Category: Republicanism

Wanna Know What America’s Problem REALLY Is? White Man BAMBOOZLEMENT Syndrome

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader — and traitor — Mitch McConnell got up on the Senate floor to give his “final thoughts” on The Mueller Report. Despite the fact that everyone in the whole world capable of reading English could see with their own eyes that Mitch was LYING about the Report’s conclusions, Mitch said — in his emphatic turtle voice — that the Mueller Report said what MITCH wanted it to say — nothing to see here, everyone can go home now — “case closed”.

Then — as they always do — members of the American Mainstream News Media dutifully played back Mitch’s words — or repeated them — without pointing out — there and then — that what Mitch had said was contradicted BY THE FACTS. By the very report itself.

This toxic game of telephone only works like this because we, as a culture, have been “seduced” — or bamboozled — into believing that what Mitch McConnell said was true – even though it wasn’t. And the REASON we’re supposed to accept that what Mitch said was true is because Mitch is WHITE.

If Mitch were female, the media would have been all over Mitch like he was Elizabeth Warren maybe not being that little bit of Cherokee she grew up believing (and loving) that she was. If Mitch were black or brown or Asian or anything other than an old white guy — getting up and LYING so outrageously, so blatantly — so disrespectfully — would have earned Mitch some very quick, very stiff retribution.

We have a disease. A bad one: White Bamboozlement Syndrome. We will accept as true — or false but acceptably true — whatever white Christian men tell us. They don’t even have to really be Christian. They just have to SAY that they’re “Christian” — and the bamboozlement — that they “are” Christian — does the rest. Even “real Christians” (whatever that is) will go along and say, “Yeah — the fake Christian’s a ‘real’ Christian now”. They’re willing even to bamboozle themselves.

That’s some powerful stuff.

But White Bamboozlement Syndrome could describe an awful lot of America’s history. Not outlawing SLAVERY at the Republic’s start, say. That was another case of White Men Bamboozling themselves and everyone else into believing that slavery could co-exist with and inside a democracy. Why, you’d have to be a white guy — a white Christian guy — to believe that.

How ironic. White Christian culture — as opposed to anything spiritual connected to the teachings of a character named Jesus — is based on a story woven almost completely from whole cloth that even a mildly skeptical mind could poke giant holes in. But — because white Christian men say “Believe It”, people are supposed to let go of all critical thinking and “buy”.

Bamboozlement complete.

Again — Jesus preached “Do Unto Others”. He didn’t preach ooga-booga. Yes, he was a theist teaching a more direct connection to the Father Figure, but he was trying to minimize all the ooga-booga the temple (the church) was throwing in the follower’s way. To Jesus’ credit — even atheists need to be fair — he wasn’t leaning on his capacity to bamboozle people. He was saying DO AS I AM TRYING TO DO. Not — per bamboozlement’s playbook — “Do what I say (but know damned well I would NEVER be so stupid as to do it — like YOU ARE)”…

Be honest — when you watch or listen to a Jerry Falwell Jr or a Franklin Graham — doesn’t your Bamboozlement Radar suddenly go off? When these two “men of faith” stick their heads so far up Donald Trump’s ass you can see their faces when he smiles — don’t ya kinda think, “Hold on, now — this smells an awful lot like Grade A Primo Bullshit”. Even ooga-booga has its limits, logically.

America is deep in the vice-like grip of its White Christian Money Lords. Having seen the future — they lose power and influence because the demographics are running hard against them — they have thrown down every last bit of White Bamboozlement Syndrome super power they can muster. They have insisted on telling a story — that Donald Trump won an election — that simply is not true.

The Republican Party is openly insisting that we NOT investigate all the terrible facts that we already know about how exactly Trump and the GOP “won” that 2016 election. They want us to simply ACCEPT that they won fairly & squarely.

Stop thinking analytically, they say. Believe what we’re telling you. Trust us — we’re White Christian Men.

