THOMAS LARSON

(3QuarksDaily November 30, 2020)

In a statement made to MSNBC's “Morning Joe,” April 11, 2011, Donald Trump continued to promote his fake "birther controversy" against President Barack Obama; he falsely quoted Obama’s “grandmother in Kenya who said, ‘Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.’ She’s on tape,” Trump went on. “I think that tape’s going to be produced fairly soon. Somebody is coming out with a book in two weeks, it will be very interesting.”

And, according to Vox News, President Trump, two weeks after losing the November 3^rd election, tweeted, “I won the election!” He had warned many times prior to the vote that the only way he would lose the election would be if it was rigged, and the only way he would win was if the election was fair, a remarkably trenchant conjuration of the Three Witches’ spell on Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

And, according to Chanel Dion of One America News and Trump legal team lawyer, Sydney Powell, software engineers in Michigan and Georgia (and in parts of 26 other states) contracted with Dominion Voting Systems, which has financial ties to Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, and the seven-years-dead Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, to make ballot-counting machines switch votes from Republican to Democrat presidential candidates or to leave out a prescribed number of votes for President Trump in Joe Biden’s favor.

And, according to President Trump’s attorney, Rudi Giuliani, the Trump campaign alleged “widespread nationwide voter fraud” in a Pennsylvania courtroom. When asked by U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann to provide evidence of the fraud, Giuliani cited two voters whose ballots they—the voters—had mistakenly marked were not allowed to be corrected and, thus, tossed out. Pondering these two instances, Brann said, “You’re alleging that the two individual plaintiffs were denied the right to vote. At bottom, you’re asking this court to invalidate more than 6.8 million votes, thereby disenfranchising every single voter in the commonwealth. Can you tell me how this result can possibly be justified?”

And, according to Republican operatives, in none of the states that President Trump won was it necessary to recount the vote because no machine turned a Biden vote to a Trump vote, because every mail-in ballot signature was correctly verified, and because every red-state poll worker was scrupulously honest even as partisan poll observers looked on.

And, according to an anonymous political observer, overheard on NPR, the fraudulent voting perpetrated by dead people and by dogs and by Mickey Mouse and the arrival of “mystery ballots” on food trucks post-midnight and the blocking of Republican overseers all combined to deny Trump the election. The fraud was so vast and so perfectly executed by Democratic operatives within the state and county registrars of voters, the observer said, that there’s no evidence of its existence.

And, according to Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, if people believe the lie that President Trump won, he is “transforming democratic politics, which is based on facts and evidence, into authoritarian politics, which is based on faith and loyalty,” from which a new religion, Trumpism, will emerge, a creed in which things are true because the leader says they are true and because all election losses are to be transformed, via “the margin of litigation,” into victories.

And further, according to Timothy Snyder, that “if you believe you were cheated by the other side in one election, then that means the next time there’s a vote, you can justify your cheating by simply telling yourself that because they did it, I can do it, too.”

(And, according to historians of the Third Reich, when Hitler was told of the Luftwaffe’s demolition of Warsaw, Poland, he told his officers through caustic tears, “How wicked these people must have been to make me do this to them.”)

(And, according to an unidentified major, a member of the U.S. military command in Vietnam, during the Tet offensive in 1968, in which one foray was designed to rout the Viet Cong from a village of some 35,000 South Vietnamese civilians, “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”)

(And, according to an Associated Press story following President George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, 75% of Republicans who voted for him believed that the Iraq War was justified because Saddam Hussein was the mastermind behind 9/11.)

And, according to semiologists and linguistic philosophers and literary critics (Wittgenstein, Foucault, Derrida, John McWhorter) on the ambiguities between reason and madness, no tautological or deceptive or specious scheme has gone unused by liars and swindlers and utopians and dictators and assassins and military juntas and death squads and victors in war and religious clerics.

And, according to Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, “What if language is exactly what the [tyrant] has mastered, and bad people tend to have a better command of language than good ones, who are often tongue-tied in the face of the world’s complexities? What if the tragedies of tyranny were, in the first instance, tragedies of eloquence misapplied—of language used for evil ends, but used well?”

And, according to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, when language is deployed to escalate power, it is “a language that is all the more persuasive because it is proud of being ethically illiterate and because it accepts, as realistic, the basic irrationality of its own tactics.”

And, further according to Merton, “The language of escalation, in its superb mixture of banality and apocalypse, science and unreason, is the expression of a massive death wish. We can only hope that this death wish is only that of a decaying Western civilization, and that it is not common to the entire race. Yet the language itself is given universal currency by the mass media. It can quickly contaminate the thinking of everybody.”

And, according to a South Dakota nurse, even as patients are dying of complications from Covid-19, a few of them deny—“This can’t be happening; it’s not real”—that they are infected with a virus that President Trump, from the Oval Office podium, assured them would disappear like a miracle.

And, according to a poll from the Economist and YouGov, 86 percent of 2020 Trump voters believe a pre-November-3rd, nationwide, centrally-planned Democratic-Party conspiracy in, at least, six battleground states, purloined the election from Trump who said he trounced Biden, “by a lot” and “everybody knows it.” Will he be forevermore hailed as the victor, despite his having lost to Joe Biden in 2020 by the same electoral spread, 306 to 232, that he beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 and who never contested his victory?

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.”