#in america the vote still meaningful because the elections are not rigged

[attheexactlyrighttimeandplace]

I tried to be cheerful and keep my message positive because the goal was to encourage people to vote, but this last response was the straw that broke the camel's back (no pun intended since I say this as an Arab).

I'm not American and honestly I didn't understand 80% of your message about your electoral system. This shouldn't be a problem: I should mind my own business quietly, not understanding any of your fucking useless, perverse American political mind games.

Jill Stein is on the ballot and she's the only sane option at this point. That you can still nitpick about her level of commitment and her ability to win, without even trying to make her win, says everything there is to say about your stupidity!

What a privileged life you have to be able to not care about the consequences of your choices on the rest of the world! And you really like rubbing it in our faces!

This is not possible for us. The stakes - a world war is looming with a new almost certain genocide but this time throughout the Middle East - of this American presidential election are too great for my continent, my country, my region, my religion, my culture and my family ! I'm totally trapped in your quagmire and I can't escape it, even if I don't want to be involved.

You have no idea what it does to our minds:

to see you weigh the options as if it were a consumer choice, the same one you make between spinach and broccoli. You don't like the menu: Trump nor Biden, but you still feel powerful like rich people because you eat at the restaurant (democracy reserved for whites and as an exception poc living in Western countries), so it's your right to critique each meal/option in detail. Maybe your restaurant is small, not famous, cheap (you'll suffer from racism or discrimination), but you still feel proud of your privilege of putting your interests first and letting someone else pay for you. So the taste of this meal will be forgotten as quickly as the new massacres you heard about on the radio on your commute to school or work. You're just going to turn off the radio and continue your daily life

Seeing you pretend that this is democracy, because if your rights are protected, everything will be fine.

To see you pretend that your trans rights are more important than our lives, as the pathetic and shameless TheRogueFeminist reminded us earlier in this thread (I'm not even tagging this empty shell who pretend to be a human being).

To see you pretend that Biden didn't act like a serial killer butcher, cutting up entire human beings, from babies to the elderly, reducing them to limbs, smashing their heads until their brain matter was out of their skulls.

To see you pretend that Biden is not doing this with the American bombs paid with your taxes, making YOU responsable for his actions!

Seeing you pretend that what happens in the Middle East, in Russia, in China, in Africa will never have direct effects on your lives, because "America is never at war, America is in shopping malls" while others suffer the consequences of the wars your government chooses to lead on your behalf.

You know what? This time, you'll have to give a damn. I have two updates on what the Biden election means for your precious lives, so superior to ours:

First, Biden “the least bad option” is in the process of militarizing the whole american society, as explained in this Antiwar article about conscription:

Friday both the U.S. Senate Armed Service Committee and the full U.S. House of Representatives approved different proposals to expand and/or make it harder to avoid the requirement for men ages 16-26 to register with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft.  The House vote was 217-199.

And it's not just about guys this time:

The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) approved a version of the NDAA that would expand Selective Service registration to include young women as well as young men. This version of the NDAA will now go to the floor as the starting point for consideration and approval by the full Senate.

There is also a worse version of the proposal where enlistment is automated to track everyone who tries to escape enlistment:

Also on June 14th the full House of Representatives approved a different version of the NDAA that would make Selective Service registration automatic while keeping it for men only.

Combine all the worst of these proposals and imagine what Biden, the protector of your dear American democracy, will do to you at the end of the year, after his election, considering this draft came during his mandate and it is he who pushes for wars with Russia and China through NATO and the EU :

Floor amendments are still possible in the Senate before it approves its version of the NDAA. But as of now, it seems likely that competing bad proposals with respect to expansion and/or attempted enforcement through automation of Selective Service — one from the Republican-majority House to try to make it automatic, and one from the Democratic-majority Senate to expand it to women — will be included in the House and Senate versions of the NDAA and go to the eventual House-Senate conference committee to sort out in closed-door negotiations late this year, after the elections.

No matter how much he doubts the practicality of this technical solution to meet the Biden administration's need to "enable planning and engagement in endless, unlimited wars,  without needing to consider regard for whether young people will volunteer to fight them".

the author's conclusion of this article said:

Young people should continue to resist draft registration and keep the draft out of the policy arsenal of the warmongers. Allies of young people and of their resistance to the draft should lobby members of Congress who oppose endless, unlimited, undeclared wars to reintroduce and push for hearings on the Selective Service Repeal Act.

If you think World War III isn't around the corner, that means you're really out of the loop in terms of current events.

In the following video (I can't post the short clip of the video I wanted to share in this thread, so I added the link to Twitter), Serbian President Vucic literally breaks down over the possibility of a nuclear confrontation between the West and Russia before the end of this year.

We are talking about a Western head of state who has been present at all NATO and EU meetings on war and peace and who is aware of all the intelligence on the subject. In this interview, he is about to fall off his chair from fear, because he knows we are heading towards a global nuclear war that will be fought on every continent.

The link for the complete video:

“We are heading for a major catastrophe and it seems that the train has already left the station and can no longer be stopped. No one in the West is talking about peace anymore - only more war. The West thinks it can win and take out Russia. I think the West is wrong. Both sides now believe it is existential for them, so I don't think they will find a solution other than war and everything, everything is at stake. In Europe, the leaders act as the big heroes, but they are not honest and do not tell their citizens that they will all pay a big price if it comes to war.”

So keep your condescension to yourself and start campaigning for Jill Stein!

to be honest it would make me a lot more comfortable if you guys would show a little concern about trump running for president again. Do not inbox me and say you don’t like joe biden omg i already know. but can we show a little concern. about donald trump. being the republican candidate for president. for the third election in a row.

[theorangedead]

“America’s democracy was designed to be anything but democratic: built on stolen land, shifty suffrage, the Three-Fifths Compromise, and an Electoral College insulating the presidency from popular will. These days, it’s hard to tell if the system is broken or if it’s working as designed. I think it’s both: The system was flawed—rigged—from the start, and has now degenerated into something even worse. We’re seeing the corrosion of a corrupt system. And it could lead to full-out collapse, right on top of us.

But as inherently inadequate as our democracy is and has always been, it would be a mistake to think that losing it is no loss at all. Even a flawed democracy has the bones of the framework we need to create the world we want. And this year, our choice is between a hollowed-out democracy and full-blown authoritarian chaos.

