I know I have been ranting about truth. But I am not finished. I started long before the election day in the US. What perfect timing. A good friend said, when we were discussing this issue, “Americans have a light touch with reality.” Very true. Not that Canadians are any different. Canadians are just Americans on valium. I will get to them soon, but have been absorbed by the craziness to our south. And I don’t want anyone to think that the craziness will change no matter who is elected down south. The results are not yet officially in as I post.

Lately  Trump has been spewing out claims of voter fraud entirely without evidence.  Though his claims have a motive. A sinister motive. More on that later too. Trump  lives in an evidence free world. But his followers don’t care. Their devotion is enduring. That is what is important.

The reason things won’t change fast is that what is clear from the election for president in the US is that about 70 million Americans still support Trump. That is more than the votes he garnered in 2016. I strongly suspect that almost everyone who voted for him in 2016 also voted for him in 2020. And this was after we saw what he did for 4 years in plain view. Everyone could see that he was an incorrigible liar. Some called him a pathological liar. Others called him a bullshitter. That refers to someone who does not care about whether a statement is true or not. That is someone who is not even embarrassed when caught in a lie. Trump is obviously that. And 70 million Americans are willing to overlook that and vote for him!

This is the point I have been trying to make in my clumsy way. How can so many people be indifferent to truth? And not just Americans either. Plenty of Canadians still support Trump too.

I think it is time for all of us—Americans and Canadians—to take a hard look at ourselves. This look might not be very comfortable. Do any of us want to admit that we don’t care about truth?

When a society is infected with a disdain for truth it is ready to collapse. Is that where we are at? Has this pandemic we are facing without much truth found a hapless victim? We’ll have to wait and see.

I am posting this while I  don’t know who has won the 2020 US presidential election. It doesn’t matter these issues about truth and conspiracies will not go away and die. They are here to stay.

According to Fareed Zakaria, “Trump uses conspiracy theories as weapons against his political opponents.” He is fighting Obamagate. The Deep State. Those who want to rig this election. Or already did.  Hillary Clinton of course, was his biggest target. And he used all his weapons against her. He called her, “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States.” He did that while his supporters carried posters saying “Hillary for prison 2016,” or “Indict Hillary,” or “Lock her up.” That was not innocent.

Recently, there was a dark conspiracy theory on the Internet that was absurd but still widely and passionately believed, aided in part by the support of Trump and his other supporters including, InfoWars and  QAnon. It was toxic but incredibly useful. It had a huge following on the Internet. Trump and his allies promoted it even as it grew increasingly toxic.” It was called Pizzagate.

In the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump was helped by countless conspiracy theories, many amplified or even concocted by the Russians. For example, the Pizzagate theory that Hillary Clinton was involved in a child molestation in the basement of Pizza restaurant was entirely without any foundation yet many people believed it and therefore did not vote for her, but supported Donald Trump instead. Donald Trump was likely assisted in his campaign for the presidency by conspiracy theories.

These were not innocent dirty tricks. It was not funny. It provoked a rabid supporter named Clinton hater, Edgar Madison Welch, to take action. As he drove from his home in North Carolina to Washington D.C. to take decisive action, he recorded a message with his phone on the dash of the car, to his 2 young daughters. “I love y’all more than anything else in the world. Like I always told you, ‘ you have a duty to protect those who can’t protect themselves, to do for people who can’t do for themselves. ”

As Zakaria said,

“He was preparing to risk his life to save children he didn’t even know. You might think he was a good man, but this mission of mercy was actually a dangerous illusion. Welch fell prey to a twisted conspiracy theory called Pizzagate. He actually believed that Hillary Clinton and other Washington elites were running a pedophile ring out of the basement of pizza restaurant in Washington D.C.”

Again,  not innocent and not funny. It was lunacy inspired and abetted by Trump and his supporters. They led Welch to travel to Washington with his weapons in place to break out these innocent children from their jail and it could have easily led to him dying or innocent people dying and Trump and his supporters were partly to blame for what nearly happened. He was carrying an AR-15, a handgun and a shotgun was found in his car. What is most surprising about the incident is that no was killed. As Jeffrey Goldberg said, “just because it’s crazy doesn’t mean that people won’t believe it.” That’s what happens in Fantasyland USA. He burst into the restaurant causing terrified customers to flee. But there were not abused children. There was not even a basement. The entire conspiracy theory was mad, dangerous, nonsense to which a candidate for the American presidency contributed. Welch went to prison. His family suffered. And Trump got elected. That is justice, American style.

So where did all this come from? It started with emails. In fact the source was a leaked email to Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. It was from his brother and all it said was, “Would love to get a pizza.” Sounds innocent doesn’t it. Well nothing is innocent on the Internet. Especially to conspiracy theorists. As unlikely as it sounds, they jumped all over this email. According to them, “pizza” is well known pedophile code word. It is used by sexual predators of children and law enforcement officials have used it to get at such predators, they say. The theorists believed that various celebrities, like Tom Hanks, had joined Hillary Clinton in a vile pedophile ring.

According to Tik Tok a social media platform very popular with children, such as my grand daughters, According to the New York Times Tik Tok has logged 18 million views with the hash tag “Pizzagate.”

FantasyLand lives on. To be continued.

This year 2020 CNN had a special report on the conspiracy theories of the president of the United States. That might seem incredible, but it’s true. It was hosted by Fareed Zakaria who asked the main question right at the outset of the show, “Why does the President of the United States of America live in a world of dark sinister conspiracies?” As one pundit explained, “He gravitates instinctively to conspiratorial understandings of the world.” Or as another said, “the world actually makes sense if you look behind a curtain. There are dark malevolent forces behind the curtain.” As Zakaria said, “behind that curtain he sees political enemies”

Trump  said Joseph Biden and his son were corrupt. Hillary Clinton was a total liar. The election (that he won in 2016) was rigged. It was, as Jeffrey Goldberg said, “it’s all totally nuts. This is the first time I have the fear that a sitting president won’t leave if he loses a free and fair election.”

Fareed Zakaria said “the subject is urgent because the conspiracy theories circulating now are dangerous and the president of the United States is trafficking in them.”

It seems impossible; it is not. The President of the United States with the largest combined intelligence services in the world by a landslide, turns instead to the Internet and Fox News and other unreliable sources for information he relies on to govern the richest and most powerful country in the world. I think he does that because that dark world of conspiracy theories is the world in which he thrives. That is deeply troubling; that is scary.

Some think ‘the adults in the room’ will save us. Trump has already demonstrated over and over again, that the adults are either sycophants or weak or are not adults. We have no protection from anyone.

Some think the constitutional system of checks and balances will protect America and the world. Again, Trump has demonstrated over and over again that he can effortlessly fly over those checks and balances. We have no protection from them either. Even far away in Canada.

Frankly, we are naked to the world in front of the most dangerous man in the world. And that is no conspiracy theory.

As Zakaria said,

“When Donald Trump tells us elections are rigged, Obamagate is the biggest scandal in history, some know these ideas are wholly false, but others are less certain, especially when they hear a story full of details that seems to explain everything. Polls show that up to 50% of Americans have believed at least one of these conspiracy theories. This is a story about just how destructive they have become. Not just to the people they target, but also to the very foundations of our democracy.”

I have said this many times, but I will repeat it. I actually don’t care about Trump. He is hopeless. What I do care about, is that millions of Americans, and Canadians, support Trump. I keep asking how can that be?