We’d never bamboozle you…

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Can We Be Honest? “Conservative Thinking” Is An Oxymoron

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I’m a proud Progressive. I prefer the term “progressive” to “liberal” because the word liberal has gone through too many gyrations over time to be effective as an accurate descriptor. “I’m a liberal” could mean a whole lot of things that “I’m actually not”.

Progressives, as the name implies, want to progress. We want to see people — as a society — progress. We want each individual person to progress — to feel like their lives are constantly improving — as are the lives of their children and grandchildren going forward. There’s a caveat there — progressives build into their calculus the fact that change is a constant. In order to progress successfully, one has to accept as a fact that things will change. People will change. Circumstances will change.

Change is a Fact Of Life.

Progressives say “Okay — change is a thing — let’s deal with it like big boys & girls, accommodate where we must but convert to our advantage in every other way”.

Conservatives also do what their name implies. They want to conserve — what is (if only because they failed in this instance to conserve WHAT WAS and so have no choice but to accept it) but really — they want to conserve WHAT WAS. Or how they “remember” what was. How they idealized “what was” in reality.

There’s a reason conservatives tend to be more institutionally religious — more affiliated with their church than the spiritual side of their faith. They like the rules and regs; doing unto others — that’s a little too hippie-dippy for them. You know — “progressive”. They prefer the concrete of Commandments. Don’t Do This, Do That — Or Else.

Conservatives want to hold tight to a thing that makes them feel safe and secure — a world where men were men and women (and people of color, non-Christians, LGBQT people) knew their place. They see the antebellum south as a kind of heaven on earth. They think white people ARE America. And that’s the America they want to conserve.

Unfortunately, that America is entirely a figment of their imagination. Yes, white people have always held sway. But “white people” have never been the engine that drives the remarkable (but flawed) experiment in self-government that is the United States of America. One of our flaws is that white people have held too much sway. The engine — the thing we call “American Exceptionalism” is diversity. It’s the flow of people from every other country in the world into this one — e pluribus unum — from many, one — that’s the nature of American Exceptionalism.

It’s the opposite of what conservatives “think”. That’s just it — conservatives, by their nature, don’t have to “think”. When everything you do is motivated by your knee jerking lizard brain, you’re not thinking — ever. You’re reacting in real time to a fear-fueled twitch instinct. Everything you do is colored by it. Your whole goal in life is to get the toothpaste back into the tube.

As we all know — that’s never going to happen.

This is why conservatives stopped playing by the rules the rest of us play by. It was leading them nowhere — except to extinction — and they know it. That’s why Mitch McConnell — at the behest of conservative money (the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelstein) — refused We The People Merrick Garland (chosen by the POTUS we elected) — then conspired with Russia to literally STEAL election 2016 in order to shove conservative judges into every open judicial seat — seats they’d been KEEPING open for this very purpose.

Make no mistake — what Mitch McConnell did and is still doing — is a deliberate soft coup d’etat. Mitch is a traitor (not a revelation). Mitch is the conservative errand boy, doing what he’s told to do. Reminder — it’s not just conservative money holding Mitch’s nuts in their hand — it’s Vladimir Putin, too. Mitch has taken gobs (as in MILLIONS) of Russian money into his PAC. In the abstract — perfectly legal. But in the midst of a counter-intelligence operation looking directly at Russian influence on American politicians and an American election? NOT so innocent or even legal perhaps). But I digress…

Mitch isn’t “thinking”. He’s reacting. He’s trying to drag us back to a time and place in the past that never was — not because he’s thinking how good it will be for us if only we’d listen to him — but because he’s stuck in the past like a mastodon stuck in tar — sinking slowly — grabbing desperately at everything around it.

They can’t save the mastodon. They can only get sucked into the tar with it. Welcome to “conservative thinking”.

Can We Be Honest? “Conservative Thinking” Is An Oxymoron

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

I’m a proud Progressive. I prefer the term “progressive” to “liberal” because the word liberal has gone through too many gyrations over time to be effective as an accurate descriptor. “I’m a liberal” could mean a whole lot of things that “I’m actually not”.

