January 3, 2022: Descent of the West? Part 1, A Preamble.
“The long democratic recession is deepening,” says Freedom House in their annual assessment of democracy’s global retreat. Of 195 nations, the U.S. ranks 61st. After 16-years of decline, 2020 was the worst as tyrannies ascended worldwide.
Patrick J. Deneen opens his book Why Liberalism Failed, with a quote from Barbara Tuchman, “When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this….” Deneen’s book is about classical liberalism employed by America’s Founders to invent a country. His thesis—addressed in future posts—is that liberalism was destined to crash by the social logic of its origin, the most brilliant philosophical movement in the record of our species.
Sociopolitical breakdowns referenced by Tuchman and Deneen are evident to anyone in the West today. Particularly America, as we lurch from one debacle, fiasco, or calamity to the next. The 2003 Iraq War bade by the Big Lie of Saddam’s WMDs having nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11; 2008’s Great Recession, begged for by the Big Lie of self-regulated laissez-faire markets; the 2021 terrorist attack on our Capitol and Constitution with continued assaults on the rule of law as coordination for the next coup and powered by the Big Lie of a stolen election. And just when we hoped a competent, mentally stable adult was at the helm: Biden’s inept Afghan-escape on the heels of The Afghanistan Papers showing 20-years of Vietnam War-like mismanagement, bungling, and lies. On historical timescales, these events are simultaneous. The gap between ideal and real is now cavernous.
Like the latest transient fad, “Why?” is all the rage. Except—outside Putin and American lie factories—this topic occupies serious thinkers like Deneen, George F. Will, Michael J. Sandel, Sam Harris, Timothy Snyder, Yuval Levin, and with the rise of China, it appears not so transient.
The Decline of the West is a longstanding refrain, the title of Oswald Spengler’s 1923 book. Like the Second Coming, it’s been going to happen any day now every handful of decades. Like repeated claims the Roman Republic was about to collapse until Cicero got it right.
Those ideals Tuchman refers to are idealizations we humans invent to avert similar disasters. They stabilize us by accommodating dramatic changes we impose on ourselves through that unstoppable knack for human innovation, technological and social, all amplified on a massively overpopulated planet. Innovation never disappoints in delivering unexpected benefits and undreamed-of punishment. No one can foresee what those will be. Innovations pile atop innovations in branching interaction trees of an interlaced n-dimensional space, where those dimensions are family, work, politics, religion, environment, economics, warfare. Our idealizations are another kind of innovation: what is a family, what the nation means, what is the “pursuit of happiness.” Some idealizations we convert into norms, institutions, and laws. They seek to patch what we broke with the last innovation or the x-innovations before that, leading to the tangled nest of unintended consequences we face in the present. Our ideals, our idealizations, are what Yuval Noah Harari labels as myths. As Harari writes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have lived in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees, and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees, and lions depend on the grace of imagined entities like the United States and Google.”
Let’s call these imagined realities “social myths.” There are also religious myths and our burgeoning trade in conspiracy theories. While religious myths violate the laws of nature, they satisfy the laws of human nature; what Marcel Gauchet calls the illogical solution to our illogical condition: death. Conspiracy theories are myths more appropriately known as lies, so abnormally inane they challenge the notion our race could ever be “successful” in population dominance while simultaneously so ignorant and gullible. Currently, this last category of myth appears most efficacious as religious and social myths are tumbling for the adoration of deceit.
Per Harari, it is myth that bound the city, State, then Empire with imaginings of origins, belonging, and duties that fostered coordination between multitudes of utter strangers. Eventually, we would invent myths about other things that do not exist in nature, like democracy and capitalism built on more elemental myths we call freedom, rights, and “maximized utility of rational consumers.” So thoroughly can we embrace these stories that tangible outcomes follow from our sometimes brilliant, at others ridiculous, but always fertile imaginations.
And in that resides a problem. The dirty little secret is out—again. That realization made by every religion to ever exist: when people question their myths, they risk doubt. We invented these tales about democracy; we can uninvent them. And we have. Expanding that doubt is now an American industry aided by hostile foreign powers.