There’s no hyperbole there. The world is literally on fire. Global warming has not paused for the Covid-19 pandemic or the long-overdue reckoning on race or any of the other crises at play. Quite the opposite. The climate crisis has gained strength and run right smack into every other crisis at hand. Just on the West Coast, for example, voters are struggling to find their way to polling places that may have burned down in an apocalyptic wildfire season that the state was ill-equipped to fight, partially because the prison labor it often exploited for this purpose has dwindled due to the coronavirus pandemic in its overcrowded prisons. 

...

It’s ridiculous to say that Donald Trump does not have a climate plan. He absolutely does, and it’s terrifying. His plan to “mitigate” the crisis is to egg it on by pouring money into the fossil fuel fiasco; his plan to adapt to the crisis is to dehumanize and deny the waves of climate refugees as the blood of needless deaths coats his hands and the children kidnapped by the U.S. government cry out for their parents. Just because he doesn’t outright call it a strategy doesn’t make it any less of one.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, has a climate plan and says as much. As his campaign will tell you, it’s the most aggressive climate plan in history. As most climate activists will tell you, when you factor in how much more ferocious the crisis has gotten with every election cycle of delay, Biden’s plan still falls short. At the same time, it’s the best option on the table. Jane Fonda said it best: “I’d rather push a moderate than fight a fascist.”

This election is less about whether we should act on climate than how we should act on it. Should we act with compassion or with cruelty? Given that our national commitment to democracy has become debatable, this election is also about whether we even have the ability to act on climate in any meaningful way in the future.

I’ll take a shot in hell over a shot to the head any day.

...

I’ve never been proud of my country, but in 2020 I’ve never been more afraid for its future. As a “climate person,” I know that the future of the planet is, cruelly and inextricably, tied to the future of America. As a Black climate person, I know that “climate action” does not necessarily mean climate justice. It can mean eco-fascism or climate apartheid. It can mean that there is, as the president puts it, “crystal clean water and air” for some people, but none for me. Which means, as a Black American climate person in 2020, I’ve never been more afraid for my life.

As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, “Voting for Joe Biden is no longer about whether you agree with him. It’s a vote to let our democracy live another day.” This past weekend, on the first day of early voting in New York City, I stood in line for more than five hours to vote like my life depended on it. Because it does. Everything does.”

[queernuck]

The Ballot Box, And Nothing Else: Aesthetic Radicalism in American Political Thought

There are, fundamentally, three different approaches to voting that must be considered when discussing the particular weight of voting in an election, more specifically American elections, Presidential and Midterm alike: the ontological consideration of what a meaningful vote is, the metapolitical and metacultural significance of a given vote as a statement regarding American political discourses, and the potential effect of a vote on the outcome of a given race, ballot measure, so on. Through one example of Judith Butler’s discussion of assembly, as implied through its shared space in an interview where she gives a halfhearted endorsement of Hillary Clinton as a candidate and realized in examining the semiotics of such an example in relation to her work both on assembly and on performative, discursive creations of the body, as well as some irreverent analysis of the spectacle of voting, a certain sort of space wherein the act of voting can be at once affirmed and rejected, held in a kind of tense compromise as simply one performance in the pornographic life of an American settler, emerges.

To begin with a precursory exegesis of Butler’s interview, her reasoning behind Clinton is one that was not terribly uncommon, both in liberal and radical discussion of the election: Hillary Clinton was the better candidate due to the likelihood that she would appoint relatively liberal (by American parlance) judges to the Supreme Court, a likely task given the death of Alito and the age of other Justices. Butler’s position, that this makes Clinton worth voting for, can then be read either as reformist (that meaningful change can come from the Supreme Court) or as a practical consideration (that the reduction or restriction of certain reactionary aspects of American legal practice could be achieved within the Supreme Court’s decisions given the right makeup of the Court). The former seems to be more in line with Butler’s own thinking, or at the very least easily emerges from it. However, a more meaningful reading of her words reveals that the second is a far stronger interpretation, even if Butler’s own thoughts on the matter do not match up with it. Given the domestic nature of the Supreme Court, how it exists as a kind of solipsistic point of consideration for Americans looking toward their electoral interests, choosing Clinton would be worthwhile so long as a secondary series of conditions were met, which would imply a larger acceptance of the structure of voting as present, but not a personal involvement by necessity. One can only vote so many times; there are so few hours in Election Day and if one lives in a state that is part of a similar voting bloc, such fraud is only meaningful on a local level, if at all. The legitimation of voter registration drives as a tactic is one that works well in the face of disenfranchisement, but in large part specifically because it allows for the choice of abstention to become a possibility rather than a foregone conclusion. The nomination of a Supreme Court Justice requires a great deal of political collaboration, and the means by which obstruction and selective acts of resignification have been used by Republicans to select and confirm favorable candidates for the Supreme Court provides such an example. The supposition goes that, if turnout against Trump had been higher, straight-ticket votes had been more common, so on, there would not have been such a situation. Of course, this ignores that participation was, in many cases, a secondary consideration if one at all. The extent to which Republicans had been aided by the Supreme Court already in rolling back laws preventing various efforts of voter suppression was already in place, and in fact accepted by Democrats as simply part of the disparities of American politics. The electoral system had been rigged intentionally, gerrymandered on a national scale, and yet “going high” was still the Democratic strategy.  

