced as doubt in facts by our political Right. Alternative facts, declared by Trump apologist Kellyanne Conaway, and truth isn’t truth, pronounced by likely-to-be-indicted Rudy Giuliani, were just what the postmodern Left declared under guard of academic freedom. [3] The Right recognized this postmodernist implement for breeding doubt and dogma for political gain through lies, practiced with such alacrity that as Paul Waldman writes, “lying is not only permitted but mandatory.” [4]
These lies, doubt, and dogma are now the grist of Right-wing American radio talkers in support of Trump, like Rush Limbaugh (I listen daily), hatched by removal of the Fairness Doctrine. [5] Just one day after DOJ Inspector General Horowitz released his report exonerating the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s Russia connections but not their FISA procedures, Limbaugh claimed the very opposite of IG findings. "The IG report confirms there was...there is an ongoing coup to get rid of Trump," he said. [6] Limbaugh has even divined that Russians who met Trump’s team over 140 times weren’t Russian, but FBI agents seeking entrapment. Limbaugh’s delivery is masterful. After 28-years of practice, America has no better liar. Thus, a better propagandist than even Sean Hannity on FOX, also a first-rate liar. As 69-year-old Limbaugh likes to tell, “I know all about this stuff, my dad was a lawyer.” (Not his strongest moment.)
But when confronted with over 30-years of experience in law by Inspector General Horowitz, 8-years as IG, with his staff having reviewed almost one million documents and 170 interviews of over 100 people with all the FBI levers at their disposal, who do we believe, Horowitz, or a talk-radio propagandist?
Hmm…
Let's see…
Hmm…
Who can say?
Such tools, leveraged by the Right (or anybody: Stalin, Mao, Hitler), are not novel, but their sweeping magnitude is new to this country. The closest example to what our Right-wing has raised to a refined art comes from Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine for the Nazis. [7] And as with 1930s Germany, such machinery is not about tribal turf alone. Moral philosopher Stuart Rachels charts a clear path from the rejection of truth to loss of trust to despotism. [8]
But there's another problem. Given that virtue so cherished by the ancients and the early Christians is dead on the New Right in America; [9] given character no longer matters in America; given winning the world while losing one's soul is how things get done, not the starry-eyed preachings applied to daily life by some wandering carpenter, then perhaps Mr. Horowitz, like ex-Attorney General and Trump loyalist William Barr, also an experienced lawyer, is just a partisan liar. How complicated things get in a post-truth country. [10]
So, where can we find truth through all this smoke? There’s no better source of truth than science. Nature tells us unconditional truth through measured data with zero concern for human political perversities. Problem is, much of what we deal with is not conducive to scientific measurement. But it is subject to that foundation of science targeted by liberal postmodernists and GOPP conservatives: reason. [11]
Take for example…Trump. Here’s a man who bragged about his adultery and draft-dodging; [12] a man who claimed to raise $6M for veterans (it was $2.8M), found guilty of misusing those funds, fined $2M, and the “charity” dissolved; [13] a man found guilty and penalized $25M for stealing millions of dollars from thousands of students at his fake university; [14] a man found after two years of Mueller’s FBI investigation to have colluded (not “conspired”) with Russia to cheat the 2016 election, obstructing justice 10 times. [15] Notice, the Mueller Report was validated by the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. [16] Of the thousands of media reports concerning Trump’s corruption from center Left (CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, WaPo) to Left (NBC, NPR, NYT) to hard Left (MSNBC), all but a handful of their reports have been correct. The mainstream media was validated by Mueller, the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, our own observations, and Trump himself. I saw and heard Trump deny his payoffs of prostitutes; deny he or his staff had any contact with Russia; deny he had business with Russia; deny Obama was born in the USA, and deny his extortion of Ukraine, to name a very few examples, then admit to all of it. Including his extortion of Ukraine, which he denies, admits, then denies again. [17] After all, who can keep track? Not even the lifelong liar.
So, if Trump says something, and the mainstream media, CIA, NSA, FBI, or any of the other 14 intel agencies contradict him, is the question “Who’s telling the truth?” a hard call to make?