On January 6, 2021, just 32 years after Ronald Reagan’s “City on a Hill” and “Morning in America,” the world saw dozens of American myths collapse in a day. With 1/6 two decades after 9/11, Al Qaeda cheered the broadcasts coming from Capitol Hill, expecting the target of their fourth plane to be taken down by Trump’s jihadists. After an initial shock that Trump might launch a strike against China to rally America and somehow seize power, Chinese Communist Party leadership toasted their predictions of America’s vertical decline. And Vladimir Putin celebrated with his American assets in U.S. government and Right-wing media, the next step of their mission accomplished. On that day, Americans lost their myth of exceptionalism: “the belief that the United States is immune to tribalism and authoritarianism that plague other parts of the world.” We joined the ranks of Banana Republics as a coup planned and attempted by a setting executive uncoiled before our eyes. We all watched the gleeful rejection of the teachings of Christ by Christians; beating, injury, and murder or attempted murder of police by the “law and order party” who “back the blue;” mobs, some carrying a pocketbook Constitution, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” for failure to exercise his nonexistent Constitutional power to overturn a record 81-million votes. All as Confederate flags from a defeated enemy nation were flown in the building under which George Washington set its cornerstone, the flagbearers shouting “1776! 1776! This is 1776, mother fuckers!” Traitors as “patriots;” assets of China and Russia who call themselves “conservatives.”
There’s an old Chinese adage, “Kill with a borrowed sword.” Why coordinate costly actions to destroy a nation when their own people can be used to do it themselves?
After the assault, with alacrity enabled by asocial media, New Right propaganda machinery, and post-truth GOPP operatives, myths were fabricated on the fly. The insurrection was nothing more than tourists blowing off some steam; it was Antifa; it never happened; it did happen, but it was an inside job staged by the FBI; insurrectionists were “hugging and kissing” the cops they hospitalized; the treasonous Ashli Babbitt is a martyr; the cops mauled by Trump’s troops were, according to FOX’s Laura Ingraham, poor actors; and according to FOX host Tucker Carlson’s “documentary,” it was both a heroic act by concerned citizens and instigated by the government, like 9/11, when it wasn’t Al Qaeda that brought down those towers. Any or all of these myths can be heard on the same day for whatever suits the moment, mood, and credulity of the audience; credulity without limit.
The very transience of these myths, embraced with the most pious devotion then swapped in an instant for another just as reverent, reinforces what we all sense. Myths, of any form—including those crafted with remarkable intellectual horsepower that once built and sustained America—are dead, or so close to terminal, we wonder if the Republic will survive another 11 months or 3 years when midterm and general elections arrive. With tenacious support of their robeless King of the Liars by “Christians,” to whom Apostille Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,” it’s clear the myth of a “Christian Right” has also expired. With the New Right’s normalization of immorality, violence, and laws that allow some “Republican” State legislatures to flip elections if they lose the vote, the end feels near. All done in daylight under the Mein Kampfian fantasy of “Stop the Steal,” while Democrats stand by, baffled, feeble, and apparently incapacitated by their too-slight control of Congress.
When Trump torched the norms of the highest office in the land, he broadcast for all the world to see that even the pinnacle of America’s image—epitomized by once hallowed names like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln—is akin to folklore. But for the amateurs, there are no consequences for violating laws, the Constitution, religion, because these are myths that maintain authority only if we believe them. Almost no one knew this. Such things were assumed to be real. Like ancient gods, they depended on the people for their existence, not the other way around. When people stopped believing in their gods, their gods vanished and so too their civilizations.
For creatures like us, reason coupled to morality, which together fabricated America’s myths, were not favored to win over savagery in the long run. When conservative William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan battled Republican parasites from the John Birch Society, Buckley said, “We’ve always had more crazies on our side.” How would Buckley and Reagan put all those cranks back in their cage with tens of millions now loose in the country? As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Events are in the saddle now, and they ride mankind.” And as Voltaire said of Trump 250-years before Trump was spawned, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
So we’ve seen.
From the books by authors noted above, could there be a glimmer of light that points out of our cave? Let’s find out. But before we grasp for such a light, we’re sure to wonder, is it a spark or an ember?
References
Paragraph 1: Freedom in the World 2021: Freedom in the World 2021, Freedom House.