One example, in Romania, shows that electoral structure can register abstention in a way far more meaningful than a vote, specifically due to the tension within the means that electoral significance, thresholds of democratic recognition, are placed in referendums like the one on a constitutional change to ban gay marriages in the country. Given the support of the ruling party and a comprehensive campaign to support the measure by many of the nation’s churches, the voter turnout was overwhelmingly in favor of the measure. However, the measure failed specifically because it did not maintain an electoral coherence: for a referendum to be recognized at least 30% of the eligible voting population must take part in it, but the referendum only reached 20.8% all votes included. Given the fervent support the Yes vote was maintaining, that the Yes vote was in fact the intended outcome of the campaign, a vote of No would have effectively been a support of the measure, as it would have pushed it closer to a point where it reaches that threshold of 30%. Due to the massive disparity between those supporting and those opposing, a conservative majority would have all but certainly won had the referendum met standards of legal acceptance, and as a result the only means of opposing it effectively was to refuse to vote, to take a specific stance of objection and maintain it in the face of temptation to participate. That so many accounts of Hillary’s loss note her victory in both the Popular Vote and large states often relies upon a kind of dual consciousness: some of the most likely Democratic voters who abstained due to objecting to Clinton as a candidate were ones who considered this in light of their own assessment of conditions akin to Butler’s: there was no need to vote for Clinton in their own state specifically because of the high likelihood of her carrying it. That the Supreme Court had been the one to hand Bush an electoral victory despite a loss in the popular vote should have been an indictment of a similar difference between popular and electoral results in the 2016 election, but instead the concentration on singular notions of abstention as due to a kind of uncaring privilege, a sort of radical liberalism that posits the non-voter as a nihilist white man within a standpoint theory framework. Radical liberalism, as a strain of thought, frequently makes genuinely incisive critiques of capitalist social formations while still maintaining a fundamental anticommunism. It looks to radical figures, takes on radical class character and consciousness, may even openly espouse certain radical ideologies within itself. There is absolutely room within radical liberalism for these critiques, so long as the tendency toward socialism is in fact a reaction to the very anticommunist ideology they too tend toward. The DSA is too far for most, if not all, and Marxism as a whole is anathema to their projects of decolonization, occasional opposition to imperialism, their naming of colonialism and thus the potential for postcolonial thought. Radical liberal notions of Marxist thought often position either Marx himself or those who adopt the label “Marxist” as racialized specifically as white, in a fashion that itself results in a kind of racialized maintenance of political hegemony. The appropriation of Marxist assemblies throughout history by this hegemonic ideation of whiteness is an Orientalist approach which names Marxism as simply flowing from colonial dominance, with a reactionary concept of a “return to nature” being invoked in some postcolonial thought. Ignoring that anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism have been almost uniformly Marxist movements over the past century, have been either started or maintained in relation to class struggle, have established national identity in opposition to a national bourgeoisie, a kind of colonial landlord resting on the plantation, a masked agent of bourgeoisie control standing in for a white body that cannot be present, is all ignored. Instead, a “self-actualization” which concentrates on bourgeoisie individualism, on the satisfaction of certain denatured goals surrounding colonial structures of power, of a refusal to enter into critical theoretical inquiries of postcolonial thought, a refusal of postcolonialism as a critique that recognizes and in fact fundamentally relies on the capitalist, imperialist resignification of culture as itself a distortion, reshaping, creation of time and history itself, the imperialist character of genealogies of cultural identity as part of a new bourgeoisie state, are inserted into the neoliberal development of a state’s identity. This has already been completed to a great degree in post-socialist nations like the former Yugoslavia, and is continuing through the presence of American colonial power through AFRICOM, the resurrection of the positions once held by the Chicago Boys in Latin America, the insistence by the United States on an irreconcilable gap between the ROK and DPRK, the necessity not of reconciliation but rather the completion of an absolute genocide against the DPRK begun during the Korean War. Radical liberalism can present itself as radical specifically because it maintains a kind of edgy aesthetic presence, using twitter wonk and various memes, irreverent positioning disguising a hegemonic structure of acceptance and belief, and a perspective on postcolonial culture like that condemned by Spivak, the acceptance of a cultural hegemony ossified in reaction to colonial control as itself a genuine and irreducible part of the culture-at-hand, one that must be not only accepted but maintained as part of a certain relativist positioning. That this relativism serves to further colonial power, that it involves a specifically anticommunist critique and requires one refuse to enter genuine discursive consideration regarding the sorts of bodies maintained by this control, instead requiring an anthropological and metapolitical distance for a “Western” onlooker, the insertion of a concrete Orientalist “other” into the space wherein such relativism could in fact be a tool of genuine postcolonial critique, is part of disguising the anticommunist character of such ideologies.

That voting is a favorite topic of theirs, then, is hardly surprising. It involves a singular action of masturbatory character, alone and yet denoted as an exhibitionist exercise, the kind of late capitalist commodification of voting as just another sort of transaction, akin to the purchase of an electorally appropriate Pumpkin Spice Latte (or, in rejection thereof, a more proletarian black coffee). Due to the means by which citizenship as marked by voting rights in America is specifically racialized, based in extending class violence to other significations of identity, the push to register voters purged from the rolls by new laws can take on a radical character in that it involves raising an awareness of how fragile the maintenance of a certain order within politics is, how much the apparent-democratic relies on not the voting itself, but the aesthetics thereof. The coverage of political candidates themselves casting votes is part of this, the notion that they too are included within their own system, that they are no more able to effect its course than the average voter, when even a cursory inquiry into this notion finds that an elected official in fact profoundly dictates the very terms on which voting may occur. Accepting the spectacle of voting, that it presents a kind of fetish within organization and moreover using it as a means of organizing other actions, of raising class consciousness, of discussing how the American government is able to create Reservations as non-places, as an absence-of-place, as part of an ongoing and centuries-long genocidal course of action necessary to maintain the settler-colonial libido, to keep fantasies of Manifest Destiny alive, to push toward an absolute genocidal end, the full settling of America, coupled with the intentional antiblackness of other voter laws, the way in which structural inaccessibility is found in so many different fashions, how maintaining barriers to entry is part of a larger hegemonic operation regarding antiblackness in America, how the policing and jailing of black Americans involves specifically creating a felon as a subject to take away voting rights, the ability to own a firearm, job prospects to increase the power of police to arbitrarily enact violence against a black person (by increasing the likelihood that any given brutalized subject will be a felon, presenting an a posteriori justification of the brutality) how protections around age, gender, ability, are all specifically forgotten within intersections and assemblages of race, blackness most particularly, is shown by the effort to organize voters. Thus, when this is made clear, when voting is used in order to show the profound failure of such a civic system, it creates potential for organization past the ballot box: after all, the old IRA slogan mentioned the ballot, but it mentioned other courses of action as well.