Hmm…
There’s also fact-checkers like Snopes.com, PoltiFact (Pulitzer Prize winner), and bellingcat.com who risk their very lives against Russian assassins for revealing so much murder and corruption by Trump’s best friend, Vlad. [18] Naturally, some sites self-designate as fact-checkers only to hawk their propaganda—be weary. For Trump, PolitiFact has page after page of his “Pants On Fire” lies, and more for “All false statements involving Donald Trump” (pull up a chair). [19] The Washington Post keeps a tally of Trump’s lies, totaling 13,435 after 993 days in office. This doesn’t count the number of Trump lies since birth. Given he’s almost 74; we can estimate (excluding lies in the womb [20]) that he’s lied approximately 365,437 times since he could first babble and drool. If Trump’s luck holds out, he might exceed a half-million lies before he’s hanged. At last, Trump can earn something honestly, without cheating to make up for his defects.
Pause to consider this argument. Right-wing media is composed of Goebbels-like propagandists; Trump has established his place in history as a serial liar and one-man crime wave; the mainstream media has an established track record, validated by the FBI, Republican Senate, and personal observation; all of us have eyes and hears that with simple honesty reveals these truths. Isn’t it plain common sense to look to ourselves and the Left-wing media (with reasonable skepticism) for facts, at least when it comes to Trump? I reference all the above for just this reason: proven performance.
It seems to me, the only way to find the truth is to be able to tell the truth. To do this—our biggest obstacle in tribal America—requires we divorce our tribe / Party / identity. Otherwise, as “cunning primates” we’re obligated to lie for it, just as I lied for my conservative tribe until the Iraq invasion. You’ll lose that sense of faux “community” and ersatz-belonging, but you won’t foul your surroundings with devout liars either.
But there’s yet another problem. We now possess a system solidifying clannism combined with techno-capitalism that kills democracies they spring from. Our impulsive passions support the multi-billion-dollar business models of Facebook (Fakebook?) and Twitter that leverage passions for profit and a national meltdown stoked by foreign hostiles. By American business ethics, why should Facebook care? Business in America is about the dollar, not the flag.
First, regulate social media until their ears bleed. Then implement the systemic solutions of Johnathan Rauch. [21] In agreement with our Founders, don’t rely on humans to do the right thing. Rely on their laws and institutions, reasoned, structured, and implemented to save us from emotions we know will betray us when the time comes. Make gerrymandering illegal, as does the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Eliminate primaries begun in 1912. Primaries cater to cranks and force each candidate to outdo the other in their appeal to base radicals, forcing candidates to somehow turn normal in the general election. Thanks to the primaries, Trump was mainstreamed by a mere 11% of the total national electorate (14M of 129M). [22] Make Congressional votes opaque again so representatives can vote freely, not as a performance for special interest groups tracking their every move. Bring back pork-barrel politics. It was removed by good intentions because it was a waste of money, but now these politicians have nothing to trade in their deal-making. Require by law that all members of Congress must live full time during their tenure in D.C., not renters Monday-Thursday. Bring back the old social gatherings between Parties, when a single Representative would dine with another of the other side to discuss policy. In ways peculiar to humans, under face-to-face conditions, they’ll venture into other matters like family, hobbies, and upbringing. Imagine that. As a Senator once said, “It’s really hard to hate your political opponent when you know his wife and kids.” [23] In short, make the system humane, reasoned, and capable of sustaining civilization, not burning it down the way we’re about to.
So ends this second of five irregular posts before the U.S. Senate takes our first step to monarchy.
[1] Brett Williams, The Worst of Things: America in the 21st Century, Combustible Books, 2019
[2] Postmodernists decided Western reason was responsible for two world wars, so reason was to be replaced by pseudo-reason, by all appearances, on its own terms. Luc Ferry & Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, UMass Press, 1990.
[3] Alternative facts, Wikipedia. Caroline Kenny, Rudy Giuliani says 'truth isn't truth', CNN, August 19, 2018
[4] Paul Waldman, href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio..." rel="external"Why the Republican commitment to lying will outlast Trump, Washington Post, December 10, 2019.
[5] The Fairness Doctrine required both sides of an argument be presented to balance naturally unbalanced humans. Dylan Matthews, FCC fairness doctrine, Wikipedia. Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, Everything you need to know about the Fairness Doctrine in one post, Washington Post, August 23, 2011
[6] Rush Limbaugh, THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW PODCAST TUESDAY - DECEMBER 10 2019 (DITTO CAM), BIG CHUTE, December 10, 2019.
[7] Joseph Goebbels, Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, AVON, 1979
[8] Stuart Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, McGraw-Hill, 2010
[9] Virtue is a community characteristic, communities were killed by individualism.
