There Are FOUR Lights, Douchebag!
For those who love Star Trek: The Next Generation, the two episodes during the sixth season that puts Gul Madred (David Warner) and Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) in a battle of wills is notable.
"Chain of Command" has Madred use sensory deprivation, sensory bombardment, forced nakedness, stress positions, dehydration, starvation, physical pain, and cultural humiliation to try to gain knowledge of the Federation's plans for Minos Korva. Picard resists. Madred attempts another tactic to break Picard's will: he shows his captive four bright lights, and demands that Picard answer that there are five, inflicting intense pain on Picard if he does not agree.
Listening to Trump's recorded phone solicitation to the Georgia Secretary of State reminded me of those episodes.
TRUMP: The other thing, dead people. So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters.
RAFFENSPERGER: Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. We talked to the congressmen, and they were surprised.
But they — I guess there was a person named Mr. Braynard that came to these meetings and presented data, and he said that there was dead people, I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted. And so that’s wrong. That was two.
TRUMP: So Brad, there can be no justification for that. And I, you know, I give everybody the benefit of the doubt. But that was — and Brad, why did they put the votes in three times? You know, they put ’em in three times.
RAFFENSEBERGER: Mr. President, they did not put that. We did an audit of that, and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.
TRUMP: Do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County? Because that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery.
Do you know anything about that? Because that’s illegal.
GERMANY: This is Ryan Germany. No, Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton County.
TRUMP: But have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts?
GERMANY: No.
TRUMP: Are you sure, Ryan?
GERMANY: I’m sure. I’m sure, Mr. President.
Like Madred, Trump simply keeps repeating his completely unfounded conclusions as fact over and over. I wonder if Rattensperger at some point in the conversation started to believe that maybe there were five lights. I wonder how tempting it would be to cave in just to get the man to stop talking.
Trump, with the help of a slew of GOP operatives and legislators, has managed to convince 68 percent of Republicans that he actually won the race. No evidence of fraud. No proof of the allegation. Thrown out of court over fifty times. Simply repeat the lie over and over until people agree that there are five lights.
The results were seen yesterday as a couple thousand dipshits literally stormed the Capitol. I’d be alarmed rather than disgusted except that instead of the staunch seriousness of revolutionaries with a cause they stopped to pilfer items and take selfies in Nancy Pelosi’s office. These idiots, like the Antifa in Oregon, are merely bored, unemployed assholes who see the burning down of the government as a great way to spend a weekend. Given the photos, it looks more like Animal House than Les Miserables.
Through it all, Trump continued hammering home the Big Lies he’s been spewing forth since November 3rd and the red meat was just too enticing for several thousand wannabe revolutionaries to ignore. If they’d been black, they’d be dead but they were white and managed to storm the Capitol for the first time in over 200 years. Those Big Lies have power.
On a sidenote, did you really expect the police, after being castigated for nearly a year for being fascist, racists monsters, would really step up to stop these buffoons? Are you kidding? And be honest — you are either in favor of violent protest or you are not.
Expanding out, it seems that Trump is not the only one using this bizarre brainwashing technique to convince people of factless realities devoid of substance but filled with emotional heft. While Trump's version of this game is almost cartoonish (and I'm not one to lightly compare the man to Der Führer) the playbook was written over half a century ago:
All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X
Like Picard, we are bound and subjected to this constant refrain of Big Lies and like Rattensperger we need to hold the line. There are four, not five, lights.
The presidential election was not stolen. There was no voter fraud. You cannot lose a substantial amount of weight in seven minutes a day. What holds you back in America is not your race or sex but your economic class. The customer is not always right. The scientific method is not biased. Merit is a better metric for success than identity. Equality is more important than equity.
THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!