However,  the singular outpouring that radical liberals have around electoral politics specifically imagines the elected official as somehow beyond any consideration, as an ontological necessity, that the democratic structure of voting cannot take place outside of electing representatives. As Laclau describes with his concepts of Radical Democracy, the character of a vote takes on a far different meaning when it is radically shrunk, out of the infinite arborescence that is electoral politics and into a rhizomal interfacing of democratic affinity, where the most basic structure of organization is itself based on democratic agreement, direct affinities that do not require voting to be masturbatory, but in fact part of a schizophrenic exchange of ideation, the acceptance that loss of a vote can in fact be not only an acceptable outcome, but one that will be celebrated. Certainly, there are cases where metapolitical considerations lead to an “acceptable loss” within liberal politics, but these are rare given the acceptance of certain sorts of politicians within mainstream discourses. That the cynical reference to the “white working class” so common in radical liberal vocabularies often specifically excludes white working-class voters except through other acts of explicit inclusion, individualization of a potential proletarian subject, a rejection of the potential of an American proletariat not as a call for Third World consciousness or a revolutionary opposition to the colonialism of the American state, but rather as a means of focusing on certain standpoint theories, of using identity in order to justify the election of reactionary candidates that have goals well in line with many white voters due to the white supremacist power that extends in a vector outwards from them, separated from their positioning of themselves by the measure of politics, favoring overwhelmingly white bourgeoisie interests in the name of opposing a “white working class” imagined by vulgar considerations of socialist theory by other members of their party. This leads to a kind of paradoxical rejection of subjects outside of hegemonic whiteness specifically because their needs may be identified alongside those of the supposed “white working class”, in that the disproportionate violence done in rejecting those interests is not to those in these areas who are white, but specifically those outside of it, those who are rejected due to gender, or orientation, or race but still are marked as belonging more meaningfully to the area, the district, the population marked in electoral terms as that of a “white working class” area.

Of course, these radical politics are hardly anything without their counterparts. The radical right, in America, needs little introduction but I feel compelled to take a genuine look at it, given the means by which it has reorganized itself from a neoconservative worldview into one that is increasingly adopting not merely the past fascist fetishes of neoliberalism, the kind of pornographic displays of a fascist libido seen in colonial action, but in fact is itself tending toward a fascist aesthetic, is accepting and creating new fascist ideological positions, is tending toward certain kinds of fascist thought which are themselves absolutely comprehensible, are not the aberration that they are made out to be but in fact a fully American phenomena, truly patriotic and truly acceptable within this electoral system. This has fueled, as well, the emergence of a radical centrism, an apparently-apolitical movement that has a cryptofascist character to it, that either spills out into neoreactionary thought or hides it behind acts of political renaming, a measuring of distance between the content of thought and its intention, the action at hand regarding it. It serves to distance itself from the American moderate conservative, the “Boomer” figure, by adopting a kind of neofascist ironic appearance, one that eschews the duplicitous substitution of language so expertly crafted within neoconservatism for a new kind of duplicity based in an outright declaration of fascist principles followed by a kind of tunneling underneath: it shows a kind of “weakness” to the aesthetics of fascism, their own grandiosity and decadence, in order to create a means of realizing them. It is almost akin to the sort of seriousness found in Drag and Camp, the blending of humorous separation and earnest engagement into a unified whole that can be easily excused as “just a joke” despite the totality which it serves to influence. A reliance on voting, here, is far less necessary specifically because fascism presents itself in a hegemonic articulation, its anticapitalism is in fact a transition into a stage of development which maintains capitalist orders of production, simply redistributed in a new fashion amongst representatives of a chosen class, a newly-minted bourgeoisie that hardly looks any different from the old one, but with a refreshing totalitarian candor and a passing resemblance to the workers in their factories.

Meanwhile, the average “centrist” of American politics, caught within this shift toward a neoliberal aesthetic of rebellion and one that accepts a turn toward fascism, sees a principled objection in declaring potentially revolutionary sentiments from absolutely incorrect reasoning. Voting is done “independently” in a way that, effectively, boils down to a particular kind of capitalist acceptance, a weighing of exactly how they see capitalist ideology as developing, as a means of crafting a political identity that is as unobjectionable as possible within American political discourses. Voting, then, is an exercise like any other personal choice, one that will lead to an ultimately good conclusion even if it involves a good-natured defeat on the part of the centrist themselves. That their condemnation of fascism is far less spirited, far more sympathetic than their reliance on continuing American realization of anticommunist ideology, the way that one finds many “centrists” opposing Antifascist Action, seeing soldiers and police officers as fundamentally good people simply following orders rather than the enforcers of a violent colonial regime, the sort of refusal to acknowledge any politics beyond the ballot, involves a larger strain of liberal thought which emphasizes the singularity of voting as an act of political determination, of one that radically signifies all other political actions. Your vote is your life, and your life is only as good as your vote.

And so, Clinton lost, Trump won, the Supreme Court took a turn further toward its already-present fascist identity, and liberals again believe that voting can fix this, even if it requires their most fundamental misunderstandings of what ends are achievable through this liberal-democratic process. Rather than accepting the sorts of strategies around voting that see it as an opportunity to organize, to highlight opposition as a larger series of positions, to accept the symbolic and ineffectual quality of certain votes, it is instead held up in spite of its impotence as the absolute model of the democratic position stopping the fascist creep. It would do these people well to remember that “blue” is not usually the color used to describe those who most ardently stand against fascism, but that is something that will take a long time to understand without it being sublimated into an appropriated history of polite and peaceful change against apartheid, sexualized oppression, the making of war and sexual violence and genocidal maintenance of global hegemony into a blase concept such as “foreign policy.”

Maybe this guy will give you better taxes.

[theliterateape]

The Demagogues Are Here (and They're Smarter Than Trump)

by Don Hall

As attempted coups go, that was a fucking mess.

Trump, like the anarchists and zealots he emboldened (on both sides of the horseshoe), had no other strategy than Burn it all down and see what happens. His M.O. was so incredibly transparent to anyone paying attention. First, distract and deflect from anything he couldn't lie about. Second, lie. BIG. A lot. The more truth obfuscated, the less centralized the potential for objectivity until all truth fits the postmodernist subjective reality mold. Third, use the passions and emotional immaturity of those most convinced by the lies to inflame the situation. Wind 'em up and let them go.

Granted, we have to give the man some credit. He introduced incredibly sticky terminology that will far outlast his four years in office. Fake News. "Every body knows" as a sign of evidence or proof. "Loser" has taken on an entirely enlarged importance due to Trump. While primarily the quintessential bullshit artist, the man knew exactly how to use social media in ways that have been constructive for everyone from middle school kids trying to out their classroom bullies to college students unhappy with their professors.

His use of Hitler's Big Lie technique is almost unparalleled.

So, if the man was so good at this despot thing why was his coup attempt so blatantly obvious and unsuccessful?

Ego. Trump is so in love with himself and the aura of invincibility he's created that he didn't care that it was in plain sight. He wanted it to be in plain sight so that he, and only he, would get the credit for it in the end. Hitler had a host of sidemen, each equally brilliant and despicable as he. Trump surrounded himself with sub-par bigots, industry insiders, and his moron children so that he was always the smartest person in the room.

His only real problem is that he is far from the smartest person in Washington, D.C.