Also, see Anne Appelbaum’s November 2021 Atlantic Monthly article, The Bad Guys Are Winning, cyber, advisors, and trade coordinated between the world’s autocracies have formed a new mafia against democratic governments. In the West, parties coordinate against each other. Anne Applebaum, THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING, The Atlantic, November 15, 2021.
Paragraph 2: Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed Yale University Press, 2018, Frontmatter.
Paragraph 3: Suzanne Goldenberg, Bush: Saddam was not responsible for 9/11, The Guardian, Sep 11, 2006.
Bruce Riedel, 9/11 and Iraq: The making of a tragedy, Brookings, September 17, 2021.
Anne Field, What caused the Great Recession?, Business Insider, Jul 8, 2021.
ERIN COGHLAN, LISA MCCORKELL AND SARA HINKLEY, What Really Caused the Great Recession?, IRLE U.C. Berkely, SEPTEMBER 19, 2018.
Michael Waldman, Trump’s Big Lie Led to Insurrection, Brennan Center For Justice, January 12, 2021.
David Rothkopf, We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie: Six months after the insurrection it triggered, it’s clear that the stolen-election nonsense is just a drop in a tidal wave of bullshit., The Daily Beast, Jul. 06, 2021.
Deirdre Shesgreen, 'Egregiously mishandled' or inevitably 'messy'? What went wrong in US withdrawal from Afghanistan, USA TODAY, August 29, 2021.
Craig Whitlock, AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH, Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2019.
Paragraph 6: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, VINTAGE, 2011, pg. 36.
Paragraph 7: Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1997.
Paragraph 10: Robin Wright, The World Shook as America Raged, The New Yorker, Jan. 8, 2021.
Isaac Stanley-Becker, Top general was so fearful Trump might spark war that he made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart, new book says, Washington Post, September 14, 2021.
Charles Maynes, As US Reels From Capitol Violence, Russia Enjoys the Show, Voice Of America, January 07, 2021.
Peter Beinart, Obama’s Idealists: American Power in Theory and Practice, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2919, pg. 162-169.
Paragraph 11: GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party, as differentiator from the old, dead GOP of Reagan, Eisenhower, and Lincoln.
Cameron Peters , The GOP whitewash of the Capitol attack shows the need for a January 6 commission /i>, VOX, May 16, 2021.
Jake Lahut, We watched Tucker Carlson's Jan. 6 documentary so you don't have to. Here's why its whitewash of the Capitol insurrection makes no sense, Business Insider, Nov 22, 2021.
Connor Perrett, Liz Cheney said she refuses to 'whitewash' the Capitol Riot, calling Republicans who do 'disgraceful and despicable', Business Insider, May 16, 2021.
Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ release of texts from FOX hosts telling Trump to stop the insurrection, shows by their coverup which side FOX is on. They don’t call it FOX RT for nothing. Dartunorro Clark, Fox News hosts, Donald Trump Jr., asked Meadows to get Trump to call off rioters, NBC News, Dec. 13, 2021.
Paragraph 12: Ephesians 4:25.
Matt Vasilogambros, Republican Legislators Curb Authority of County, State Election Officials, PEW, July 28, 2021.
Paragraph 13: Caveats to the notion of myth: First, the notion of myth is broadened beyond Joseph Campbell’s definition to include the popular use of the term, as in the lies of conspiracy theories. Second, if the ancient Aristotelian notion of Natural Law were revived in terms of human nature and shown to be an emergent property of biology, serving the survival of the individual and thus the species, might then some categories of myths may be seen as objective aspects of that Natural Law, realities of human nature? i.e. as real as any other physical characteristic emergent from other physical characteristics, like the property of wetness from water, a molecule that feels dry until a critical threshold in number is reached.
Paragraph 14: Erick Trickey, Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party, Washington Post, January 15, 2021.
49,000,000 comes from 66% of 74,000,000 who voted for Trump and believe the election was stolen. Of FOX RT viewers, that’s 82%. Even more radical Right-wing media has a 97% conviction rate. Clearly, the dimmest people watch the stupidest programming. What a surprise. No wonder Putin is so successful here. PRRI Staff, The “Big Lie”: Most Republicans Believe the 2020 Election was Stolen, PRRI, 05.12.2021.