Progressives, as the name implies, want to progress. We want to see people — as a society — progress. We want each individual person to progress — to feel like their lives are constantly improving — as are the lives of their children and grandchildren going forward. There’s a caveat there — progressives build into their calculus the fact that change is a constant. In order to progress successfully, one has to accept as a fact that things will change. People will change. Circumstances will change.

Change is a Fact Of Life.

Progressives say “Okay — change is a thing — let’s deal with it like big boys & girls, accommodate where we must but convert to our advantage in every other way”.

Conservatives also do what their name implies. They want to conserve — what is (if only because they failed in this instance to conserve WHAT WAS and so have no choice but to accept it) but really — they want to conserve WHAT WAS. Or how they “remember” what was. How they idealized “what was” in reality.

There’s a reason conservatives tend to be more institutionally religious — more affiliated with their church than the spiritual side of their faith. They like the rules and regs; doing unto others — that’s a little too hippie-dippy for them. You know — “progressive”.

Conservatives want to hold tight to a thing that makes them feel safe and secure — a world where men were men and women (and people of color, non-Christians, LGBQT people) knew their place. They see the antebellum south as a kind of heaven on earth. They think white people ARE America. And that’s the America they want to conserve.

Unfortunately, that America is entirely a figment of their imagination. Yes, white people have always held sway. But “white people” have never been the engine that drives the remarkable (but flawed) experiment in self-government that is the United States of America. One of our flaws is that white people have held too much sway. The engine — the thing we call “American Exceptionalism” is diversity. It’s the flow of people from every other country in the world into this one — e pluribus unum — from many, one — that’s the nature of American Exceptionalism.

It’s the opposite of what conservatives “think”. That’s just it — conservatives, by their nature, don’t have to “think”. When everything you do is motivated by your knee jerking lizard brain, you’re not thinking — ever. You’re reacting in real time to a fear-fueled twitch instinct. Everything you do is colored by it. Your whole goal in life is to get the toothpaste back into the tube.

As we all know — that’s never going to happen.

This is why conservatives stopped playing by the rules the rest of us play by. It was leading them nowhere — except to extinction — and they know it. That’s why Mitch McConnell — at the behest of conservative money (the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelstein) — refused We The People Merrick Garland (chosen by the POTUS we elected) — then conspired with Russia to literally STEAL election 2016 in order to shove conservative judges into every open judicial seat — seats they’d been KEEPING open for this very purpose.

Make no mistake — what Mitch McConnell did and is still doing — is a deliberate soft coup d’etat. Mitch is a traitor (not a revelation). Mitch is the conservative errand boy, doing what he’s told to do. Reminder — it’s not just conservative money holding Mitch’s nuts in their hand — it’s Vladimir Putin, too. Mitch has taken gobs (as in MILLIONS) of Russian money into his PAC. In the abstract — perfectly legal. But in the midst of a counter-intelligence operation looking directly at Russian influence on American politicians and an American election? NOT so innocent or even legal perhaps). But I digress…

Mitch isn’t “thinking”. He’s reacting. He’s trying to drag us back to a time and place in the past that never was — not because he’s thinking how good it will be for us if only we’d listen to him — but because he’s stuck in the past like a mastodon stuck in tar — sinking slowly — grabbing desperately at everything around it.

They can’t save the mastodon. They can only get sucked into the tar with it. Welcome to “conservative thinking”.

Wanna Know What America’s Problem REALLY Is? White Man BAMBOOZLEMENT Syndrome

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader — and traitor — Mitch McConnell got up on the Senate floor to give his “final thoughts” on The Mueller Report. Despite the fact that everyone in the whole world capable of reading English could see with their own eyes that Mitch was LYING about the Report’s conclusions, Mitch said — in his emphatic turtle voice — that the Mueller Report said what MITCH wanted it to say — nothing to see here, everyone can go home now — “case closed”.