The only action that will eliminate his threat to our country (or at least severely minimize it) is in the hands of the Gods of Social Media. Take away his bully pulpit and Don Jr. is the only one he reaches. Zuckerberg snapped his FB and Insta until after January 20 but he should consider it permanent if mitigating the TrumpFire is a goal. Twitter has closed him out temporarily -- should be permanent.

Yes, Trump will be a problem for us until the fatass finally clogs his heart-hole up with a Big Mac and he croaks on the shitter like Elvis but at this point, we have more insidious things to worry about.

The demagogues of 2021 have been watching. They've been fine-tuning their approach to power and are constructing their own Big Lies to spread. Unlike Trump, they aren't supposed captains of industry and have no designs on public office. They've seen the constraints of political power and know those obstacles are not the clear road to dominance.

Like Trump, they've seen the power of populism gone rogue and intend to use us against ourselves in exactly the same way. That's how Trump came to power. The Russian hackers didn't rig our election, change votes, or tamper with machinery. They hit us where we can't see it: social media propaganda. They ginned up our own hatred for one another and jacked us all up emotionally. They used our own blind faith in the authority of the internet to divide and conquer. It was nearly flawless and extremely effective.

It's easy to see the asshats who breached the Capitol as stupid morons, stealing lecterns and taking selfies but each one is you. Each one is a normal American who was victim of propaganda. Every QAnon believer has been messaged to over time until the conspiracy seems reasonable.

There has been plenty of handwringing think pieces written about the dangers of both social media and populism. Populism is not in and of itself a bad thing. It is, on its face, the ideal behind our democracy after all. Neither is social media. How could a technology that allows my mom to see pictures of my wife and I in Rhyolite, NV or David's parents see videos of his two year old son saying "Fuck" be evil? Nonetheless, the combination of the two elements create a potentially deadly mix.

As recently as this time last year when confronted with the idea that so-called hate speech should receive censorship my eyes would roll around like marbles in a coffee cup. The very concept of censorship in a marketplace of ideas is against everything I believe America to stand for yet, after watching anti-vaxxers, QAnoners, maskholes, and Donald Fucking Trump use the unlimited reach of the internet to poison that very marketplace, I have to re-examine my stance. 

I have to imagine what the Third Reich would've been if Goebbels had had Faceborg and the thought is horrifying. If Hanoi Hannah had Twitter instead of the radio? Christ. These sorts of propagandists are not new. In a war, messaging to the enemy has been standard operating practice since Alexander the Great ("Great," see?) but the addition of the awesome reach of our modern-day soma is giving the Big Lies rocket fuel.

We have licenses to drive and speed limits because there are always going to be few who can't be trusted to drive responsibly. We have licenses for owning guns because a few are always going to use them criminally. Perhaps, in the argument to somehow regulate communication we require a license to Tweet? Yeah, I hear you. How dare we even consider something so legislative? The libertarians will go apeshit at the government overreach. Right now the internet is only regulated in any meaningful way by the providers. For a large enough fee, you can use it without limitation.

Perhaps the internet should be a public utility like water or electricity? Sure, you're still gonna punish black people in Flint, MI but at least there are legal remedies to that sort of bigoted grift. Whatever the answer, we need to be talking about this now. QAnon came to be via an unlicensed, anonymous jackass convincing otherwise reasonable people that there was a pedophile ring in the basement of pizza parlor in D.C. run by Hillary Clinton. That's the kind of spew one would hear from a raging lunatic digging into a trash can on a street corner wearing stuffed animals for shoes but somehow, on the internet, it suddenly seems more plausible to the gentle-minded few looking for answers to the question "What did Hillary do with those seven year olds who only wanted a slice?"

Expanding the definition of hate speech isn't going to help us. The further we go to muddy the waters of what is and is not hate speech has left us with the notion that everyone white is racist and that everyone Asian is also white. The expansion of hate speech has us somehow agreeing that a dirty joke in the wrong setting constitutes assault and that sort of thinking is just one virtue signal away from being Pizzagate.

No. The demagogues have been watching and waiting and Trump's yuge shadow merely kept the light of day off of them. He'll be out of the picture (at least as much as he'll accept it) soon enough and those Capitol-storming jack holes and Seattle-burning Antifa posers will find another power-thirsty grifter to follow like Moses did a shrub on fire.

You'll know them because their credo has no evidence for their conclusions, it centers on them as the experts, denies corroboration from science or credible expertise, and intentionally creates division and Otherism in order to maintain a foothold into the mania that is their Big Lie.

They are also smarter than Trump so their coup will be sneakier and far, far more effective.

[davidcoopermoore]

“Uneducated”

NOTE: This is something I wrote the day after the election and then sat on for months. It was too raw to post when I wrote it, but I think there's a lot in it that I'd still like to explore, and I don't want to give up the things I like about it even though there's a lot here I'm uncertain about.

A quick note on terminology: I will not write the word "uneducated" without scare quotes. I also will not write the phrase "only a high school degree" without putting scare quotes around the word "only." Hopefully my reasons for this will be clear below.

My job right now is to work with the "uneducated." These are students who for a variety of reasons -- some mundane, some utterly soul-crushing -- dropped out of high school. Most, not all, are black. Many, not all, live at or below the poverty line. Their blackness and their poorness have no obvious correlation to their success in our school, or at least we work really hard to make this true.

I teach students who just skipped school, because they hated it, until there were no obvious alternative but a literal "alternative school." I teach students who were pregnant or caring for younger siblings or elderly family members and simply fell too far behind. I teach students who were incarcerated. I teach students who have gone through unspeakable tragedies and I am awed that they're just there, day after day. But I also teach students who are more or less comfortable, just didn't "click" with school, and needed something different to get over the finish line. And I should note that none of these categories are mutually exclusive.

The one thing that quickly became screamingly obvious in my job is this:

They did not fail. Education failed them.

I have a lot of ideas and opinions and beliefs. Today they swirl around in my head as I shadowbox myself and my perceptions of many others, as I worry about "what to say in school on Monday" as though there's anything to say, as though I know more than anyone else, as though I can't just listen, which would be so much harder (oh well; it's what I have to do).

But the only truly bedrock one standing after a year of teaching in an alternative high school, and one that has been underlined, amplified, spotlit, and emblazoned across my heart and my mind especially after this election and its rhetoric, is that education is a human right, and a person who can't achieve some significant, if minimum, level of status -- and according opportunity from that status -- have been robbed of that right.