Until next time, the first Monday in March, the 7th, 2022.
Patrick J. Deneen opens his book Why Liberalism Failed, with a quote from Barbara Tuchman, “When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this….” Deneen’s book is about classical liberalism employed by America’s Founders to invent a country. His thesis—addressed in future posts—is that liberalism was destined to crash by the social logic of its origin, the most brilliant philosophical movement in the record of our species.
Sociopolitical breakdowns referenced by Tuchman and Deneen are evident to anyone in the West today. Particularly America, as we lurch from one debacle, fiasco, or calamity to the next. The 2003 Iraq War bade by the Big Lie of Saddam’s WMDs having nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11; 2008’s Great Recession, begged for by the Big Lie of self-regulated laissez-faire markets; the 2021 terrorist attack on our Capitol and Constitution with continued assaults on the rule of law as coordination for the next coup and powered by the Big Lie of a stolen election. And just when we hoped a competent, mentally stable adult was at the helm: Biden’s inept Afghan-escape on the heels of The Afghanistan Papers showing 20-years of Vietnam War-like mismanagement, bungling, and lies. On historical timescales, these events are simultaneous. The gap between ideal and real is now cavernous.
Like the latest transient fad, “Why?” is all the rage. Except—outside Putin and American lie factories—this topic occupies serious thinkers like Deneen, George F. Will, Michael J. Sandel, Sam Harris, Timothy Snyder, Yuval Levin, and with the rise of China, it appears not so transient.
The Decline of the West is a longstanding refrain, the title of Oswald Spengler’s 1923 book. Like the Second Coming, it’s been going to happen any day now every handful of decades. Like repeated claims the Roman Republic was about to collapse until Cicero got it right.
Those ideals Tuchman refers to are idealizations we humans invent to avert similar disasters. They stabilize us by accommodating dramatic changes we impose on ourselves through that unstoppable knack for human innovation, technological and social, all amplified on a massively overpopulated planet. Innovation never disappoints in delivering unexpected benefits and undreamed-of punishment. No one can foresee what those will be. Innovations pile atop innovations in branching interaction trees of an interlaced n-dimensional space, where those dimensions are family, work, politics, religion, environment, economics, warfare. Our idealizations are another kind of innovation: what is a family, what the nation means, what is the “pursuit of happiness.” Some idealizations we convert into norms, institutions, and laws. They seek to patch what we broke with the last innovation or the x-innovations before that, leading to the tangled nest of unintended consequences we face in the present. Our ideals, our idealizations, are what Yuval Noah Harari labels as myths. As Harari writes in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have lived in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees, and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees, and lions depend on the grace of imagined entities like the United States and Google.”
Let’s call these imagined realities “social myths.” There are also religious myths and our burgeoning trade in conspiracy theories. While religious myths violate the laws of nature, they satisfy the laws of human nature; what Marcel Gauchet calls the illogical solution to our illogical condition: death. Conspiracy theories are myths more appropriately known as lies, so abnormally inane they challenge the notion our race could ever be “successful” in population dominance while simultaneously so ignorant and gullible. Currently, this last category of myth appears most efficacious as religious and social myths are tumbling for the adoration of deceit.
Per Harari, it is myth that bound the city, State, then Empire with imaginings of origins, belonging, and duties that fostered coordination between multitudes of utter strangers. Eventually, we would invent myths about other things that do not exist in nature, like democracy and capitalism built on more elemental myths we call freedom, rights, and “maximized utility of rational consumers.” So thoroughly can we embrace these stories that tangible outcomes follow from our sometimes brilliant, at others ridiculous, but always fertile imaginations.
And in that resides a problem. The dirty little secret is out—again. That realization made by every religion to ever exist: when people question their myths, they risk doubt. We invented these tales about democracy; we can uninvent them. And we have. Expanding that doubt is now an American industry aided by hostile foreign powers.
