Last week, we discussed how millions of white Americans align their interests with Vladimir Putin’s Russian cleptocracy.
People walked their dogs. Shoveled driveways. Shopped for the Super Bowl party.
Meanwhile, Republican Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander went down in history by blocking the calling of witnesses, AT A TRIAL, with his pivotal vote, worrying about political unrest if Trump were removed from the ballot.
People got ready for Friday night out. Tucked their kids in. Watched “American Housewife.”
The streets were quiet.
Winter is the time to suspend Democracy, it would seem. Especially before the only national ‘religious’ event: Super Bowl Sunday.
The Russians, the Saudis, have spent billions on buying influence in America, yet until last week’s baldfaced buying of votes in the African-American community by Trump supporters, no one has actually tried to buy a vote. Just the politicians for whom you can vote.
There is no democracy that can be bought off, and destroyed, as is happening right now in the United States of America, without a primary ingredient:
Apathy.
Of the 330,280,286 Americans alive today, the vast majority, 255,369,678, are adults. 75% of Americans, according to polling, wanted to hear witnesses. How many millions of them flooded the Senate with phone calls, demanding a trial? Took to the streets in protest, as they did during the inauguration of Donald John Trump?
Senator Alexander admitted that Trump was guilty, right there on the floor of the U.S. Senate, that the House managers had made their case.
People went to their kids basketball games. Argued over Oscar picks.
The one thing that you DON’T hear, in coffee houses to coffee shops, to the water cooler, is talk about politics. No conversations. No debates. The polarity is at such a level that silence is the unwitting accomplice to the division.
”A house divided cannot stand...”
The Russians learned one key flaw in democratic systems. A confronted nation, like America, or the United Kingdom, rises up against tyranny when it comes at you with tanks, bombs, guns, and missiles.
- Align with their churches, with the shrinking white majority’s racial, and economic fears.
- Pick a political party with enough affinities for power that fears globalism.
- Dispense propaganda that aligns beliefs to the point that facts no longer matter.
- Help those who want to open the dirty money floodgates into a political system (Citizens United).
- Co-opt their daily news digest to reinforce alternate theories of reality.
- Co-opt their politicians through the normal channels.
If the Senate acquits Donald John Trump, whether you’re rabidly pro Trump, or Anti, as of the next day we have established a dictatorship in the United States of America. Your elected officials will have given ANY PRESIDENT, not just Trump, the power to lie, cheat, and steal their way into retaining office, possibly for as long as they like. All of it legal, because the United States Senate, a body whose rules are based on PRECEDENT, in the year 2020, made it so.
There is one reality.
Lamar Alexander proved that, when he blocked the hearing of witnesses. It would have clearly told the story of Donald John Trump’s guilt, and made apparent, to all, that he requires removal from office.
In an odd way, perhaps Alexander was right in his fears. If you put a pin into the Putin-pal bullshit bubble that millions of Americans have been living in for decades, the panic-fed, paranoia driven, gun-hoarding, Trump-train loonies that have been stoked to rabid levels might do what the hundreds of millions of Americans sitting idly by do not:
Take to the streets.
Where will you be, when Mitch McConnell’s Moscow-minions cast the final vote this week? One would think, if you love your country, on the phones, and in the streets.
People will walk their dogs. Gossip about friends’ shameless behavior. Watch America’s Got Talent.
God save America. The Republic fell at her citizens’ hands.
There is a protest on February 5th. Find one. GO! Show the Russians what we’re made of.