All of the students I teach, aside from a handful whom I often suspect are concern trolling their classmates, despise Trump with a passion unmatched in any other figure in the United States today. They believe that, along with the election being rigged (for Trump), and with the uneasy sense that their voice, and hence their vote, doesn't truly matter, that Trump will usher in the most racist policies they can imagine. "Bringing back slavery" is how they usually put it.

They don't believe these things simply because they are "uneducated," even if in some technical sense they can sometimes be wrong. Conspiracy theories are merely a backdrop for a more intuitive understanding of the gross injustices that are with them, sometimes in the background and sometimes in the foreground, all the time.

And I believe the same to be true, more or less, of Trump supporters generally, at least those with "only" a high school diploma, who have been held up as, essentially, too stupid not to vote for Trump. They too have their own, if different, conspiracy theories that provide context for their sense of gross injustice, sometimes racist ones. (The SNL "Black Jeopardy" sketch made something like this point af few weeks ago.)

In a Guardian article published a few days before the election, Chris Arnande describes the split between the "uneducated" white and black communities he visits this way:

Natchitoches [in Louisiana] was like many other towns with their share of enthusiastic Trump supporters. It had suffered a devastating economic downturn in the 1970s and 1980s when the cotton gin mills closed. Other than jobs related to the state university, it has since offered little opportunity. Those in town whose lives were not connected to the university lifeline were the Trump voters. Well, the white people in town. Natchitoches, like the US, has long been divided along racial lines, with black residents confined to a lesser choice of jobs, homes, and schools. And Trump was dividing them further. [...] America has changed fundamentally over the last 35 years, and I saw and heard the impact of those changes. America had finally started upending a longstanding and ugly racial hierarchy, removing legal barriers that had made the playing field anything but level. For this, minorities overwhelmingly supported the new system, despite still suffering economically and socially more than white Americans. Yet we replaced that system with one based on schooling, building a playing field that was tilted dramatically towards anyone with the “right” education. The jobs requiring muscle decreased (many going overseas) while the jobs requiring school increased. Compounding the pain from this, we started giving the winners a much larger share of the profits. The early Trump voters I met were the losers from these changes. Their once superior status – based only on being white – was being dismantled, while their lack of education was also being punished. They lived in towns and communities devastated by economic upheaval. They were born in them and stayed in them, despite their fall. For many, who had focused on their community over career, it felt like their entire world was collapsing.

What I like about this analysis is that it doesn't take racism off the table, but contextualizes white racism with the legitimate struggles that white Americans deal with -- and deal with, in part, by doubling down on those few advantages they feel are being threatened. They are right, I think, to believe those advantages are also their rights; but they are wrong, I think, to believe that other people aren't equally and in some cases more deserving of those advantages, which are also their (the others') rights.

(Generally I've been frustrated by critiques of this election, from many perspectives, that conflate "white supremacy" and "white supremacists." The idea that you can't factor in white supremacy to the mindset of a person who voted for Obama and then Trump, for instance, is to confuse that person, who has undoubtedly benefitted from white surpemacy without seeing those benefits for themselves in any meaningful way, just by dint of not knowing what it's like not to be white, for a white supremacist. The on-record white supremacists also turned out in droves for Trump, but not necessarily for the same reasons. More than one problem led us to Trump.)

We can mock or deride "uneducated" whites and insist that education would change them. But when we talk like this, it seems like we've got the problem the wrong way around. Whites with "only" a high school diploma don't want to throw a "Molotov cocktail right in the center of the bastards who did this to us" (in Michael Moore's prescient phrasing) because they are uneducated. They are uneducated because they are in a system that isn't working for them, to the extent that it seems to require a Molotov cocktail. They just don't recognize, or don't care, that the fire won't hurt them as much as it hurts other people for whom the system isn't working either.

I'm not absolving whites with "only" a high school diploma from their votes for Trump (and I can't absolve myself for not talking to more white people who I knew would likely vote for Trump). Like my students' fear they'll be "sent back to Africa," on some level, lots of Trump voters are simply mistaken about a lot of what they believe, especially as regards what a Republican-controlled Congress and a President Trump would do about their problems, the source of those problems, and any possible hard solutions. But what they're not mistaken about is the existence of their problems. Their "uneducated" status is a symptom of those problems, not its cause.

(So how about those whites with college degrees, like the insurance adjuster I met last night who delightedly quipped that he is "NOT! Disappointed!" in the election results, before returning workmanlike to the everyday functions of his high-paying job that reqires a college degree? He's not the same. But then I'd also hazard to guess he didn't support Trump in the same way that the subjects of Arnande's piece did. Again, more than one problem led us to Trump.)

To see things the other way around -- to think that people vote Trump because they are uneducated, rather than that a breakdown in education and basic security as human right is one of many factors that makes Trump look particularly appealing to white voters with "only" a high school degree -- to see things this way is to use the same logic that paints my students, who are in a system that has failed them, as failures themselves. In this telling, "dumb people voted against their interests,: we are making the inexcusable mistake of equating the "uneducated" and a whole group of unrelated adjectives -- stupid, bad, ridiculous. Even after I'd taught at my school for about ten minutes I knew, if I didn't know it before, that there is no obvious correlation between any of these words and whether or not my students had (or later, "only" had) their high school diploma.

So yes, by all means, we need to improve the social infrastructure that guarantees rights to people to a safe and productive and meaningful life. But thinking that "to educate," beyond improving that social infrastructure, means something like "present the right facts and different perspectives and watch the problems go away" is not only naive -- it's an insult to those "uneducated" out there who know a lot, but about things that don't make it any easier for them to succeed in their society.

My students all start their time at my school "uneducated." They, for the most part, leave with "only" a high school diploma. That is an enormous achievement often made against cruel barriers. What we can't do is guarantee that other people -- those who make up our colleges, our local, state, and federal government, our social welfare support systems -- have taken the steps they need to do their part, too.

[forsetti]

On a Post-Factual World: The Root of The Problem

“When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.”-Merlin in “Excalibur” There are so many things happening right now, it is difficult to get a good grasp on what the real problem is.  Yes, Trump is a problem but he didn't get to be president by accident.  Yes, the media is a problem but they didn't get to be this way overnight.  Yes, fake news is a problem but it didn't appear overnight.  Yes, undereducated voters are a problem but they didn't get this way by accident.  If you boil all of these problems down, you are left with a simple reduction-the death of truth.  Whatever was once commonly accepted as truth has been eliminated from public discourse.  Facts/truth have been replaced with feelings.  It doesn't matter if all the evidence says otherwise, how people “feel” about it has been given priority.  

