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If the situation we find ourselves in today were instead merely a horror movie, this would be the part where the peasants would be massing with their pitchforks and torches and storming the king’s castle.

While some might say that already happened last week, those who believe so are overlooking the fact that the building they sacked was the wrong one.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting the violence, the lawbreaking, was okay. Of course it wasn’t. I’m merely pointing out the cognitive dissonance inherent in the acts of misdirected rage directed toward the wrong targets, for equally wrong reasons.

Had these folks been  grounded in reality, their ire would have been directed toward the real source of their troubles, the White House, and the sinister figure who resides within, a man who’s succeeded in channeling their anger in directions that benefit only him at their great expense, while totally convincing them that he is the one and only answer to all their problems.

I suppose we should congratulate the president for his adeptness at pulling the wool over so many people for so long that, despite reality’s practically screaming the truth repeatedly in their faces, they continue to remain unmoved, seemingly immune to logic, unpersuadable.  But I cannot go there. The man is a terrible human being, plain and simple, and deserving of nothing but scorn.  

But perhaps the greatest of his many abominations, certainly in terms of lives lost and families forever prematurely diminished, has been his pitiful mishandling of the pandemic, that, awful as it’s been, is now capped by the following revelation from today’s Washington Post:

“A promising announcement earlier this week from Operation Warp Speed — that the government would release more vaccine doses that were being held in reserve — was dashed when the group admitted to states that the reserves never existed. Officials had hoped to expand access to millions of elderly people and those with high-risk medical conditions.  One state health official called the revelation “extremely disturbing.’”

So much for “Operation Warped Feed!” The Post article continues:

“As Americans prepare for President Trump to leave the White House, they face a sickening reality: Nearly 400,000 people have died of covid-19 under his watch. His administration led a bungled response from the start, health experts have repeatedly said, for which the nation has paid a devastating price. American deaths make up 20 percent of the global toll — which just crossed 2 million — despite being just 4.25 percent of the world’s population.”

And from the BBC today:

Funding for a program in Thailand created to identify and study viral transmission in bats that is vital to the prevention of transmission to humans,  the “10-year Predict programme, was allowed to expire by the Trump administration, although US President-elect Joe Biden has promised to restore it.”

These real-world implications, in which millions of lives  have been lost and many more millions imperiled, underscore the importance of never again permitting the  science-deniers among us to shape or otherwise affect the science-based  policies, research initiatives and preventative efforts enacted and supported by our government or those of like-minded governments across the world.

Soon, tr*** will be gone, but the damage wrought by this man will persist for decades. For the nation to truly heal, a full accounting must be made, beginning with the complete and total denunciation of the myth of The Steal by every elected official who’s endorsed and perpetuated it. Those who refuse should be removed from office in disgrace.

In addition, efforts must be undertaken to somehow counter the propaganda being strewn across the airwaves and the internet by Right-leaning media outlets and their spokespeople, who’s poison has been spreading unimpeded and  virus-like, for far too long.

And their leader must be held accountable—criminally, civilly and in the Court of Public Opinion. Only then will it be possible to begin the work of healing the nation.

Tim Konrad                                                                     January 15, 2021

Post Link:

BBC link:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210106-nipah-virus-how-bats-could-cause-the-next-pandemic?xtor=ES-213-%5BBBC%20Features%20Newsletter%5D-2021January15-%5BFuture%7c+Button%5D

Last night, I watched about 20 minutes of Sean Hannity.

That was all it took.

(Seems oddly telling that his name rhymes with ‘insanity.’ As Joe Leaphorn often noted, there are no coincidences.)

As I watched, I observed the host and his guests putting forth a version of “reality” diametrically opposed to the one in which I and those close to me live. I find comfort in saying that I am fairly confident the reality I inhabit is the one that most accurately comports with objective reality.

 I am not surprised at hearing these men declare t**** the honest one and label anyone of a different view as lying, nor did it startle me to see them parroting the untrue talking points of their great leader, one after another. I was caught off guard, however, by the deceptive way in which they aired crudely spliced video segments of prominent leading Democrats, representing the speakers’ remarks, removed from their original contexts, in such a way as to create a false narrative that suggested they were espousing views in complete opposition to their original intent—the very definition of deceit itself.

The thought struck me that Hannity and the other people party to this enterprise had no shame, that what they were doing to fool impressionable people into believing such dangerous and destabilizing nonsense was totally reprehensible, cruel, immoral, devoid of conscience. This organized, delusional fantasy they were feeding seemed a gross disservice to the show’s audience, undertaken without regard for their viewers’ best interests.  It was, simply put, utterly beyond the pale.

By their actions, these men were willfully and deliberately poisoning the minds of their followers, with no discernible thought as to the consequences of their actions.

As they decried Twitter’s exiling of t**** as further proof of the need to regulate Big Tech, I thought to myself, “these people are the ones who should be regulated.” Mindful of the ironies inherent in censorship, I mused, shouldn’t there be some way to “suspend” people like Hannity from being able to infect his audience without invoking censorship? Isn’t his brand of poison every bit as lethal as COVID and equally in need of containment? After all, the wolf we feed is the one that grows strong.

But, how does a person (or a nation) separate suspension on social media from censorship?  Where does the notion of free speech fit into that schema?

That the propaganda put forth by Hannity and his peers should be deemed permissible in a society such as ours, or, for that matter, in any society, raises serious questions about whether we are capable of the self-governing necessary to tame our darker passions. The behavior of those responsible for Hannity’s show and others like it argues, in the strongest possible terms, that we are not.

One thing seems certain: without containment, the t**** cancer will continue to spread, as it has since his ascendancy, giving agency to the free expression of mans’ darker desires. This malignancy has been around for far longer than the time t**** has disgraced the scene, but it has grown exponentially through his constant and audaciously misleading messaging.

It’s uncannily mirror-like how t**** followers view things the opposite of how we see them, only the reflections they perceive are darkly perverse, twisted and cynical.

 The sense of moral outrage we feel when viewing t***-inspired domestic terrorists ravaging the Peoples’ House is the same feeling the MAGA set experiences when being told how the country is going to the dogs because of liberal, socialist policies, or how they feel when listening to their leader lament about all the ways he’s been wronged by the Democrats, the media, and basically anyone else who disagrees with him.

How are we to re-establish common agreement over what constitutes consensus reality with the almost half of the people who continue to subscribe to an alternate view of reality, folks who jumped on the crazyland train and can’t or are unwilling to find their way off?  Bridging that divide will be the challenge underlying the many social, environmental and economic challenges of at least the next several decades.

This task won’t be easy, but it is and will remain an essential one if we are ever to find our way back to living under a government based on the principles—right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom, equality, justice—upon which our country was founded.

Tim Konrad                                                                      January 9, 2021