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GELFAND’S WORLD - The clock is ticking. Seven weeks and it will be election day. If you count early voting, it's a lot shorter.
Beyond lying to the point of public endangerment
So J.D. Vance now admits that he is willing to make up claims like the fake dog eating, in order to get the media to take notice of how much the American people are suffering due to illegal immigration. Notice the logical contradiction here: The suffering is illusory since the dog eating and cat eating are themselves illusory. But Vance defends his use of the Little Lie, claiming that he has good intentions rather than just being another political opportunist. He would say that the lie is spoken in support of some bigger truth, which is something about the effect of immigrants on employment and crime. But then why call attention to the fact that you are beginning with a lie? It's about as convincing as what I hear from all those telemarketers who tell me that they are calling from my cable tv company.
This brings up a question for the remaining Trump supporters and those few who are still on the fence. We understand that the hardcore faithful take Trump's lies as facts -- as something equivalent to the old Communist Party Line that was handed down in a similar way in the 1930s -- so that anything Trump says is defended as likely to be the truth. But do you now demand that there be two official liars in the Republican Party and, indeed, on this national ticket?
This is actually an important question, because the press and the rest of us have been forced to give a little bit of latitude to the MAGA coalition over Trump's outrageousness. But now we have two official Big Liars.
Until recently, J.D. Vance was just an undistinguished senator who had not really made much of a record. Now, he is working to make his mark by promoting a series of untruths. In the old days -- back in the first years of the Soviet Union -- this was called Agitprop. It was the official technique adopted by the Bolsheviks and it was celebrated in the films of Dziga Vertov and others. The rank-and-file Republicans in the U.S. Senate are, once in a while, a little uncomfortable with Trump over his denial of global warming and his support for the Russian incursion in Ukraine. But now, Vance is advancing the approach as if it were defensible and virtuous.
So how many official liars and Big Lie proponents can a political party have without becoming a total laughingstock?
The real-world damage
It's true that the big lie technique has had some political advantages for Donald Trump and his Republican followers. If nothing else, it forces a kind of party discipline on the rest of the Republicans in the congress, because taking a position against Trump (like, for instance, voting for the impeachment) gets them primaried and usually costs them their reelections. But the dog-eating lies are having a real world, pernicious effect on real people. Just for a start, we have seen the closing of schools and now a couple of closed colleges due to threats.
This is the culture of the MAGA cult in 21st Century American. When the Leader speaks in anger, at least a few of his followers take the hint and threaten people with maiming and death. Once in a while, people get hurt or killed.
Political observers have even invented a descriptive term for this kind of reaction. Since it happens randomly and unpredictably, they now refer to it as Stochastic Terrorism. The term has been further described as stemming from the vague and indirect comments that work as hints to the faithful followers. The classic example is the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, where Donald Trump mentioned that protests should be peaceful, but also gave the wink and the nod to wholesale violence.
The question, as yet to be answered, is how things will play out should Trump and Vance lose in November.
The latest assassination attempt
Those of a certain age remember the murders of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, the wounding of Ronald Reagan, and the resultant need for massive overcontrol by the Secret Service over every presidential move.
The most recent would-be-assassins do indeed fit the Republican's image of mentally ill weirdos, Republicans like to say that we don't have a gun problem, we have a mental illness problem.
This is of course both illogical and counterfactual, as CityWatch authors have pointed out so often. There are a lot of angry loaners and mentally ill people in all societies. It is here that they have easy access to guns and ammunition. And, we might add, the onetime function of the National Rifle Association to teach firearm safety has largely been forgotten, and replaced with the pushing of their own Big Lie.
We might observe that just like the fact that we have lost time in the fight to limit global warming, we have fallen behind in dealing with gun violence.
Suppose the other side were to play the conspiracy game?
Everything about this latest assassination attempt reeks of false flag operations. For one thing, the gunman survived. For another, it came in a particularly low period in Donald Trump's reelection campaign, a moment when he is falling behind in the polls, clearly lost the debate with Kamala Harris, and is looking at a sentencing hearing in late November. There is every reason for him to want to go back to the magic moment when Democrats and Republicans alike were wishing him health and safety.
Trump is now blaming this second attempt on the Democrats and their rhetoric. This coming from the guy who fomented the Capitol riots, just called Kamala a commie, and threatened the state of California with loss of firefighting money if we something something don't something.
For the conspiratorial minded, this assassination attempt is all too convenient and all too unreal. Besides, if you add up the letters in the assassin's name and rearrange their order, they add up to the number of the lesser beast.
Or something like that.
OK, I'm not particularly conspiratorial, so I can believe that a longtime nut with an equally long history of firearms crimes (having a machine gun, for example) and a couple dozen chips on his shoulders might think about making his own mark on history. After all, Trump is going to be a focus for people with daddy issues and with authority issues and basically with any old issues at all. He's got name recognition.
Rounding the final turn
Even Bill Maher now says that Kamala is going to win. This sort of announcement is based on the assumption that Democrats and Independents will continue to work for the campaign and will come out to vote in record numbers. But those are reasonable predictions. What we ought to be concentrating on right now are all those congressional campaigns and a few critically important senatorial campaigns. The difference between 50 Democratic senators and a Vice President vs. 49 Democratic senators is gigantic.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