Then — as they always do — members of the American Mainstream News Media dutifully played back Mitch’s words — or repeated them — without pointing out — there and then — that what Mitch had said was contradicted BY THE FACTS. By the very report itself.

This toxic game of telephone only works like this because we, as a culture, have been “seduced” — or bamboozled — into believing that what Mitch McConnell said was true – even though it wasn’t. And the REASON we’re supposed to accept that what Mitch said was true is because Mitch is WHITE.

If Mitch were female, the media would have been all over Mitch like he was Elizabeth Warren maybe not being that little bit of Cherokee she grew up believing (and loving) that she was. If Mitch were black or brown or Asian or anything other than an old white guy — getting up and LYING so outrageously, so blatantly — so disrespectfully — would have earned Mitch some very quick, very stiff retribution.

We have a disease. A bad one: White Bamboozlement Syndrome. We will accept as true — or false but acceptably true — whatever white Christian men tell us. They don’t even have to really be Christian. They just have to SAY that they’re “Christian” — and the bamboozlement — that they “are” Christian — does the rest. Even “real Christians” (whatever that is) will go along and say, “Yeah — the fake Christian’s a ‘real’ Christian now”. They’re willing even to bamboozle themselves.

That’s some powerful stuff.

But White Bamboozlement Syndrome could describe an awful lot of America’s history. Not outlawing SLAVERY at the Republic’s start, say. That was another case of White Men Bamboozling themselves and everyone else into believing that slavery could co-exist with and inside a democracy. Why, you’d have to be a white guy — a white Christian guy — to believe that.

How ironic. White Christian culture — as opposed to anything spiritual connected to the teachings of a character named Jesus — is based on a story woven almost completely from whole cloth that even a mildly skeptical mind could poke giant holes in. But — because white Christian men say “Believe It”, people are supposed to let go of all critical thinking and “buy”.

Bamboozlement complete.

Again — Jesus preached “Do Unto Others”. He didn’t preach ooga-booga. Yes, he was a theist teaching a more direct connection to the Father Figure, but he was trying to minimize all the ooga-booga the temple (the church) was throwing in the follower’s way. To Jesus’ credit — even atheists need to be fair — he wasn’t leaning on his capacity to bamboozle people. He was saying DO AS I AM TRYING TO DO. Not — per bamboozlement’s playbook — “Do what I say (but know damned well I would NEVER be so stupid as to do it — like YOU ARE)”…

Be honest — when you watch or listen to a Jerry Falwell Jr or a Franklin Graham — doesn’t your Bamboozlement Radar suddenly go off? When these two “men of faith” stick their heads so far up Donald Trump’s ass you can see their faces when he smiles — don’t ya kinda think, “Hold on, now — this smells an awful lot like Grade A Primo Bullshit”. Even ooga-booga has its limits, logically.

America is deep in the vice-like grip of its White Christian Money Lords. Having seen the future — they lose power and influence because the demographics are running hard against them — they have thrown down every last bit of White Bamboozlement Syndrome super power they can muster. They have insisted on telling a story — that Donald Trump won an election — that simply is not true.

The Republican Party is openly insisting that we NOT investigate all the terrible facts that we already know about how exactly Trump and the GOP “won” that 2016 election. They want us to simply ACCEPT that they won fairly & squarely.

Stop thinking analytically, they say. Believe what we’re telling you. Trust us — we’re White Christian Men.

We’d never bamboozle you…

Wanna Know What America’s Problem REALLY Is? White Man BAMBOOZLEMENT Syndrome

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader — and traitor — Mitch McConnell got up on the Senate floor to give his “final thoughts” on The Mueller Report. Despite the fact that everyone in the whole world capable of reading English could see with their own eyes that Mitch was LYING about the Report’s conclusions, Mitch said — in his emphatic turtle voice — that the Mueller Report said what MITCH wanted it to say — nothing to see here, everyone can go home now — “case closed”.