On January 6, 2021, just 32 years after Ronald Reagan’s “City on a Hill” and “Morning in America,” the world saw dozens of American myths collapse in a day. With 1/6 two decades after 9/11, Al Qaeda cheered the broadcasts coming from Capitol Hill, expecting the target of their fourth plane to be taken down by Trump’s jihadists. After an initial shock that Trump might launch a strike against China to rally America and somehow seize power, Chinese Communist Party leadership toasted their predictions of America’s vertical decline. And Vladimir Putin celebrated with his American assets in U.S. government and Right-wing media, the next step of their mission accomplished. On that day, Americans lost their myth of exceptionalism: “the belief that the United States is immune to tribalism and authoritarianism that plague other parts of the world.” We joined the ranks of Banana Republics as a coup planned and attempted by a setting executive uncoiled before our eyes. We all watched the gleeful rejection of the teachings of Christ by Christians; beating, injury, and murder or attempted murder of police by the “law and order party” who “back the blue;” mobs, some carrying a pocketbook Constitution, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” for failure to exercise his nonexistent Constitutional power to overturn a record 81-million votes. All as Confederate flags from a defeated enemy nation were flown in the building under which George Washington set its cornerstone, the flagbearers shouting “1776! 1776! This is 1776, mother fuckers!” Traitors as “patriots;” assets of China and Russia who call themselves “conservatives.”
There’s an old Chinese adage, “Kill with a borrowed sword.” Why coordinate costly actions to destroy a nation when their own people can be used to do it themselves?
After the assault, with alacrity enabled by asocial media, New Right propaganda machinery, and post-truth GOPP operatives, myths were fabricated on the fly. The insurrection was nothing more than tourists blowing off some steam; it was Antifa; it never happened; it did happen, but it was an inside job staged by the FBI; insurrectionists were “hugging and kissing” the cops they hospitalized; the treasonous Ashli Babbitt is a martyr; the cops mauled by Trump’s troops were, according to FOX’s Laura Ingraham, poor actors; and according to FOX host Tucker Carlson’s “documentary,” it was both a heroic act by concerned citizens and instigated by the government, like 9/11, when it wasn’t Al Qaeda that brought down those towers. Any or all of these myths can be heard on the same day for whatever suits the moment, mood, and credulity of the audience; credulity without limit.
The very transience of these myths, embraced with the most pious devotion then swapped in an instant for another just as reverent, reinforces what we all sense. Myths, of any form—including those crafted with remarkable intellectual horsepower that once built and sustained America—are dead, or so close to terminal, we wonder if the Republic will survive another 11 months or 3 years when midterm and general elections arrive. With tenacious support of their robeless King of the Liars by “Christians,” to whom Apostille Paul said, “We no longer lie to one another, we only tell the truth,” it’s clear the myth of a “Christian Right” has also expired. With the New Right’s normalization of immorality, violence, and laws that allow some “Republican” State legislatures to flip elections if they lose the vote, the end feels near. All done in daylight under the Mein Kampfian fantasy of “Stop the Steal,” while Democrats stand by, baffled, feeble, and apparently incapacitated by their too-slight control of Congress.
When Trump torched the norms of the highest office in the land, he broadcast for all the world to see that even the pinnacle of America’s image—epitomized by once hallowed names like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln—is akin to folklore. But for the amateurs, there are no consequences for violating laws, the Constitution, religion, because these are myths that maintain authority only if we believe them. Almost no one knew this. Such things were assumed to be real. Like ancient gods, they depended on the people for their existence, not the other way around. When people stopped believing in their gods, their gods vanished and so too their civilizations.
For creatures like us, reason coupled to morality, which together fabricated America’s myths, were not favored to win over savagery in the long run. When conservative William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan battled Republican parasites from the John Birch Society, Buckley said, “We’ve always had more crazies on our side.” How would Buckley and Reagan put all those cranks back in their cage with tens of millions now loose in the country? As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Events are in the saddle now, and they ride mankind.” And as Voltaire said of Trump 250-years before Trump was spawned, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
So we’ve seen.
From the books by authors noted above, could there be a glimmer of light that points out of our cave? Let’s find out. But before we grasp for such a light, we’re sure to wonder, is it a spark or an ember?
References
Paragraph 1: Freedom in the World 2021: Freedom in the World 2021, Freedom House.
Also, see Anne Appelbaum’s November 2021 Atlantic Monthly article, The Bad Guys Are Winning, cyber, advisors, and trade coordinated between the world’s autocracies have formed a new mafia against democratic governments. In the West, parties coordinate against each other. Anne Applebaum, THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING, The Atlantic, November 15, 2021.
