A recent diary by Gabe Ortiz describes a no-win situation faced by U.S. citizen Maria Soto.
The DJT Administration is denying her a passport, claiming she has not proved citizenship, even though she presented her original birth certificate.
It’s an extension of the birther movement to deny the authenticity of authentic documents.
Racist: You weren’t born here.
PoC: Yes I was. Here’s my birth certificate.
Racist: I don’t believe this document is real.
PoC: But here is the original seal and the raised letters and everything! It’s an official document!
Racist: I don’t believe this document is real!!!
At that point there’s nothing you can do, because conservatives refuse to inhabit the same reality.
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Some of you may already know there is a whole birth certificate denial movement built around this idea in the border states:
Racist: You weren’t born here.
PoC: Yes I was. Here’s my birth certificate.
Racist: Well “everyone knows” that part of [California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas] has people issuing fake birth certificates!
PoC: But here is the original seal and the raised letters and everything! It’s an official document!
Racist: I don’t believe this document is real!!!
At that point there’s nothing you can do, because conservatives refuse to inhabit the same reality.
Here is the one thing all dictators love about being dictators: real power is when you get to dictate (get it?) reality, and everyone else has to accept your version of reality.
We joke all the time about Rcons using 1984 as an instruction manual. But look at all the ways it is true. They have been working for decades to create a world where they and only they get to decide what is real and what is not:
"That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality… we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
They want a world where Truth is what Rs say it is, and they can change their mind about what reality is from day to day, regardless of what they said in past generations, regardless of what they said last year, regardless of what they said five minutes ago. Deficit reduction is a top priority when a Democrat is President, deficits disappear as an issue when a Republicon is President. Democrats are constantly pushed pushed pushed to explain how they will pay for everything they propose, Republicons can promise the sun moon and stars without anyone asking where the money will come from. Education reform, infrastructure projects, and health care policies designed by Republican administrations become TEH SOCIALISM when Democrats propose the exact same legislation. Every day is opposite day, and the rest of us are not supposed to notice or comment on it.
This is why DJT is the perfect president for them right now. This is why they voted for a man who decides for himself what reality is, moment by moment, depending on how he feels. One day he feels his net worth is ten billion dollars, the next day he may say a completely different number, even though there is no documented proof that he is worth even one billion dollars. He can claim he has $4 billion in the bank at one time of day, and later the same day he himself can claim he has less than $2 billion in the bank (again, with no proof). He tells the FEC a golf course is worth $50 million and tells the tax assessor the same property is worth $5 million. He calls the Duchess of Sussex “nasty”, and it is recorded on tape, but when asked about it he simply denies he said it and Rs agree to pretend they didn’t hear what everybody clearly heard.
DJT claims he is not separating families when he is. He says he sent $90 billion to Puerto Rico policy when he didn’t. He announces he is building the wall when he hasn’t. And everyone around him obediently says yes, sir, absolutely, sir while lapdog pundits complain smugly that media elites are insulting the heartland by failing to praise the Emperor’s New Clothes. When DJT says "What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” they know they better dutifully stand in front of the camera and defend it, or else. As Orwell put it: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” So every elected and appointed Republicon official dutifully joins in on the pluralistic ignorance—praising the intricacy of the weaving and the beauty of the cloth in public, calling the president a naked orange blob in private.
And it doesn’t bother them! They’re getting what they want—why should they let a little thing like Truth rob them of the perks of power and privilege? That kind of resistance is for fools on the Blue Team!
“You are a slow learner, Winston."
"How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder.”
The scariest part of 1984, or of any dystopia (for people with brains), is the idea that someone else gets to interpret reality for you and force you to deny your own lived experience and truth. People controlling what you do is one kind of oppression—people trying to control what you think is a lot harder for us to accept.
The title photo refers to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Jean-Luc Picard is being tortured. All he has to do to end the torture and live a life of comfort is say he sees five lights when there are only four lights lit.
Why doesn’t he just say it? He still knows how many lights there are in reality—what difference does it make what he says? Isn’t survival more important? He’s not giving the Cardassian the satisfaction of breaking him if he can still hold on to his true beliefs in the privacy of his soul.
Along the same lines, the little known but undeniably brilliant Martin Scorcese film Silence shows priests and newly-minted Christians suffering horrendous torture in 17th century Japan rather than step or spit on an icon of Jesus. Why don’t they just do it? To save their lives and the lives of their families and their village? They know what they still believe inside their hearts!
But the world is divided into two groups of people: those who would be torn apart if they were forced to live with an inconsistency between what they believe and what they do & say; and those who aren’t bothered by hypocrisy at all if it serves a higher purpose.
These days we are being governed by people in the second group.
If they have to say they believe something they don’t believe in order to have a good job, or to get along with the powerful, or to accomplish some other goal important to them (like packing the courts with right-wing judges, making it difficult or impossible for women to get abortion care, or keeping PoC out of the country) they just do it. No biggie. Gotta get paid, right?
While I am writing this, a MAGA 2020 spokesbot was just asked point blank “Do you believe this president has ever lied to the American people?” And she said, “No. I don’t believe the President has lied.” The interviewer, who usually tries very hard to avoid being on one side or the other, just could not process the raw audacity of that answer and was so rattled he had to go off teleprompter for a moment: “Listen. Hold on. You can’t say that this president doesn’t lie to you guys. You can argue why he lies, you can argue how you feel about his lies, but if you can’t even admit that, the conversation is dead. I’m sorry, but it is. Now let’s go back into the time machine, the days before everybody lied every two seconds,” followed by a segue into a story about the anniversary of the day Obama wore the tan suit. What a “scandal”!
