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.
