As the World Turns - My Political Self

I had always, until 2015, been under the impression that the longer we live, the smarter we get. By “we,” I mean the human race, as a whole. Over the millennia, there have been individuals whose curiosity led them to make various discoveries in science and philosophy and mathematics and law and psychology and physics and engineering, and every bit of knowledge that we gained meant that we took a step forward. Because of a lack of good communication in the past, say prior to the 19th century, many discoveries were made contemporaneously in various parts of the planet, but eventually the communities of like-minded individuals were able to get together and hypothesize and test and work out the results of their various theories, so that they could finally put some facts on the table: the Earth rotates around the sun; food that we consume by mouth is digested in the mouth, stomach, small intestines and large intestines, in that order; the diameter of a circle can go around it π times; growing roses and tomatoes is best done with manure, etc.

These are facts, and historical events are facts, and apart from discovering and proving these facts, we document them. We documented historical facts in written media such as newspapers, magazines and books, and we now document them in digital media, as well, but we like to keep track of what we know so that we can build on our knowledge instead of reinventing the wheel in every generation.

Throughout history, of course, there have always been people who didn’t believe in facts, or didn’t believe in conventional facts, as it were. It wasn’t until Columbus “sailed the ocean blue” that some people were finally convinced that the world (the Earth) is spherical. Until then, there were plenty who argued that the world was flat, mostly because people on the ground had no other perspective, but then along came ships and people were able not only to travel farther than they’d been able to see, but out on the open ocean, one does have more of a perspective of the planet in general than one does standing on a sidewalk or in a cornfield. Yet there are people, even today, who still believe the Earth is flat. One of them, whose name I will not mention, died in 2020, in a rocket of his own making, while trying once again to prove that the Earth is flat. It is not, but he literally crashed and burned, and was therefore not privy to his own non-discovery.

Be that as it may, there is plenty of proof that the Earth is a sphere, though an ever-so-slightly flattened sphere, and people who still believe it is flat need either to be educated or medicated, depending on how many other non-facts they believe.

What happened in 2015 to change all this? DUMP.* Dump’s ride down the golden escalator at his eponymous tower became the end of fact and the beginning of what we can call the “Elmer Gantry Era,” notable for it’s lack of facts. The Elmer Gantry Era is when facts began to take a hike, when education failed, when people took as gospel things that are not true simply because someone – a famously uncharismatic someone – said so.

For some reason, anything this Dump said would fly, even if it were an outright lie, and was proven to be an outright lie. He was under the impression that anything he said was true simply because he said it. He ran all his businesses into the ground, but claims to be a successful businessman, and people not only believe him because he said it, but poo-pooed the evidence of it being true. He has at least six bankruptcies under his belt – including his casinos – yet people who believe that he is a successful businessman can be shown court records of those bankruptcies and excuse them by claiming they’re not true, or they came about under a Democratic administration, or that the courts were rigged. Every excuse and rationalization in the book, but they simply cannot believe the facts that are in front of them.

They said the same thing about Dump’s 34 felony counts. They did not blink for a second when he was indicted on 91 counts of various crimes. They managed to excuse all of them by saying that the Democratic government was out to get him, when, in fact, the federal government had nothing to do with the charges – except the ones that the federal government was prosecuting – but they still thought of everything except the truth, which is that this man had committed crime after crime after crime. He is, in fact, a serial criminal. He is, in fact, a narcissistic sociopath, who can commit these crimes and not only have no remorse, but can always blame them on someone else, or say that someone else made up the charges or was persecuting him or using “lawfare.” But not one of these people can admit the facts.

And this is the root of the problem. What spell has he cast upon them to blind them to the facts? What spell has he cast upon them to make them rationalize his faulty explanations instead of investigating what he said? What spell has he cast upon them to make them spend far more than they can afford to buy his trinkets? What spell has he cast upon them to make them think he is 100% correct in tariffing and demonizing China while having his shoddy merch manufactured there? In what way has such a large part of the American public been so hoodwinked as to believe everything this felon says?

The common explanation is that these people “drank the Koolaid,” but had they drunk Jim Jones’ Koolaid, they’d be dead. They’ve gotten into something, though; something that distorts their perception, that causes them to have zero curiosity about the world around them, that causes them to be incapable of recognizing some of Dump’s most obvious contradictory statements, that causes them to be irony-impaired. And whatever is causing this cognitive dissonance or sudden-onset psychosis needs to be remedied quickly, except, of course, for the recent defunding of and firing at the NIH and the dismantling of the Department of Education, which might delay this. I think these people have been dosed, and the sooner we find out what was used, the better. We need to get this country back on track, and we can’t do that if 35% of the people here are delusional.

* A serendipitous contraction of the first letter of his first name and the last three letters of his surname.