As someone who has spent their life dedicated to knowing facts from the obscure and ridiculous to the highly specialized and esoteric, truth has always have always been a top priority.  When I was young, I rarely read non-fiction (the Nancy Drew series one of the exceptions.)  I read the encyclopedia and reference books.  I read them every night long past my bedtime.  If the internet and smartphones had existed back then, I probably would have only slept from exhaustion.  The motivating force behind this obsession with facts was I hated not knowing something.  If adults were talking about economics or a topic I didn't know anything about, it really bothered me.  If I saw a news report about a country in Africa, I wanted to know as much as I could about it so the report made sense and could be put in context.  I'm fairly confident that the reason I gravitated to studying philosophy was a search for deeper, more fundamental truths.  

This placement of truth at the top of my priorities caused problems here or there in classes, discussions, friendships...but for the most part, it has just been what it is.  This changed when I joined social media.  I didn't realize just how much I had subconsciously shielded myself from people who don't really care about the truth and surrounded myself with people who do until I joined Facebook. Suddenly, I was inundated with posts and comments that were not just devoid of truth, but easily disprovable.  This by itself wouldn't have been a problem if the person who posted something obviously untrue was open to being politely corrected.  For the most part, they aren't and they aren't because no matter what they may tell others or themselves, being right isn't a priority.  Thinking they are right, however, is.  This is the direct opposite of how I'm built.  This attitude of believing you are right being more important than actually being right is the root of the problem.  It is why fake news is able to get traction and have an impact.  It is why Donald Trump was able to draw large crowds during his campaign and eventually get elected.  It is in large part why the media has failed to live up to even the most basic of journalistic ethics.  It is why there are so many undereducated voters.  Facts don't matter.

There are a lot of culprits responsible for why facts don't matter.  First and foremost is everyone who either doesn't care enough about the truth to make it a high priority, those who are too lazy to find out, and those who are too arrogant and prideful to admit when they are wrong.  Rightwing talk radio, websites, and FOX News have led the charge against facts in order to push a conservative agenda that cannot hold up to the light of facts.  A mainstream media that has turned away from journalism in favor of clicks and ratings.  And, the democratization of information through the internet and social media. This combination has fostered and fueled the fall of truth and the rise of feelings on the importance hierarchy.  It has led to the death of expertise and the demise of knowledge. I really didn't get involved with social media on any meaningful level until 2008.  It didn't take long to see how facts don't matter to a whole lot of people.  By the time President Obama won the election, this anti-fact phenomenon was in full swing.  It was amazing to see people who I had known to be semi-serious, semi-rational people post, cite, and parrot blatant lies with fervor and zealotry.  If I tried to explain why/how what they said/posted wasn't true, but in fact, the opposite of truth they lashed out, doubled down on the lie, and/or quickly changed the subject, usually to a different lie.  It didn't matter how calmly I responded.  It didn't matter the depth and breadth of counter-evidence I presented.  They were not willing to even entertain the possibility they might be wrong.  They were right because they felt they were right and that was all that mattered. Facts were sent to the back of the bus and feelings were placed in the driver's seat. Coming from my background and where I place truth/facts on the hierarchy of importance, not only is this approach to reality completely backward, I have no idea how to react to and deal with it.  People who reverse the order of truth and feelings are speaking a foreign language that doesn't have any rules.  Emotions are easily manipulated, often wrong, unreliable...  I'd rather have Billy Joel behind the wheel after an all-night bender than someone's feelings.  At least I know Billy will sober up at some point and make a good decision, like marrying Christie Brinkley.  This is where someone tells me, “Yeah, but facts can be manipulated too.”  If a fact is manipulated, it is no longer a fact.  Facts matter.  They matter a lot and excuses to not accept them, to deny them don't fly with me. I could spend days writing out the things conservatives “feel” are true but aren't. -Obama wasn't born in America. -Climate change is a hoax. -The Affordable Care Act is a socialist takeover of health care. -Obama paid Iran $1.7 billion dollars. -Obama ordered the U.S. Armed Forces to take over Texas. -The unemployment numbers are rigged. -Obama isn't fighting ISIS. -Obama refuses to stand up for the police. -Obama went on an “Apology Tour” of the world. -Health insurance has gone up faster under ACA than it did before. -The deficit has risen the past eight years. -The mortgage crisis was caused by minority home buyers defaulting on their loans. -Hillary Clinton had __________ killed. -The Clintons made millions from their foundation. -Illegal immigration has increased under Obama. -13 million people voted illegally for Hillary. -Taxes when up under Obama for the lower and middle classes. -Tax cuts for the wealthy creates jobs. -Violent crime has gone up the past eight years. -The Affordable Care Act was passed with no Republican input. -Obama took more vacation days than any other president. -Obama signed more Executive Orders than any other president.

Every single one of these is a lie.  Not a difference of opinion.  A flat-out lie.  That a good chunk of conservatives choose to believe them or “feel” they are true doesn't make them any less of a lie. Truth/falsity is not dependent on how many people or how strongly they feel it.  

For me, the fundamental question is, “Why are so many conservatives so willing to adamantly believe things that are blatantly false?” This is the root of the problem.  This is why there is a massive cultural and political divide in this country.  This is why our government isn't working the way it should.  

There are a lot of reasons why people, especially conservatives are so willing to deny and ignore facts.  There is a direct relationship between conservatives willingness to place feelings above facts and their religious underpinnings.  Religion is all too often devoid of facts and most of the doctrine hinges on feelings-faith.  All the evidence showing the world was created billions of years ago doesn't mean a damn thing because of faith in an unscientific book written by unscientific people and translated by anti-science people.  Facts run counter to Western religions and they are a big reason most of them have and still are anti-science.  It is so much easier to rely on what someone else tells you than use your own brain.  It is so much easier to “feel” you are right than do the actual work necessary to be right.  It is so much easier to follow a script of what is true and what isn't than constantly be testing each one to see if they are or not.  Feelings being more important than facts is a direct byproduct of religious belief.