Then — as they always do — members of the American Mainstream News Media dutifully played back Mitch’s words — or repeated them — without pointing out — there and then — that what Mitch had said was contradicted BY THE FACTS. By the very report itself.

This toxic game of telephone only works like this because we, as a culture, have been “seduced” — or bamboozled — into believing that what Mitch McConnell said was true – even though it wasn’t. And the REASON we’re supposed to accept that what Mitch said was true is because Mitch is WHITE.

If Mitch were female, the media would have been all over Mitch like he was Elizabeth Warren maybe not being that little bit of Cherokee she grew up believing (and loving) that she was. If Mitch were black or brown or Asian or anything other than an old white guy — getting up and LYING so outrageously, so blatantly — so disrespectfully — would have earned Mitch some very quick, very stiff retribution.

We have a disease. A bad one: White Bamboozlement Syndrome. We will accept as true — or false but acceptably true — whatever white Christian men tell us. They don’t even have to really be Christian. They just have to SAY that they’re “Christian” — and the bamboozlement — that they “are” Christian — does the rest. Even “real Christians” (whatever that is) will go along and say, “Yeah — the fake Christian’s a ‘real’ Christian now”. They’re willing even to bamboozle themselves.

That’s some powerful stuff.

But White Bamboozlement Syndrome could describe an awful lot of America’s history. Not outlawing SLAVERY at the Republic’s start, say. That was another case of White Men Bamboozling themselves and everyone else into believing that slavery could co-exist with and inside a democracy. Why, you’d have to be a white guy — a white Christian guy — to believe that.

How ironic. White Christian culture — as opposed to anything spiritual connected to the teachings of a character named Jesus — is based on a story woven almost completely from whole cloth that even a mildly skeptical mind could poke giant holes in. But — because white Christian men say “Believe It”, people are supposed to let go of all critical thinking and “buy”.

Bamboozlement complete.

Again — Jesus preached “Do Unto Others”. He didn’t preach ooga-booga. Yes, he was a theist teaching a more direct connection to the Father Figure, but he was trying to minimize all the ooga-booga the temple (the church) was throwing in the follower’s way. To Jesus’ credit — even atheists need to be fair — he wasn’t leaning on his capacity to bamboozle people. He was saying DO AS I AM TRYING TO DO. Not — per bamboozlement’s playbook — “Do what I say (but know damned well I would NEVER be so stupid as to do it — like YOU ARE)”…

Be honest — when you watch or listen to a Jerry Falwell Jr or a Franklin Graham — doesn’t your Bamboozlement Radar suddenly go off? When these two “men of faith” stick their heads so far up Donald Trump’s ass you can see their faces when he smiles — don’t ya kinda think, “Hold on, now — this smells an awful lot like Grade A Primo Bullshit”. Even ooga-booga has its limits, logically.

America is deep in the vice-like grip of its White Christian Money Lords. Having seen the future — they lose power and influence because the demographics are running hard against them — they have thrown down every last bit of White Bamboozlement Syndrome super power they can muster. They have insisted on telling a story — that Donald Trump won an election — that simply is not true.

The Republican Party is openly insisting that we NOT investigate all the terrible facts that we already know about how exactly Trump and the GOP “won” that 2016 election. They want us to simply ACCEPT that they won fairly & squarely.

Stop thinking analytically, they say. Believe what we’re telling you. Trust us — we’re White Christian Men.

We’d never bamboozle you…

HELP! We’re Trapped In A False Narrative & Can’t Get Out!

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

The most painful part of listening to or watching the news channels these days is the constant barrage of false narratives.