Paragraph 2: Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed Yale University Press, 2018, Frontmatter.
Paragraph 3: Suzanne Goldenberg, Bush: Saddam was not responsible for 9/11, The Guardian, Sep 11, 2006.
Bruce Riedel, 9/11 and Iraq: The making of a tragedy, Brookings, September 17, 2021.
Anne Field, What caused the Great Recession?, Business Insider, Jul 8, 2021.
ERIN COGHLAN, LISA MCCORKELL AND SARA HINKLEY, What Really Caused the Great Recession?, IRLE U.C. Berkely, SEPTEMBER 19, 2018.
Michael Waldman, Trump’s Big Lie Led to Insurrection, Brennan Center For Justice, January 12, 2021.
David Rothkopf, We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie: Six months after the insurrection it triggered, it’s clear that the stolen-election nonsense is just a drop in a tidal wave of bullshit., The Daily Beast, Jul. 06, 2021.
Deirdre Shesgreen, 'Egregiously mishandled' or inevitably 'messy'? What went wrong in US withdrawal from Afghanistan, USA TODAY, August 29, 2021.
Craig Whitlock, AT WAR WITH THE TRUTH, Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2019.
Paragraph 6: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, VINTAGE, 2011, pg. 36.
Paragraph 7: Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, 1997.
Paragraph 10: Robin Wright, The World Shook as America Raged, The New Yorker, Jan. 8, 2021.
Isaac Stanley-Becker, Top general was so fearful Trump might spark war that he made secret calls to his Chinese counterpart, new book says, Washington Post, September 14, 2021.
Charles Maynes, As US Reels From Capitol Violence, Russia Enjoys the Show, Voice Of America, January 07, 2021.
Peter Beinart, Obama’s Idealists: American Power in Theory and Practice, Foreign Affairs, November/December 2919, pg. 162-169.
Paragraph 11: GOPP: Grand Old Putin Party, as differentiator from the old, dead GOP of Reagan, Eisenhower, and Lincoln.
Cameron Peters , The GOP whitewash of the Capitol attack shows the need for a January 6 commission /i>, VOX, May 16, 2021.
Jake Lahut, We watched Tucker Carlson's Jan. 6 documentary so you don't have to. Here's why its whitewash of the Capitol insurrection makes no sense, Business Insider, Nov 22, 2021.
Connor Perrett, Liz Cheney said she refuses to 'whitewash' the Capitol Riot, calling Republicans who do 'disgraceful and despicable', Business Insider, May 16, 2021.
Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ release of texts from FOX hosts telling Trump to stop the insurrection, shows by their coverup which side FOX is on. They don’t call it FOX RT for nothing. Dartunorro Clark, Fox News hosts, Donald Trump Jr., asked Meadows to get Trump to call off rioters, NBC News, Dec. 13, 2021.
Paragraph 12: Ephesians 4:25.
Matt Vasilogambros, Republican Legislators Curb Authority of County, State Election Officials, PEW, July 28, 2021.
Paragraph 13: Caveats to the notion of myth: First, the notion of myth is broadened beyond Joseph Campbell’s definition to include the popular use of the term, as in the lies of conspiracy theories. Second, if the ancient Aristotelian notion of Natural Law were revived in terms of human nature and shown to be an emergent property of biology, serving the survival of the individual and thus the species, might then some categories of myths may be seen as objective aspects of that Natural Law, realities of human nature? i.e. as real as any other physical characteristic emergent from other physical characteristics, like the property of wetness from water, a molecule that feels dry until a critical threshold in number is reached.
Paragraph 14: Erick Trickey, Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party, Washington Post, January 15, 2021.
49,000,000 comes from 66% of 74,000,000 who voted for Trump and believe the election was stolen. Of FOX RT viewers, that’s 82%. Even more radical Right-wing media has a 97% conviction rate. Clearly, the dimmest people watch the stupidest programming. What a surprise. No wonder Putin is so successful here. PRRI Staff, The “Big Lie”: Most Republicans Believe the 2020 Election was Stolen, PRRI, 05.12.2021.
Until next time, the first Monday in March, the 7th, 2022.
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