Another reason conservatives are more than willing to deny and ignore facts is because they've been told and firmly believe they are right.  They are “right” because they believe in the “right” God.  They are “right” because they are white.  They are “right” because they are male.  To believe you are right because you are a Republican is easy once you've bought into all these other justifications for believing you are right.  You are used to it.  Being right by default of some external criterion becomes second nature.  You're not right because of the time, energy, and work you put into something.  You are right because of your skin color, religious or political affiliation.  If you need reassurance about your being right, just ask your political or religious leader and they'll reaffirm it for you.  Since the facts don't line up and support a lot of their beliefs, they have to fall back on “feelings” as grounds for justification.   If this wasn't bad enough, in order to maintain their belief they are right, conservatives have taken things to a totally unethical and dangerous level.  As counter-evidence and information to their claims/beliefs have become readily available and easily accessible, conservatives have adopted what can only be called, “propaganda.”  Rightwing radio, FOX News, a lot of conservative websites...are nothing more than propaganda generating entities.  Their goal is two-fold: 1-Tell the “faithful” what they want to hear and believe; And, 2-Undermine people and entities who are telling the truth in order to destroy their credibility. This is the same tactics used by the tobacco companies when all the scientific studies showed a causal link between smoking and certain forms of cancer.  The tobacco industry came out with their own “scientific studies” that showed smoking was 100% safe and they put “doctors” in their advertising.  All of this was done intentionally in order to muddy the waters of what is factual and what isn't.  A lot of the very same people in charge of this propaganda campaign for the tobacco industry took their strategies and talents to the oil/gas industry and ginned up “counter evidence” against climate change.  There's no debate about climate change any more than there was about smoking's link to cancer but a lot of people “feel” there is because facts don't matter to them and they are willing to believe whatever supports their preconceptions.

Another tactic being used by conservatives to delegitimize facts is by not even allowing them to be written or talked about.  There have been numerous bills passed in state houses around the country by conservatives who have made it so terms like “climate change” cannot be used in any government report.  It doesn't matter who does the research or who writes or talks about the report, they are forbidden, by law, to use the words, “climate change” or “global warming.”  Apparently, if it can't be said, then it doesn't exist in the minds of conservatives.  This is the opposite of their belief about “radical Islamic terrorism,” which is by saying, is supposed to make the threat less greater, the fight against it more real, a legitimate strategy to defeat it.  This strategy of banning things that go against their ideology is not just confined to language.  Numbers are just as dangerous and are in need of banning for conservatives.  When the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) came out with reports showing the very negative impact the Republicans' plan for repealing the Affordable Care Act would have on the deficit, debt, and economy, the Republican-led House banned them from using the scoring method they have always used and demanded they use a new one called, “dynamic scoring.”  In a nutshell, dynamic scoring is mathematical wishing and pixie dust.  It is based on the unicorn belief that massive tax cuts for the wealthy plus a GDP growth of 5% a year will exist and this is the framework from which all scoring must be done.  When Jeb Bush promised he'd bring 4% annual GDP growth to the country if elected, he was rightly ridiculed.  When Bernie Sanders said he would bring 5% annual growth he was rightly mocked. The last time the U.S. had 5% GDP growth for a single year was 1984. The last time there were three out of five years with 5% GDP growth was the 50s before China emerged as an economic player when Europe and Japan were still rebuilding after WWII when the U.S. had little economic competition.  To believe we can create and sustain 5% annual growth is a complete fantasy.  To demand this fantasy be the basis for the CBO's analysis is dangerous.  Right now, if conservatives don't like the truth/facts, they deny they exist or demand they don't exist.  That is propaganda.

The entire Trump campaign and the first few days of his administration have been nothing but propaganda.  They have lied about so many things, it is impossible to keep track of them or respond because, by the time you do, they've told a half-dozen more.  They lie about easily disprovable things.  They lie with impunity and his supporters don't give a damn because the lies confirm their feelings. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer took to the podium to make sure the press knew that Trump's Inauguration was the best attended, ever.  When told this wasn't true, he went ballistic and reiterated it with all the fervor and passion one would expect from someone who was psychologically unhinged.  What he was saying and arguing for is blatantly and easily proved to be false, a lie. Just in case Spicer's adamant claims weren't enough, Trump's spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway went on “Meet The Press” and said Spicer was offering “alternative facts.”  Go ahead, let the sheer stupidity of this phrase sink in.  “Alternative facts.”  2+2=5, is an alternative fact.  The Civil War wasn't over slavery, is an alternative fact.  Obamacare increases the deficit/debt, is an alternative fact.  Guns in the house keep people safer, is an alternative fact.  I'm old enough to remember when alternative facts were called, “lies.”

The democratization of information has created the environment where people can push their own “truths.”  The media, whose responsibility is supposed to be to inform and educate the public, have failed and failed miserably to do their job.  They've largely stopped being journalists and become stenographers, and bad ones at that.  Time and time again journalists will say it isn't their job to point out the truth, but to report what was said.  This lazy and devoid of ethics stance has helped create an entire generation of people who don't trust the media and who spout false equivalencies about everything.  If the media wants to know why they are no longer trusted like they once where, they need look no further than their advocation of their responsibility to inform the public.  After the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary, when Republicans in the Senate blocked gun purchase background check measures, almost every major media outlet's headlines were, “Senate Blocks_____________.” NO!!!  The Senate didn't.  Republicans in the Senate did.   This may seem like not a big deal but it is.  This kind of half-ass reporting done consistently over a long period of time gives people the impression that there are no differences between Republicans and Democrats and that government is the problem, not Republicans in government.  Instead of informing the public of how government works, the rules of the Senate, why a measure didn't get a hearing or a vote, too many in media have resorted to lazy reporting.  They do this, in large part because they are corporate owned, their priority is not informing but generating advertising dollars.  You don't do this by pointing out that the party half your viewers voted for is the problem and the main reason for their problems.  Doing their jobs properly might be good journalism, but its bad marketing and they are in the business of making money not informing the public.   This advocation by the media to do their job properly has left people to their own devices to become informed and we see how well that's turned out.  They may have access to the information, but there is too much information and they don't have the mental tools to properly sift through and analyze it.  Being overwhelmed and underprepared, people will almost always revert to what they already believe and what makes them feel good about themselves.  When this happens, truth is pushed aside for feelings.  When this happens, people are easily manipulated by demagogues and propaganda.  When this happens, an arrogant, narcissistic, petty man is elected to be president of the country that prides itself on exceptionalism. “The human mind is as naturally sensitive to arguments as the eye is to colors. (There may be some people who are argument-blind!) But the eye will not see if it is not kept open, and the mind will not follow an argument if it is not awake.” ― Mortimer J. Adler