The biggest false narrative of all, of course, is that Donald Trump got elected. He may have been given the victory but he lost the popular vote by over 3 million votes (it would have been lots more if not for voter suppression); as for Trump’s EC victory, the Mueller Report hints at what became of the internal polling data Paul Manafort gave Oleg Deripaska in August 2016. Deripaska and the Russians weaponized it and turned it back on Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

We don’t know empirically if Manafort giving Russia proprietary polling data resulted in any votes being changed. That is, we don’t know if we know. No one outside of Twitter, far as I can tell, has bothered to ask. No one’s done any official forensics on the machines in those states. We don’t know if they were hacked and their vote totals tweaked. We do know there are anomalies in several Pennsylvania counties (keeping in mind that between PA/WI/MI Trump eked the win by less than 70,000 votes combined!) There are counties in northern Pennsylvania apparently where the vote totals are suspiciously similar, defying mathematical probabilities.

If just ONE vote was changed because of this? That’s a crime same as if it were MILLIONS. The fact that we may not see it that way — it’s on us. You don’t get to a what we’re living through without the steady drip-drip-drip that starts with us shrugging off ONE vote being illegally denied.

“One altered vote doesn’t matter” is a false narrative. It does matter. Of course it matters!

Our problem is, we live in so many false narratives already that we’re inured to getting sucked into one more. Think about it — think about all the false narratives that we take for granted. The most obvious one is religion.

A person who earnestly believes that a sky deity had magical sex with a human female and produced a man-god whose job it was to “absorb” all the rest of the humans’ sins is living inside a false narrative. No such thing ever happened. To pretend that it did — and then live your life a certain way because you’re determined (lack of evidence be damned!) that this thing did happen — is living inside a false narrative.

If you make life choices based on that false narrative — you’re doing it for the wrong reasons and it could very easily bite you in the ass. Would you agree to let a surgeon work on you who’d never been to med school but knew his beatitudes almost by heart? Of course not — that surgeon’s living inside a false narrative — that he’s a surgeon.

A person unaware their spouse is cheating on them (they think their marriage is just fine) — false narrative.

Same goes for a guy who doesn’t know his business partners are cheating on him. False narrative.

The inhabitants of Pearl Harbor slept the morning of December 7, 1941 believing we were at peace with Japan. We weren’t. Japan had unofficially declared war on us. The fact that we didn’t know it didn’t mean it wasn’t so. We were living in a false narrative.

If you get right down to it, Christmas is a false narrative — the story it celebrates never happened. Ditto Easter. And Passover. The story the seder’s rituals tell never happened; Jews as slaves in Egypt, though it sounds good, simply doesn’t appear anywhere in the historical record. It’s a false narrative.

A lot of America’s history is false narrative. We tell ourselves we’re a bastion of freedom — but that’s only true if you’re a white, Christian man. For everyone else — that’s a false narrative. The Thanksgiving story? Mostly false narrative. The Salem Witch Trials? Extremely false narrative.

“All men are created equal”? Nice words but no one actually lives that way. Anyone who thinks they are? False narrative. How could that narrative NOT be false when our Constitution (written by the same clique of men) allowed for slavery? A slave isn’t a citizen’s equal — not in the citizen’s eyes.

Manifest Destiny? Rubbish. The White Man’s burden? Only in the White Man’s racist mind. Racism itself is a false narrative — racists think their race is better. No, it ain’t. But your narrative sure is false.

We’ve lived inside a false narrative from the instant Donald Trump was declared the “winner” of election 2016. We knew at the time that something smelled rotten — Trump winning felt like a false narrative. It’s never stopped feeling that way.

Mitch McConnell refusing to give Merrick Garland a hearing wasn’t a false narrative — though it was bullshit. The false narrative was every bit of McConnell’s determined lie that he was justified in doing it. It’s a false narrative that McConnell is any sort of patriot; he’s a traitor who sold out America for the benefit of the Koch Bros, his backers. Mitch hitched his wagon to Russia because the demographics spell certain doom for Republicans.

Every day, our news media act as if Donald Trump is a normal potus doing normal potus things. They continue to explain away this madness with a shrugged “but America voted for him”. Did we? I seem to recall it differently. The majority of Americans did NOT vote for Trump – or any of this bullshit.