[10] If Trump had an operative brain cell, he’d use his term of “shithole countries” on this one. Not a material shithole, a moral shithole. Given morality is outside his purview, no such connection is possible.
[11] GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party.
[12] Max Rosenthal, The Trump Files: Listen to Donald Brag About His Affairs—While Pretending to Be Someone Else, Mother Jones, SEPTEMBER 29, 2016. Trump says sex in the Eighties was 'his personal Vietnam', Daily Mail, video. Steve Eder and Dave Philipps, Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments: Four for College, One for Bad Feet, New York Times, Aug. 1, 2016. Tim Mak, Draft-Dodger Trump Said Sleeping Around Was My ‘Personal Vietnam’, The Daily Beast, Apr. 13, 2017
[13] Merrit Kennedy, Judge Says Trump Must Pay $2 Million Over Misuse Of Foundation Funds, NPR, November 7, 2019
[14] Josh Hafner, Judge finalizes $25 million Trump University settlement for students of 'sham university', USA TODAY, Apr. 10, 2018
[15] The Mueller Report Paperback , The Washington Post, April 30, 2019.
[16] CRISTIANO LIMA, Senate Intel's newest Russia report undermines pro-Trump conspiracy theories, POLITICO, 10/08/2019
[17] Grace Panetta, Watch Trump openly admit on live TV to doing the thing he's accused of in the impeachment inquiry, Business Insider, Nov 22, 2019. Sonam Sheth and Grace Panetta, Trump essentially admitted on live TV to doing the thing he's accused of in the impeachment inquiry, Business Insider, Nov 22, 2019. Conrad Duncan, Fox News host Tucker Carlson admits media is right about Trump’s lying: ‘He’s a full-blown BS artist’, The Independent, 28 November, 2019. Jen Kirby, Donald Trump just tweeted he paid back his lawyer for the Stormy Daniels hush money, VOX, May 3, 2018. Kevin Liptak, Trump now says both China and Ukraine should investigate Bidens, CNN, October 3, 2019. INAE OH, Trump Admits He “Lightly Looked” at Developing a Russian Building Project During the Election, Mother Jones, NOVEMBER 30, 2018. ERIC LUTZ, TRUMP ADMITS RUSSIA HELPED HIM WIN, DENIES IT 20 MINUTES LATER, Vanity Fair, MAY 30, 2019. Merrit Kennedy, Trump admits son met Russian for information on opponent, BBC, 6 August 2018. Glenn Fleishman, , FORTUNE, December 19, 2018. Veracity of statements by Donald Trump, Wikipedia.
[18] Eliot Higgins: Searching for facts in a 'post-truth' world, BBC, HardTALK, 12/11/2019
[19] All Pants on Fire! statements involving Donald Trump, PolitiFACT. All False statements involving Donald Trump, PolitiFACT.
[20] “Excluding lies told in the womb.” Which raises a question: If Trump tells a lie in the womb and nobody hears it, is it a lie?
[21] Jonathan Rauch, How American Politics Went Insane, The Atlantic Monthly, JULY/AUGUST 2016
[22] 2016 United States presidential election, Wikipedia. Results of the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, Wikipedia
[23] The Senator’s name is lost to memory.
If the previous 30-years have not proven this is America's reality, the last seven have. Truth is now the enemy of political dogma as physical truths in nature have been the enemy of mythical aspects in religious dogma for centuries. But lies and dogma imply conscious knowledge of truth. What is "truth" in a post-truth America, and how can we find it?
The fog started long ago. Postmodernism led the way. Postmodernism was born from a mid-twentieth-century notion that Western reason was responsible for or could not stop the Great Depression and two world wars, so reason was to be replaced by pseudo-reason, by all appearances, on its own terms. As Wikipedia has it, while "Various authors have criticized postmodernism as promoting obscurantism…" postmodernists claim, "objective facts are dismissed as naive realism." Like the conservation of mass/energy and angular momentum, Newtonian mechanics or Maxwell's electromagnetism - from which all working technologies are built, performing just as science designed them to work. From the beginning, leftist French postmodernists of the 1950s and '60s claimed a paradox: the truth is there is no truth. Then they proclaimed the "truth of relativity" of values, traditions, norms, knowledge. This served to dismantle moral judgment, which requires a footing on social norms of assumed certainty, which happened to have been the individualistic utility of this "philosophy." But postmodernism aimed at much bigger game. In Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut's, French Philosophy of the Sixties, we find that once Marxism could be seen to fail its meeting with human nature, postmodernism became the radical Left's tool against the West built on ancient Greek philosophy and European Enlightenment foundations of reason. [2] To emphasize its anti-West posture, every other culture became its favorite. A minority of anything became superior to the majority of anything else. And all which was not Western took on the halo of what Bertrand Russel termed, "The superior virtue of the oppressed."
