No revelation here: It is way, WAY easier to sell Americans bullshit than it is to take that bullshit away from them once they’ve acquired a taste for it.

H L Mencken got it right: no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence or taste of the American public. Maybe our problem is Americans (conservative ones especially) have a religious bent that distorts their thinking right out of the gate.

For reference’s sake, consider how insidious religion is – and how (and when) the religious begin shoving their religion down young throats and into young minds. The point of the exercise is to undermine any capacity for analytical thought.  Accept what we tell you as truth.  Nothing else matters.

Did a sky god really have unprotected sex with a teenage human virgin to produce a hybrid man-god put here to die for human sins tracing back to a supposed first woman who ate a piece of forbidden fruit at the behest of a talking snake?  That’s a soupcon of the bullshit you have to accept to be a fully practicing Christian (in the eyes of fully practicing Christians).  Proof that you’re “faithful” is that you will willingly spit all this nonsense back as required – and then insist that you use it every day as the basis for ALL your “thinking”.

There are people among us who start their day accepting that great buckets of bullshit are true – and then they start making decisions based on it.  It’s not unlike being captain of the Titanic, seeing that you’ve hit an iceberg, but pressing on nonetheless for New York as if nothing had happened. Most bullshit is denial of what is.

These people accept lies as truth – as their starting point.

Selling more lies to people happy to buy lies is easy.  That is what Donald Trump & the Republican Party is really good at.  They know their base are rabid Magical Thinkers to whom Trump is a business genius simply because he says he is – and the word of a liar is good enough for them. 

We (our Main Stream News Media) began to normalize Trumpian bullshit in earnest the instant they stopped challenging Trump on his “Mexicans are rapists” pronouncement.  The instant that stopped, Trump succeeded in normalizing his racism.  “Mexicans are rapists” was no longer cause for his campaign to end.  Racism was now “just how Trump is”.

There is no safe amount of bullshit.  All bullshit has the potential to kill you – even the incidental bullshit we all live with every day (“Five more minutes of sleep won’t make me that late…”) can build up like plaque in a vein.

And just like plaque in a vein, that first bad cholesterol lipid that sticks to the vein wall is a problem – because a second bad cholesterol lipid will stick easily to the first lipid.  Blockage – and potential death –  is just a matter of time and more lipids.

Never mind the exhaustion.  Either we fight back or we start looking over out shoulders.  The end could come at any moment otherwise.  And that end does not have to be.

That end cannot be.  Let’s start fighting back one lie at a time. Let’s start by calling them all out – screw anyone who has a problem with it.  They’re gulag bound anyway.