Lying to stay alive, or to save someone else’s life, is one kind of lie, and sometimes could be called a greater good. Lying to put money in your pocket, or hold on to political power, or advance the cause of white supremacy, is another kind of lie. Rcons can call their lies “noble lies” if they want, but we know better. (And maybe Rs know better also.)
Blue Team people think: How can anyone stand having a job where they have to pretend DJT is smart or competent or even sane? How can anyone wake up every morning, determine what a man like that wants them to say, and then lie on command every day? How can people say Up is Up on Tuesday and Up is Down on Wednesday? We don’t get it. For the most part, our minds don’t work like that. We really don’t like it if authority figures create a situation where we are pressured to say the short line is really longer than the long line.
Some deplorables are willing to get caught up in this devil’s bargain because they believe they ARE saving lives. Saving teh baybeez. Saving “their country”, and their heritage, and the world they want their children to grow up in. They are willing to put up with lies, financial fraud, sexual assault, concentration camps on the border, deporting critically children to countries where they can’t get the same lifesaving medical care, and any other collateral damage from DJT’s madness, if he gives them the big picture satisfaction of preserving the last gasp of the white privilege they were told is their birthright. Oh, and tax cuts. And an increase in their 401K. They are selling themselves woefully cheap, since DJT is making a lot more money off this deal than they are.
Republicon gaslighting serves two purposes.
On one level, it is a simple in-your-face demonstration of their power. They get to say what they want when they want and contradict themselves from day to day and hour to hour and they have the freedom to completely disregard anyone who says they are lying.
But the thing they love EVEN MORE is that it drives the rest of us crazy. “Owning the libs” is at the top of their to do lists every single day. Twisting our minds into pretzels and our stomachs in knots so they can drink those sweet liberal tears is one of the few things they can count on in their lives that gives them deep satisfaction.
And for a cherry on top, the constant state of aggravation and frustration disorients us and upsets us and makes us less effective overall. We waste precious time and effort trying to make them admit they lied, showing them evidence, playing them tapes, but they are never going to admit it. Instead of just being about the work of defeating them, we drive our own selves around the twist because we can’t process the cognitive dissonance as easily as they can. Stop expecting Republicons to make sense!
Everyone is focusing on the part of the recent Anderson Cooper interview with Stephen Colbert where each man shares heartbreaking details of his lifelong grief journey. But at the very beginning of the interview Colbert says amazing things about the truthiness epidemic ravaging our country right now (go to 3:39 on this clip):
Our president wants to live in a fantasy world where only the way he perceives the world is the way it is, and only things that sort of serve his vision, and he’s also trying to convince us that that is the only world that exists: it’s extremely solipsistic. But he’s also trying to invite us into this madness that he has, and that is a--that’s heresy against reality...
Brief pause for a vocabulary orgasm at the way STC the gentleman philosopher comedian casually threw down solipsistic where most people probably would have settled for a word like egocentric. Have I said lately how much I love Stephen Colbert?
A few moments later Anderson Cooper adds: “I’ve heard you say that the thesis of your show has become essentially ‘Hey, you’re not crazy’...“ and Colbert agrees: “Right! Right. The audience is not crazy: how you feel is actually how you feel; how you think is actually how you think; what you see is actually happening; what you hear is actually what he said.”
Colbert is #1 on late night for a reason.
That is the energy we need to tap into to win this election.
Democrats need to nominate one of the presidential candidates who can create a similar vibe on the campaign trail. So many people are desperately looking for reassurance that reality really is reality, and DJT really is going off the rails, and they are not imagining all this, and they are not alone—other people have noticed it too. A candidate who manages to do that will reap tremendous positive energy from millions of voters who just want to hear someone tell them “Yes, all this ridiculous horrendous is really happening! It’s not fake news! You are not crazy!”
Voters are longing for someone who will speak the truth and shame the devil in the Oval Office. It’s the one emotional hook Democrats have to offer that Republicons can’t co-opt and can’t refute. It’s a core message that has the ability to unify the base, roll out the welcome mat for Never Trumpers who want a good reason to vote D this cycle, and pull in others in the middle who are slowly and painfully realizing they were conned and are reluctantly realizing they have to vomit up all the Rcon lies FNC and hateradio forced down their throats.
Maude help us if Dems blow this. If we try to run on policy and issues and position papers instead of giving people an emotional release from the gaslighting and frustration of the DJT years, we will lose more than the White House. We will seriously be on the cusp of relinquishing the very idea of democracy. If we lose this election we will be giving DJT and his ilk and his enablers unfettered ability to determine what is reality and what is not.
Obviously they don’t deserve that power. Think of the unbridled sadism that would flow from them having that kind of power. Think of the evil acts they have already done and how much worse things they will do, if the 2020 election results give the message that there is no one to stop them—no political process or social structure with the power to counteract whatever terrifying dystopian reality they might dream up next, or copy from 1984 or the Handmaid’s Tale or the Hunger Games.
Somehow we have to focus on making this a major theme of the 2020 election:
Give America a reality-based President again.