However, at the root of right-reason is a core of healthy doubt; a recognition of fallibility to preserve open-minded examination in the interest of truth. Postmodernists transformed this doubt from a stimulus for knowledge to paralysis. By the end of the Sixties, French postmodernism infected American universities, which commenced to flush its untreated (and untested) notions in torrents from academia to literature, media, and policymakers. A public philosophy of relativism began to leach its way through the American psyche. Postmodernists were building a vacuum. But the human psyche abhors a vacuum, especially for those losing their traditions. The vacuum was looking for a way to fill.
What the postmodern Left pioneered as doubt in knowledge was eventually embraced as doubt in facts by our political Right. Alternative facts, declared by Trump apologist Kellyanne Conaway, and truth isn’t truth, pronounced by likely-to-be-indicted Rudy Giuliani, were just what the postmodern Left declared under guard of academic freedom. [3] The Right recognized this postmodernist implement for breeding doubt and dogma for political gain through lies, practiced with such alacrity that as Paul Waldman writes, “lying is not only permitted but mandatory.” [4]
These lies, doubt, and dogma are now the grist of Right-wing American radio talkers in support of Trump, like Rush Limbaugh (I listen daily), hatched by removal of the Fairness Doctrine. [5] Just one day after DOJ Inspector General Horowitz released his report exonerating the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s Russia connections but not their FISA procedures, Limbaugh claimed the very opposite of IG findings. "The IG report confirms there was...there is an ongoing coup to get rid of Trump," he said. [6] Limbaugh has even divined that Russians who met Trump’s team over 140 times weren’t Russian, but FBI agents seeking entrapment. Limbaugh’s delivery is masterful. After 28-years of practice, America has no better liar. Thus, a better propagandist than even Sean Hannity on FOX, also a first-rate liar. As 69-year-old Limbaugh likes to tell, “I know all about this stuff, my dad was a lawyer.” (Not his strongest moment.)
But when confronted with over 30-years of experience in law by Inspector General Horowitz, 8-years as IG, with his staff having reviewed almost one million documents and 170 interviews of over 100 people with all the FBI levers at their disposal, who do we believe, Horowitz, or a talk-radio propagandist?
Hmm…
Let's see…
Hmm…
Who can say?
Such tools, leveraged by the Right (or anybody: Stalin, Mao, Hitler), are not novel, but their sweeping magnitude is new to this country. The closest example to what our Right-wing has raised to a refined art comes from Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine for the Nazis. [7] And as with 1930s Germany, such machinery is not about tribal turf alone. Moral philosopher Stuart Rachels charts a clear path from the rejection of truth to loss of trust to despotism. [8]
But there's another problem. Given that virtue so cherished by the ancients and the early Christians is dead on the New Right in America; [9] given character no longer matters in America; given winning the world while losing one's soul is how things get done, not the starry-eyed preachings applied to daily life by some wandering carpenter, then perhaps Mr. Horowitz, like ex-Attorney General and Trump loyalist William Barr, also an experienced lawyer, is just a partisan liar. How complicated things get in a post-truth country. [10]
So, where can we find truth through all this smoke? There’s no better source of truth than science. Nature tells us unconditional truth through measured data with zero concern for human political perversities. Problem is, much of what we deal with is not conducive to scientific measurement. But it is subject to that foundation of science targeted by liberal postmodernists and GOPP conservatives: reason. [11]
Take for example…Trump. Here’s a man who bragged about his adultery and draft-dodging; [12] a man who claimed to raise $6M for veterans (it was $2.8M), found guilty of misusing those funds, fined $2M, and the “charity” dissolved; [13] a man found guilty and penalized $25M for stealing millions of dollars from thousands of students at his fake university; [14] a man found after two years of Mueller’s FBI investigation to have colluded (not “conspired”) with Russia to cheat the 2016 election, obstructing justice 10 times. [15] Notice, the Mueller Report was validated by the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. [16] Of the thousands of media reports concerning Trump’s corruption from center Left (CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, WaPo) to Left (NBC, NPR, NYT) to hard Left (MSNBC), all but a handful of their reports have been correct. The mainstream media was validated by Mueller, the Republican Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, our own observations, and Trump himself. I saw and heard Trump deny his payoffs of prostitutes; deny he or his staff had any contact with Russia; deny he had business with Russia; deny Obama was born in the USA, and deny his extortion of Ukraine, to name a very few examples, then admit to all of it. Including his extortion of Ukraine, which he denies, admits, then denies again. [17] After all, who can keep track? Not even the lifelong liar.