The fact that Trump won the Electoral College (did he though — I believe that’s under investigation; it says as much in the Mueller Report?) points to the fact that our Electoral College, by its nature, tells a false narrative. By handing a presidential victory to Donald Trump, it seems to be saying that the majority of Americans chose him over Hillary. It’s not even remotely true — as we know.

The Electoral College creates a false narrative in our minds — that the Will Of The People is being done. it’s not true.

I genuinely believe we’re living inside the Giantest False Narrative of all that Donald Trump “won” the presidency. The publicly available evidence says Donald Trump conspired with Russia to steal the presidency. That means — per his own projecting — his presidency has been illegitimate from the get-go. That shouldn’t be a revelation.

The fact that we’ve so willfully refused to vacate this false narrative — that should be shocking to us.


Help! We’re Living Inside A False Narrative & Can’t Get Out!

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

From the moment we “accepted” that Donald Trump had “won” the presidency, we’ve been living inside a False Narrative — that Donald Trump won. The implications have been devastating.

From the get-go, Trump himself has defensively knee-jerked the word “legitimate” into the conversation. As in “No collusion, my presidency’s legitimate!” If Trump wasn’t a serial projector of his innermost truths, we might could get suspicious. He’s told us all along (in his own way): he did not “win” the presidency. If anything, it was stolen on his behalf.

The Mueller Report touches on this very subject on page 140.

We know that Manafort handed proprietary polling data to Kilimnik. We know Kilimnik is Russian intelligence. What’s not here in the report though is another piece of information we’ve always known: 10 days before the 2016 election, Paul Manafort — who had left the campaign because of his associations with Russia, returned to the Trump campaign with this directive: Concentrate on Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

As we know — those three blue states flipped red, stunning everyone. But here’s the thing — Trump won those three blue states by 77,000 votes combined. Talk about close. Talk about suspicious. No one, by the way, has ever done an official forensics on the machines. Unofficial audits turned up strange anomalies across Pennsylvania; for instance, counties that all voted with the exact same percentages.

But even if the machines themselves weren’t touched, if a single Russian propaganda ad placed on a Clinton-voter’s Facebook page had its desired effect — and misinformed that voter into NOT voting, the effect is exactly the same as not counting their vote.

Keeping in mind that Team Mueller’s purview was extremely limited — Russian hacking and any cooperation between Trump’s campaign and Russia — plus the attempts to obstruct justice to keep all that from getting out. Team Mueller was never charged with answering the whole Russian question — only a small part of it. Everything else they’ve bumped into, they’ve farmed out to other jurisdictions for prosecution or continuing investigation. And we still don’t know much about the heavily redacted intelligence investigation. What we already know about this story leaves absolutely no doubt that Donald Trump — and probably the bulk of the republican party — conspired with Russia to steal election 2016.

The question Trump kept putting out there — about his legitimacy — it’s a thing. A very real “thing”.

We have been living inside the False Narrative that is The Trump Presidency. It’s real, all right. But its existence is based on a lie. It shouldn’t exist at all.

False Narratives unfortunately are powerful things. They seduce with their reasonableness (relative to their environment). In Nazi Germany, it became “reasonable” that Jews were the cause of Germany’s problems. It became acceptable to burn their shops, beat them in the street, humiliate them in public. Germans were living inside a false narrative that this wasn’t barbaric.

But it was barbaric.

It was a false narrative that cannabis caused black men to rape white women so therefore should be illegalized. Parts of the country — and most of the world — still lives inside the false narrative that says any of that is even remotely true.

It was a false narrative that Jesus was a literal “son o god”, that (if he ever actually existed), he was the product of a virgin birth. It was a false narrative that Jesus turned water into wine and bread into his body. It was a false narrative that Jews killed him.

It’s a false narrative that America is a center-right country. When more Americans vote, they vote Democratic. In fact, they vote more progressively.

I could go on. And on.

We live inside plenty of false narratives. We may think it does us good — we’re living inside another false narrative if we think that.

Donald Trump is not the president of the United States. You know that is.