So, if Trump says something, and the mainstream media, CIA, NSA, FBI, or any of the other 14 intel agencies contradict him, is the question “Who’s telling the truth?” a hard call to make?
Hmm…
There’s also fact-checkers like Snopes.com, PoltiFact (Pulitzer Prize winner), and bellingcat.com who risk their very lives against Russian assassins for revealing so much murder and corruption by Trump’s best friend, Vlad. [18] Naturally, some sites self-designate as fact-checkers only to hawk their propaganda—be weary. For Trump, PolitiFact has page after page of his “Pants On Fire” lies, and more for “All false statements involving Donald Trump” (pull up a chair). [19] The Washington Post keeps a tally of Trump’s lies, totaling 13,435 after 993 days in office. This doesn’t count the number of Trump lies since birth. Given he’s almost 74; we can estimate (excluding lies in the womb [20]) that he’s lied approximately 365,437 times since he could first babble and drool. If Trump’s luck holds out, he might exceed a half-million lies before he’s hanged. At last, Trump can earn something honestly, without cheating to make up for his defects.
Pause to consider this argument. Right-wing media is composed of Goebbels-like propagandists; Trump has established his place in history as a serial liar and one-man crime wave; the mainstream media has an established track record, validated by the FBI, Republican Senate, and personal observation; all of us have eyes and hears that with simple honesty reveals these truths. Isn’t it plain common sense to look to ourselves and the Left-wing media (with reasonable skepticism) for facts, at least when it comes to Trump? I reference all the above for just this reason: proven performance.
It seems to me, the only way to find the truth is to be able to tell the truth. To do this—our biggest obstacle in tribal America—requires we divorce our tribe / Party / identity. Otherwise, as “cunning primates” we’re obligated to lie for it, just as I lied for my conservative tribe until the Iraq invasion. You’ll lose that sense of faux “community” and ersatz-belonging, but you won’t foul your surroundings with devout liars either.
But there’s yet another problem. We now possess a system solidifying clannism combined with techno-capitalism that kills democracies they spring from. Our impulsive passions support the multi-billion-dollar business models of Facebook (Fakebook?) and Twitter that leverage passions for profit and a national meltdown stoked by foreign hostiles. By American business ethics, why should Facebook care? Business in America is about the dollar, not the flag.
First, regulate social media until their ears bleed. Then implement the systemic solutions of Johnathan Rauch. [21] In agreement with our Founders, don’t rely on humans to do the right thing. Rely on their laws and institutions, reasoned, structured, and implemented to save us from emotions we know will betray us when the time comes. Make gerrymandering illegal, as does the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Eliminate primaries begun in 1912. Primaries cater to cranks and force each candidate to outdo the other in their appeal to base radicals, forcing candidates to somehow turn normal in the general election. Thanks to the primaries, Trump was mainstreamed by a mere 11% of the total national electorate (14M of 129M). [22] Make Congressional votes opaque again so representatives can vote freely, not as a performance for special interest groups tracking their every move. Bring back pork-barrel politics. It was removed by good intentions because it was a waste of money, but now these politicians have nothing to trade in their deal-making. Require by law that all members of Congress must live full time during their tenure in D.C., not renters Monday-Thursday. Bring back the old social gatherings between Parties, when a single Representative would dine with another of the other side to discuss policy. In ways peculiar to humans, under face-to-face conditions, they’ll venture into other matters like family, hobbies, and upbringing. Imagine that. As a Senator once said, “It’s really hard to hate your political opponent when you know his wife and kids.” [23] In short, make the system humane, reasoned, and capable of sustaining civilization, not burning it down the way we’re about to.
So ends this second of five irregular posts before the U.S. Senate takes our first step to monarchy.
[1] Brett Williams, The Worst of Things: America in the 21st Century, Combustible Books, 2019
[2] Postmodernists decided Western reason was responsible for two world wars, so reason was to be replaced by pseudo-reason, by all appearances, on its own terms. Luc Ferry & Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, UMass Press, 1990.
[3] Alternative facts, Wikipedia. Caroline Kenny, Rudy Giuliani says 'truth isn't truth', CNN, August 19, 2018
[4] Paul Waldman, href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio..." rel="external"Why the Republican commitment to lying will outlast Trump, Washington Post, December 10, 2019.
[5] The Fairness Doctrine required both sides of an argument be presented to balance naturally unbalanced humans. Dylan Matthews, FCC fairness doctrine, Wikipedia. Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, Everything you need to know about the Fairness Doctrine in one post, Washington Post, August 23, 2011
[6] Rush Limbaugh, THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW PODCAST TUESDAY - DECEMBER 10 2019 (DITTO CAM), BIG CHUTE, December 10, 2019.
[7] Joseph Goebbels, Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, AVON, 1979
[8] Stuart Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, McGraw-Hill, 2010
[9] Virtue is a community characteristic, communities were killed by individualism.
[10] If Trump had an operative brain cell, he’d use his term of “shithole countries” on this one. Not a material shithole, a moral shithole. Given morality is outside his purview, no such connection is possible.
[11] GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party.
[12] Max Rosenthal, The Trump Files: Listen to Donald Brag About His Affairs—While Pretending to Be Someone Else, Mother Jones, SEPTEMBER 29, 2016. Trump says sex in the Eighties was 'his personal Vietnam', Daily Mail, video. Steve Eder and Dave Philipps, Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments: Four for College, One for Bad Feet, New York Times, Aug. 1, 2016. Tim Mak, Draft-Dodger Trump Said Sleeping Around Was My ‘Personal Vietnam’, The Daily Beast, Apr. 13, 2017
[13] Merrit Kennedy, Judge Says Trump Must Pay $2 Million Over Misuse Of Foundation Funds, NPR, November 7, 2019
[14] Josh Hafner, Judge finalizes $25 million Trump University settlement for students of 'sham university', USA TODAY, Apr. 10, 2018
[15] The Mueller Report Paperback , The Washington Post, April 30, 2019.
[16] CRISTIANO LIMA, Senate Intel's newest Russia report undermines pro-Trump conspiracy theories, POLITICO, 10/08/2019
[17] Grace Panetta, Watch Trump openly admit on live TV to doing the thing he's accused of in the impeachment inquiry, Business Insider, Nov 22, 2019. Sonam Sheth and Grace Panetta, Trump essentially admitted on live TV to doing the thing he's accused of in the impeachment inquiry, Business Insider, Nov 22, 2019. Conrad Duncan, Fox News host Tucker Carlson admits media is right about Trump’s lying: ‘He’s a full-blown BS artist’, The Independent, 28 November, 2019. Jen Kirby, Donald Trump just tweeted he paid back his lawyer for the Stormy Daniels hush money, VOX, May 3, 2018. Kevin Liptak, Trump now says both China and Ukraine should investigate Bidens, CNN, October 3, 2019. INAE OH, Trump Admits He “Lightly Looked” at Developing a Russian Building Project During the Election, Mother Jones, NOVEMBER 30, 2018. ERIC LUTZ, TRUMP ADMITS RUSSIA HELPED HIM WIN, DENIES IT 20 MINUTES LATER, Vanity Fair, MAY 30, 2019. Merrit Kennedy, Trump admits son met Russian for information on opponent, BBC, 6 August 2018. Glenn Fleishman, , FORTUNE, December 19, 2018. Veracity of statements by Donald Trump, Wikipedia.
[18] Eliot Higgins: Searching for facts in a 'post-truth' world, BBC, HardTALK, 12/11/2019
[19] All Pants on Fire! statements involving Donald Trump, PolitiFACT. All False statements involving Donald Trump, PolitiFACT.
[20] “Excluding lies told in the womb.” Which raises a question: If Trump tells a lie in the womb and nobody hears it, is it a lie?
[21] Jonathan Rauch, How American Politics Went Insane, The Atlantic Monthly, JULY/AUGUST 2016
[22] 2016 United States presidential election, Wikipedia. Results of the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, Wikipedia
[23] The Senator’s name is lost to memory.
